It was impossible to approach the crater, impossible to get a good view inside or even contemplate trying to climb down. The ground was still crumbling at its edges. Even Giddon, who should have been able to muscle himself down into that hole and find her, find her!, was reduced to shouting.

He searched for rope in the barn, instead finding the sixth guard, trying to sneak out on a horse. Giddon, exhausted, worried, and hacking up dust, dragged the man down from his saddle, then did his best to knock him out without killing him. These things weren’t exactly a science, after all, and it was getting harder to care, what with Hava inside the earth somewhere, not responding to their cries.

Finding no rope, he returned to the others. Bitterblue lay flat on the ground, too close to the rubble, ear to the dirt. At first the sight frightened him—she looked like she’d collapsed there—but then she turned her head, pressing her other ear flat to the ground.

She raised a hand. “Everyone,” she said. “Silence.”

Everyone went quiet, standing still, staring at the prostrate queen.

“I hear her,” Bitterblue said. “She’s calling my name.”

—

Hava’s ankle was trapped under a ladder. It was, by her estimation, sprained or worse, and her head hurt, but she insisted she was otherwise fine. She’d been knocked unconscious. As she came awake, her voice grew stronger. The group, gathering as near the crater as seemed safe, could hear her, and shout down questions.

“It’s a cave,” she told them. “With high, curving walls. There are even stalactites and stalagmites”—she spoke those words in Lingian—“though I can never remember which is which. I can’t move this ladder. Both of its ends are trapped.”

“Can you see any path down that looks steady?” called Giddon.

“No. And stuff keeps falling in and there are explosive eggs near me. Kindly don’t drop more rubble down here and set them off.”

“My mother told me of a cave,” Lovisa said numbly, sitting farther away than the others, her back to a tree, shivering.

Giddon spun to her. “What did she say about it?”

“Her father sent her there for punishments,” said Lovisa.

“Hava’s cave doesn’t sound like an accessible sort of cave,” said Giddon.

“I saw a trapdoor in the floor of the storehouse,” Lovisa said. “With a key sticking out of the lock.”

“Well then,” said Giddon, with rising impatience, “if that was the access point, it’s gone now.”

“She used to talk of being able to watch the sun set from the cave. She talked of being visited by birds,” said Lovisa, speaking with the numbness of an automaton, as if she had a rote announcement about the cave and had to make it all the way through from start to finish before stopping. Meanwhile, Hava was trapped. Giddon wanted to shake anyone who wasn’t helping.