Well, I’ll be damned, I thought, staring around some more, because a little ambient light had just come on, from where I wasn’t sure. But it allowed me to see that the little capsule or shield or protected area—whatever we were in—was moving quickly upwards, through solid stone. But it wasn’t carving a path; there were no sparks or flying shards here. Instead, I watched the rock slide around us like a river, parting to let us through and then closing back after us again.

I remembered Pritkin doing something similar, although with great effort, in medieval Wales. We’d been captured and confined in a room surrounded by disgruntled fey. We’d had zero chance of reaching the door, even when a bevy of pretty girls brought dinner to everyone, creating a small distraction.

Until the wall behind us, composed of huge old stones, had liquified and let us through.

It wasn’t a great memory to have right now, because Pritkin’s ability with earth magic was pretty minimal, which had resulted in us getting stuck halfway. I vividly remembered the feeling of claustrophobia, of being entombed in stone, of running out of air and of everything getting too hot and too close while terror clawed at my throat. I’d wondered if I was going to become a permanent resident of the wall, a Cassie-shaped fossil for someone to discover, centuries later, and marvel about how I ended up there.

But then we’d popped out the other side, with Pritkin red faced and panting, and me practically kissing the ground underneath my clutching hands.

I’d never been so happy to see open air in my life.

Kind of like now, when the ‘elevator’ stopped and the ‘door’ opened, and we stepped calmly out. At least, the fey did. I was having a silent hissy fit, trying to gulp in extra oxygen because that had been a really small capsule, only his body wasn’t cooperating.

But then I looked up and forgot all about it. A huge, flat cave spread out before us, as big as a couple of football fields placed end to end, with a jagged, horizontal fissure in one side that looked out over the snowy vista beyond. The fissure spread across most of the length of the cavern, and was tall enough to serve as an exit point for the strange, pyramid-shaped craft that were lined up in rows, what had to be hundreds of them. Including one that had just zipped in and was slowly rotating in the air, while several fey jumped out.

Neither of them was the pilot we’d met, who I now saw jogging this way with his hand outstretched. “Old Tagget just got in a barrel of Heart’s Gold—twelve years old—that he declares to be divine,” he informed us.