“Can you feel anything in the currents of air? Dampness that might be from dungeons?” Eira replied hastily, pulling them along.
Cullen dug in his heels at the center of the room, eyes closing. Eira waited, her attention on the doors. She couldn’t hear what was being said to the people in the market. But the noises had quieted.
“That way.” Cullen pointed to one of the side doors in the back corner.
Wasting no time, she pulled him over and pressed her hand to the lock. As ice filled it, pushing against the interior tumblers, forming a key ring that extended out beneath her waiting palm. The door swung open and they slipped through, easing it closed behind them. Judging from the voices and footsteps they shut out, it wasn’t a moment too soon.
A labyrinth of corridors awaited them, connecting various rooms that were packed so tightly together that the walls could hardly be more than a stone thick. Cullen shifted to lead. Without needing to communicate, or ask, he knew the direction in which she wanted to go. He knew what she needed from him.
Without warning, he pulled her into an alcove created by a door. Eira crashed into him from the momentum. It wasn’t enough for her magic to waver, but it was enough to steal her focus, especially as his hands landed on her hips, clutching her closer—protective.
They inhaled and exhaled together, eyes locked, bodies flush.
A pair of knights walked through a cross hall, oblivious to the two of them. Thanks, in part, to Eira’s illusion and Cullen’s quick thinking. But all she was focused on was him. For a second that seemed to stretch on forever, they didn’t move. They didn’t pull apart. It was only them.
The slightest smirk tugged on the corner of his lips, as if he also couldn’t believe the thought that was crossing his mind before he said it.
“Do you remember the trials?” Cullen whispered so softly that Eira could’ve sworn she had heard his thoughts. “When I pulled you aside like this? The first time I kissed you?”
“I’d never forget.” She couldn’t, even if she tried. No matter what, he was a part of her. He was etched onto her lips, her heart, her body. A stain—a gilding. Shame over all she should’ve done better and pride in what they had accomplished. “I…”
“You?” he breathed.
She was aware of the time that was being wasted. Of the precious seconds they didn’t have to spare. Yet… Eira leaned forward.
“I enjoyed it,” she confessed to herself more than him.
“I would’ve never said I did, if you’d asked then,” he agreed. His thumb dragged across her lower lip. When had he started holding her face? “But when I kissed you…I knew I?—”
Eira interrupted him by pressing her mouth firmly against his. Cullen’s hand was in her hair, nails scraping against her scalp. It was seconds long. Nothing much. Brief enough that it could’ve been forgotten in a breath.
Yet, if it was nothing more than a breath, it was the first breath of spring. The first breath of air after being under too long. When her eyes fluttered open, she met his gaze and a thousand questions ripped across her mind.
“I knew, from the first time I kissed you, it’d be easier to cut off a limb than cut the other from our lives,” he finished his earlier statement, causing her heart to skip a beat. Then, Cullen was the one to say the obvious. “We need to keep on. I don’t sense anyone else around.”
Eira wondered if he had been stalling for that reason, or just to savor those moments as she had. Either way, their briefreprieve had ended. With a nod, they carried on. Their window of opportunity was fleeting, and every second counted. There wasn’t time here and now to waste on kisses, as much as she might have otherwise wanted.
He came to a stop at the bottom of a stairwell. “I think this is the lowest point; the air is the most still here. But that means I can’t find a path forward for us anymore.”
“I’ll take it from here.” Eira closed her eyes and shifted her focus with her magic without releasing any of the other feats she was simultaneously performing. She strained her ears magically, sifting through the benign to the horrifying to find the mention of a single name:Allun. Eira opened her eyes and strode off with purpose. “This way.”
After two other instances of narrowly avoiding confrontation with patrolling knights, they reached a row of cells. It wasn’t hard to find Allun thanks to the echoes. She was positioned far in the back, the lock surrounded by an extra thick chain, covered in runes, as though they fully expected her to attempt escape even though her hands were bound.
The flickering torchlight danced upon the iron bars, barely reaching back to the woman hunched in the far corner of the cells. She was little more than a faint outline. Long shadows clung to her.
Yet, despite their deft silence from their honed movements, despite Eira’s skilled magic in crafting an illusion, and the shackles that surrounded Allun’s wrists…her head rose. Hazel eyes pierced the darkness to meet Eira’s and a familiar sensation of being watched overcame her. Eira knew this woman. She’d seen her before, but only for a moment that had been overshadowed by the flames of that day.
“Why, hello there,” Allun whispered, low, slow, ominous. A serpentine smile sneaked across her lips. “It’s been some time, incarnation of Adela.”
14
Eira dropped her magic like a silken curtain, returning to the realm of perception. “It’s you.”
“You recognize me?” Allun seemed surprised, but genuinely pleased. “It was brief, and I was but one among the masses.”
“You looked at me like you knew me, then.” It had been a brief meeting, and Allun was merely one among the masses in the mines. It was when Mel had escorted her into the large cavern the prisoners of the mines were kept in. That night, Eira had seen Allun, though she hadn’t known the significance of the woman then.
The explanation of her recapture and finishing the job from Drogol suddenly made a lot more sense.
