The Thirteenth Key (Seraphine's Chosen Book 1) by Cara Nox

Author:Cara Nox [Nox, Cara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stella Charta Press, LLC
Published: 2023-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

NOA

Everyone met up at the departure station around midnight, fighting off exhaustion. Noa shoved her hands in her jacket pockets, relishing the full weight of four keys now hanging around her neck. Part of her was irritated that it should be five, but she reminded herself that she had all that she needed for it, minus a strategic plan to acquire it.

Patience.

Patience, however, wasn’t something that Noa was ever good at. Slow and steady wasn’t quite her pace either, not unless it came with progress. Moving to a new destination just to sit around in an apartment or hotel for a few weeks was the exact opposite of that in her mind.

A shuttle train arrived—an odd choice on Nyx’s part due to the lack of private cars or overnight cabins. Table booths lined the walls with a handful of them occupied by other passengers through the dozen cars. They settled into one of the empty ones, claiming back-to-back booths where she boxed Glacier in against the window and Nyx took the seat across from her.

“Where are we going?” Noa asked, stifling a yawn. She caught Glacier’s sideways look, and she shot him a glare. His head whipped back around to stare out the window instead.

“Tabir,” Nyx answered, pulling out her phone.

Noa’s head hit the back of the seat with a groan and dropped her arms against the tabletop. “Gods, that’s going to be a long train ride…”

Nyx continued to tap on her phone. “We’re actually not taking a train there. It’s faster to go by boat, so I booked a luxury, multi-room cabin on the ship departing from Port Cameron just outside Corvia’s border. It’ll be almost two days by boat and a half-day by train through Mharu.”

Noa sat up straight with a jolt. “Wait, what?”

Nyx frowned. “Did I stutter?”

Her mouth worked, unable to immediately form a response once she felt Glacier’s eyes on her again, but this time he leaned against the window to put distance between them with a weary expression.

“Why can’t we just take a train up and around? Aren’t there plenty of other routes we haven’t exhausted yet?”

“Yes, Noa,” she replied with a hint of caution, heavily mixed with suspicion. “But we’re all clearly tired, and we’re going to need time to recover once we get there. A train isn’t exactly easy to sleep on…”

Noa wanted to argue that a boat wasn’t exactly easy to sleep on either, but it sounded like a flimsy argument when Nyx was aiming for speed.

“And I know the faster we go, the sloppier we might get, but faster is actually better in this case. The alternative would be to take a north-eastern line back into King’s, go all the way around the coastline of King’s into Mharu on the complete opposite side, and then have to travel for at least another couple of days southward to Tabir since it’s at the tip of the damn peninsula. The trip could eat up the better part of a week by then, versus a couple of days.

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