Chapter 22

Leena appeared near the mouth of the cave. Her head felt fuzzy and she had to stop and take a few deep breaths to steady herself. Her third trip of the day was always more tiring than the first two.

“Ahh, good, you’re back,” Boktar said. He and Josip took the bundle of wooden boards she was holding. She could only carry a small stack at a time, so she’d been bringing some back on each trip. “That took a while.”

“It was hard to find an ironmonger’s shop without being able to speak the language. I had to get help from the desk clerk at the Senshall office.” She took her bag from her shoulder and handed it to Josip. It held the nails and iron brackets the two men had requested so they could finish reinforcing the wooden supports that were keeping the fallen rocks from collapsing into the cave entrance. They’d already disassembled one of the wagons for parts.

“Will this be enough?” Ellerie asked, coming over to join them. She smiled at Leena, touching the back of her hand. Leena smiled back, but then looked down. She couldn’t risk any complications in her life right now.

Boktar said, “We’ve got enough to finish shoring up the existing timber. We’re just building it alongside the old stuff. I didn’t want to risk removing and replacing the old boards.”

“But it’ll be safe to use?”

“I’m not an expert,” the dwarven man said. “If I’d wanted to spend my time digging around in caves, I’d have stayed in Stone Home. Yes, I think it’ll hold, but I also think half of us should stay out here at all times just in case it doesn’t. If it collapses, we’ll have to do some fast digging.” He frowned as he thought. “Take Corec with you in case there’s trouble, but leave the other men here to handle any heavy lifting. And leave Leena here, so we can find you if we need to.”

“She could tell you where we are just as easily if she comes with us.”

“Not if it collapses on her.”

Leena shivered at the thought. “It’s that dangerous?”

“Probably not. Josip and I have gone through a dozen times already, working on the barrier. Elle’s peeked inside too. There’s about twenty feet of rubble to climb over once you’re past the barrier, but then there’s an open tunnel. The mountain’s stood for all these years; it’s not likely to fall apart now.”

Leena nodded.

“And it’s a man-made tunnel,” Ellerie told her. “It’s not natural, which means it must go somewhere. We haven’t found anything interesting at the other campsite, so I think it’s time to move everyone over here. I’ll go tell the others.” She turned to Boktar. “Can you finish this tonight?”

“We’ll be done before you finish moving the camp,” Boktar said.

“Great. Then, tomorrow, we can go in and see if there’s anything to see.”

The elven woman left to organize the move, but Leena stayed behind with Boktar and Josip. With three trips to Aencyr and back, she’d teleported six times in less than half a day. She wasn’t feeling up to walking over a mile back to the old camp.

She took a seat on a large stone the men had rolled out of the cave. The bulk of the work seemed to have already been completed. The new barrier, constructed mostly of lumber and nails from the wagon they’d taken apart, was layered directly against the old barrier. Using the nails she’d brought with her, they went back and doubled up on the work they’d already finished. The new boards went to strengthening the entrance itself. With that done, Boktar and Josip started fastening the iron brackets to all the right-angled joints.

While they worked, Leena started to feel more like herself. Lately she’d been Traveling to Aencyr three times a day, which took a lot out of her. Luckily, though, she hadn’t needed to do any Seeking on top of it. She hadn’t had any problems remembering the location signatures, and her modified version of the warden sense to find Corec didn’t require an actual Seeking.

But that meant it had been a week and a half since she’d last attempted to Seek her target, and she was starting to grow nervous. Ever since reaching Cordaea, the Seeking kept pointing her in the direction the group intended to travel, but right now, they didn’t have any plans on where to go next. It all depended on whether they found anything here.

She decided to risk it. She didn’t have any more work to do for the day except to hand out trail rations for supper, so if she was more tired than usual, it shouldn’t matter.

Tell me where I need to go next to protect my brother, she thought to herself.

The Seeking failed, and icy fear gripped her chest. How could it fail? Even if she was supposed to stay where she was, it should have told her that. To get nothing at all...

Had something happened to Udit?

In desperation, she tried the only thing she could think of. Picturing her family’s camp outside Matihar, she Traveled.

“What do you mean she’s gone?” Ellerie asked. “Gone where?” When she’d returned to the cave with the rest of the group, she’d found Boktar and Josip alone.

“I don’t know,” Boktar replied. “She was sitting right there,” he pointed to a nearby rock, “and then she just disappeared.”

“She didn’t tell you what she was doing? She’s already been to Aencyr three times today. I thought she was going to wait here.”

“She didn’t say a word. She was watching us work on the barrier, and then she was gone. That was over two hours ago.”

Ellerie frowned. Leena was rarely gone for more than an hour unless she had trouble finding whatever she was shopping for. She hadn’t been scheduled to go out again, and the sun was starting to dip down below the horizon. Had she decided to take an extra trip to buy food, after having to waste three trips hauling lumber for the barrier? If so, why wasn’t she back yet?

“Corec!” Ellerie called out, looking around only to find him already making his way over from where the rest of the group had started setting up the new campsite.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, looking from her face to Boktar’s to Josip’s.

Boktar told him what had happened.

“Can you find her?” Ellerie asked. “Is she in Aencyr?”

Corec’s eyes unfocused for a moment. “No. Aencyr’s too far north. She’s somewhere to the southwest.”

“Where?”

“You know it doesn’t work like that.”

His tone was oddly gentle, but she glared at him anyway. “Maps!” she said. “Wait here.”

