Sir’s grip tightens. “You’re the queen—you do not rush into collapsed mines!”
I almost scream at him. It fizzes in the back of my throat, and already I can feel parts of myself sigh at the familiarity of yelling at Sir.
But no scream comes. Because over the ridge rushes one of the Cordellan soldiers charged with guarding the entrance to the mine.
“A miner!” he announces over the square to cries for details. “Coming up the shaft!”
Relief springs in my gut. The magic—it gave them endurance and strength. Maybe it let one of them escape to run desperately fast up the mine shaft.
Sir pushes through the crowd, letting me follow a beat behind.
When we make it to the ridge, the hill on the other side curves down before splitting around a path lined with boulders. The path leads to a cave that seems like any other—dark and fathomless. Sir and I sprint for it, and a trail of people—Conall and Garrigan, Theron, a few Cordellan soldiers—gathers behind us. As I focus on the entrance, I beg the darkness to relinquish the miner, for news that the cave-in wasn’t a cave-in, but something else—
Just as we reach the entrance, the miner stumbles out and falls to his knees. He’s so covered with grime that his ivory skin and hair are gray, and he hacks a funnel of dust into the sunlight. I drop before him, my hands on his shoulders. No thought, no chance to reconsider—the magic swells in my chest, a surge of frost that coats every vein as it rushes down my arms and slams into the miner’s body, clearing his lungs, healing the bruises along his limbs.
All the air drains from me, leaving me to pant from the unexpected use of magic as the tension on the man’s face alleviates. Does he realize I used magic on him?
“A wall collapsed, my queen,” he coughs. “Weren’t expecting it, not there, but—”
Theron falls to the ground beside me, his attention boring into the miner in a frantic pull of pure, aching need.
“We . . . found it,” the miner says like even he can’t believe his own news. He blinks at me, and I try with everything I have left to breathe, just breathe, keep breathing.
“We found it, my queen. The magic chasm.”
Meira
HANNAH? I TRY, and my magic sparks the slightest flash of cold. Tell me he’s wrong.
But the emotion that radiates from her is the opposite of what I expected: amazement. Awe. The same winded shock that descends over everyone else.
We were so close, she gasps. The Tadil, all this time—we were so close . . .
Her words fade, but I know what she means.
Before Angra overtook Winter.
The miner shoves to his feet, wordlessly leading me on. Sir lets me stumble after him without protest, trudging along behind me as if he’s being dragged into the mine against his will. We’re trailed by Theron, Garrigan, Conall, and a handful of Cordellan soldiers.
The morning sun lights the first few paces inside the mine shaft, but farther in, when the ground starts to slant around serrated rock walls, everything is coated in darkness. The miner picks up a single lit lantern, most likely the one he carried as he ran out to us, and the rest of us take a few from a pile, strike flames to life, and follow him.
The cave flashes into view, tools littering a corridor two arm lengths wide and little more than a full man’s height tall. Silence ensnares us the moment we enter the tunnel, the only noise the muted shuffling of our feet as we take cautious steps into the shadows.
Fingers brush my wrist, a delicate touch that grows bolder when I pull up a weak smile for Theron. He doesn’t say anything, though I can tell by the way his mouth pops open that he wants to. What is there to say, though, beyond murmurings of disbelief?
I squeeze his fingers and tug him forward, leading him into the darkness.
More shafts open along the way, but the miner at the front of our group leads us past them all, plunging into the deepest tunnel in the Klaryns. The air smells of ancient, musty grime, coating my skin in thin layers that feel, somehow, just as Winterian as snow. That does little to abate the tension coiling in my gut when the tunnel before us ends at an opening.
The other miners’ lanterns light up the puckered wall, clearly an unexpected expansion by the way rocks sit in haphazard clusters of debris along the ground. The remaining Winterian miners seem uninjured, which eases some of my worry. They all stand in the tunnel, gaping at the crack in the wall, too afraid to move inside, too awed to pull away.
When they see us, they step back, all eyes snapping to me. But I’m just as afraid, just as awed, the lantern trembling in my grip, light pulsing in dizzying flashes.
Someone made this space. Beyond the opening, perfect diamond cuttings turn the gray-black ground into a marble-like floor. The walls around the room are the same jagged rocks as the rest of the mine—but even that seems intentional, as it draws all focus to the back of the room, where the stone has been flattened into a smooth wall.
In that wall stands something that makes me gasp with astonishment.
I slide forward, past the crumbled heaps of rock, depositing my light at the threshold since the lanterns behind me brighten this new space. The moment I step into the room, the air crackles against my skin, a jolt like the electric charge of a thunderstorm preparing to unleash cascades of lightning. I shiver, bumps rising along my arms.
The air hangs heavy and humid with magic.
And I think . . . I think I’m looking at the door to the chasm.
Theron touches my elbow and I start. I didn’t know he’d followed me into the room, but he seems the only one brave enough—or stupid enough—to venture after me. Everyone else remains pinned in the entrance, gaping in shocked horror at the same thing that draws my attention like a gnat to a flame.