The horse snorted, but returned to his chewing. He showed his displeasure by ripping up a large patch of grass and chewing it hard between his flat teeth.
Cassian guided me deeper into the woods, where the old growth filled the air with an odor of moss and heavy years. Shadows lingered at the roots of the trees that never saw the sun, and the paths of the woodland animals were so old that they sank into the earth.
Cassian’s voice intruded on the solitude of that holy place. “Are you cold?”
We passed under a large tree, and I shivered. “A little.”
“You might remove some of your clothing and wear mine.”
I snorted and wrapped the coat tighter around myself. “I’ll be fine once we get back on the road and into the sun.”
“It’s not far now,” he assured me as he brushed aside a layer of vines that hung from a thick bough.
The drawn curtain revealed a small hollow. The ancient trees stretched their limbs over the grotto, covering everything in a thick layer of darkness and wet ferns.
Everything except the center. The earth was hollow there. We stopped at the edge of the hole, and I peered into the depths. I couldn’t see anything.
Cassian grasped the right side of his coat and dug into the pocket before he drew out a handful of small white crystals. He plucked one from his palm and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. A soft glow of light emanated from the stone and grew stronger the more he rubbed it.
My eyes widened at the growing brilliance. “More magic?”
“Of the simplest kind,” he told me as he held the glowing stone over the hole. “The stone stores heat and turns it into light.”
He opened his fingers, and the stone dropped into the hole. The tiny rock illuminated a large room, the floor of which was ten feet below us. A set of crude stairs carved out of the earth and stone led to the floor.
“Do you think you can make it down there?” he asked me.
I craned my neck and swallowed hard. “I’ll give it a try.”
“Then I’ll go first and help you down,” he offered as he did as promised.
Cassian pressed his back against the earthen wall on one side of the steps and held my hand. He walked sideways down the stairs, never missing a step. We reached the bottom, and he rubbed another stone, which he held out to me.
“Keep rubbing the stone, and it will remain bright,” he instructed me.
I clasped the light between my hands and did as he instructed. My little light shone about ten feet around me and revealed a subterranean world of stalactites and puddles of water. Strange-looking water.
I stepped up to one of the puddles and leaned over the depression. The water was murky and didn’t reflect my light at all. In fact, it didn’t reflect anything, not even my face.
“What is this-”
“Don’t touch it.”
Though Cassian’s voice was calm, there was such a sharpness to his words that I started back. “Why? What is it?”
“A nethral, or the beginnings of one.” Cassian strode up to me with a glowing stone in one hand and one of his scales in the other. He tossed his scale into the center of the puddle. The plate caused a ripple, and then the whole puddle began to quiver. The ‘water’ shriveled to nothing, leaving only the depression and a scale.
Cassian plucked the scale from the floor and held his light aloft to the rest of the small cavern, for that’s where we found ourselves. The grotto stretched from the stairs twenty yards long and nearly that wide. The ceiling fluctuated between eight and ten feet high, with small stalactites threatening to knock the senses out of the less wary.
And depressions. Dozens of depressions. Some were as shallow as the one I stood over, while others were larger. They were more like pools than puddles. Not all of them were occupied, but there were a half dozen that held the putrid nethral material.
“What is this place?”
“A nethral pit,” he told me as he rubbed more crystals and tossed them about the room. “I came to see if any had grown back since its cleansing a decade ago. I’m sorry to see it has.”
“Do they grow back this fast?” I asked him.
He tightened his grip on his scale and grimly stared at the puddles. “Sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but they always return.”
