Lichgates: Book One of the Grimoire Saga (an Epic Fantasy Adventure) (27 page)

Braeden walked Kara to her room. Their trip was noiseless, and he had no idea how to fill the silence.

“He thinks he’s using me,” she said after a while. “But we’re trying to make the same thing happen, just in different ways.”

Braeden shook his head, grateful that she’d listened after all.

“I’m scared for you,” she continued. “Some people can’t see through their hatred, and Gavin is one of those people. You’re in danger if you stay here.”

“I’ll be fine.” He shrugged as they stopped in front of her door.

She looked up and forced a thin smile in response. So she didn’t believe that either.

There were light, purple bags under her eyes, and it was hard to imagine that he’d been showing her the blades technique just that morning. He’d weaseled a few smiles out of her, then, but those were long gone. Whatever the drenowith had done to her had seen to that. He set his hands on her shoulders.

“I know that you have no desire to talk about what happened before I found you at the waterfall last week,” he began. “And I know that you probably can’t tell me what the drenowith told you today. But I’m here if you do ever need someone to talk to.”

“Thanks, Braeden.”

He opened her bedroom door for her and could smell perfume in her hair when he leaned for the handle. She hesitated on the threshold, but ultimately stepped through and peeped around the door as it closed.

“Sleep tight,” she said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

FIGHT

The door clicked as Kara pressed it shut. She leaned against the paneled wood, unsure of what exactly had just happened but relishing the quick race of her pulse. Braeden sighed on the other side of the door and after a pause, the echo of his footsteps started toward the stairwell.

She sat on the edge of the canopy bed, her eyes stinging and begging her to sleep as blue moonlight bled through gaps in the drapes. The pale light splashed across the polished hardwood beneath her feet and left her borrowed room both bare and quiet.

She slipped off her boots, letting them thud on the floor, and curled her legs beneath her as she settled on the bed and examined the freckles on her hand without really seeing anything. Her shirt crinkled as she shifted, the dried sweat on the cloth cracking with the movement. She cringed and looked over at the bathroom, where a bath and clean towels hid beyond the light, but her eyes drooped.

All she wanted was sleep, but she was afraid of the dreams she might have after such a hellish day: she’d relived her mother dying; she’d been told she wasn’t even worthy of Adele’s or Garrett’s friendship; Braeden had almost been found out. Carden had been so close, and if the Stelian prince hadn’t gone with her to the drenowith—well, she didn’t want to think about it.

Carden is starting something vile. I just wish I knew where he was going with this. I mean, why kill the Blood? Chaos for its own sake? It’s not like Carden could ever rule any other kingdom but the Stele. Right?

A memory flashed across her mind of the horde of wolves and minotaurs and trolls and the gray, smoking yakona which had tracked her after her escape from Carden’s throne room. She shuddered and summoned the Grimoire.

The warm musk of its leather filled her nose, and she smiled for the first time since Braeden had shown her how to pull a blade from the air. She flipped open the cover, brushing her hand along the first, empty page. If nothing else, she had the Grimoire. It was constant. Steady.

Smart.

“What is Carden up to?” she asked.

Flick, flick, flick.
The pages stopped on a block of text:

I know only of the past, never of your present.

“You are the worst Ouija Board ever,” she muttered.

Someone knocked on her door. She flinched and listened. The hollow thud of footsteps raced down the hall.

She jumped up and yanked open the door to look for her visitor, but the portraits were her only company in the empty hallway. They each stared, peering at her through the dark hall. A few creaks broke the silence, floorboards bending beneath feet in the hallway above, but there was no one nearby. Her visitor was gone.

Intuition pulled her gaze to the floor. There, wrapped in a loose white cloth, was a blue stone. It was square, two of its edges jagged, and small bits of embedded gold glittered from behind the carvings which adorned its polished face. The Grimoire’s clover symbol was engraved with delicate lines into the corner where the two smooth edges met.

Kara knelt and grabbed the cold blue stone. It was identical to what Braeden had given her. She peered around the hallway again, but it was useless. If anyone had stayed to watch her accept the gift, they were well hidden.

“Thank you,” she said anyway as she retreated to her room. She leaned against the door once it closed and bit her lip. The hairs on her neck stood on end. Goosebumps broke out on her arms.

That was half of the puzzle completed, and she hadn’t even left Hillside yet. She should be ecstatic. But a chill raced up her back and tickled her neck instead.

No one would leave a rare slab of lapis that obviously belonged to the Vagabond at her doorstep without an explanation—that is, unless they knew what the lapis was meant to do. Unless they wanted her to find the village.

She huffed and stripped off the nasty, sweat-stained clothes that had carried her through the day, trading them for clean pajamas before she slid beneath the covers. The slab of blue stone weighed on her fingers as she examined it, but there was nothing on it to distinguish it from the other one. This had to be the Hillsidian map piece. She desperately hoped it was, at least.

Her back slouched against the headboard in defeat. It didn’t matter if someone had ulterior motives for helping her find the village; she needed to do it anyway. The Vagabond had told her that his half-finished projects would help. What with the crazy monsters and all the creatures that could shape-shift, those projects might even save her life.

Kara stretched her arm to the floor and after a second or two of reaching for her satchel, she dragged the bag onto the bed and pulled out the other lapis square. She weighed it in her hand before experimenting with the various ways they fit together. When she found the right fit, she touched their edges to one another.

