The room Alie remembered from the summer was painted with a71. Behind her, Lilia grimaced. “Seventy-one rooms filled with enough riches to feed the whole damn continent.”
“The whole world, probably.” The door was locked. Alie fished a pin out of her hair and wiggled it in the keyhole until the mechanism caught. “And there are over a hundred rooms, actually.”
“Enough riches to feed the whole world, and they don’t even have a dead bolt,” Lilia muttered.
Opening the door was like opening a mausoleum. The only light was what managed to seep in from the dim hallway, barely illuminating giant shapes draped in white muslin. Gaudy statues, huge paintings. Most of them had a number pinned somewhere on the fabric.
A click; flame leapt from a lighter in Lilia’s hand. “The letter said number two oh seven.” She shielded the fire with her hand as she peered at the numbers on the ghost-lit shapes. “And I assume it’s something small.”
“It could take ages to find it in here.”
“Then we’d better be fast. If Apollius catches wind that we want to restore the Fount, He’ll probably swallow the piece before He lets us have it.”
With a sigh, Alie started searching.
There were, unfortunately, lots of small things in the storeroom, and also unfortunately, most of them appeared to be stacked together, making them difficult to search through. Alie found a pile of wrapped parcels wedged beneath a particularly ugly statue of a nymph and pulled a face. Clearly, whoever was in charge of this room now didn’t care for organization like she did.
She crouched, reaching into the pile to pull out something that looked vaguely rock-shaped.
The whistle of wind was her only warning when the nymph statue toppled over.
It was instinct, movement without thought. Alie held up her hands, twisted threads, her thoughts gone to cloud and breeze. Air wove together, iridescent threads, stopping the statue right before the trident it held speared through her skull.
Alie stared up into the nymph’s face, breathing hard. Her hands trembled as she kept hold of air, used it to gently lower the statue to the ground. She watched it wide-eyed as her vision bled back into color, magic seeping away from her fingers. They looked ghostly, nearly see-through, though that could have been the dim light and the way they trembled.
Close call, murmured a voice in her head, so quiet she barely heard it.
Alie froze.Lereal?
The voice was gone.
No. Couldn’t be. Nyxara told Lore the minor gods were too diminished to speak, too weak to come back as anything more than Their power. It’d been a cold comfort, one Alie clung to.
But it wouldn’t be the first time she and the others were wrong.
Cool breeze in her head, soothing. Lereal didn’t speak again, but the feeling was a kind of reassurance. Even if the god could talk, They didn’t want what Apollius did.
That was something.
For all that Lereal’s presence was gentle, it still wound Alie tight as a bowstring.
Still shaky, Alie bent and unwrapped the parcel she’d nearly been impaled for. A collection of satyr figurines, just as ugly as the nymph.
Fitting.
Five minutes and a few more figurines later, she heard a small, guttural gasp.
“Lilia?” Her eyes had adjusted, but Alie still couldn’t see much more than a few feet in front of her. “Did you find it?”
No answer. Alie followed the tiny flicker of flame from the other woman’s lighter.
Lilia hadn’t found the Fount piece. But she’d found something.
The Night Priestess stood in front of a huge painting, so large that the muslin cover still drooped from one corner where she wasn’t tall enough to pull it all the way off. Alie could only see smudges of the subject until she stood directly in front of the canvas, and when she did, her mouth set in a grim line.
It was Lore. Lore dressed as the Queen of Auverraine, her generous body draped in white, a golden circlet in her brown-blond hair. A silver crescent moon was mounted in the center of the circlet, hovering over her hazel eyes. She wore a soft, demure smile, completely unlike any expression Alie had ever seen on her friend.
This was Lore as Apollius wanted her, Lore as a replacement for Nyxara, molded into the submissive wife the god had tried toforce the goddess to be. It was almost like looking at a painting of a stranger.
