Rylan and Lorelei flew for hours, deep into the Holt. When Lux rose, reckoning was hardly more than a glimmer of gold overhead. The sky turned robin’s egg blue, and the green forest canopy sprawled as far as the eye could see.
Rylan pointed over Lorelei’s shoulder ahead to their right. “Watch tower.”
Lorelei nodded and adjusted Bothymus’s path to avoid it. “Can you sense her yet?”
“Not yet,” Rylan said. “Hopefully soon.” Rylan was beginning to worry. He should feel her by now. Each passing mile made him wonder if she’d been spotted on the way back to her nesting grounds and been hunted. She’s fine, he told himself over and over. We’re just not close enough yet.
It had been some time since he’d ridden an indurium, and Bothymus, typical of his breed, was a pleasure to ride. Vedron was constantly weaving and ducking, but Bothymus flew straight as an arrow and wasn’t pushed about by heavy wind as Vedron was. Perhaps sensing his thoughts, the indurium released a long, blaring trumpet.
Rylan called above the whump of Bothymus’s wings, “How much time do you suppose we bought ourselves?”
Lorelei shrugged. “By now they’ve probably noticed Bothymus has gone missing. They may or may not have had time to send Glaeyand a warning by vyrd, but we should assume they did. A talon or two will be sent after us, but even so, I figure we can reach Vedron and get out of the area before they spot us.”
She was likely right, but Rylan was nervous. His father would likely give Andros the honor of hunting for him. Rylan could only imagine his smug smile if he caught them.
A short while later, Rylan was relieved to sense Vedron waiting. He urged her to meet him at Thervindal’s Tor, a place not far ahead where they’d spent many lazy afternoons. Stay low, he bid her, fly in the trees. She grumbled at being told how to fly undetected; she had been doing so every day of her life.
He pointed Lorelei toward a gap in the trees, where the Diamondflow snaked through the forest. Near a bend in the river was a large outcropping of black rock. “Land on the rock,” he said. “Vedron will meet us there.”
Bothymus landed gracefully on the broad, flat top of the tor above the roaring Diamondflow, and Rylan and Lorelei slipped down from the saddle. The water churned and frothed as it slipped over a scattering of boulders below them. Vedron’s bond with Rylan grew stronger, lifting his spirits. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed her. Little more than a day had passed since the fire at the library and her rescue of him, but it felt like an age, and he realized he missed their days flying alone as much as she did.
Bothymus arched his head back and trumpeted a long note, less warning than a claim on the jutting tor. Vedron rounded the trunk of a citadel and began circling lazily down toward them.
Bothymus trumpeted again, louder, beat his wings and extended the frill atop his head. Vedron stopped descending and soared in a level circle. Rylan felt her confusion. She didn’t understand why he’d called her to a place with another dragon—a radiant, no less.
“It’s all right.” Rylan placed his hand on the rough scales of Bothymus’s shoulder. “He won’t hurt you. Will you, Bothymus?”
Bothymus gurgled noncommittally.
Rylan stepped away from the indurium and tried to calm Vedron. He beckoned her closer. Eventually, she circled down and swooped to a landing on a patch of soft ground ten paces away.
“There,” Rylan said, climbing off the rock. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Vedron trilled and Rylan scratched the wattle along her neck, but her emerald gaze never left Bothymus. When she was sufficiently calm, Rylan reached into her saddlebag. “Now,” he said, “let’s see what we’ve got.”
As he unbuckled the bag, he worried someone had somehow beat him to Vedron and taken the chalice, but when he threw the flap back, it was there in its cloth sack, just as he’d left it. He took it out and showed it to Lorelei.
Lorelei gaped. “May I?”
He handed the chalice to her, and she turned it in her hands.
“They’re the same as the runes on the vyrda, yes?” Rylan said.
“Yes.”
“Can you read it?”
“I’m a little out of practice, but I think so.”
The sun shone off her red hair as she rotated the chalice slowly, tapped on a few of the runes, and hmm’d. Finally, she pointed to the top row. “As near as I can tell, it says, ‘Here lies a part, or maybe a piece, of Alra the Blinding and thus, a part of us all, for it was Alra who struck Faedryn down.’”
“That’s odd,” Rylan said. “I thought it was Alra’s paragons who defeated him.”
She pointed to the second line. “That’s acknowledged here. Sort of. It says, ‘Through her charges was the trickster god lured near, through her charges was the dark sun’s child laid low, through her charges was he delivered to his tomb ’neath the Umbral Tree, all as the bright sun’s daughter had deemed.’”
Vedron seemed to grow bored. She darted toward Bothymus and stopped just short of clapping her teeth on one of his wings. Bothymus pulled his wing away and huffed.
Lorelei glanced at them and smiled, but Rylan scowled. “Settle, down, Vedron. Can’t you see he doesn’t want to play?”
Vedron cooed, swung around and nudged Rylan’s leg with her head.
“Shush, girl. We have business to take care of first.” He turned to Lorelei again. “So it’s saying Alra acted through her paragons, and therefore, everything that followed was, in essence, due to her?”
“That’s how I interpret it, yes. The last line reads, ‘May Faedryn lie in darkness forevermore; may Alra lie in peace until once again made whole.’”
