hundred and twenty steps by Peigi’s counting, before they emerged without challenge to the topmost part of the keep. Cracks in the ceiling above them showed the gray afternoon sky. It was colder up here, the draft icy.
Crispin led them down a short, dark corridor and paused before a door made of plain slabs of wood held together with bronze bolts. The door handle and lock were also bronze. Crispin tried the latch, but not surprisingly, the door didn’t budge.
“Can you open that?” Crispin asked Stuart. “You know, with …” He wriggled his fingers.
Stuart moved the ropes and slid from Peigi’s back, taking the hard sword with him. “Iron master, not bronze master.”
Peigi shifted to her between beast. “I can break it open,” she offered.
Crispin looked pained. “I hoped we’d get in and out without making noise and drawing attention. You know we’re in a castle full of hoch alfar with sharp weapons, right?”
“I do.” Peigi leaned to study the lock, letting her bear claws recede. The bronze was cool beneath her human fingers, but the lock mechanism was simple. “All right then, I’ll pick it.”
“You can pick locks?” Crispin asked in surprise.
“Sure. Nell taught me. I just need some lock picks.”
Stuart handed her two. Peigi threw him a startled glance and realized he’d fashioned them from a piece of his iron sword.
“No wonder the hoch alfar are afraid of you.” Peigi smiled and took the picks, wanting to kiss him, but she’d save that for later.
The lock was new and clean, which meant someone wanted whatever was inside protected. A clean lock was also much easier to pick. Peigi inserted the metal wires into the hole and played around with the mechanism, as Nell had showed her. Nell had learned lock picking when she’d had to retrieve her sons from wherever they’d gotten themselves stuck as cubs. Shane and Brody had been holy terrors, according to Nell.
Not long later, the lock made a satisfying click, and the door creaked open.
Neither Stuart nor Crispin charged inside, instead hanging back and studying the opening with care. They expected traps—poisoned darts or a dying guard with a sword—like in every good treasure-hunting movie Peigi had watched with the cubs.
Nothing happened. Stuart peeked around the door, then blew out his breath. “Come on.”
Peigi motioned Crispin to follow Stuart in while she brought up the rear. The room they entered was dark, the only light coming through cracks around a worn shutter opposite the door. Peigi carefully skirted the room and pulled open the shutter to reveal a small square window, about eighteen inches on a side.
“Fuck,” Stuart said behind her.
Peigi jerked around, terrified Crispin had found some way to attack, but Crispin stood next to Stuart, gazing at what he did in almost as much dismay.
A much-carved, thick-legged wooden table held court in the center of the room. On its broad top lay a pool of metal, edges cracked, most of it a collection of gray ash and red rust.
Stuart reached out a finger to it, and the metal where he touched it crumbled to powder.
“The karmsyern,” Stuart said in a hushed voice. “Or its remains. They’ve destroyed it.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“How?” Peigi, still in her half-beast form, demanded.
Stuart’s heart pounded in rage. If Crispin had known this, if he’d brought them here to trap them …
He swung around, and Crispin flung up his hands in alarm. “I didn’t know. I swear, I didn’t know. It was fine when I left.”
The karmsyern, the sacred talisman of the dokk alfar, the one thing that had kept the hoch alfar from being more of a collective pain in the ass than they already were, was a wreck. A heap of rust and slag on a table.
“How?” Peigi repeated. “Hoch alfar can’t work iron, right? This looks like it was left out in the rain for a couple hundred years.”
“A very, very good question.”
Stuart understood why the hoch alfar weren’t guarding it closely, and why no one in this castle was sick and dying from it. They still wouldn’t come too close, hence the thing was alone in a locked room high in the keep, but at the same time, there was nothing more to fear from it.
“Shit.” Stuart flung his sword to the floor. It rang as it skittered across the stone.
“Remember when I said you should make another one?” Peigi asked. “I think you’re going to have to.”
Stuart retrieved the sword before Crispin could snatch it up. “The technique was lost, the spells too. Damn it,