She handed the bowl to the Ala, who gave the intricate carvings on the side only a cursory glance. Her eyes drooped closed and she went very still. Everyone waited, silent. After a few moments, the Ala opened her eyes and smiled. There was sadness in that smile.
“It’s a clever bit of spell work,” said the Ala. “Your instincts were right, Echo. This bowl can be used to track down certain items, but it needs to be linked to some physical part of the person you seek. As you said, a feather or a lock of hair would suffice. However, unless Caius had the forethought to gift you with a few strands of his hair, then I do not think—”
“What about blood?” Dorian asked, none too politely.
The Ala blinked at him, no doubt silently delivering the litany Echo had heard a thousand times before about the impudence of younger generations, which, considering the Ala’s advanced age—she was a thousand years old, give or take a few decades—consisted of pretty much everyone. Aloud, she said, “Blood would do. It would be even better than hair or feathers, as it is commonly more potent when deployed in magic such as this. Even a few drops would be inordinately useful, but unless you’re carrying a bottle of it around—”
“Which would be intensely weird,” Echo said.
“—then I’m afraid we’re back at—what’s that saying?—square one.”
“Rest assured, I do not make it a habit of carting blood around with me, but I do know where we can acquire a sample of Caius’s,” said Dorian.
“Where?” asked the Ala.
“Wyvern’s Keep.”
“Oh, hell no,” Ivy said.
Echo patted Ivy’s knee. Of everyone in the room who wasn’t Drakharin, Ivy had accumulated the most visits—two—to the keep. Neither one had been overly pleasant. “We’re not sending you back there. No matter what.”
Not to mention the fact that a ruse similar to the one that had tricked Tanith the first time wouldn’t work a second time.
“We don’t need to send anyone in,” Dorian said. “Helios passed along the pendant Ivy smuggled into the fortress. It’s connected to the blade of my sword. We can use them to communicate with my agents inside the keep. There are some still loyal to Caius, and they’ve been laying the groundwork for an uprising from within. They can acquire the blood, and if the gods smile upon us—”
“When do they ever?” Jasper muttered.
“—they will be able to smuggle the blood out of the keep and into my waiting hands.”
“Question,” Echo said. “Why is Caius’s blood lying around the keep? That seems unsanitary.”
Dorian rolled his eye. “It’s not ‘lying around the keep.’ It’s in a vault, along with the blood of every other Dragon Prince elected since the title came into being. Part of the coronation rituals requires a ceremonial bloodletting. It’s meant to symbolize that the elected prince will willingly shed his or her blood for the good of the Drakharin people. The office of Dragon Prince is about more than just having power over our people. The prince belongs to them, body and soul. The blood is collected in a vial and stored in a secure location for posterity. And to remind both prince and pauper of the nature of the Dragon Prince’s sacrifice.”
“How difficult will it be for your agents to access the vault?” the Ala asked.
Dorian shrugged. “It’s hard to say. At least one guard is stationed at the vault at all times, but it’s more of a formality than anything else. If Tanith suspects we might attempt to steal the blood, for whatever reason, then she may have assigned more guards to it. As far as I know, there have not been any changes in the guard rotations for that section of the fortress. According to the last report my agents sent me, only the exits and entrances have had additional forces assigned to them. Tanith has also doubled up the scouting parties in the surrounding area. Getting the blood out of the keep might be harder than getting into the vault itself.”
The Ala nodded. “See what you can do. As challenging as it seems, it might be our only way to find Caius and, through him, Tanith. Our scouts have spotted her or her operatives all over the globe, but there doesn’t appear to be a pattern to her travels. There must be one, but we have not yet seen it.”
Echo fidgeted in her seat. She knew she should be more concerned with whatever plan Tanith was concocting, but all she could think of was that they were closer to figuring out where Caius was—and whether he was even still alive—than they had been in weeks. Ivy bumped her shoulder against Echo, as if sensing her agitation. The Ala began to hammer out details for how to proceed, with Dorian and Helios chipping in with knowledge of the Drakharin when needed, but Echo was only half listening. She said a silent prayer to the gods she wasn’t sure she believed in, that Caius would hang on just a little bit longer.
We’re coming for you, Echo thought. All you have to do is stay alive.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Caius didn’t know where he was.
The uncertainty assaulted him on two fronts: geographically and existentially. He had no idea where in the world his body was. Not that it particularly mattered, he had to admit. Each and every day was the same: an endless parade of misery through the hellish landscape he now called home. He had thought that time would help him grow accustomed to the pain of having his life force, his vitality, the very thing that made him more than simply a sack of bones and meat, drained to top up his deranged sister’s power stores, but the days turned into weeks, and his naive notion was proven indubitably wrong.
Yet more than the question of his location—he was vaguely aware of having left Scotland, but beyond that, the specifics remained a mystery—the certainty of his being was fuzzier than he preferred. It was hard to tell sometimes whether he was even in his own body. He felt, on occasion, like he was floating through the void of the in-between, lost to the darkness that lived between all the heres and theres of the world, stuck in a limbo that defied the senses. The pain followed him into that void even when he wasn’t aware of his own body; it had invaded his consciousness, depriving him of a single moment’s rest, refusing him the sweet embrace of oblivion.
Death would have been a kindness.
“Wake up, Brother.”
A damp cloth was pressed to his chapped lips, and the sensation dragged him out of the void. His throat was parched. He would have killed for a drink of water, but he wasn’t sure he had the control of his muscles to swallow anything successfully. He wasn’t sure any Dragon Princes had ever met their end by drowning in bed, and he wasn’t keen to be the first, even if he was currently dethroned.
The cloth was removed. With his eyes still closed, Caius worked his jaw, testing its range of motion. He hadn’t eaten anything for days, he’d been so ill, and even the small motion was enough to send bolts of pain shooting through his skull. The dehydration certainly wasn’t helping. Whatever Tanith was doing to him was killing him, slowly but ever so surely.