Then he turns and moves smoothly from the room, either not noticing or not caring about the trail of cursed darkness he leaves behind him. The tar spreads across the floor of the chamber, oozing into every crack, and a whiff of its scent carries across the chamber toward us. Alastor curses as several of the others slap their hands over their noses, trying to block out the stench of rotten eggs mingled with something sharp and burning.
“We need to follow him,” Ana says, urgency making her words come out in a rush. I shift my hold on her arm down to take her hand, my voice heavy.
“I don’t think it worked, Ana. You saw him; he didn’t look like he was suffering. That cursed power might have corrupted him in some way, but it didn’t make him weaker.”
“We have to be sure,” she says, her eyes desperate as she tugs on my hand.
“Come with me,” Etusca says. “If we go back the way we came, we may still catch up with him.”
They don’t give me time to argue as we scrabble back through the tunnels. We meet Hyllus, still waiting by the Temple exit, but he shakes his head.
“He’s going back toward the Miravow, but I don’t think you want to catch up to him.”
“What do you mean?” Alastor asks.
Hyllus frowns, disturbed. “I don’t know what he did to his horse, but it sounded horrific.”
As we round the side of Aquila Hall, that smell hits us again and Etusca gasps, muttering some prayer in Agathyrian. Caledon’s left a trail of devastation. The inside of the hall is dark, the lamps beyond the door all snuffed out by tracks of sticky darkness running down the walls. Beyond, every flower in the street, every blade of grass, is lying withered and dead, suffocated by the cursed dark that Caledon’s left in his wake.
In the center of the square, a few yards before the edge of my chasm, lies a blackened shape, left oozing in the sun. Here and there tufts of brown fur show through, and if I squint, I can make out what would’ve been the horse’s head and legs, but its body is oddly flat and shriveled, as if it’s had all the life sucked clean out of it.
“I don’t understand what happened,” Ana says, staring at the scene. “If this stuff is so toxic, why isn’t it killing him?”
Etusca breaks in muttering her prayers. “I-I think the curse on the star must’ve corrupted his immortal form. If he’s meant to be invincible, and then came into contact with this fatal curse…then the curse is workingthroughhim. Rather than killing him, it’s turned him into something that delivers death.”
“Do you think we made him stronger?” Drisha asks, unable to keep the dismay from his voice.
Etusca swallows. “I don’t know. He probably has access to the same amount of power, but now it’s twisted. At least with the tokens, the source of his magic was sacred and pure, given it came from sources of life and light like Ethira and the other gods. But this…”
She shakes her head, unable to give words to the unnatural decay so evident to us all. I stare at the darkness, rememberinghow it slowly poisoned Fairon, destroying him in the most painful, horrible way.
“What have we done?” Drisha murmurs with a horror I share.
“This curse might not kill Caledon,” I agree grimly. “But it could destroy everything else.”
There are footsteps behind us, and we turn sharply to see Tira coming around the side of the hall. I have to confess, in the rush through the tunnels, I’d not noticed that she’d hung back in the first place. But the look on her face—focused and determined—tells me it was for a good reason.
She takes in the street and, with a shudder, turns to Ana. “There’s something you should see.”
Chapter 35
Morgana
“Inoticed it just when we were leaving, so I stayed to make sure. And, well—just wait and see.”
I try to focus on what Tira’s saying as she leads us back down to the gaidonesti chamber, but my mind keeps flitting between a hundred different thoughts.
It didn’t work. I worried that maybe Caledon would see through our trap, or else he’d be smart enough to avoid the cursed star. But neither of my worst predictions came true. Instead, we’re left with a possibility I never considered—one that is so much worse.
I want to hit myself, I want to scream, but both require too much energy—energy I’m putting into staying calm right now, into not losing it in front of my guard. These are Trovians who’ve put their faith in me, who are ready to lay down theirlivesfor me. I can’t reward that by going to pieces, even if we might just have doomed us all. Leon’s horror emanates across the mooring—even he thinks we’ve monumentally messed up.
As Tira leads us back into the chamber, the light of the gaidonesti looks dimmer than before. I’m sure I’m not imagining it. We promised the dryads a solution, forcing them to give access to their most sacred objects, and now Caledon has taken away the power they hold most dear and will probably destroy their country.
There has to be a solution. This can’t be the way things go, not when we’ve tried so hard to do the right thing. Would the gods really punish us like this?
The gods—Ethira. Someone speaks his name, and I look to where Tira’s pointing across the chamber floor. The tokens of Ethira still lie there, forgotten: the bow on one side and the belt with the other items a few feet away where Caledon dumped it. They look pristine, nowhere near as old as legend says they are. I frown, my tense mind at last focusing enough to understand what Tira’s getting at.
The ground around the tokens is pristine too, untouched by the dark substance Caledon’s shedding with every step. It covers the chamber floor, oozing with a malevolent shine, but the ground is completely clean in a foot-wide perimeter around the artifacts.
