Moments later, she heard Rhea catching up to her, feeling her way up the path with the use of a weathered grey staff. That unassuming staff, like the crystals Cas carried, was embedded with Marr magic—with Fire-kind magic—and it doubled as a weapon and a guiding stick.
“Terrible storm tonight,” Rhea commented innocently.
“This empire has seen worse,” Cas said, squinting into the cave and studying it briefly before shuffling her way inside.
The storms that had rolled through the former kingdom of Alnor on the night of her adoptive parents’ deaths were unrivaled at the time, and they had remained the fodder of legends even in the thirteen years since. The destruction had been catastrophic, with dozens of casualties and hundreds of homes flooded and otherwise destroyed.
The passing of the Lord and Lady of House Tessur, the last members of the powerful house that had once ruled the largest of the Alnorian realms, had gone largely unnoticed in the aftermath—as had the disappearance of their adopted daughter, Silenna.
Silenna Tessur was dead, as far as anyone needed to know.
She had become over a dozen other people since that death, but she was Casia Greythorne now, and she had worked hard to leave her other identities in the past where they belonged.
“Anyway, Silverfoot’s spotted some interesting things in this storm,” Rhea said, climbing into the cave. She was slow, but surprisingly sure-footed, and Cas knew that she hated having people wait on her— so Cas hadn’t waited.
“What kind of interesting things?” Cas asked as she subtly kicked aside a treacherously loose looking bit of shale in Rhea’s path.
Rhea was quiet for a moment, concentrating. “I see metal stamped with the Bone god’s symbol, and those twisted white trees that people talk about. The entrance to Oblivion…it’s really as big and ominous as they say. And there are so many clouds beyond it. Looks like an ocean of grey waves and starlight; it’s all got a weird glow to it.”
“Silverfoot is at the gate already, you mean?”
“He ran ahead after showing me this cave,” she explained. “And that gate is less than a half mile ahead. He’s spotted a small group of the king-emperor’s Peace Keepers hanging around it.” She said Peace Keepers like it was a curse.
That wasn’t too far from the truth.
“So Varen is meddling in something up here,” Cas said, frowning.
“Seems like it.”
“But what?”
“Doesn’t matter, does it? We just need proof that it’s happening,” Rhea reminded her. “Let Lord Merric and his political allies confront Varen about it if they want to. That’s nothing we need to get tangled up with.” She wrinkled her nose, and, more to herself than Cas, she added, “Least not beyond what we already are.”
The king-emperor needs to be investigated and held accountable, for the good of the empire, Lord Merric had claimed.
Cas was not a fool; Merric’s motives were not entirely altruistic. The Stonefall Realm he oversaw was simply closer to these mountains than any other, and that meant his people would bear the brunt of whatever horrors the king-emperor’s meddling might awaken.
Merric collected taxes from those people. He couldn’t do that if those people were dead, or otherwise incapacitated. That Fading Sickness that had plagued their empire for so long had already been flaring in his region as of late, and there were rumblings, she’d heard, that Merric might soon be supplanted in favor of a new Lord or Lady who could better protect his people.
It seemed like almost all of the once-powerful houses of the Kethran Empire stood on unstable foundations, now.
But if Lord Merric could blame at least some of his realm’s troubles on the king-emperor, then it might save him some face with his followers and shore up his house’s rule once more.
He couldn’t do that without proof, however.
Cas took that brooch she’d collected from her bag and twisted it around in her hands, thinking.
She knew Rhea had a point; they didn’t need to get mixed up in the bigger parts of any of this. And truthfully, she didn’t want to get mixed up with anyone or anything beyond herself and the very few people she cared about in this world. But still…
“You’re sure they’re actually Peace Keepers?” she asked, and then frowned as Rhea nodded, though she didn’t really doubt Rhea’s source.
That source was more sharp-eyed than either of them. Silverfoot was a fox—the small creature that had brushed against Cas earlier—and one of the peculiar sort from the Twisted Wood of the Wild In-Between. Like most things that hailed from those wilds between their empire and the Sundolian Empire to the south, he carried a trace of divine magic. Air-kind, in this case. The creature’s eyes were the same odd grey-green shade as the crystal that Cas had used earlier.
And his magic worked in a similar manner; he had bonded himself to Rhea after she’d found him, abandoned and hungry and hurt, as a kit. She had nursed him back to health, and now, perhaps as a way to thank her, he used his magic to pass messages—mostly images of whatever he was seeing— into Rhea’s mind. He was the only way she clearly saw anything these days.
He was also the first of the remaining members of their party to arrive in the cave; he returned from his scouting of the gate, moving so silently that Cas didn’t even notice him until he’d slinked up to his customary perch on Rhea’s shoulder, wrapped his black-tipped tail around her neck, and settled there with a yawn.
“He took a high path to the gateway.” Rhea was quiet for a moment, head bowed in concentration as it often was when she was trying to more fully picture Silverfoot’s mental images. The fox’s intelligent eyes shimmered with the glow of his magic. “The three of you should be able to take that same path. It looks narrow and steep as hell, but it appears as if it will take you to a good vantage point that overlooks that gate. Meanwhile, we’ll stay here and keep an eye out for things.” She gave the fox a little scratch under his chin and added, “And we’ll keep dry, won’t we Silvie?”
“Lucky about that last part,” Cas said, attempting a cheerful tone again, mostly because she knew Rhea actually hated being relegated to the role of a mere scout.
Before she had come to live with Cas and the others—and before she had lost her sight to a head injury she didn’t like to talk about—Rhea had been a decorated soldier in one of the armies of the southern empire. She had lived and died by the sword. And she rarely complained about being forced to trade her sword in for a guiding staff, but Cas knew her well enough now to know that she would have been the first to rush that Oblivion Gate if she could have.
Instead, Rhea merely described the way to that path Silverfoot had found in great detail, and then they sat in alert silence for a few more minutes, waiting for the others to catch up.
Even though she was expecting footsteps, when they finally came, all Cas could think about were those undead monsters she’d left in the pass—could they have been reanimated once more?
Every nerve ending in her body tingled to life, and her fingers wrapped more tightly around the stolen sword in her lap.
Silverfoot leapt from Rhea’s shoulder and crept out of the cave. A moment later, Rhea relayed what the fox had seen: “Zev and Laurent are almost here.”