Page 10 of Hymn of Breath and Bone

“A tyrant?” she suggested bitterly.

“Misguided,” I corrected. “If anyone can make him see reason, Urchin, it’s you. He clearly loves you. In that, he and I have something in common.”

I could still sense her lingering questions as I kissed her, so I forced a smile. “Training now. Then you have an appointment with Ana at the library,” I reminded her.

She sighed, rolling her eyes as she began to braid her hair back from her face. “Yes, yes. I didn’t realize coming here would be quite so muchwork.”

I laughed, catching her chin and bringing her mouth to mine in one more quick kiss while we lingered in the relative privacy of the little entry alcove.

“Work now, Urchin,” I purred, sending my desire for her through the bond in a way I hoped had her toes curling. “Play later.”

Chapter 5

Damned Caspian and hisdamned desire.

Of course I could feel it along with my own. By the end of training, I was flushed and sweaty and about ready to jump him right there on the mat.

He seemed about ready to let me, too. The evidence of his feelings was hard beneath me as I straddled him after finally managing to takehim to the floor.

Only a traitorous gasping wheeze seemed to shake him from his desire. He sat up and held me away from him, insisting I take time to shower while he got me a dose of medicine for my lungs.

He disappointingly didnotjoin me in the shower.

“I’m fine,” I insisted when he asked for the third time if I was sure I didn’t want to rest instead of visiting the library. “The medicine helped. I just overdid it.”

It was true. The siren medicine seemed to work wonders for my lungs, enough that it wasn’t until the end of the hour-long lesson that I began to feel winded. I made a mental note to ask Caspian to take me to meet the healers so I could ask about the strangely sweet tonic.

“If that was overdoing it, you’ve got a lot of training ahead,” he grumbled, guiding me down a stone passage that led to the library. “You need to build up your stamina.”

“I can think ofotherways we could do that,” I teased, feeling his pulse of desire twine through my own.

He quickly looked away, and I wondered if he could feel it too. If, perhaps, he already knew on some level that we were mates.

I would tell him the truth later.

I had never been in the cliff dwellings on the Silent Isles, but I wondered if they were similar in layout at these cliffs. Surely not, since hidden passages wouldn’t have been necessary for the sirens living there hundreds of years before.

“How did you excavate these tunnels?” I asked, admiring the swirling pattern of moonstone that webbed over the walls and lit the way. “It must have taken centuries.”

“Many of the passages were already like this when we arrived,” he replied, his thumb stroking absently over the back of my hand as he held it. “Old dwarven settlements from before they united under a single king.”

“That was lucky,” I mused, noting that Caspian had to stoop slightly in the section of the hallway. Dwarf tunnels indeed.

“Luck had nothing to do with it, Urchin,” he replied with a wry grin. “We had extensive maps of the lands surrounding the isles. We brought them with us when we left. Spent the first fifty years looking for a suitable home.”

“How do you know?” I asked. Caspian couldn’t have been alive that long ago, since he had only been king for fifteen years.

“Records,” he said with a shrug. “Some first-hand accounts. Here we are.”

Caspian stopped in front of a set of stone doors that blocked the end of our hallway. Unlike most of the doors in the cliffs, which consisted of curtains disguised as moss or plant life, these doors were blocks of stone that had been carved with images of flora and fauna and strange symbols I didn’t recognize.

“Dwarven writing,” Caspian said, noticing my eyes scan the doors. “Ana has translated most of it, but none of it tells us much about their history.”

He pushed the huge blocks, which looked to be half a foot thick, despite being at least two inches shorter than Caspian. They opened into a cavern that had me gasping in delight.

The room was huge, carved entirely from the stone of the cliffs and so tall that several narrow stone staircases worked their way up the levels of the library. Shelves upon shelves of books lined the walls all around the cavern and circled the main floor like markings on a giant sundial. A series of smallwindows were carved near the top of the room, perhaps large enough for a single siren to fly through. Sunlight streamed through them and bounced off of several mirrors embedded strategically into the walls, enhancing the glow of the moonstone and casting the whole room in daylight.

In the center was Ana, books piled high around her circular desk. Several reading areas with worn armchairs and ancient tables circled her space, and the distant fluttering of wings and movement of figures against the walls of the cavern told me there were other archivists working in the space.