“Do you have to turn everything into a joke?” Dorian snapped.
Jasper didn’t flinch, though Echo noticed the tightening of his eyes. His expression shuttered, like a window being slammed shut. She had seen him do that countless times. He clammed up when he slipped his mask on. When he was afraid his face would betray what he was truly feeling.
“Just trying to keep the mood light,” said Jasper. “Between you and Echo, I’m getting a bit sick of the doom and gloom.”
With a displeased grunt, Dorian turned away, toward the passage that the trail of blood seemed to indicate. Jasper caught his arm, his mask slipping just enough for Echo to see the way his eyes softened. Dorian paused but didn’t turn around.
“He’s going to be fine,” Jasper said to Dorian’s back. “We’re going to drag him out of here and patch him up, and then you can mother-hen over him to your heart’s content.”
“I hope you’re right,” Echo said. She stepped around the two of them, taking the lead again. Dorian would likely take point at any sign of danger, but the sight of Caius’s blood had made her own run cold, and putting one foot in front of the other quelled the unease she felt, if only slightly. They needed to find him. Now. Before there was nothing left of him to find.
They walked in tense silence through the dilapidated temple. Broken statues littered their path, strewn about like victims of a long-ago battle. Chunks of masonry had fallen from the walls, parts of a frieze depicting Drakharin gods and goddesses at war. Echo tried to piece together the story, but there were too many missing fragments for it to make much sense. A great tangle of roots had worked its way through the cracks in the paving stones as nature fought to reclaim the earth upon which the temple sat.
Echo’s curiosity warred with her inclination to leave Dorian alone. She wanted, desperately, to ask him if he was familiar with the tale carved into the marble walls, but there was a purpose in his stride and a tension in the set of his shoulders that made her think he had no desire to satisfy her curiosity.
Jasper had no such reticence.
“I wonder what it all means,” he said, stepping carefully over a particularly large segment of the shattered frieze.
To Echo’s surprise, Dorian answered Jasper’s non-question. “It’s the same nonsense for which all monuments are built: we fought, we bled, we died, and all in the name of glory. And so we perpetuate the legend that all that fighting and bleeding and dying is worth something so that future generations can go on repeating the sins of the past while expecting it to result in anything besides more fighting and bleeding and dying.”
It was by far the most poetic thing Echo had ever heard him say.
It wasn’t difficult to imagine how beautiful the temple must have once been. High above their heads soared a barrel vault ceiling, the mortar tiles of which were flecked with bits of peeling paint. The support columns—which were mercifully in far better condition than the statues—were adorned with a curling form of Drakhar script that wound around each column like decorative ribbon. The writing bore some similarity to the Drakhar runes Echo had seen, but it seemed older. Ancient. Certain figures reminded her of the soft, curving lines of Avicet script. The Avicen and Drakharin had a shared past, though both sides behaved as though they would like nothing less than to remember it. But the words engraved in the marble columns betrayed the lie. Language knew. Language remembered.
Echo craned her neck to get a better look at the carvings high up on the walls. Her foot snagged on a root and, with a muffled curse, she went down, hands braced to break her fall. When she looked up, she found herself staring into the eyes of a dragon.
She may have screamed. She would never, ever admit to doing so.
“It’s just a statue,” Jasper said, resting his foot on the thing’s severed head. He exhibited as much respect for the gods of the Drakharin as he did for the Avicen pantheon, which was none. Echo wanted to punch the smirk off his face. “Scaredy-cat.”
The dragon’s eyes were unseeing alabaster pools, though the delicate lines of its face had been hewn with exceptional realism. An open maw, lined with two rows of sharp teeth, snarled with such eternal ferocity that Echo thought she might be able to feel its sour breath upon her face if she stared at it long enough.
Jasper offered her a hand to help her stand, but that damnable smirk was still plastered on his face.
“I may be a scaredy-cat but at least I’m not—”
“Hush,” said Dorian. He held one hand up in the universal gesture of “shut up.” He cocked his head to the side, listening.
Echo hushed, silently grateful for his intervention, because she was sorely lacking in clever comebacks. She’d probably come up with one later. L’esprit de l’escalier, as the French liked to say.
“What is it?” Echo asked. She brushed her dirty hands against her jeans, but even that noise felt too loud in the silence. “What did you hear?”
“Nothing,” said Dorian. “And that’s the problem.”
He was right, Echo realized. If Caius was here, then there should have been guards. Or at the very least some signs of life. But the ruins were undisturbed, as if no one had set foot in this forgotten place for years and years.
From everything Caius had said, Echo knew his sister to be a master strategist. She could be bold to the point where weaker men would have called it foolishness, but there was always a reason behind her actions, some clever tactic that at times only she could see. It was difficult to reconcile the idea of that person with someone who would go through the trouble of kidnapping a very powerful foe, only to abandon him in a run-down temple without the slightest security.
“Something’s up,” Echo said.
To that, Dorian nodded. He unsheathed his sword. “Be on your guard.”
Without another word, he resumed their trek through the corridor, sidestepping fallen idols. Echo and Jasper followed, giving him a wide berth so that if he swung his sword, they’d be well out of his way. Jasper had a long, wicked-looking knife strapped to his back, and Echo had her magpie dagger tucked into her boot, but she knew drawing it in a fight would be a waste. Stabbing an enemy would be simple enough, but her real weapon was not wrought of steel, it was in her. She focused, feeling the current of magic that flowed through her veins as naturally as her own blood. Her body felt warmer as the magic responded to her. With each passing day, she was feeling more and more attuned to it. Using it still caused her pain, but so long as she inflicted some in turn on the Drakharin who had taken Caius, she could deal with it. A little pain for a lot of power seemed like a fair trade.