But he’d done a damned good job of it.

So, why hadn’t he used it? I wondered. Was that other city considered more impregnable? Because that didn’t seem likely. Or was I seeing something from the past? Was this vision, or whatever it was, from hundreds or thousands of years ago, and showing an older capitol now abandoned?

Because I couldn’t imagine anyone abandoning this.

I stared at it some more; it was hard not to. Under the bulbous domes, it looked like someone had brought a gigantic sword down, shaving off a third of the mountainside, to reveal the heart of the stone within. And then carved a city inside it, a massive sculpture that was largely invisible, being deep inside the rock, but could be glimpsed through terraces, balconies and open-air windows. There were some external staircases as well, linking two or more terraces and running for ridiculous distances down the cliffside, and making me dizzy at even the thought of traversing them, especially with the force of the wind currently whipping the fey’s hair around.

The same was true for a second fey who pulled up beside us a moment later. His silver hair was flying, and his body was half leaning out of a strange, wooden contraption that looked like a small, four-sided pyramid, except for a rounded top. It had several open sides and several closed ones and wasn’t much larger than the basket on a hot air balloon.

Only there wasn’t any hot air. Or any balloon. Or any visible means of support, yet it was keeping pace with us.

“Up for another go?” My fey yelled, his voice almost whisked away by the wind.

“You never get tired of losing, do you?” the pilot of the small craft said, grinning.

“Usual stakes?”

“Agreed. I can always use another flagon. Where to?”

“Same as always.”

The door on the opposite side of the small pyramid slammed shut. “Be waiting when you arrive,” the pilot said, and dropped like a stone.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Eight

We immediately dove after him, a sudden move that had me screaming internally, because our mount had turned into a brown and white bullet shooting straight at the ground. I could see it through a gap in the fluffy white nothingness below, which parted to reveal a beautiful blue lake. It was almost perfectly round, and reflected the mountains in its placid surface like a mirror.

Will we splat or drown, I wondered, staring at it.

Probably splat.

Even water, when hit from this high up, would be as hard as concrete.