The Queen's Secret (The Queen's Secret #2) - Melissa de la Cruz Page 0,43
don’t know. I live day to day, waiting for the next terrible thing to happen.
Chapter Eighteen
Caledon
To the untrained eye, Baer Abbey looks like an overgrown ruin.
Cal’s horse picks its way across slick flagstones that are tangled with withered vines. Jander is in the distance, near the riverbank, his own horse navigating a tumble of fallen trees. Impatient Rhema is off her horse and crouching on the ground, sifting soil through her fingers and sniffing.
Cal’s already signaled to the guards, who huddle in a disconsolate group by the mine entry. As he makes his way toward them, their expressions—of boredom, anxiety, and relief—become clearer. Their uniforms are ragged and dirty. This is no crack team, he suspects. Out here, so far from anywhere, guard duty is a punishment, not a reward. Perhaps even a peril.
He questions them without getting off his horse. Cal likes the vantage point it gives him. He’s had nothing but bad experiences at the abbey in the past—surprises, attacks, near-misses, condemned to imprisonment for assassinating a traitor.
“No miners here, sir,” the stocky captain tells him. “They’re too afraid. Packed up and left days ago. We’ve been waiting here for reinforcements, or you, sir.”
Eight wan, grubby faces stare up at him. Like many Renovians, they know that Caledon Holt is the Queen’s Assassin, the son of the great Cordyn Holt. Strange, Cal thinks, to be back in a place where his name means something. In Mont it was easier to hide, to slip in and out of the shadows.
The captain fills him in: One man was found in a mine shaft, savaged by some unseen animal. He was still alive when his colleagues came across him, blood dripping from his blackened face, but everything he tried to tell them, in blood-frothing gasps, was unintelligible.
“Looked clawed to death, sir, when they carried him from the mine. One of his eyes gouged out and a hand torn off. Horrible sight. None of the miners would go back down after that.”
“You saw nothing down there when you investigated?” Cal asks, and the guards look sheepish. None of them will meet his eye. None of them, Cal realizes, look much older than Jander or much stronger.
“We went in,” says the captain. “Well, we went in a short way, to where the body was found. The miners said they heard some kind of whispering deeper in the mine, where they’d been working. But we didn’t hear anything. To be honest, sir, we didn’t explore much beyond the place the body had lain. It was pitch-black and our torches kept blowing out. And we didn’t have the . . .”
“The what, Captain?” Cal asks.
“The weapons, sir,” replies the captain, head down. “It’s a narrow space and . . .”
He can’t finish, and Cal doesn’t press. He has no interest in humiliating the guards. He’s seen things before in Baer Abbey that no ordinary soldiers could fight.
Cal beckons Jander and Rhema over. All the horses are jumpy, sensing something they don’t like—an approaching storm, maybe—because the sky has turned into a turbulent mass of rolling gray clouds. With an almighty crack, black lightning splinters the sky. Magic is still here at the abbey; the place is clearly potent with evil. The guards drop to the ground in terror. Rhema, hands on hips, whistles.
“Never seen that before,” she says, sounding pleased rather than frightened. “Heard about it, but never seen it. How something can be both black and bright at the same time—wow.”
The captain glances up at her. Yes, Cal wants to tell him, she’s a strange girl. Strange is what he needs right now. Strange and brave.
Jander isn’t wasting time: He’s pulling a tinderbox from his saddle bag, ready to light torches. From the pouch around his neck he produces a white stone that’s new to Cal.
“Mesha gave me this,” Jander tells him. “If the torches go out, it’ll glow.”
“At last,” Rhema says under her breath, just loud enough for Cal to hear. He knows what she means. After their long trek, it’s time for a fight.
Before they enter the mine, Cal turns one last time to the guards.
“Don’t think of taking the horses,” he says to the captain. “They won’t let anyone but their true rider onto their backs. And if you manage to rope them, they’ll drag you to your deaths. They train with the assassins.”
“Wouldn’t think of it, sir,” says the captain, and Cal wants to laugh. He’s seen the soldiers eyeing up the horses, and they’d be fools if they hadn’t