A car door slammed; he glanced around to see Val settling in the midst
of the young women in the little car. The car pulled back onto the road, sped
away. Leith watched it, startled.
“They said they’d take him to the nearest garage,” the driver explained. “
Their phones work fine,” he added bitterly, as Leith walked to the edge of
the road, stood frowning at the Greenwing disappearing around a bend.
“I don’t like this.”
“They seemed very nice,” the driver assured him. “Students on their way
back to the local college. I offered to go, but—”
“I know. An otherwise appealing young knight except for his brains. Or lack
of them. He was the one who reminded me that we are on a quest. Sylvester
Skelton said we must assume nothing.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the driver said uneasily. “I thought—”
“Well,” Leith said, leaning against the limo beside the tiny bronze wyvern
rearing on the hood. “You may be right. We’ll wait.”
The driver got back inside, tried rousing the engine again. Leith, his arms
folded, brooded at the highway. Pierce went looking for a bush.
He walked farther than he intended, lulled by the soft breeze, the smells of
needles, pitch, sun-burnished bark, the shadows and gentle whisperings of the
immense trees. For the first time since he had left home, he feared nothing,
anticipated nothing, just rambled without thinking through the quiet
afternoon. A squirrel chided him; a bird sang briefly, then fluttered away, a
streak of yellow against the green. He rounded a tree trunk that might have
taken a couple dozen arms to span its girth. At the other side of it, he saw
the sea again, the brilliant light across it that, in a tale, might have been
the blazing wake of a vessel made of gold.
From somewhere in the trees above him there came a sudden, high-pitched
scream.
His head snapped around; he took a step uphill and heard a gunshot. He froze.
Someone shouted from below: Leith, he thought, but had no time to answer
before he began a scrabbling run among the stones and swollen tree roots. The
girl cried out again; this time it sounded like a curse. Another shout came,
this one from uphill as well. Pierce crashed through a thicket; the ground
leveled on the other side of it, trees opening up in a crescent around a
strange stone ruin.
Water flowed out from under the ruin, a quick little rill that vanished back
underground beneath a brake of ferns. The ruin, three broken walls and an
archway, had been built around what looked like a cave in a steep, sudden rise
of earth, slabs of stone, more trees.
The voices sounded very close, a tangle of men, the girl crying at them
fiercely, rhythmically. Pierce saw the mountain bikes lined along both sides
of the dark opening.
All of them carried the familial devices of the Wyvernhold knights.
The girl’s voice rose sharply. Pierce looked around wildly for a weapon, saw
a lovely glass pitcher lightly chained around its neck to a tree branch above
the froth of water. During the moment it took him to reach it, break it
against a stone and turn, armed with a shard of jagged glass attached to the
pitcher’s handle, some of the confused knot of voices began to break into
words.
“Put that down! I’ll shoot, I swear—”
“All weapons belong to Severen—you can’t shoot us. Just put it down—”
“You put that down!”
“This is holy ground. We are Knights of the Rising God on a quest in King
Arden’s name, and this gold mine is dedicated to Severen—”
“This old shaft is as empty as your heads, you assholes; it went dead a
hundred years ago!”
“If you’ll just listen—”
“Put that down, too! This is Tanne’s holy ground, not Severen’s, and I
swear—”
There was an odd snick of metal that Pierce associated with weapons in very
old movies. He plunged into the ruins, wielding his broken glass in the air,
and found an elderly man with white hair down his back swaying on his knees
and trying to pull himself upright. His eyes widened at the sight of Pierce
and his weapon. He threw himself sideways to grasp at some kind of long-
handled implement. Pierce moved quickly through the ruins and into the open
earth beyond them, the mouth of an old shaft crisscrossed with miners’
lights, young men’s faces flaring and disappearing as they roamed, and
rummaged, and the girl cursed them in the constantly shifting shadows.
One turned headlamp illumined her face finally: a young, freckled oval,
narrowed gray eyes beneath flaming red brows, lips pared thin as thread with
fury.
Then she vanished as light drenched Pierce’s face, then flashed across the
broken pitcher.
Pierce heard her gasp. A thundering boom sent dirt scattering down from the
ceiling. There was a tortured groan from very old timber. All of the headlamps
pointed up.
The world went black.