A circle had been carved into the ground around Caius, with runes spaced evenly along its circumference. They were reminiscent of the protective runes Echo had seen Dorian and Caius use at Jasper’s warehouse in London, though these were far more complex. The Drakhar script was sharp and jagged, and curiously well preserved, as if age could not touch them. There were additional runes drawn in straight lines from the outer edge of the circle and pointing toward its center. Toward Caius. A small moan escaped Caius—it was so quiet that Echo was half certain she had imagined it, but Dorian’s hand tightened painfully where it held her. No, she hadn’t imagined that pained sound.
Jasper drew even with them, slowly, seemingly reluctant to get too close to either Caius or the circle. “What is that?”
“It’s a barrier glyph,” Dorian replied. “Of ancient design, but the construction is similar to the ones we use in the Drakharin military.” His voice was oddly cold. Perhaps he was trying to distance himself from the situation to be objective. Echo spared him a glance. Though his tone was detached, his expression was not. His already-pale face had gone ashen at the sight of Caius, and a slight tremor worked its way through his body.
The longer Echo looked at the circle—and it was easier to look at the circle than at Caius, though avoidance felt cowardly—the more she felt the magic emanating from it. The firebird allowed her to sense magic in the air, like currents. She could feel it. Taste it. She tilted her head to one side, looking askance at the runes. They shimmered with a sickly glow, like an oil slick in sunlight. A faint sense of unease seemed to radiate from the circle. Echo knew without being told that if she tried to cross it as it was, she might not survive the attempt. At least, not in one piece.
“Well,” Jasper prompted, “how do we get through it?” He waved a hand at the chains holding Caius up by his bloodied wrists. “We can’t just leave him like this.”
Dorian whirled on Jasper, fists tightly clenched, and Echo worried that he was actually going to start throwing punches. “Don’t you think I know that?”
To his credit, Jasper barely flinched. His eyes narrowed, but he was otherwise unperturbed. “Then do something.”
Echo stepped between them.
“Dorian,” she said, trying to keep her voice as level as possible. A presence fluttered anxiously at the back of her mind. Rose, drawn by Caius’s suffering, no doubt. Echo pushed it down as best she could. “Is there anything we can do about the glyph?”
Dorian shook his head, not as though he were admitting defeat but as if he was adrift. Lost. His eye strayed to Caius, and Echo didn’t miss the anguish in his gaze.
“There should be a way to break the glyph,” Dorian said, voice thick with emotion, “even if this is the most complicated barrier spell I’ve ever seen.”
“Anything that can be locked can be unlocked,” Echo said. A peculiar quiet calm came over her. If she ignored the body hanging from chains, if she recast Caius as a puzzle to be solved, then she could focus on the problem at hand: how to free him.
With steady, careful steps, Echo walked around the circle, mindful of the barrier she could not cross. One of the first skills she had acquired as a runaway illicitly living in the shadows of one of the finest libraries in the world was the art of picking locks. It wasn’t terribly hard once you knew what you were doing; it required patience and a bit of cleverness. Echo wasn’t always brimming with the former, but she liked to think she had an abundance of the latter.
“Maybe if we…” The words died in her throat as she saw the ruin of Caius’s back.
She remembered the landscape of his back, though not with her own memories—with hands that were not her own, lips that had never touched his skin. Faint scales dusted his shoulder blades, rounding the contours of bone and muscle to meet at the column of his spine, where they descended to the waistband of his pants. Echo knew how it would feel to trace that gentle arc of scales with the tips of her fingers. She knew the way the texture shifted beneath her touch, how the scales were slightly cooler than the skin around them. She knew that caressing the place where skin met scales would make Caius dissolve into laughter that was most unbecoming to a prince of the Drakharin.
She knew all that without ever having done any of it. The memory of how beautiful he had been made what had been done to him worse somehow.
Long angry welts crisscrossed flesh mottled by bruises, some old and yellow, others fresh and purple. Rivulets of dried blood caked Caius’s scales, while split skin oozed thick, viscous crimson.
“Echo.”
She started at the sound of her name. By the look on Dorian’s face, it wasn’t the first time he’d called it. His brow crinkled in confusion before he appeared to decide that her momentary lapse was not something he ought to be concerned about just then.
“There are two ways to break through a barrier glyph,” Dorian said. “The first is with magic. If we had a skilled enough mage, they might be able to undo the spell work that created this one.”
“Too bad we didn’t think to bring one of those,” Jasper muttered.
“And the second way?” Echo asked.
An expression that was too grim to be called a smile but too eager to be called anything else flitted across Dorian’s face. “Good old-fashioned brute force.”
Echo eyed the elaborate carvings on the stone floor. There was a faint vibration in the air, nearly imperceptible but noticeable if one paid very close attention. The glyph radiated with magic. Strong magic. A sense of foreboding flavored its energy, and each step Echo took closer to its outer circle filled her with the threat of malice. The spell work was beautiful in its complexity; it warned you off the closer you got to it, so that when you burned against its barrier you had no one to blame but yourself.
“So we just smash through it?” Echo could not help sounding dubious.
Dorian replied with a brief nod. “Yes.”
“Is that wise?”
Dorian shook his head. “No. Probably not. But it’s our only option to get him out of here before…” He let the words die in his throat, pain and sorrow etched across his face. “We need to help Caius before his wounds prove too much for even him to heal.”
“The clock’s a-ticking,” Jasper said.
Echo nodded as she shrugged off her jacket. If she was going to use her power, she didn’t want to singe the leather. “Then we better get to work.”
—
Breaking the ground around the seal wouldn’t work, Dorian assured them. The spell had been embedded into the carved inscriptions, but the magic would hold even after their destruction. So that plan was out.
So Echo did what was starting to feel like a natural response to situations that stymied her. She set the blasted thing on fire.
The magic inside her felt strained, but she reached for it all the same. Magic was not an infinite resource, and it did not come without a cost, but Echo would be more than willing to pay later in pain if she could only manage this one task. If she could perhaps burn the magic out of the glyph by overloading it with her own, like an outlet channeling too much electricity. It was a theory she prayed would work in practice.
“Are you sure this is going to do the trick?” Jasper asked.