The Dragon's Price (Transference #1)(19)
His eyelids flicker, and he slowly focuses on my face. “Princess Sorrowlynn?” he asks, furrowing his brow. His head falls forward so our foreheads are touching, and a goofy smile quirks his lips. “From the first moment I saw you standing on that dais in the evening sun, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. Your eyes are the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen,” he says, his words slurred. “Even prettier than Evay’s. Hers are brown. Yours are…green.” Despite the fact that he’s obviously delirious, pleasure fills me. He closes his eyes and sighs. “If I die will you do something for me?”
“If I don’t die, too.”
“If you don’t die, tell Evay I’m sorry. Tell her if things wouldn’t have turned out this way, I would have married her when I came home.”
“Wait…who?” I lean away from him, and his head sags forward. His body turns boneless and the weight of him increases, tilting me sideways until I fall to the ground, and he lands on top of me. Our small sphere of light disappears as the dragon scale is sandwiched between us.
Carefully, I wiggle my way out from under him and turn him onto his side. His breathing is deep, his mouth hanging open. I brush his tangled black hair from his face and make sure there are no rocks under his head. And then I summon all the energy I possess and stand.
All I want to do is fall back down beside the horse lord and go to sleep. But I thrust my chin forward, tuck back the loose wisps of hair hanging out of my crown braid, and stand tall. Putting one burning foot in front of the other, I start following the cave wall, looking for a new passage. Maybe we already passed one. Maybe we already passed dozens. With the small space the scale lights up, we could have passed thousands and never known.
I shimmy over rocks and hold the scale up to the cave walls as I go back the way we have come. And then, not five steps ahead, the air in front of me fills with light, a perfect tube of orange going from the floor all the way to the top of the cave, leaving a bright circle on the ceiling high above.
My heart starts thumping and I wonder if the cave is going to fill with fire again. I limp over to the tube of light and get down onto my hands and knees. Crawling up to the very edge, I peer over a hole the circumference of a water well and shiver at the thought of walking right past it and not falling in. Far, far below, so far that I almost wonder if I am seeing things correctly, is something so shiny I have to squint to look at it, like looking at the sun after the clouds have parted. A gust of warm, dry air wafts up from the hole, followed by a shriek so loud and so terrible that the very ground I am lying on shudders.
The light goes dark as a great, moving shadow blocks it, and I hear the snap of fabric catching air. A moment later, the shadow is gone, and the light shines up again.
Too scared and too mesmerized to move, I lay with my body pressed against rock and pebbles, and stare down at the light shining deep below. It is golden, like sunlight on water. It is as bright as daylight. It might be the way out. Or it might be the fire dragon’s fabled treasure.
My eyelids become heavy, and I imagine the rock below me is cradling my body and rocking it. I give in to my weighted eyelids and let them slip shut. The instant they close, I realize something is making a sound. I think of the clock in my bedchamber, which is always ticking, but I hear it only if I consciously listen for it. Somewhere in the cave there is a click, click, clicking. I keep my eyes closed and focus on it. The dark space around me slowly comes to life with noise, a myriad of clickings, some loud, some so quiet I almost wonder if I hear them at all.
I climb to my feet and brush the grit from my skin, and start hobbling toward the sound. With the light coming from the well, I can see the cave better than I’ve ever seen it before. The walls sparkle and glitter like the night sky. The floor is strewn with thousands of blackened bones and rusted bits of armor and weapons. Above and to my right, the ceiling has two white lumps sticking out of it. Directly below are two matching white lumps, like teeth that have been rounded with time, jutting up from the cave floor. I limp over to the closest lump. It is as tall as my waist, and milky smooth. I put my hand on it and pull back. The stone is covered with a slippery liquid. I peer up at the twin ceiling lump. A single drop of water falls from it and clicks onto the lump beside me, bursting into a thousand minuscule droplets.
If the clicking I am hearing is water dripping, and I can see only two lumps, that would mean only two clicks. But there are lots and lots of clicks echoing through the darkness, maybe even hundreds. Turning toward the sound, I step up to the cave wall. As far as I can see, it is a sheet of sleek black stone covered with sparkles. I run my fingers over the rough surface, and after I have gone three steps, my hand disappears. It looks like the rock has bitten it off at the wrist. I gasp and yank it toward my body, and it comes out of the wall completely normal.
For a long moment, I stare at the rock, and then, summoning all of my courage, I lift both of my hands and ease them forward. When they are even with the glimmering stone, I push them a little further and feel…nothing but air. I take a tiny step forward and my arms disappear into the rock all the way to my elbows. Another step and my nose is a hair away from the wall, and my arms are gone. I squeeze my eyes shut and take one more giant step, and the clicking becomes so loud that I almost scream from the shock.
Slowly, I open my eyes. I am standing in a room more beautiful than the cliffside palace I grew up in. Massive white columns are braced between the stone floor and ceiling. They look like giant, delicate icicles, and they seem to absorb the pearly light from the dragon scale and reflect it back twice as bright. Hundreds of smaller, half-formed columns hang from the ceiling, dripping water down onto their other halves, as if the two stones are alive and reaching out for each other. In the center of the room is a lake with white columns shooting up from its center.