Caged: A Fae Fantasy Romance (Fae Magic Book 4) by Jessica Aspen

Author:Jessica Aspen [Aspen, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abracadabra Publishing
Published: 2019-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-three

Ardan stumbled out of the iron storage room. Despite the heavy protective spells, his skin burned and his entire body ached as if he’d been practicing his sword-play for days. He peered through watering eyes and found his way to the decontamination chamber near the tower’s exit. The cool rush of healing magic flushed the toxins from his system, but even so, when he left the room, he still ached and he wondered at the permanent damage being done to his body.

He sank onto the recovery bench next to a man with the overly large ears and the deep craggy wrinkles and clouded eyes of someone close to their tenth millennium.

“Greetings, elder.”

“Captain Ardan.”

He hadn’t had the chance to learn many of the workers’ names, but they’d all figured out who he was immediately.

“Is it always draining like this?” Even after all the healing had cleansed him, he still felt like he could sit on the bench and not move for days.

The old man cracked a smile. “Heh! That’s a good one.” His smile disappeared back into the wrinkles and the dark shadows reappeared in his eyes. “No. It gets worse every time.”

“Oh.” Deep depression sank into him.

To take dragon bone—a substance so filled with magic it almost didn’t exist without it—and blend it with iron, the bane of every magic-using creature in the worlds. This was a Herculean task. It might take years. Or it might not even be possible and he only had days. And with workers getting sick just by being in the same room with the iron there was no way he’d accomplish what the queen wanted. There would be no dragon chains. Or net. Or any way to control the beast.

The weight of his body got suddenly heavier. “We’re all dead, aren’t we? She’ll have no choice but to kill all of us when we fail.” And they would fail. There was no doubt. He sank his head into his hands.

“Cheer up, boy. At least the queen’s death will be quick. Iron poisoning’s a slow way to die.”

Ardan snorted a laugh, knowing he sounded as humorless as the old man next to him. “Maybe, if we had time, we could figure out a solution. But I’m the queen’s last-ditch solution and I have no idea what to do. You’ve all tried so many things, and nothing’s worked. The bone rejects the iron every time.”

“I told them before, we need a dwarf. But nobody listens to an old man.”

“What?”

“A dwarf.” The old man sighed. “And not just any dwarf. We need Ringwold.”

“Who’s Ringwold?”

“He’s a master at his craft. Holds more knowledge in his thumb about metals than any of us here have in our entire heads. We’re elvatian, and worse than that, we’re all Tuathan—lazy to the core. Most of us know how to wield a sword, but to craft one? We buy the fuckers from the source.”

“The dwarves.”

“The dwarves.”

They sat in silence and watched the next man stumble from the chamber to the other bench, his skin a pasty shade of green.

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