He grunted in acknowledgment.
“Yes, I remember.” Then his words from earlier returned.An altar that shouldn’t have existed. A place I was never supposed to be.
The particular hedge was thick, its blooms large enough to hide all manner of sins, possibly even those of a queen who worshipped a forbidden goddess. He pushed between the thick branches and knelt. The words slotted into place as he dug his hands into the dirt. In moments, he scraped the sediment from a wooden trapdoor, his hand poised to pull it open using a brass handle.
“Your mother’s altar.”
He opened the trapdoor to darkness. A descending ladder was barely visible.
“Is this part of the mines?”
Carefully, Hart searched both sides of the hedge for guards on patrol, but here, we were nearly invisible. “It was an original site that my grandfather wasn’t able to use. It caved in before he got deep enough to mine, but that made it perfect for her purposes.” He gestured toward the pendant beneath my blouse. “Can we use it to light our path?”
I pulled the throne-shaped necklace free and unwrapped it. The red glow lit the darkness between the branches. It wouldn’t be much in the total darkness beneath us, but it was something. I swallowed and offered it to Hart.
“Can you go first? I need to pull this shut behind us.”
The ladder disappeared into blackness after only a few rungs, but the look of distress on Hart’s usually stoic features motivated me. I climbed carefully down, and the red of the gem grew brighter the farther I descended.
I dropped onto cool dirt. The cavern was tall enough that I could stand without hitting the ceiling. That was better than I expected. What little light snuck in from above was gone within moments as Hart secured the trapdoor, then landed on the ground beside me.
He offered his hand for the pendant. He would lead if I asked—tackle whatever we found in this place. Unfortunately, his presence buoyed my strength. I told myself it was that he literally fueled my magic. With him beside me and with a bit of his fear, I could defend myself.
But I was as good at lying to myself as I was at doing hard things.
I clasped the necklace tighter in my hand and lifted it to illuminate the path. Careful steps beneath the red glow led us from the ladder.
“This path ends at the altar room. There is another trapdoor there, and it exits to the opposite side of the city wall.”
I nodded, unsure what to say. We had obviously been desperate. There was no other way out that we could use. It was this path or unleashing our magic and fleeing through the Eastern Gate. Doing so would only have alerted more guards to our whereabouts. Wielding the magic of Champions would be hard to miss.
But this…
“Hart—” The word was rough, and suddenly, my throat closed around all the emotion packed into it. We’d been in Alaric’s workshop to dig up sadness, to bring forth our deepest regrets and losses. I was ashamed to admit I hadn’t trulyconsidered how far back in Hart’s history we had to go to find his.
“I hoped I could find something in Alaric’s workshop. A memory. Anything,” he said quietly.
My chest tightened as I remembered his stiffness, the rigidity of his frame as he realized what he had to do.
“It had to be my turn eventually, Chaos. The trials are for both of us.”
His words were so heavy. I wondered what this would cost him. He spoke with a resignation that said he’d known we would end up here. Maybe he’d tried to avoid it. Maybe the circumstances weren’t ideal, but the location was unavoidable for him, given our goals.
We walked in silence. Me, unsure what to say, and him … I couldn’t begin to imagine what went through his mind. Before I knew who he was, he had told me all he’d done to fight the summons. He’d gone so far as to find and shape the adamas himself, attempted to create others who had the same magic he did, and hoped they could take his place as Themis’s Champion.
That hadn’t worked. The goddess didn’t wantjust anyone. She wanted him.
After inadvertently creating the Blessed in his attempts to flee his fate, he’d turned to anger and decided to challenge Eris himself. If he had no choice but to be Themis’s Champion, he wouldn’t wait for Eris’s Champion to find him. He used his mother’s altar to challenge Eris directly.
He should have died for the audacity. The goddess had every right to kill him. Instead, his mother bartered for his life. A devoted follower, Eris granted her request not to kill Sebastien Glanmore, but his slight could not go unpunished.
The price of challenging a goddess was death. If Sebastien Glanmore wouldn’t pay it, someone else had to.
This was the first part of the Cursed King’s story I identified with. The burden of others’ choices to protect him. At the time, I’d likened it to my own mother’s story. She’d protected my secret, that the Blessed of Kavios couldn’t take from me, and because of that, a Blessed had taken from her to excess. Now the concept was even more familiar. A heavier grief settled on my shoulders as I considered not only my mother’s youth and her mind, but also how Alaric’s life had been sacrificed in service of my destiny.
When would it end?
The tunnel widened as the red light from the necklace spilled into a larger opening. I lifted the pendant for better visibility. A ladder on the left led toward what I could only assume was the other trapdoor. On the right, a small dragon statue sat on a wooden riser. Beside it, a large gemstone lay on the ground.
