Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 22 of 22

The shaft closed around her shoulders. Elaria pushed the glowing stone ahead with her forearm and dragged herself after it. Lia lay in the frostcloth against her chest, wings slow, breath thin. The metal walls sweated cold. Somewhere behind and below, the second sprite would find the vent soon. Somewhere ahead, the shaft either ended in sky or in stone. She did not know which, and Lia would not last a wrong guess. She stopped at the first bend and worked a hand into her coat. The wayfinder came out warm from her body. Its face lit under the stone's glow — a compass ring, a shaped arrow, small green marks flickering along the edge. Her father's officers had used these on the ridge patrols. Point it along a passage and it read the moving air, then drew the line air took to open ground. The arrow settled. It bent left and up, then held. Open sky, it said. Not a wall. She let out a breath she had been holding since the grating fell. She crawled. The bend came where the arrow promised. Past it, the shaft narrowed. Elaria turned her shoulders sideways and pulled with her elbows. The light stone scraped ahead. On the wall by her face, scratches came into the light — arrows cut deep into the metal, the word EXIT chalked and gouged and chalked again, some hands neat, some frantic. A seeker had come this far and marked it for the next. Elaria set her jaw and moved past the writing. Lia shivered against her ribs. The frostcloth had gone damp at its edge. Elaria pressed the light stone into a seam to free her hand and touched the cradle. Lia's wing folded under her thumb like wet paper. Elaria drew her hand back. She could not stop here. She fixed her eyes on the wayfinder's arrow and pulled harder. The shaft tilted up. Cold air struck her face in a steady push. She could smell snow in it — not the dead cold of the chamber but the living cold above the glacier. The stone's glow found a lip of iron ahead, and past the iron, gray light. Elaria shoved the stone out first. It rolled and stopped against something soft. She dragged herself over the lip and fell forward onto packed snow. She lay under a broken roof. Frost-furred beams leaned in above her, half caved, the drift risen inside the walls to her waist. An old shelter, built over the vent by someone who had known this way out. Wind moved in the gaps. Sky showed through the breaks in the boards, pale and real. Elaria opened the cradle. Lia's light was a thin blue thread. Elaria packed fresh snow around the sprite with shaking fingers, and the thread steadied, and held.