Shatter the Earth by Karen Chance

Author:Karen Chance [Chance, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: urban fantasy, fantasy series, Series, fantasy magic, action fantasy, fantasyromance, fantasy elves, fantasy wizard, Cassandra Palmer, new york times bestselling series
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

Damn it! I thought, staring around.

But at least it wasn’t horrible this time. There were no blood-splattered gladiators sinking to their knees, no terrified mothers running with their babies, no monsters out of an ancient bestiary attacking anybody. No anything.

I appeared to be entirely alone, in some sort of little courtyard.

Damn it, Gertie! I thought again, feeling a surge of genuine anger. She always did this. Her straightforward conversation style was the exact opposite of her training methods, which were oblique as hell and often provided more riddles than answers.

She said it was because a Pythia had to be able to figure things out for herself, and not just wait around for someone to give her a solution to her problems, which I totally agreed with—in theory. But in practice, it was absolutely maddening. Especially when I didn’t even have any clues to use!

And there weren’t any around here.

There was nothing here except for a floor of gray stones of all different shapes and sizes, which had been fitted together with the cheerful disregard of a toddler forcing a solution to a puzzle. And a round circle of the same stacked stone with a little wooden house on top, like a wishing well out of a fairy tale. There were some vines scrawling all over it and up the side of a house made out of—you guessed it—the same gray rocks.

The vines provided some much-needed color, because the sky was gray, too, as was the ocean that I discovered when I rounded the house and found a beach so close that the incoming tide tickled my toes.

There was nobody on the beach, but there was an indentation in the sand that looked like it had been dug out. The tide had filled it in and then retreated, leaving a bunch of tiny silver fish behind, trapped in a miniature sea. I walked over and watched them for a moment, their small bodies darting here and there, their skins flashing silver in the sunlight. The vines weren’t visible from here, so everything was completely gray: the silver fish, the pewter sky, the craggy, whiteish-gray cliffs in the distance, the darker, rolling tide, and the pearly foam on the ashen sand. It was beautiful, in a stark, monochromatic kind of way.

I didn’t get it.

“My grandmother’s home, when I was a girl,” someone said, and I looked behind me to find Gertie standing there. I knew it was her—the voice was the same—but the body definitely wasn’t.

The purplish curls with their gray roots were gone, and in their place were bright red braids that stretched almost to her waist. The more-than-slightly-padded, grandmotherly figure I knew was also missing, replaced by a slender, boyish body in an old-fashioned outfit—but not a girl’s. Gertie had found some knee breeches somewhere, along with a white linen shirt that was far too big for her.

She looked to be about eight, maybe nine, and had a pail full of clams in her hand, which explained the holes dug around the beach.

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