She twisted, pushing him off and giving him a good kick in the chest. He grunted.
“I told you to wait,” she whispered. Her voice carried, as if the faint current of air curling through the tunnel had captured and amplified it.
“I don’t take orders from you,” he hissed, “Mistress.”
She rolled her eyes. “I know you have a chip on your shoulder about—”
He took her wrist and helped her back into the vertical tunnel. “I don’t have a chip on my shoulder.” He frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means you need to get over it,” she said. “You’re a Prince, all right? There are plenty of worse things you could be.”
“Like what? An imp? A nymph?”
“There are no male nymphs.”
“You don’t understand what it’s like.” He took her wounded chin between his thumb and fingers, pressing hard against the stinging wound. She winced, but he held her tight. “Raes have all the power in this world, all the freedom.”
Soon, the sting of the cut subsided and then vanished. At the pain’s tail end, his emotions began to spiral into her awareness. So much anger...
She pulled away. “I didn’t know what freedom was until I was exiled.” Turning, she crouched before the adjoining tunnel again. “Being a Rae is as much a prison as Lavana’s dungeon.”
Kaelan peered over her shoulder into the narrow passage.
“But your very nature does not make you its slave,” he muttered. The force of his frustration battered against her back and left all the muscles in her neck tight.
“Doesn’t it?” she murmured, ducking into the tunnel.
On her hands and knees, she crawled in. “Hero?”
Midway, she was forced to drop to her belly and pull her body forward with her elbows. A strange tension built in her chest, as if she had suddenly become claustrophobic. It took her a moment to realize that, again, Kaelan’s emotions had worked into her, even though they weren’t touching.
Picking up the pace, she soon broke from the confines of the tunnel and stepped out into a cave.
Stalactites hung above like the jagged teeth of a subterranean monster. Some met with the stalagmites below, forming pillars. Wrapping around the mineral formations, clinging to the walls and the ceiling in curvilinear designs, luminescent fungi filled the cavern with soft, eerie light. A vast pool stretched away to the back of the cave, where low archways gave glimpses of more caverns beyond.
Kaelan hurried out behind her, sweat sheening his face, breath quick, almost panting.
Hero peeked out from behind one of the stalagmites, his nose and mouth glowing with fungal residue.
“Hero,” she said, stalking up to him. “You weren’t eating this stuff, were you?”
“Magda,” Kaelan whispered in a held-breath voice.
She turned. “What—?”
He stood near the edge of the water, staring down into the glowing depths as if mesmerized.
She approached him and the water’s edge cautiously. She’d assumed the glow on the water was reflected from the waves of fungi on the ceiling above, but in fact, below the surface of the water, something else was glowing.
At first glance, it appeared to be a strange formation of stone, covered completely in the soft fur of glowing fungi. But then, she spotted the hands, the feet, the shape of a face. She drew back and then, unable to help herself, looked again. The creature appeared to be three times as large as a Pixie, curled on its side at the bottom of the water. Sprouting from its back like bony quills were glowing stalagmite-type formations.
Hero clambered up her back. She flinched, kicking some loose dirt into the water.
“It is Ouda,” Hero said. “The true Ouda.”
“The true Ouda?” she repeated.
Kaelan shifted back. “Is she dead?”
