“How do you know?”he argued absently, playing the light over the closed end.No silvery door appeared.“If Anciela’s data proves correct, which I suspect it will, your brain and magic are the same as any wizard’s with one small block.If Gabriel can access ancestral Phel knowledge, so can you.”
She didn’t know about that.She didn’t feel all that intuitive.
“No luck on the light,” Jadren informed her, unnecessarily.“What should we do, intuitive one?”
“You’re not funny.”
“I’m being perfectly serious.”
And he was, she could see.“Well, I think we need to apply moon and water magic together.If you’re right and this is the entrance to the arcanium, we’ll need both.”
“Good thinking.”Jadren looked around.“We should have brought some water.”
“There’s some right on the other side of these stones,” she suggested helpfully.“A whole lakeful.”
He grimaced.
“Don’t remind me.I can practically feel the weight of the lake overhead.”
“How about your water flask?”She grinned at his stunned expression, feeling very clever indeed.
“You’re a genius, Seliah mine.”Jadren dug out the moonsilver water flask from one of his pockets.He’d helped Gabriel redesign the flasks for production by House Phel and kept this one as a nostalgic prototype, but also because having a flask that was always full of cool, clean water came in handy.The flasks weren’t all made of moonsilver—that was a fancy version Nic had insisted upon for the cachet for the nobility and those who fancied themselves noble.Her marketing savvy had proved true and the silver flasks were bestsellers.
Jadren and Selly had gotten so used to having this one that they’d taken its magic for granted, but it was a stellar combination of moon and water magic.Jadren held Selly’s hand and asked her for a blend of the magics this time, and splashed the stone wall with water from the flask.The stones glowed and changed texture, swirling like a whirlpool as the cracks between the stones bent and spiraled.A grinding sound echoed through the tunnel and then the wall vanished, opening up into the most extraordinary room Selly had ever seen.An underwater dome.
Gleaming tiles formed the floor, spinning in a dizzying pattern of silver and myriad shades of blues and greens, evoking the swirl of moonlight on water.Stone walls inlaid with silver runes framed sheets of thick glass, the water beyond them deep blue, growing lighter nearer the surface with the sun now at midday.An enormous round lens of glass—or crystal, given its luminosity—sat in the center of the ceiling, focusing sunlight on a circle formed by the tiles, an echo of the window above.At night, it and the glass panels curving from it to the floor, would glow with moonlight.
Various cabinets lined the walls between the windows.Strange tools—mostly moonsilver by the look of them—hung in orderly rows.Selly had no idea what they might be used for, but Jadren surveyed them with interest, looking as if he itched to test a few.Her attention, however, was riveted to the piece of furniture occupying the tiled circle under the moon window.It was a bed made entirely of moonsilver, radiating moon magic and made up with pillows and various coverlets.
And silver chains at the four bedposts.Too late, she clapped a hand over her eyes.
“Can’t unsee it,” Jadren taunted.
“Why is there a bed in here, with chains?”she got out, firmly turning her back on the sight.Shewouldunsee it.She’d prove Jadren wrong there.He was methodically searching the cabinets, scrutinizing the rows of tools and especially documents and diagrams stored in shallow drawers.She should probably be helping, not… speculating.Curse it.
“Oh, I think you know,” Jadren said in a teasing singsong.“Does it give you ideas?Maybe some fun with sex magic?”
“No,” she answered emphatically.“I am decidedly not picturing Nic and Gabriel in here drumming up sex magic in that…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.
“Sounds to me like you have a pretty vivid image in your mind,” Jadren commented so blandly that in itself that became as suggestive as an eyebrow-waggle.
She glared at him, which he didn’t notice because he was busy being useful.Determined to put the silver bed and sex magic out of her mind, and to be useful herself, she applied herself to searching through the cabinets on the opposite side of the dome from Jadren.“This feels so invasive,” she muttered as she did.
“Yeah,” Jadren agreed.“I get why Alise and Cillian didn’t want to be the ones.At least you’re family, so there’s a level of being in the inner circle.Still, it’s generous of Nic and Gabriel to give us permission.”
“The cause is important to them.”
“True.”
So they really needed to make this effort count.“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” she complained.“Is it going to be a book titledKey to Anciela Phel’s Encrypted Data?”
Jadren snorted.
“I’m serious,” she said after a moment, straightening from bending over a drawer with all blank sheets of very nice Calliope stationery.“We’re looking for something that we don’t know what it is in a place we’re only guessing has it.How does this make sense?”
“We’re unraveling a two-hundred year old mystery,” Jadren answered equably.“I don’t think any of this makes sense.As for what it looks like, I know you’re being sarcastic—clearly you’ve been around me too much, poor thing—but no, it won’t be titled because there will have been the same need for secrecy.And before you make any more of those frustrated growling noises at me, cute as they are, it will look like probably something as equally innocuous as those journals about ballgowns or boring pamphlets on fruit wasp larvae.But it will have those elements in juxtaposition with something else, like one side it says one thing and on the reverse it says another.But one is actually a translation of the other.”
“Or an inventory of dressmaking supplies with numbers attached?”Selly asked.
