Brothers in Shadow by Violet Joicey-Cowen

Author:Violet Joicey-Cowen [Joicey-Cowen, Violet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646370467
Published: 2019-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Glare

It was hard not to rush ahead, but Cesteru was right. I did not want to risk our baby. I let him take those first few cautious steps before me without saying anything. A few more steps down, however, my impatience got the better of me.

“Cesteru, come on.”

He huffed and grumbled but began moving a bit quicker.

“Can you do anything about the light? Oh! Thank you.” He must have felt the need for additional light at the same moment I asked, because before I finished my sentence, a silver ball of mage light materialised. It hovered over his outstretched palm, increasing in size until it was larger than his head and floated up above him by a foot or so.

The blue mosaic tiles above gave way to bare stone as we descended the steps, which wound around a broad central pillar that widened as we went down. The pillar was underneath the basin in the hall above and could easily be hollow if the water it contained really was as deep as it had looked. It wasn’t made of blocks of stone, but one piece. Magic must have been involved in its creation if it was indeed hollow. The space around us formed a larger cylinder, with a gap between the steps and the outside wall of about ten feet at the top. Each rotation around the central pillar narrowed the space until the last few steps connected with the wall and a passageway opened in front of Cesteru.

He tried to step through the opening but stopped as if he had run into a wall. He raised his hands, feeling the air in front of him.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s a barrier here. I can’t get through.”

I tried to peer past him and put my hand on his arm to nudge him aside a little. Nilan knows what I thought I could see when he was the mage, but the moment I did, he fell forward with a startled noise, the barrier apparently disappearing. We both stopped.

“Cesteru?”

“Yes?”

“Did the barrier just disappear when I touched you?”

“I…I’m not sure.” He straightened and moved back a few paces, leaving me on the other side of the barrier my senses couldn’t detect.

He felt the air in front of him again. He looked for all the world like a street performer I remember seeing when I was a child, before the plague came and killed my fathers, and we stopped leaving the palace without a huge contingent of guards to accompany us. His hands stopped at a point in the air, meeting an obstacle I couldn’t see. I reached for him, my hands only feeling air before touching his fingers. The moment I felt his skin, his hands moved forward, unimpeded once more.

“Interesting. Do you feel nothing there at all?” he asked. I shook my head. “All right. I’ll explore that later, along with the disappearing floor up there. For now, we probably need to hurry. I know the guards have orders to wait outside the room, but if we’re too long they’ll want to check you’re safe.

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