Page 66 of Lady Knight and the Thief

Cypress couldn’t help but think that Caelith should have just given the scepter to Torren.

“Is there anything else to be seen in here? Anything else, I would be compelled to inform the King about to aid your assertion that the Old One was waking?” Cypress asked.

She wanted to leave this place.

“Do you want to go into the hole?”

Cypress blinked. “Are you asking me if I want toget inside of a mass grave?”she hissed, sure she hadn’t heard Torren correctly.

He smiled.Actually smiled.“Yeah. You can see it for yourself.”

“Have you been inside?” She asked, unable to contain the morbid curiosity erupting in her middle.

Torren nodded. “It’s not bad, Lass. Just dark,” he shrugged, still grinning at her.

Cypress sighed in resignation. “I suppose I should, just in case.”

“Atta Lass,” Torren said, and then disappeared down through the opening of the large, black hole where the rubble had exploded from.

Cypress heard him land seconds later, and then Torren called up, “Come on, Lass. It’s safe.”

Gathering her courage, Cypress rolled her shoulders, then said to herself, “Here goes nothing.”

She fell for only a few moments before being caught in Torren’s embrace, her knees hooked over an arm, the other supporting under her shoulders.

“I got ye, Lass,” Torren said, just before placing Cypress gently on her feet.

Then, he said a handful of words in the Faerie language, and a small orb of light hovered just above their heads.

What she’d thought was only a hole in the ground was almost like a large, cavernous grotto. While the hole wasn’t too far above their heads, the rest of the space seemed to go on forever.

She would never admit as much, particularly not to Torren, but Cypress felt terribly out of her depth.

And to think, she was supposed to have Fair Folk blood running in her veins.

Cypress thought she could do a little with their unflappable disposition. Torren seemed unaffected by the tomb, the guardian, the atmosphere– none of it.

Cypress drew herself up to her full height and set aside her reservations to focus fully on her task. She was here to verify Torren’s claims as a Knight of Grethnah, Captain of the Prince Guard.

She could do this.

Cypress slowly took stock of the grave, the cold, haunted feeling of the space. It was as if the stones had absorbed the Hound’s essence and were reverberating it back to them. She feltas if there were thousands of eyes pressing in on her skin, as if this were a trap, ready to spring at a moment’s notice.

The rocks all looked as if they had been clawed at for years, centuries even. The jagged markings from the talons covered nearly every surface. She could scarcely imagine the power these beasts would have to be able to make such a marking in the hardened bedrock.

“Was there anything of note in here when you came the first time?” Cypress asked, wandering a little farther from the entry hole. Torren’s globe of light followed her movements.

“When I first visited this place, the Song Stone was intact. After I was informed of the breach, what I saw is what you’re seeing now,” Torren shrugged. “It’s all important, if you know what you’re looking at.”

“Meaning?”

“Well,” Torren started with a sigh, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. “The claw marks, for one, don’t reflect a, shall we say,peacefulrest. I would wager the Hounds have been awake for some time, clawing at the enchantments that kept them here.”

“The wards, you mean?”

Torren shook his head. “No. Those are to keep intruders out. There are separate enchantments that make it so the Hounds cannot utilize the powers of the Hunt in order to escape.”

“And so when that didn’t work…” Cypress started, guessing how everything played out. “They turned to finding a weak point in the lullaby. The seal, so to speak.”