Raven Steele's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Raven rode back to the ridge above the mines with the map rolled in her belt and eleven days left before the full moon. Her ally waited with the horse and the silver armor. Raven spread the hide on a flat stone and traced the flooded tunnel with her thumb. Two people could enter. Two people could not fight their way out with a third who had been three years underground. She needed hands, and every village within a week's ride had already turned her down. Her ally spoke first. "There is one place left you have not tried." She pointed east, past the salt flats, toward a low black shape on the horizon. "The old fortress. The one the warlord's men will not go near." Raven had seen the shape before and ridden around it. A stone keep bristling with pipes and gearwork, built by a people no one remembered. Workers in the forge town said the doors opened for no one. Raven looked at the map, then at the moon already thin in the afternoon sky. She mounted. They reached the keep at dusk. The gates stood shut, ringed in brass and cold iron. Raven put her gauntlet on the door. The runes on her breastplate lit. Something inside the wall answered them, and the doors ground open on their own hinges. The hall beyond was empty. At the far end, set into the stone, hung a ring of metal the size of a wagon wheel, its center full of turning light. Gears floated around it, unattached to anything. A voice came from above. "You wear a key you do not understand." Raven looked up. A dragon lay along a beam in the rafters, its scales the color of a night sky, its eyes pale. It did not move to strike. "The ring behind me opens onto other hours," it said. "Men once used it to send soldiers where soldiers were needed. The soldiers are still there. They have been waiting." Raven understood the offer and the price at once. She could bring back fighters from a war the world had forgotten, and she would owe the thing in the rafters whatever it asked later. Her ally stood at her shoulder, silent, waiting for the call. Raven thought of her sister on a cot in the dark, and the moon growing thinner every night. She walked to the ring. She pressed her gauntlet against the frame. The light inside pulled taut, then opened. Figures stepped through, armored, blinking, twelve of them, then twenty. They lowered their weapons when they saw the runes on her chest. Raven turned to her ally. "We ride tonight." Behind her, the dragon settled deeper into the beam and closed its eyes, as if a debt had been written down and set aside. She had her hands. She did not yet know what she had promised for them.