Page 253 of A Dagger of Ice and Intrigue
The right I’d spent the last sixteen years earning.
“The Protectorate crown belongs to the true heir. And now that you have it, Allie, you can command the entire army and take your throne back.”
Chapter
Sixty
RYKER
The leaf drifted down arrogantly, swaying in the air as if the entire world could wait on it forever. It turned, revealing the glimmering rune etched on its back, rudimentary and jagged.
“What if it doesn’t work?” I asked.
“It will,” Calyx said from beside me, holding onto his crutch like he wanted to throw it into the garden.
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Just because I can’t walk properly anymore doesn’t mean I’ve lost my other abilities.”
My gaze jumped to him. “I didn’t mean–”
“I’m just messing with you.” A grin broke the eerie seriousness which had taken over Calyx’s face ever since Sanctua Sirena. He looked like his old self, but didn’t feel the same. Something had cracked deep within him and no matter what any of us tried to say, he ignored it. “Now pay attention, it was a pain to scratch the rune into a bloody leaf.”
Said leaf had almost touched the rock we’d planted there minutes ago–a rock that hid a violent secret.
The rune burned bright gold as the leaf barely grazed the stone.
A moment later, it exploded, digging into the earth a full three feet down and sending clumps of dirt flying through Calyx’s garden.
“Goddammit, my tomatoes.” He sighed. “That hit harder than I planned.”
But it had worked. “Powerful is what we need. How can I be sure the trap won’t activate when it senses any kind of magic?”
“It’s been calibrated to only activate when it senses dark magic. At least the kinds we know about.” He grimaced at his leg and thumped back into his workshop, leaving me alone on the balcony and the searing sun, so much more pressing than the trickle of rays we got in Solkar’s Reach.
I watched the last grains of dust and dirt fall back onto the ground.
It felt like sacrilege to dig these contraptions into my realm, especially so close to the passage entry, after so many of my ancestors had simply let it be. Like I didn’t believe enough in the magic of the crater to be sure it could protect us.
It felt like hammering rusty nails into an ancient tree. My mother had raised me to revere the land, not desecrate it.
But I had to do it.
Yesterday had proven our barrier could be breached.
I wasn’t taking any chances.
“I’ve already crafted twenty,” Calyx called out from inside. “I can give you ten.”
“Why not all?” I turned, following him. The metal dust inside crawled down my throat and the smell of spilled oil burned through my nose.
Calyx’s workshop was, to put it mildly, peculiar. Between the cogs, scrolls, and makeshift instruments he’d also created himself, small pots of plants were littered everywhere like the room couldn’t decide if it was a menacing arms laboratory or a greenhouse.
Calyx said the plants calmed him down amid the explosion. I chose to believe him, even as my senses screamed out the place needed to be tidied up, the unfurled scrolls wrapped up and placed in the bookcase, the plants placed by the windows, and the cogs gathered from the floor and organized by size.
Solkar’s Reach was a very different place than this.
“Because war is coming.” Calyx stopped in front of his workbench, tinkering with a spiked ball. “The king and queen might be oblivious, but everyone else knows it. I can’t get a bloody copper shipment from the Fair Isles to save my life. They’re closing all trade and, soon, they’ll close the ports, sheltering themselves from reality as they always do.”