Rylan stood there, stunned. “Made whole?”
Lorelei seemed just as shaken as he was. “That’s what it says.”
“What does it say on the base?”
She turned it over. “It’s a list of names.” She pointed to one. “This one says ‘Izrahim.’”
Izrahim, as everyone in the empire knew, was one of Alra’s five paragons. As Strages was interred in Ancris’s holy shrine, so was Izrahim in Olencia’s.
Lorelei pointed to the other names in turn. “Rai’al, Strages, Cinder, Ember . . .” She pointed to a sixth name. “And then there’s Yeriel.”
Rylan shook his head. “Six?” Lorelei handed it to him and he turned it around. Sure enough, there were six names on the chalice, not five. “It can’t possibly be the same Yeriel, can it?” Yeriel was the leader of the wardens who guarded Faedryn’s prison below the Umbral Tree in Gonsalond.
“She’s said to be long-lived,” replied Lorelei. “Some say she’s undying.”
“I know, but it seems preposterous to think she’s related to the events of the Ruining.”
“I don’t think we can rule it out, but you’re missing the most important point.”
“And that is?”
“If there really were six paragons, why does history tell us there were only five?”
It was a question with staggering implications. “Perhaps the sixth fell into disgrace,” Rylan said. “It wouldn’t be the first time the empire wrote something out of their histories.”
“Maybe, but there was so much written about the five. There were the shrines and the quintarchs and the cities as well.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’m saying that if, at the time of Faedryn’s fall, there were six paragons, wouldn’t there have been six pieces of the Heartstone as well? Wouldn’t a sixth shrine have been built to hold it?”
“I could make any number of arguments for Yeriel having done something that displeased Alra, or the other paragons, or the generals in her war against Faedryn. It could easily have led to her being denied a shrine of her own.”
“I suppose . . .”
Just then Vedron darted toward Bothymus again, and this time she did nip his wing with her teeth. Bothymus roared, reared up, and beat his wings. When Vedron didn’t back away, Bothymus spun and lashed his tail at her. Vedron flapped her wings and tumbled back—
—straight into Rylan and Lorelei.
Rylan fell. Lorelei stumbled, and the chalice went clunking down the tor’s steep, rocky slope.
“Bloody hells,” Rylan grumbled.
He leaned over and spotted the chalice on a ledge, near the base of a gorse bush. It was tricky, but he climbed down to it. The bowl was dented and scratched, and the rim was terribly bent. Then he noticed faint lines where the verdigris had scraped away on the rocks. They were words of some sort, or maybe a drawing. He tried scraping away more, but it was difficult.
“The holy lands of Déu, what are you doing?” Lorelei asked.
“There’s something here.”
“Something where?”
“Just give me a moment.” He climbed back up the bank but instead of handing the chalice to Lorelei, he carried it to where Vedron was hunkered some distance away, rummaged through a saddlebag, and pulled out a kerchief. Then he held the chalice to Vedron’s snout and said, “Exhalo. Just a little, understand?”
“Stone and scree, Rylan, what are you—”
“Just wait.”
Vedron opened her mouth and breathed a thin stream of acid from beneath her tongue. Rylan caught it in the bowl of the chalice.
“Rylan, don’t!”
But it was already done. Rylan swirled the acid around in the bowl, then wiped it away with the kerchief. The shiny bronze surface of the bowl’s interior was completely cleaned.
Lorelei snatched it from him. “How could you?” Then she stared into the bowl, and her eyes went wide. “Sweet Alra’s grace.”
Trees and a winding river were etched into the bottom of the bowl. They looked exactly like the Diamondflow from the maps Rylan had loved poring over. Along the edge of the bowl, the Whitefells were arranged in a grand arc.
“It’s a map of the Holt,” Lorelei said.
“Yes.” Rylan pointed to the center of the design—a tree much larger than the others. “There’s the Umbral Tree. And here”—he pointed to the designs that looked like caves in the mountains—“are the shrines.”
“Six of them.”
“Yes.”
“There were six shrines.”
“Are six shrines,” Rylan said. “There were six then, and there are six now.”
The map was fairly detailed and seemed quite accurate. The five known shrines in the empire’s five capitals, were easy to spot, which made the sixth stand out, northwest of Ancris and south of Caldoras, like a wisp in a dark swamp.
“Look at these.” Lorelei pointed to several peaks. One had a hook at its peak, another a hole along one side, a third had a wavy lake. “I know these mountains.”
As Rylan stared at them, he started to feel giddy. “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”
Lorelei lowered the chalice, stared Rylan straight in the face. “We have to go there. We have to find the sixth shrine.”
Were it not for his worries over what the Red Knives and the Hissing Man had planned for Ancris, he would have agreed to go immediately, but he found himself wondering if they shouldn’t return to Ancris to let the others know. “Shouldn’t we consider going back to Ancris?”
“Yes, but we can’t really go back without more in any case. We have to see why the chalice is so important, why the Hissing Man wanted it so desperately.”
Vedron, sensing Rylan’s mood, flapped his wings, arched his neck back, and trumpeted enthusiastically.
Lorelei smiled. “Is that a yes?”
Rylan couldn’t help it. He smiled back. “That’s a yes.”