He rushed to retrieve it from the pocket on his pack.
Uncapping the metal canister, Riley poured the liquid against the rock wall, washing away hundreds—if not thousands—of years’ worth of dirt and silt.
“What are you—” Clark began, but then stopped because they could both see.
Deep, dark marks scoured the rock face. Etchings. The characters small and precise and dense. Picture symbols, almost like hieroglyphs, some of them burned away by scorch marks.
“Riley,” Clark said, bending down beside her, “I think these are really old.”
“Older than the castle?”
He nodded, not tearing his gaze away from the symbols. “It looks like the lost language of the northern tribes that built their kingdom in Dark Age Scotland. Who beat back the Romans before they disappeared from record.”
“Oh, so like, old old.” Riley blanched.
He ran his fingers over the marks. “This is unbelievable.” He grinned at her, drunk on the discovery. “I wonder if anyone knows this is here.”
“What do you mean?” Riley said, each word edged with danger Clark didn’t notice until it was too late.
He was too busy thinking about whether he should take out his camera, about whether he could get decent enough pictures in this low light to send to his friend Rodney, who specialized in ancient civilizations of this region. Whether he should get out his phone and call his dad—even though there was no chance he’d have service—
“Clark.”
He stilled, hearing the danger now.
“Why are you so surprised?” Her whole body had gone rigid. “You developed the map based on research that identified fae interference in this area, right?”
“Uh,” he said, his brain overworked, sloppy, lazy. “Yes. Quite right. I just—well, you see there was some evidence, a few anecdotal references, but I . . . I didn’t necessarily . . .”
She closed her eyes. “Wow. I am such a fool.” A horrible half smile pulled at her mouth.
It was like watching a mirror or a recording of himself six months ago. Clark knew the symptoms she was experiencing, the disbelief, the way it was almost funny, laughing gas before a root canal.
“You think curse breaking is a farce.” Her face shuttered then, became hard, impenetrable. “Of course you didn’t expect me to find anything.”
“Riley.” But what could he say? His gut twisted, the sick feeling returning with a vengeance. He’d eaten all the ginger candy already.
“Did you think we’d wander around in the dark for hours?” She swore under her breath. “I knew something was up when you said the compass stopped working. It was too obvious an oversight. You really constructed this whole elaborate plot to humiliate me. That seemed worth it to you?”
Christ. He was going to be sick.
Clark didn’t expect her to understand. She hadn’t seen how bad things got after Cádiz. The way he couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat.
Even based on their short acquaintance, he could tell Riley was stronger than him. That she could weather a professional nosedive, losing her family’s respect, even the disintegration of the only support system she’d ever known, far better than he had.
He’d tried to spare her as much as he could, by pulling the wool over her eyes privately rather than publicly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” The question was drenched in disdain.
He couldn’t hold her gaze anymore. The weight of his own self-disgust threatened to engulf him. Just next to his boot, something small and dark at the very bottom of the wall caught his eye.
“Riley.” He bent for a closer look. The set of letters were smaller, fainter, more urgently etched than the symbols they’d first seen. “This is Scots Gaelic.”
Bending, he traced the line with his thumb. “See how the carving is shallow? The Picts would have used tools made of silver, would have planned their symbols meticulously, but this is crude, done quickly, maybe even with a rock. Someone else came to this site much, much later.
“Crìoch air naimhdean,” he read, his voice hoarse and low.
She took out her phone, using an app she’d downloaded the other night for translation.
“An end to enemies,” she read.
“What do you think that means?”
“I think it’s the curse,” Riley said, face grim.
Chapter Eleven
Back in her room at the inn, Riley stared at her murder board. Wait, no—her not-at-all-crime-affiliated curse-breaking mind map. Man, that really didn’t roll off the tongue in the same way. Whatever. After scribbling a rough approximation of the Gaelic words they’d found etched in the cave along with their English translation on a Post-it, she tacked the note up in the center of the board. The scent signature in the cave had matched the one in the castle exactly.
She had it—the language of the curse, the keystone piece to breaking it. An end to enemies.
When Riley closed her eyes, she could almost see Philippa Campbell, hiding from her family’s butchers, sneaking out under cover of night to scale the dangerous cliffside, searching for a sacred place revered by her ancestors. A fae cave where ancient magic bled through stone.
Something in her bones assured Riley that Philippa had scraped those words into the rock face. Willing them true. A prayer. A vow.
To find that cave—that particular spot—she must have known where to look. And therefore known the risks.
Philippa had chosen in those desperate hours to do what she must. To put herself at the mercy of a power that local legend promised was both great and terrible.
She’d made her daring into the sword she couldn’t wield, her body a vessel for her clan’s vengeance.
Riley felt like an echo the choice that was no choice. The helplessness. The ambition. Philippa had come to that cave at the very end of what must have been an exhaustive search for her family as they struggled for so long to find another way to hold the castle—their home.
Even now, tucked under her quilt at the inn—the clock by her bedside flashing almost midnight—Riley still felt the unbridled power of that cave thrumming in her ears.
Born of rock and salt water, carved by the hand of the tides as a monument, that place was proof that even the unyielding could yield.
Thousands of years ago, the people who had left those symbols had marked that spot as sacred, determined to use their tools and their language to bear witness to a force they otherwise couldn’t process, couldn’t name. Whatever ran through the seams of those rocks had proven both ancient and enduring. And way more intense than anything Riley had ever faced before.
She’d stared at those cave walls, two sets of etchings carved centuries apart, each holy in their own way. And for the first time in a long time, she’d been afraid, not of failing but of falling.