Her step falters, just barely, and her eyes follow the current. Her mouth opens. Closes.
We walk for what feels like an hour. The light doesn’t change. There is no sun that I can see. The sky seems to produce its own glow.
The mountains ahead grow larger, slowly.
Seraphina stops at the crest of the second ridge.
Below us, the valley descends into a basin. Circular. Ringed by the mountains. Gold veins in the stone pulse in a rhythm that thrums in my sternum.
At the center of the basin, a magnificent structure.
“The Lithenmere. My father’s palace,” Seraphina says.
The palace rises from the rock of the mountain itself, walls and towers and archways flowing upward from the stone. No seams. No joints. No evidence of tools.
“It wasn’t built or carved,” she says. “The mountain grew it.”
The main structure alone runs a quarter mile across the basin, and below it, visible through gaps in the foundation rock, halls descend into the earth.
The path descends. The stone underfoot changes as we approach the Lithenmere, the temperature rising by degrees, until by the time we reach the base of the outer wall, the surface beneath my boots is warm.
The entrance is an archway three stories tall. The stone at the edges is darker, older, veined with the thickest concentration of gold I’ve seen yet. No doors. No gates. Beyond it, the interior carries its own light.
Seraphina pauses at the threshold.
“The Lithenmere is alive,” she says. Her eyes move to me. Then to Celeste. “It will know you. It will learn you. It will form opinions about you based on criteria you cannot anticipate. It is not hostile. But it is not neutral either.”
Celeste glances at me. “Opinions,” she says. Then she turns to Seraphina. “How old is it?”
“Old.” A pause. “Older than Lanthar. Older than the courts. The mountain was here before the Fae organized themselves into anything resembling a civilization. Lanthar’s line asked it for a palace. It agreed. It has been agreeing, and revising its agreement, ever since.”
She turns back to the archway.
We walk through the archway.
The interior runs hotter than the exterior. The hall beyond the entrance stretches long and deep, ceiling vaulting upward into shadow, walls smooth and luminous. The light comes from everywhere and nowhere. It seems as if the stone itself is producing it. The floor beneath our feet vibrates at a low frequency that I feel in my ankles, my knees, the base of my spine.
My shadows stir again. The witch-dark in my blood recognizes something in these walls, in this stone, in whatever animates this palace. It reaches for it. Gently this time. Shadows expanding against my skin toward the walls.
The stone answers. The gold threads in the wall nearest to me wake. Fractionally. A response so subtle that if I weren’t watching for it, I would have missed it entirely. The shadows extend toward the gold, and the gold leans back, and then both settle.
I look at my hands. The shadows have retreated, resting just below the surface.
Ahead, the hall widens into a large room. The acoustic shift, the change in air pressure. The ceiling rises. The walls pull back.
“The Heart Chamber,” Seraphina says.
At the center of the immense space, a single tree grows through what appears to be solid granite. Its trunk is as wide as the courtyard fountain at the compound, bark silver-gray, andits roots thread down into the stone in veins of living gold. The branches spread across the ceiling in a canopy that catches the light and breaks it into patterns that move, slowly.
Everything in the space is arranged around it.
The gold threads in the roots beat with a rhythm I can count. Steady. Patient. Like a heartbeat.
I stop walking. The others stop with me.
“What is this tree?”
“The heart of the Lithenmere,” Seraphina says. “It was here when Lanthar’s line arrived. It will be here when his line ends.”
