“Oh, no, are we?” Celeste turned to him, and then she ducked below the surface.
“Celeste?” Reeve lunged forward to where she had been. “Why would she—” The pond’s floor disappeared below his feet, and a rushing current dragged him under.
CHAPTER 19
THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS
Reeve was a perfectly fine swimmer, he was from Bendcrest after all, but there was no swimming to be done. The current swept over and under him, and he lost all sense of direction. He thrashed, sucked in a mouthful of water, and then there was an arm snaking around his waist.
The pull at his middle was strong, and he broke the surface to land gracelessly on his hands and knees. Shadowy arcana slithered around his midsection, not an arm at all but warmer than the water had been, squeezing him with a tightness that wasn’t as horrifying as he thought it probably ought to be. Reeve sputtered as he tried to call out for Celeste, but when he lifted his head, she was right there in front of him.
“Breathe!” There was a hard slap against his back, and he coughed up a lungful of water right onto her lap.
“Oh, gods, sorry,” he choked, not that she could have gotten any wetter.
Celeste was sitting on the ground, absolutely drenched. Her hair was plastered to her head and outlining her frame, one hand on her locket, the other on his bare shoulder. A very thin layer of silky, soaked material suctioned right up against every contour of her body, the modest fullness of her breasts, the peak of each nipple, the valley between her thighs, even the indent of her bellybutton. Thank Valcord he was still freezing, but with all of that in front of him, he might just be able to overcome the cold and rise to the occasion.
“Reeve, are you breathing?”
He remembered how to inhale then, looking everywhere but at her, surprised he could see at all since his spell had been doused along with them, but they had come up in a place that wasn’t pitch black—it was blue.
The walls were the rocky, dark stone they’d traversed before, but rivulets of teal water ran in the cracks and crags, illuminating the space. Clusters of mushrooms giving off their own glimmering hue dotted where the walls met the ground. They were kneeling not on rocks but sand, and when Reeve lifted his hand, the grit fell away with its own luminescence before shifting back to black.
“Are we in the Everdarque?”
Celeste sat up straighter, and he was glad for her closeness. She cast from her locket and used noxscura to pluck the satchel from the water’s edge. “I don’t think so since my arcana is working correctly.” The satchel slipped and splashed back into the water. “Don’t worry, that’s normal.”
Reeve grabbed Sid from where he washed up on shore beside them. “You all right?”
“Don’t need awhetstone anymore, that’s for sure.”
Reeve flipped the scabbard upside down, water pouring out. “Last time Sid and I were in the Everdarque, he spoke in a different language, but this place still feels fae.”
Celeste leaned toward a grouping of mushrooms. When she touched one, it vibrated, and its light went out. “I think we’re still beneath Briarwyke, but I’ve heard that even when tears in the planes close up, remnants of other places can be left behind.”
With Sid in hand, Reeve recalled the field guide to Briarwyke he’d read and its author’s claim about a fissure more than two hundred years prior. “Is this what you were expecting to find?”
Celeste stood and squeezed her hair, her ribbon lost, silvery eyes darting all over the chamber and catching its teal glow. “I’m not sure. I was reading Geezer’s book about sieves and cross-referencing it with some of the Valcordian texts in the temple’s library, one about how apotropes are made and another about how life itself is created.”
Reeve also stood, rooting around in the satchel. Most of their things were soaked, but nothing was missing, the apotrope safely nestled in the bag’s bottom. “Valcord is the god of new beginnings, but not life. He doesn’t do birth or, you know, how babies are made.”
“That’s what it said, but also that a new beginning is similar to a new life, and if Valcord grants you that, it’s like having your soul cleansed, so I wondered if a sieve could gain something more that way.”
Reeve watched the back of her as she went to the cavern wall, her hips and thighs painted with sheer fabric that hugged her the way he longed to. The blue luminance was lost as she trailed fingers into the liquid that slid down the cavern’s clefts. His own fingers twitched, demanding to trail over her contours, to learn every dip and dune of her body, to…to press together in prayer and plead for absolution—now was not the time, they were lost for Valcord’s sake!
Reeve pulled his pants from the satchel and gave them a forlorn look. “You think Valcord gave that sieve life?”
She glanced upward, her voice sounding far away. “I think the priests thought they could.”
Reeve had failed the priest exams, but even he knew that wasn’t possible. Or at least it wasn’t wise, playing at being a god. Sort of like pulling on leather breeches when they were soaking wet. “No,” he said, conviction stabbing at his chest, “they wouldn’t do something like that.”
“Geezer theorized that a sieve could be made into something more, and the Valcordians believe that being touched by divinity makes a being more advanced—like you, with your arcana. If that’s true, maybe being touched by darkness does the same.”
He grunted. “Valcordian priestsdon’tdabble with murkiness.”
“There was another book, a journal kept by someone named Father Charles. It was troubling.”
“Celeste, I don’t believe—”