A sharp burst of silver light erupted across them, blinding her. Spots dotted her vision. She cursed and squeezed her eyes shut. The light glared for a minute, but receded once more into the blue darkness before dissolving completely. She blinked until she could see shapes and colors again.

The pieces in her hand had fused together. There was only one jagged edge, now, along the top. The welded edges were perfectly smooth; there wasn’t even a scar where they had once been broken apart. The map made slightly more sense now that she had half of it, but not by much.

In the center was half of a massive oval, which took up a third of the space. Both corners had the clover symbol carved into the stone in thin indents, and the entire map was framed with twisting vines and leaves, but there were no mountains or landscapes that she could recognize. For a map, it had remarkably little direction to it.

Something vibrated. It was short. Sudden. For a moment, she wondered who the text message could be from.

Then she laughed.

The vibration came from her satchel, where her little blue egg was nestled in the bottom corner. She lifted the little orb from the bag and slid the half-finished map back inside. The egg’s inner light glowed orange, the hue more vivid than before. She rubbed it with her thumb.

“So what is this thing, Grimoire? What does it hatch into?”

The pages opened to a drawing of a small creature that resembled a fox. Red stripes lined the otherwise black fur in curving patterns. Its ears swallowed its head and its massive eyes glistened with curiosity. The drawing twitched. The sketched creature tilted its head and snapped its mouth once in a silent bark. She laughed, surprised, but the fox-thing didn’t move again. According to the header on the page, it was an Xlijnughl.

“It’s—” She played with the pronunciation, but didn’t even know where to start. “It’s a what, now?”

She reread the name several times and didn’t get anywhere, so she skimmed the description. The creatures were considered good luck, and if one could find an egg and raise the thing from birth, the creature would be bonded to that person for life. They had many small powers and in lore were considered one of the most powerful omens of good fortune.

“So it’s a miniature fox with massive ears, zebra stripes, random magical powers, and it hatches from an egg?” She paused and looked at her orb. “Why does anything here faze me anymore?”

The egg glowed brighter as she rubbed it, so she toyed with the little orb and lost herself to the thoughts of what would come.

“What are the Rose Cliffs and the Villing Caves?”

The pages flipped to a header that read, “Ourea’s Wonders.” The two-page spread was a collage of small sketches: a wall filled with diamonds that glittered despite the darkness; a cliff that overlooked hundreds of miles of forests; a tall volcano that stretched to the heavens.

She turned the page. Another two-page sketch portrayed a cliff range in stunning detail, from top to bottom. Thin vines with small blossoms covered the rock face, while a forest composed of tiny trees carpeted the hills and valleys along the bottom of the picture. If the scale was correct, the cliff had to be at least a few miles high. In the sky beside the rock wall were the words, “The Rose Cliffs.”

The page turned on its own and revealed the same image, but drawn this time in gray pencil. Thick blocks of text were overlaid in dark red ink.

The kingdom of Kirelm celebrates the Rose Cliffs as the birthplace of its race and the stronghold of its magic. Legends say that the first Blood of Kirelm was pricked by one of the hundreds of thousands of roses which span the side of the Cliffs as he climbed it in search of a better home for his tribe. In this moment, his blood was infused with the magic that later developed into the Kirelm bloodline that is known today.

The Kirelm people once lived above the cliffs, but fear of discovery drove them away shortly after the yakona race’s great divide. Still, its eleven miles of cliffs is often visited by Kirelm merchants, and one of their villages is rumored to exist in its forests.

Kara turned the page again to see yet another two-page spread, this one of a cave wall, its polished rock embossed with veins. She squinted. No, the rough lines had patterns to them: they were dragons. Many had beards, their mouths hung open in frozen bellows. Crystallized fire spewed from them, fossilized in the rock, and spiraled around a small being in the center of the massive wall.

She shifted into the moonlight to get a better view and figure out what this smaller thing was. Two legs. A face. He was a broad man, built like a tank and frozen in the rock with the dragons. His hands stretched to the curved, unmoving heavens above him, and one held a sword as tall as him. His face was locked in a roar.

Again, she turned the page for its description.

Now vacant to all but its immobile tenants, the Villing Caves were once a celebrated haven in the time of Ethos. Yakona would come from miles away to walk the endless grottoes and explore the hidden caverns and lakes here. After the collapse of Ethos, however, the caves became favored by the Retrien Bloods: a yakona bloodline that preferred the heat of the caves’ nearby volcanoes.

More than two millennia ago, a vicious breed of dragon infested the network of caves that compose the caverns. They killed thousands of Retriens. To save his people and his home, the Retrien Blood led a final, desperate battle against the dragons. When it was clear that his soldiers were losing, he called upon every drop of power he possessed and sealed the dragons and himself in a stony tomb.

His bloodline has long since disappeared, as his Heir did not awaken at what all thought to be his father’s death. Instead, it’s believed that the Blood lives still, trapped in the very stone which binds his enemies.

“Ourea is intense,” Kara said, rubbing her face.

She nestled her head against the pillow, but tried to stay awake even as her eyes glazed over. Her mind would just replay the car crash over and over if she slept, like it had for a solid month after the accident. Her eyes closed even as she begged her body to stay awake.