Royston and I would have to jump alone to the George Peabody Library in Baltimore, Maryland, where I had left Gian’s book and the leather canister. I was uneasy about it, but Bastien and his guards would be sensed in the gateway, and our whereabouts would be discovered. Bastien would wait for us by the gateway book in the Chetham’s Library with two of the guards from Couve who had joined us in Barmhilde.
The Red and his army had forced the council’s forces out of the library, which allowed Bastien to put a spell on the page into Chetham to lock them out.
Bastien gave me one of the guard’s window rods to contact him should we run into trouble.
Trouble? The end of our quest would bring us smack in the middle of it. To the Tetrad.
I hugged the fur jacket The Red had given me. All the talk about releasing the Tetrad and no one ever mentioned what would happen when the beast was released. Supposedly, whoever opened its prison could control it. But how were they so certain it would work? A prophecy? I had my doubts.
Royston put the strap holding a canteen over his shoulder and then the crown I had removed from my body onto his head. He nodded at me then jumped into the book.
Bastien cradled my head in his hands and pressed a long kiss on my lips. “Take your time. Don’t make rash decisions.” His hands fell away, the warmth of them leaving my skin.
“I will. And Bastien, I, well, I—” I considered telling him how I felt about him, but the words wouldn’t roll off my tongue. Maybe it was better to leave it unsaid. I worried he would think me saying it was only fueled by our situation and not my real feelings.
“What is it?” He watched me curiously.
“I’ll see you soon,” I said and kissed him one last time before leaping into the open page.
After I landed, Royston and I didn’t speak. He handed me the crown, and I returned it to my body. We climbed to the fifth level of the cathedral-like room and went straight to the bookcase where I’d hidden Gian’s book and leather canister. Thankfully, they were still where I had shoved them behind the books.
Royston paused in the middle of putting on his fur coat. “Did you see that?”
I buried the canister into my boot and darted glances around us. “What was it?”
“Might have been a bug.”
A shiver tickled up my spine, and I scratched my neck. “I hope not.”
I had thought we could only jump into libraries, but Emily had found a charm in the ancient spell book that could create a gateway to anywhere. Gian must’ve used it for his book. I slipped on my coat and opened the book to the page with the three-peaked mountain range on it.
“Let’s go.”
We grasped each other’s hands and jumped into the photograph.
Like a million needles, the icy wind stabbed at my exposed skin. I pulled the fur hood over my head. We were at the foot of the tallest peak of the mountains. In front of us, a trail spiraled up to the mouth of a large cave.
With shaky fingers, I opened the leather canister and carefully removed the parchment with Gian’s instructions. “We have to look for etchings. There are clues for getting past traps.”
We followed the trail to a wall made out of some sort of metal. It had to be over twenty feet tall, stretching from one side of the mountain to the other.
“Possibly we need a Chiave for this?” His breath froze in front of his face.
“I think you’re right.” I touched the slick wall and instantly wished I hadn’t. The frozen metal bit my fingertips. “Crap. That was real smart.”
“You should never touch metal that is frozen,” Royston warned, a little too late.
As I rolled my eyes at him, I spotted an etching in the wall. There was a shape of a cross cut into the metal. The spirit of the Chiave had told me the wearer or owner would see things that had come before them. I couldn’t see over the wall, so I guessed using the cross would show me something. Like the other side maybe.
The wind picked up as I opened my jacket, pulled aside my leather breastplate, and lifted up my shirt. I placed my cold fingers on the cross branded into my skin and shivered.
“Reditum,” I said. The cross tugged from my skin, and I fell to one knee from the pain.
Royston caught the cross and slipped it into the etching on the wall. It fit as perfectly as a puzzle piece. The ground shook as the wall separated in the middle, leaving just enough space for one person to pass through it at a time.
I removed the cross from the wall. Holding it on my palm, I chanted the charm to return it to its original form.
“Modificare.”
The cross flattened and twisted into a long metal rod with a blue tint to it. I stuffed it into the deep pocket of my fur coat and shimmied through the opening in the wall.
We traveled up to a fork in the pathway. At a loss for which way to go, I searched for one of the etchings. After several minutes searching, I sat on a large rock and pulled the fur jacket tight around me.
“There’s nothing,” I said.
Royston sat down beside me. Something on a nearby tree distracted him, and he pointed at it. “Is that an eye?”
I popped up. “It is. We must have to use the telescope here.”
After removing the telescope from my side, I peered through the lens at the forked path. One of the paths was blurry while the other was clear. I worried that it was just me and maybe I’d squinted wrong, so I had Royston look.
He lowered the telescope. “The left path is clear.”
“It was for me, too,” I said. “So we go that way.”
I changed the telescope into a rod and continued up the pathway behind Royston.
The trail spiraling upward was difficult to travel with the ice slicking the rocks. I fell twice, landing on my knees. Eventually, we came to a flat part of the path. A large boulder secured with a metal net blocked our way.
A sweep of the area gave us no clues. I stared at the boulder, shivering against the cold. The sun came out from behind a cloud and glistened against the metal surrounding the boulder.
“Search the net,” I said, combing every bit of it until my eyes came to a tiny sword cut into the metal. “Here it is,” I said, opening my jacket to retrieve the sword.
The pain wasn’t as bad this time when the sword tore from me, either because I’d gotten used to it, or because I was a walking Popsicle and couldn’t feel anything. I had to focus to keep my frozen fingers wrapped around the hilt of the sword.
The etching on the net didn’t match the size of the sword as the cross had in the wall. My gaze ran across the circumference of the boulder. There had to be some mark or even a hole the Chiave fit in…
Nothing.
There was nothing.
The clouds drifted overhead, the sun warming the back of my neck, its light glinting against the netting.
Of course.
The Chiave could cut metal.
I swung the sword at the lock securing the netting around the boulder. The hilt shook violently in my hands when it made contact.