Page 102 of Thorn Season
My bruised neck smarted as I imagined my lifeblood spilling by that same blade. Because the keeper would do this to me, too, the moment the compass’s needle pointed in my direction. The eighteen years of my life—every moment of love and pain and longing—would be reduced to a bare footprint inside a cell.
A bolt of fear hastened my steps.
Then I stopped before a mound of crumbled earth, riddled withrock and debris. This section had caved in, too. Perhaps the entire structure was unstable.
But what if answers stood on the other side, just five feet away?
Squaring my shoulders, I poured my specter toward the mound. Powdered earth trickled at the disturbance, pattering my boots. I wriggled deeper, teeth gritted against the weight.
Voices rumbled on the stagnant air, coming from behind.
My specter jolted, walls shuddering around the mound. But my blood hummed with new promise.
I carefully withdrew the tendril and set the torch in a spare holder. Tari was right; it would be a beacon.
I followed the voices back the way I’d come, hugging the walls and breathing raggedly. I stopped outside an open chamber where light bled through the darkness.
“It’s definitely Ansoran?” The voice was deep, authoritative.
“It’s the ancient language, for sure.”
“How can you tell?” A third voice, female and husky.
“Because it’s the only language Ican’tread.”
“Is now the time for bragging?” the woman asked.
“It’s not bragging if it’s the truth.”
“Enough, both of you.” The first voice again. His timbre tickled my memory, but I couldn’t pinpoint its owner. “Do you know anyone who could read it?”
A hesitation. Then the other man replied stiltedly, “You’d be lucky to find a living being who can read the old language.” Not quite an answer, I noticed.
“Then what are you even good for?” A fourth, gravelly voice sent a shard of ice through me.
Drink, that voice had ordered during my kidnapping, gloved fingers handing me a nightmilk vial. I hadn’t realized my fear had searedthe moment into my memory. Yet I knew now, with certainty and fresh alarm, that this voice belonged to Goren.
And these were Keil’s Wielders.
My fists clenched. I’d assumed Keil was working alone to recover the compass for his empress. Clearly, his cronies had lingered in Daradon to help. But I’d acquired these coordinates from Junius—who’d obtained them from Kevi Banday’s wife. How had they beaten me here?
“Nobody’s here, Dash,” said the woman, Osana. “Maybe her information was wrong.”
Dashiel sighed in reluctant agreement. “This isn’t exactly what we were expecting.”
I poked my head around the threshold. Four figures occupied the rugged room, black masks again concealing the lower halves of their faces. All wore hoods apart from Lye, whose blond hair fell loose to his shoulders. He shifted, and in the flickering light of the torch he carried, I saw what they’d been looking at:
A swirling, rounded symbol—the same symbol etched into the weapon at my belt—glaring red on the earthen wall.
I almost heaved. This wasn’t like the Hunters’ Mark I’d scrubbed from Marge’s door. Somehow I knew from the dark color, from the macabre drippage that had gathered and dried into the ground... this wasn’t paint. It was blood.
Wielder blood.
A shuffle sounded, and I ducked from view.
“Who’s there?” Dashiel called. “Show yourself.”
I crept away, heart pounding.