She ran down the slope to where Nedley was unloading the horses, and searched through her saddlebags for her stack of maps. She thumbed through them until she found one that showed the Gilded Sea, with Aravor to the west, Cordaea to the east, and Vestath to the south.

Returning to the cave entrance, she handed the map to Corec. “Can you find her?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but then he hesitated. All he said was, “I’ll try. Josip, can I borrow your compass?”

The guide slipped the compass out of his pocket and handed it over.

“This map doesn’t actually show the barrens,” Corec said, after checking the compass and the position of the sun, “but if I had to guess, she’s either still in Cordaea or she’s in Sanvar, if she can Travel that far.”

“She went from Sanvar to Larso once,” Ellerie murmured thoughtfully. “Do you think she went home? Why? And why not tell anyone she was leaving? Boktar was standing right there!”

“I don’t know, but we know she’s alive, and she told you if she ever got lost, she’d find her way back eventually, right?”

Ellerie forced herself to calm down. “Yes, that’s true. And she said it would be easy to find you. Something about the warden sense combined with her Seeking.”

“Well, then, we just have to wait. She’ll be better at finding us than we’d be at finding her.”

Ellerie sighed. “I guess we don’t have a choice.”

“We can’t wait too long,” Boktar warned. “We were depending on her for supplies. If she’s not back in a day or two, we’ll need to head out of the barrens.”

When Corec left his tent the next morning, Ellerie was waiting for him. He quickly dropped the tent flap to block the view inside. Shavala had stayed in his and Katrin’s tent again. As far as he knew, Treya was still the only person who’d discovered the arrangement, and he hoped to keep it that way. He had no idea what the others would think about it.

“She’s still not back!” Ellerie said, agitated. “Is she all right? Where is she?”

Corec checked Leena’s warden bond. “She’s still to the southwest. I can’t say whether she’s moved or not, but she’s still in the same direction. Did you get any sleep after your watch shift?”

“Treya did something that knocked me out. Where is she?”

Corec didn’t reply. Her question was obviously about Leena rather than Treya, and was just as obviously rhetorical. They’d talked about it late into the night as Leena’s absence had continued, but they hadn’t come to any conclusion.

To distract Ellerie from her worrying, he said, “What’s the plan for today? Are we going to wait here?”

She bit her lip, then glanced up the slope to the cave entrance. “If we might have to leave tomorrow to resupply, I suppose we should still explore today, to see if it’s worth coming back. Will you ask around and see who’s coming with us? I’ll go put something together for the morning meal. Oh, Boktar wants to keep most of the men out here. He wants to clear away more of the rockfall, so that if it collapses, there’s not as much to dig out.”

“Sure,” Corec said. “We should probably leave some sort of guard presence here too, if Boktar’s going to be busy. Someone to keep watch, at least.”

Ellerie nodded. “That makes sense. I’m going to go see if I can figure out where Leena packed the rest of the food that we didn’t find last night.”

An hour later, they assembled at the cave entrance. Katrin and Razai had agreed to keep watch, while Bobo had hemmed and hawed before deciding to stay in camp. He’d claimed he wasn’t interested in exploring underground unless he knew there was something worth seeing.

Corec and Ellerie were taking Shavala, Treya, and Sarette with them.

“Stay together,” Boktar told the group. “Don’t get separated. Watch where you put your feet. If someone needs to explore a tunnel or crevice alone, tie a rope around them. If an area doesn’t look safe, don’t risk it. I can check it out later.”

“If it’s just a cave, I don’t plan to spend too much time in there,” Ellerie said. “I’m hoping it’ll be similar to the tunnels below Tir Navis.”

Boktar eyed the mountain. “That would be like going back to Stone Home.”

“Maybe the Ancients were stoneborn,” she said, smirking at him. Planning for the trip had seemed to calm her down. “There are a lot of them here in Cordaea, after all.”

“You know more about the Ancients than I do,” he said. “I know my people didn’t come from Stone Home originally.”

Ellerie patted the coil of rope she’d looped over her shoulder, then looked back at the group. “I guess we’re ready to go.”

“Wait for me!” came a shout. Bobo was jogging up the slope from camp, grasping his walking cudgel.

“I thought you weren’t coming.”

“I changed my mind.”

“I’ll take point,” Corec said. “Sarette, will you bring up the rear?”

The stormborn woman nodded.

“Is that really necessary?” Ellerie asked.

Boktar frowned at her. “Remember the giant spider? Take Corec’s advice.”

“It’s just until we see what it’s like in there,” Corec assured her. “If it’s similar to Tir Navis, we won’t have to be as careful. But I want to hear the story about the spider.”

She rolled her eyes and muttered something under her breath.

Corec laughed, then made his way through the newly reinforced barrier, which was keeping the rockfall from collapsing back into the entrance. As the tunnel opened up wider, it became clear that a lot of the rocks had fallen inside, either during the initial avalanche or more recently when someone had first dug out the entrance. Corec stepped carefully over the uneven ground, bracing one hand against the side of the tunnel. As the others followed behind him, they blocked the sun coming through the opening. He summoned a mage light and left it floating in the air, then captured a second one in the empty lantern he’d brought with him.

Ellerie joined him at the front with her own lantern. “The rocks don’t go much farther,” she said. “Boktar’s been past them already.”

Twenty feet from the entrance, they were past the worst of it, walking on a flat dirt surface rather than jagged rocks.

“The walls are smooth, like the tunnels below the South Valley ruins,” Sarette said. “These black lines are new, though. I don’t remember seeing them there.”