I blinked after him. “Why?”
He glanced over his shoulder. “Now you’re going to argue me out of it?”
“No.”I’m just surprised you’re listening to me.He had been doing that more often.
“It’s a good question. About the corridor.” Then, after a pause: “We’re also out of food.”
Now I caught up to him. “You think we’ll have a shot at killing one during the day.”
“Not a grown one, but maybe a youngling. Today we’ll backtrack to where we last found the corridor.”
It was madness—but I was already starving. Those times I’d run the barracks yard for hours, I’d eaten like a wild animal afterward. And here we had nothing but dew-water.
“I’m coming with you,” I said.
“Eury…”
I set my hand on his arm. “I need to see it for myself.” His gaze lowered to my hand, then up. I said, “Something about what Thalassa said.”
“‘The way through is easier than you think?’”
“Those weren’t her exact words.” I couldn’t recall them, but I didn’t know how to explain the tug in my gut—I only knew I had to be there. “I’m good at being silent.” How many times had I climbed the walls? Hundreds.
His glance was sideways, measuring. “Can you be fearless?”
My mouth twisted. “Does turning toward my death at the end of a sword count?”
His lips curled. “Always.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The sky threatenedrain from the moment we woke, the air heavy with it, the clouds a gray bruise above the hedge.
We slept in a dead end for lack of an alcove. It worked just as well with Dorian’s cloak hung just right—the end appeared simply to continue, a trick of shadow and shape that might fool anyone passing through.
By morning I was hungrier than I’d ever been, which was saying something for a girl raised in the Dip. Our water was dwindling, even with my dew-collecting, and Dorian gave me the last of it to drink. Desperation hung between us, jaw-tightening and sour. I could almost smell it on myself.
As we neared the thornstalker corridor just after sunrise, I moved with Dorian’s strict instructions in my ears: Step on my toes. Keep to the hedge. Stay behind him. Watch for his hand signals.
When we got close enough, the air shifted. Something foul threaded into my nose, and my hand instinctively found the pommel of my sword.
Then I saw it—the corridor.
The maze opened up wider than I’d ever seen. The hedge walls pulled back, leaving fifty paces of open dirt between us and the farside. It stretched in both directions at a diagonal, no clear end in sight. Narrow paths branched from it like ribs, each an entrance or exit into the rest of the Eldermaze.
Dorian looked back at me, nodded once. I nodded in return.
He crept forward, bent low, almost brushing the hedge. I followed, breath held tight. We stepped out into the corridor.
And stopped.
There were no thornstalkers. No hives. No nests. Just unbroken path in both directions, the hedge breathing softly under a low, cloudy sky.
Holyshit.
This was the center of the maze. No question of it.
Dorian had told me on our first day that the center meant life and death. I had pictured a battle, a monster, something to fight with blade or bow. But now, standing in the middle of this corridor, I understood it differently.
