The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

And as we gained more height I could see she was right. Among the tumbled and blackened walls the stuff grew knee-high, the seeds floating away in white profusion. Even so, something seemed wrong.

“Doesn’t it look odd to you?” I asked.

Ahead of me Snorri stopped and looked back. “What?”

“It’s too still,” Hennan said, coming up behind me.

That hadn’t been what I was thinking, but he was right. The seeds had been drifting around us lower down the slope, but above the fireweed they hung in a great motionless cloud as if the air were wholly without motion.

“Grandmother came through here . . . what, two weeks ago at the very most?”

Snorri shrugged. “You tell me. You saw her leave—I was in . . . another place.”

Kara frowned. “Two weeks isn’t long enough for fireweed to grow and go to seed. Not even if it sprang up the moment the fire went out.” She kept her gaze on the false and unmoving smoke. “Perhaps your grandmother didn’t do this.”

“It was her.” I walked past them, angling toward the far side of the breach where the only weed that grew still lay close to the ground without sign of flower or seed. At the back of my mind another of the Red Queen’s blood-dreams replayed itself, not of Taproot in the palace forty years before I was born, but of Ameroth keep . . . another fortress that had exploded and where time had run in strange patterns.

Many people must have been killed but we saw no bodies as we crossed the courtyard, clambering over rubble. One could read that as good news—Grandmother having ordered their cremation, meaning that the Dead King would have no handy corpses to set chasing me for the key, or as very bad news, taking it to say that the Dead King had already gathered them into a single force, perhaps hidden amid the shattered walls of the stables, just waiting to pour forth . . .

“Jal!” Snorri’s voice startled me from my imaginings. I jumped away, spinning, sword half-drawn.

“What?” Anger and fear mixed in my voice. Shadows filled the interior of the fort wall to wall. I could make out the northerners but the rest lay in a jumble of soft grey shapes.

“The beeping. It’s slowing down. Was faster back there.” He jabbed a blunt finger toward a group of outbuildings.

I nodded and started back. In truth I’d already tuned out the box’s noise, too focused on my fears to hear it, only noticing it now that Snorri drew my attention to it. There are probably half a dozen lessons in that for a wise man.

As I approached the nearest of the outbuildings the box’s beeps grew so rapid as to join together into a single tone which then, thankfully, ended. “Perhaps he died,” I said. “We should go back to the horses now.”

“We don’t need a lantern, Jal.”

I hadn’t been planning to go back for a lantern—I wasn’t planning on returning. But we did need light if we were intending to venture into the structure in front of us, and Snorri was right, we didn’t need a lantern for that. “Fine.” I pulled the orichalcum cone from my pocket and tipped it from its leather bag into Snorri’s outstretched hand. The cold light that sprang forth as orichalcum touched skin revealed that the mist had caught us up again, faint tendrils of it curling about our ankles. What I’d taken for gravel underfoot turned out to be grain, the building before us a granary. Snorri stepped up to the shattered doorway and raised his hand. The light also showed a profusion of sacks, wreckage, and that whoever had gathered up the corpses—Grandmother’s troops or the Dead King— hadn’t been particularly thorough. The body of a stout, middle-aged woman lay trapped under one of the fallen roof beams. The sickly-sweet stink reaching out of the room suggested she had been lying there long enough to give birth to several generations of flies. I tried not to look too closely where her flesh lay exposed, not wanting to see it crawling.

“So, we’re going in, then?” I asked as Snorri stepped through, Hennan and Kara crowding behind him.

“This floor is Builder stone.” Kara knelt to set her hand to it, brushing away grain from split sacks.

“It will be below us,” Snorri said. “The things that time wants to keep, it buries.”

“Time might be playing different games around here,” I said. The fireweed had shown a month’s growth in less than two weeks, then become frozen in a single moment. Whatever had happened here broke something important and time itself that invisible fire in which we burn, had become fractured.

“I think there’s a trapdoor over here.” Kara called us from beside a pile of debris and fallen beams. “Bring the light.”