Finally, she came to the door. In a labyrinth of nothing but dark tunnels and open doorways there stood a bronze beast of a door. She ran her hands over the cold, filigreed panels. Few people knew about the door or the chamber beyond, except those who had a chance of someday residing there.
Twisting the heavy ring handle, the lockthunked, echoing low and deep through the darkness. With a grunt, she pushed open the door. Magical guardian flames wove a flickering wall before her, silver and blue. She shut the door and stepped through the fire, unscathed. She was a Rae. These were her lands. She did not fear its magic—she was its magic.
The fire died behind her. The torches on the walls lit up and up and up in a spiral of flame that dissolved into the looming darkness. The top sat hundreds of feet above. When her father had been buried, she’d peered down over the edge—until vertigo had set in—attempting to see the bottom.
The Well of Souls. The burial chambers of the Raes and Princes of the Eastern Cliffs.
The main entrance to the Well tunneled all the way from Stonehigh, miles and miles. The Well itself was hidden under the moors and the Ironwood, which was home to, amongst a few other creatures, a breed of raven that gained higher knowledge by eating the eyes of unwary travelers and thus absorbing all that they had seen and learned in their lifetimes.
But the ravens were not the most dangerous creatures in the Ironwood. The trees themselves were deadly. Not only sentient and very easily annoyed, they were of a rare composition. Their wood could not be burned or penetrated, because into their living pulp a type of iron was fused. Rightfully, most steered clear of the Ironwood. But the Radiant’s secret stores of knowledge held some particularly unusual information concerning ironwood that was not widely known. A Pixie could touch ironwood and possess it without suffering ill effects, but if she were pierced with it, even a splinter, death was almost assured.
Grasping the climbing rungs, Magda started up.
For a time, she lost herself in the climb, not thinking about Lavana or Endreas or Kaelan or anything, focusing only on the steady inhale and exhale of her lungs, the firm beating of her heart, the sweat rolling between her shoulder blades.
At last, she reached the ledge she’d been seeking, hurrying along its narrow span without looking down—more out of habit than fear.
The entrance to the tomb was like all the others. Only the name carved above differentiated it.
Magda ducked into the passage, which had been bricked into a narrow slit after her mother’s death. She had to shuffle through sideways until she reached the chamber proper. The room was small, stone walls painted with scenes of the living, inscribed with prayers to the gods, heavily laden with chests of gold and silver, swords and shields and spears and axes on the walls. Golden bowls full of gem-encrusted fruits and vegetables were placed amidst similarly opulent goblets and pitchers. Silken clothes and dusty armor hung on forms. Once her people had believed that they needed all of these things in the Godlands. While that belief no longer held, they continued the ritual of it.
As she approached the sarcophagus, she recalled her mother railing against the absurdity and wastefulness of grave goods.
“The soul is only cursed by the material weight of such things,” her mother had said, as she’d sparred with her warriors, taking on two at a time, sweat running down her porcelain skin. Only her lips showed any flush from her efforts, her silver eyes glinting as though polished. “Death is the only true freedom, daughter, remember that.”
Then she’d knocked both of her guards unconscious, striking one on the back of the head with her elbow and then launching off of his back as he fell to kick the other in the temple. And they’d only been sparring. The captain of her guard had laughed—that deep warm laugh of his that had always brought a smile to her mother’s face.
The captain was here too. In the corner, in a tomb of his own, carved in silver and painted in his likeness, his narrow amber eyes, the crooked angle of his nose, the cleft in his chin.
Magda stood before the gold painted face of her mother. She ran her fingers over those full crimson lips.
“Hello, Mother. I’ve come back.” She hung her head, her hand drawing back into a fist at her side. “I know you’ve been disappointed in me. I’ve been disappointed in myself. But... that’s not entirely true. I know you would’ve considered it a disgrace that I was beaten and exiled, not given an honorable death. But... I was relieved. I was happy. Happier than I was here. You always said death was the only true freedom, but I felt free when I was exiled, Mother. It wasn’t life that was the prison. It wasthislife.”
She glanced over at the captain, who gazed down at her with those empty painted-on eyes, forever watching over her mother’s tomb.
“Cavan,” she said to him, though it had been many years since she’d even thought about him.
He’d been executed for treason. Yet, in her final rites, her mother had requested that Cavan's body be moved to the spot where the Radiant's most trusted servant was placed—often her Prince, but not always. Magda had been so young when Cavan had been tried and killed that she couldn’t recall what acts of treason exactly he’d been accused of, only that her mother was never the same after his death. Not that her mother had ever been light-hearted, but after Cavan was gone, Magda didn’t remember seeing her mother smile in the same way as she had when he was alive.
Magda gazed up at the captain’s dark eyes, the echo of his laughter rising from the forgotten depths, her mother’s smile...
Magda looked back down at her mother.
It had been done quietly, she knew, Cavan’s body moved from its burial plot to her mother's tomb here. At the time she'd been too caught up in plotting her next move to give it much thought.
“But you loved him, didn’t you?” Magda murmured.
In one of those scintillating moments of revelation, the past suddenly became clear.
“And he loved you.” She sat back on her heels. “I remember now. The arguments you had with Father and the counselors. Father must have realized. That’s why Cavan was executed...” She searched those foggy depths of her memory, pulling forth the names of her mother’s counselors at the time.
Magda had only been four or five, but their stern faces came back to her. Moren, with the hooked nose, who died from a fall from the gallery at the library, a broken neck. Uli, the dashing one, also found dead. Stabbed by his lover in a jealous rage...
She lifted her head and looked down at her mother. “But it was you, wasn’t it?” She rose to her feet. “You killed them all, didn’t you? One by one.” She looked back up at Cavan. “For him. Because they made you execute him. You always told me never to let anyone too close, to keep my guard up. Your head, your heart, you said, never let anyone into them. But you did.”
She thought back to her father, with his bright blue eyes. He'd drowned while taking his daily morning swim in the sea, before even the captain had been executed.
“You killed him too. Didn’t you, Mother?”
