“Your brow pinches a bit, and your gait grows stiffer. You’re sure you want to do this today?” he asked.
I downed most of the vial and teased, “I deal with you daily—how much more monstrous could these beasts be?”
Huffing a laugh, Krait said, “Sources save us. We’ve been married not ten minutes.”
We stepped carefully around textile tents and avoided collision with carriages on the narrow dirt-coated cobblestone street.
“Where are they kept?”
“They lie in the tombs below the city.”
“And now...you wantmeto wake them up? Just like that?” I asked uneasily.
He took my hand. When he spun the wooden ring on my finger, warmth flooded me. For once, when I had approached that altar, there had been no hesitation—no inclination to run.
“Just like that.” He quirked a brow. “Frightened?”
“Of course not,” I scoffed the lie.
We passed a barren block of row houses with boarded windows and cracked foundations. Sahlmsaran guards stood watch at each end of the streets, and a few trailed us wherever we went, keeping their distance at Krait’s request.
Krait led me into an alley just behind the row houses; the narrow path was devoid of any foot traffic. Barely any light reached the cobblestones here, and the shade was a reprieve from the sun.
At the end of the alley, an iron door stretched at least twenty feet tall.
When we reached the entry, Krait placed his free hand just above the doorknob. He whispered a charm in Brennac. I reminded myself to tell him later that I’d like to learn his ancestors’ language.
After he spoke the charm, gears turned within the door, making an awful grating noise. We backed away, and the door swung open.
It was pitch black inside—a void reminiscent of Krait’s Shadows. He stepped forward and took a torch off the wall. With another whispered charm, it sputtered alive with flame.
“Can Source-wielders control any Source?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Small charms here and there are possible, like that one. It’s much harder, nearly impossible, to hold and wield other Sources than one’s own; it takes too much energy. Power isn’t a bottomless well. At some point you do reach an end, a moment when you can’t go on. Even for you—that is a universal rule.”
With the flame he held, he lit more sconces on our way down a stone stairway.
“Asterie was able to light all the sconces at once in the Luz crypts,” I challenged him.
He smirked. “I don’t deal in light. I’m weakest at charms that require fire or sun. She also had a piece of Fen’s magic too.”
We continued to step into the belly of the tombs below Sahlmkar. The stone walls around us were dark gray, and the air grew sticky and too warm. It smelled of soil, mold and dust. When we reached the bottom, the tunnel forked in four possible directions.
“Oh, joy. A maze,” I mused.
He brushed back cobwebs. “Purposefully so.”
I tried to remember which direction we went—left, left, right, straight, left, right. The winding path had so many turns that I grew dizzy, and my anxiety mounted. Finally, we reached another door. This one was as large as the entry but a sooty color and carved with a pattern reminiscent of the Shadows often ebbing from Krait.
“Was Desidero an ally to Isolde?” I asked, finding it oddly comforting to think our ancestors may have aligned once.
“Desidero was thought to have been in love with her daughter Isleen.” His words were darkly alluring. I rose to my tiptoes to brush a kiss across his bottom lip.
“Of course he was,” I mused as Krait’s hand dug into my hair to steady me.
“As thrilling as it would be to take you here, we need to focus, my Queen.”
I returned to flat feet. “Fine,” I huffed.
