Chapter 67 Chapter 67

Chapter 67 Chapter 67

Twilight's POV 

She led us without hesitation and that was the problem. I knew Krai was disappointed in me, not just him, but the whole council as a whole but this was Aretia.

Every direction we had tried on our own had bent back on itself, every path had curved in ways that made no geographic sense, every landmark had appeared from angles that didn't match Devonye's map. Two days of walking and we had gotten nowhere. But the moment she stood up and started moving, the land seemed to rearrange itself. Paths that hadn't been there before opened up between the trees. The ground leveled out under our feet. We covered in two hours what we hadn't been able to cover in two days and none of us said anything about it out loud because saying it out loud would have meant admitting exactly how thoroughly we had been played.

I walked behind her and watched her and thought about everything.

Devonye fell into step beside me after the first hour. "You doing okay." She said quietly.

"I'm thinking." I said.

"You've got that face."

"What face."

"The one where you're working something out and you don't like where it's going." She said. "You've had it since she said fine."

She was right. That fine had been sitting in my chest since the moment it came out and I couldn't put it down no matter how many other things I tried to think about. Something that had been running a plan this long and this carefully did not just agree and cooperate because you drew a blade on it. It agreed because agreeing fit into the next part of the plan.

Which meant there was a next part.

"She needs us at the egg." I said to Devonye, keeping my voice low enough that only she could hear. 

"She's been keeping us away from it but she needs us there. Why."

Devonye was quiet for a moment. "Something about the egg requires you specifically."

"Or requires what I carry." I said. "Ryaknorg. The bond. Whatever it is that makes me what I am."

"So she gets us to the egg and then what."

"That's what I don't know." I said. "And that's the part I don't like."

Isla was walking on the other side of our unwilling guide, close enough to grab her if she tried anything, her hand resting on her blade with the particular casual readiness that meant she was prepared to use it within a second. I caught her eye across the space between us and she held my gaze for a moment and I could see she was working through the same things I was.

We had talked the night before, briefly, while Devonye kept watch. Isla had told me about the council again, about what they said, about why do you search for what is not lost. We had turned it over between us from every angle and kept arriving at the same place. Isma was not dead. She was somewhere. And whatever was wearing her face knew exactly where.

The trees thinned out ahead of us and then disappeared entirely and we came out into open land that stretched flat and wide in every direction under a sky that was just beginning to go grey with early morning. In the center of that open land, maybe three hundred steps ahead, was a structure I had no word for.

It wasn't a building exactly. It was stone, old stone, the kind that had been standing so long the color of it had changed from whatever it started as into a dark grey that looked almost black in the low light. It rose in a rough circle, stones placed upright at intervals with others laid across their tops, and in the center of the circle was an altar that I could see even from here, low and flat and carved all over with markings that made the ones in the druid settlement look simple.

Devonye stopped walking. "That is not what I was expecting."

"What were you expecting." I said.

"I don't know. Something more hidden. Something that required more finding." She looked at it with narrowed eyes.

"Something that wasn't just sitting out in the open like that."

She had a point. We had spent days walking toward something that turned out to be sitting in the middle of open ground with nothing around it for miles. Anyone could have walked up to it. Anyone could see it from a distance.

There was no reason it should have been difficult to find.

Unless the difficulty was never about finding it.

"Keep moving." I said.

We crossed the open ground in silence. The structure got larger as we approached and the markings on the altar got clearer and I studied them as we walked, trying to find anything familiar in them, anything that matched what I had seen before. 

Some of them did. Some of them were the same as the ones on my skin, the ones that had appeared the day Ryaknorg chose me, and seeing them carved into stone out here in the middle of nowhere made something shift uneasily in my chest.

We stopped at the edge of the stone circle.
She turned to face us for the first time since we started walking and the expression on that borrowed face was one I had not seen on it before. Something almost reverent. Like she was standing somewhere that mattered to her in a way that went beyond the plan she was running.

"The egg is on the altar." She said.

I looked. There was something there, in the center of the altar, covered in a cloth so old the color of it was indistinguishable from the stone beneath it. The shape of what was underneath was unmistakable.
"And you're just telling us." Devonye said flatly. 

"Just like that."

"You asked me to bring you here." She said. "I brought you here."

"Why." I said.

She looked at me. "Because only you can touch it." She said. "It has been waiting for you specifically. 

Any other hand and it stays exactly as it is. Stone. Cold. Nothing."

When we went to the Isle of the Lost, ivy, Violet and Eleanor did not tell us anything about others not touching the egg. I knew more than I felt that something was wrong.

I looked at the altar and then back at her. "And what happens when I touch it."

She smiled. "Something wonderful." She said, looking at us.

"For one of us."

The silence that followed stretched out long enough that the birds somewhere in the trees behind us started calling to each other in the growing light and even they sounded wrong out here, too far away, like the sound was being carried from somewhere it didn't originate.

"She's not going to tell us the rest." Isla said 
quietly from beside me. "She's said everything she's going to say."

"I know." I said.

"So what do we do."

I looked at the altar. At the shape under the cloth. At the markings that matched the ones on my own skin. I thought about Krai in the dream telling me I was overconfident. I thought about Ryaknorg pulling away from my outstretched hand. I thought about my mother's face and the disappointment on it that hadn't needed a single word.

I thought about Isla, about everything she had tried to tell me before I was ready to hear it, about the way she had stayed beside me anyway.

And then I thought about the thing that had been nagging at the back of my mind since we crossed the open ground and I finally let myself look at it directly.

Why was it so easy to find once she started leading us? Nothing made sense now.

Not the directions. Not the path. Why was the structure itself sitting in open ground with nothing protecting it, no enchantment we had to break through, no guards, nothing.

Something this important, something that people had been keeping us away from for days, should have been harder to reach once we were actually going toward it.

Unless we were supposed to reach it.

Unless being here, right now, with me standing at the edge of this circle, was exactly where we were supposed to end up all along.

I turned to look at her.

She was watching me with those wrong eyes and that borrowed face and that smile that hadn't moved and something about the patience in it finally told me what I had been missing.

She hadn't been keeping us away from the egg.

She had been delivering us to it.

And we had walked every step of the way ourselves.