Blood and Ember by Isabel Cooper

Author:Isabel Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2021-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

“Caves!” A woman called to him out of the wind. “Near here!”

The figure in front of Olvir turned sideways, put her palms against the mountainside, and began slowly shuffling forward.

Vivian, he thought, putting a name to the shape and the voice. Memory was a stone he had to lift now, heavier with every step. That was a bad sign. Olvir recognized that but didn’t have the strength to worry. All existence was the shape in front of him, the rise of a single foot, then the fall of the other. They got heavier too. The snow sticking to his boots was only a small part of that weight.

“Here!” Vivian called in triumph, cutting through the fog in Olvir’s mind. All the same, he nearly ran into her: his legs were slow getting the message that she’d stopped.

She stood with her chin tilted up, peering at a hole a few feet above her. “You go first.”

Olvir didn’t argue. First of all, he doubted his lips could move. He simply grasped the edge of the opening, the stone sharp in spite of his gloves. Up, he told himself. Up.

On a normal day, entering the passage would have been a trifling effort. Olvir’s arms were shaking before he got his head and shoulders inside. When he finally pulled his whole body up, only the knowledge that Vivian needed to get in behind him kept him from simply flopping onto the stone like a dying fish.

The tunnel rose high above him, glowing with bright colors, but he was only really conscious of the entrance. He turned, reached down, and grabbed Vivian’s upper arms.

Helping her into the hole wasn’t as difficult as Olvir had feared. She was no featherweight, but she was strong and had long ago learned how to move most helpfully in such circumstances. He provided leverage more than anything else and a more comfortable grip than the ledge.

They collapsed together when she’d gotten inside. The storm shrieked only a few inches away. Soon they’d feel the cold again, but right then, they were each content to slump against the wall, their vision slowly clearing until they could take in the details of their shelter.

A series of rings led off down the tunnel. Olvir and Vivian half lay in the first, ten feet or so of milky moonstone that wrapped around them from the smooth floor to the equally smooth ceiling. The ring became pale opal at the inner edge, then a sapphire hue not quite as dark as that in Ulamir’s hilt. After it turned a deeper blue, the tunnel widened to become the entrance of a room.

All the stone glowed from within, not quite as bright as the sun but better than moonlight. The patch of floor against Olvir’s cheek was faintly warm. He stripped off a glove and laid his palm against the wall: it, too, was heated.

“Ulamir says the old enchantments are still here,” Vivian said, a heavy breath between each two or three words. “He had no

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