Tesla Dart’s wizened face knotted. “One way down, one way up.” She hesitated. “Maybe I can say you are prisoners of me. Maybe say I found you here.”
Oriantha shook her head. “We’re not letting them take us. I promised Redden, and I meant it. We break free or we die.”
Redden nodded, not caring for the odds, but knowing he could never go back into a cage. Another imprisonment and he would lose what was left of his already damaged mind. He could feel what it would be like already, just thinking of it. Nothing would save him if they got hold of him again.
He was still clutching the box with the Elfstones as he turned around and looked back across the cavern at the niche with the collected implements of magic brought over from Faerie. “Do you think there might be something there?” he asked the shape-shifter.
Oriantha sprinted back across the chamber and began searching. Tesla Dart had not reset any of the traps or released the serpents anew, so there was no danger of anything harming her while she did so. The Ulk Bog followed, looking decidedly forlorn.
Redden watched them for a long moments, standing close to the mouth of the passage, desperately trying to keep himself together. His emotional stability was already dangerously thin, his sense of self reduced to a small hard kernel of doubt. Being trapped like this was the worst fate he could imagine, the one thing he hadn’t wanted to happen. Oriantha had recognized the danger when she had urged him not to go looking for the missing Elfstones.
He should have listened.
But he had been determined to come here, to search out the Elfstones, to find them and bring them back. Diverting from their original plan posed a terrible risk, and in hindsight he knew he should not have insisted on it. This would not end well for either of his companions. Oriantha would almost certainly fight until she was killed. She would never be taken alive. Tesla Dart might choose death, as well.
It gave him pause. Was he strong enough to follow them? Was his determination enough to keep him from being imprisoned anew?
Still watching his companions as they rooted through the ancient treasures in the niche across the cavern, he opened the box containing the Elfstones and glanced down at them.
Was there a way to make use of them? Even without knowing what they did, even without knowing what it would mean to summon their magic, should he try anyway? Should he risk releasing their power, whatever form it might take, against the creatures coming for them? Even knowing the magic was dangerous to use since his Elven blood was so thin?
Or should he rely on the magic of the wishsong—a magic he knew and had employed once already against his pursuers. Would it be powerful enough? Could he even manage to summon it again?
There were no answers to be found. The risk was clear, whichever way he went. But he had to do something. Neither of the others had the power he possessed, regardless of which path he chose. Their lives were in his hands.
He stared across the blackness of the cavern at the bobbing torchlight of his companions, conflicted. If he guessed wrong, if he made a mistake in his choice of magic, they were finished. In all probability, he would only get one chance. He watched Lada skitter past him, disappearing into the black hole of the tunnel behind him. He had only a short time to wait before the little creature was back again, chittering wildly.
He knew at once that their hunters were close.
Barely conscious of what he was doing—almost as if his fingers were acting on their own—he reached inside the metal box and extracted a single set of the three Elfstones. He knew instinctively which ones he wanted and where within the velvet cushioning they lay. Then he closed the lid, tucked the box under his arm, and moved back across the room to join his friends.
The search had yielded little. There were weapons available, but they were ancient and clearly meant to be used as talismans. And there was nothing to reveal what sort of magic any of them possessed and no way of knowing how to summon that magic.
“When they come,” Tesla Dart announced suddenly, “I will throw the box with the serpents at them.”
Oriantha said nothing. She moved away from them and began to shape-shift into her animal self, stretching out and turning sleek and powerful, abandoning her human form in favor of something faster and stronger and more dangerous. She had made her choice in this matter, as Redden had known she would. She would make no concessions to her hunters.
Tesla Dart started scurrying about, finding additional torches at the entrance to the niche that she lit with fire from the torch she carried. Then she began placing them about the cavern at regular intervals, trying to make it easier for them to see what was coming, hoping to give them some small advantage.