I laughed almost maniacally—because he was going to deny it. The revelation should have been devastating, but fortunately, there was no need to delve too deeply into more complicated emotions when anger was still within easy reach. I had plenty more to unleash. “You are so selfish. You thought only of yourself when you were summoned. You handed your father adamas on a silver platter in your attempt to free yourself! The consequences of your actions never occurred to you, did they? They never do! You didn’t want to be Champion, and you let everyone around you pay the price. You’d think losing your mother would have been enough to make you think twice.”
Something cracked inside me as the words left my mouth, but I didn’t care.
A deep red flashed in my periphery. Something in the hoard.
“And finally, I have your opinion of me.” Hart’s voice brought him back into focus. He looked like I’d slapped him, but his hands balled into fists at his side. “Well done, Chaos. Don’t stop now.” He turned in a slow circle, as if making a final attempt to search for the prize that brought us into this cave in the first place.
I couldn’t stand even the veil of calm he held in place. I kept going. “I was so angry that Alaric kept so much from me. The more I learned, the clearer it became that he’d made decisions on my behalf. Decisions that were mine to make. You hated it when a goddess took away your choices. You saw how I hated what my family hid, how it crushed me, yet you did the exact same thing!”
His hand was in his hair as he lost whatever internal battle raged within him. “Why don’t you take a little responsibility yourself, Ember? Yes, your family kept things from you.” He choked on the following words. “I kept things from you.”
I wanted to hurl every emotion into a void. His keeping things from me and my family doing the same were too different to explain. If he didn’t get that, I didn’t know why I bothered.
“Aren’t you forgetting someone on this list of people you’re angry at?” he asked. “What about yourself! You made your own choices. Alaric wanted you to leave, and you chose to take his place as jeweler. I wanted you to leave me in the woods, and you chose to answer Eris’s call.”
Another flash of red lit the cave as he finished. This time, it didn’t disappear—the glow remained.
My anger roared back to life at the sting of his words. Whatwas I supposed to do? Let him die? “You make it sound like I’m such a burden, never doing what I’m told.”
Hart made a strangled sound, and I couldn’t look at him a moment longer.
I tracked the red light as the last words I wanted to hear echoed through my head.“Hurry up in there. I see wings on the horizon—Scarlett returns.”
My heartbeat raced even as I tried to calm myself. The red glow was too familiar to ignore. A color I’d learned to fear in Kavios. I didn’t quite understand what it meant here. Brushing past the questions on why it would glow for now, I ran toward the light on the opposite side of the hoard.
“Ember—”
Hart’s words caught as he seemed to note the glow. I skidded to a halt by the eerie light and reached down. A gold pendant on a chain was tucked into a silver cup. I pulled the pendant free, and the heat of the adamas told me what it was before my eyes did. The shape matched the picture in Alaric’s pages perfectly. One of the adamas gems in the throne glowed red.
Hart arrived at my side, staring at the necklace.
How did it glow? The gems were adamas, that much was clear, but we hadn’t touched them. They should only glow when the bearer collects an emotion or wields one of the associated magics. This glow should have been impossible.
I grasped for words. “But we didn’t?—”
“We don’t have time.” Hart grabbed the necklace and slipped it over my head. He wrapped his hand around mine and tugged me to the entrance, pulling hard as we approached Charon.
“We can’t get away,”he said.
With a single glance, I agreed with him. The approachingdragon’s wingspan was at least as large as Charon’s, and the red scales left little doubt about who she was.
“What do we do?”
“Hide the necklace beneath your blouse. Maybe she won’t want to fight if we haven’t taken anything.”
A growl tore through the sky.
“Unlikely,” Hart mumbled.
“If you have any better ideas, speak now, Cursed.”
“Don’t bother,”Scarlett’s voice was only slightly less gravely than Charon’s. Like him, she spoke directly into our minds, and she did not sound pleased.
10
Forgive me, Ember. I dared to hope.
— ALARIC SARE’S PAPERS FOR EMBERLINE ARKOVA
