“All you want or all you’ve accepted?”
“Rune—”
“I’ve watched you, Elle. You love people. You love talking to them—males and females. You’re interested in them and never at a loss for words. I saw that at Seahorn. You glow when you’re talking to anyone. Be it a barmaid or a peer. But here, where your home is, it seems as though your life is…empty.”
Her lips pulled into a tight line. “My life is not empty.”
“I mean no disrespect.” His hand flew up, palm to her. “I was just noting you seemed happier, more at ease at Seahorn. The same at Lord Kallen’s castle. Melancholy sets into your eyes when you’re within these walls.”
“You don’t know what you speak of, Rune.”
His hand fell to the table and he nodded.
The rest of the meal passed in silence.
{ Chapter 11 }
“Twelve steps if I remember correctly. Are you there?”
Rune reached downward with his right toe and his foot hit hard stone. He stretched the last step down off the ladder and the leather satchel strung across his shoulder swung and hit him in the lower back. He set the lantern he had dangling across his arm down onto the stone floor, half angled on a pile of dirt.
Cool clamminess blanketed his skin and he glanced about, the light from his lantern not lending much illumination to the chamber he’d just descended into.
He looked upward on the ladder. “I’m down. Your turn.”
Through the flickering shadows of the lantern hanging from her arm, Elle turned about and scampered down the wooden ladder riveted to the dusty stone wall. Fast, almost as though she was skipping steps on the way down.
His hands went up in the air about her waist, ready to catch her just in case, but she was solid in each step she took.
She jumped from the last step, landed and spun to him, a smile bright on her face. “This is it. I always loved coming down here. Lord Kallen has already done so much excavating on the upper chambers that there aren’t a lot of surprises. Except for when we found the entrance to this chamber in the floor. That was a surprise.”
She shifted the lantern swaying from her arm to her hand and the light reflected up onto her face. Her blue eyes were sparkling diamonds for the sheer excitement running through her.
“Everything down here is mostly untouched—hasn’t been seen for hundreds of years. It’s been more than half a year since I’ve been in this lower chamber. It’s dug deeper into the stone but still had a water source at some point. I always found it more interesting than the upper chambers, though Lord Kallen likes to spend most of his time excavating in the Gold, Silver and Emerald chambers above and I help him as directed, even if my eyes are always straying to the entrance of this chamber. Other than this small entrance downward, we’ve never found a stairway leading down into it, so it’s a mystery. But it was clearly in use at some time.”
She stepped around him and moved forward, her feet crunching through dirt and rubble as she lifted her lantern high in front of her and pointed with her free hand. “This area was the bath—you can see the indentation in the ground. So much has fallen from the ceiling and slid down into there. Tiles and dirt—or it’s quite possible the bath was filled in before they moved to creating the higher baths. Unless they did this one after the others. But tiles used to exist on the ceiling as well—one can tell for the amount of tesserae mixed in among the dirt.” Her finger flicked toward the pitted, dank ceiling, beads of water dripping occasionally from crevices. “Unfortunately, whatever that was up there has been lost to time. Come—follow me in. The mosaics with the box in it are on the far end of the chamber.”
Rune watched her movements in the shadows in front of him as she scrambled her way across the debris lining the edge of the bath. She was in a bubble of joy, digging around in the cavern of this room—talking about it. Bewitching, in more ways than he could count.
A sorceress.
That was what she had to be.
Why else had he told her at dinner the previous night what he had been thinking?
Talking about his youth. Telling her of his loss. There was only one other person that knew of his youth, what he had suffered, and that fact alone had already cost him too much in his life.
It’d been stupid to tell another soul. Stupid to ramble on to Elle.
But he hadn’t been able to curb his tongue until it was too late.
She was a sorceress—it was the only logical explanation.
It couldn’t be that he was actually forming a bond with her.
She’d vowed no attachments. An oath he’d echoed wholeheartedly at the moment he’d made it.
But then she had bloody well kissed his scar. And when he had driven into her, their bodies meeting in visceral rawness, he’d found himself drowning into a belonging like he’d never known. There’d been no way to stop it.
That his declaration to not form any attachment to her had lit to flame and was quickly burning to ash had not escaped him.
That had always been his problem. He formed bonds with people, and those bonds had always been detrimental, in one way or another. Elle would be no different and he needed to rein in his overzealous cock.
Elle looked over her shoulder at him. “What do you know of the Box of Draupnir? I know you know about the time that Des and Jules and then Weston and Laney possessed it. But before that? Jules said that your first captain on the Firefox—the privateering ship—had held onto the box for a number of years?”
“Yes. Captain Folback. And the box ruined him, full and through. The box delivered riches as promised.” He shook his head. “The ships we captured had bounty like you wouldn’t believe on board. It made all of us so wealthy after the first year there was no reason to continue on—all of us on that ship could have retired and never had another care in the world. But we persisted, more ships downed. More bounty. And it rotted our captain from the inside out. He was always a fair man, a good man, but he couldn’t stop. Not until his wife was killed by men that wanted to take the box for their own. He forfeited his own life to save her, even though she was already dead.”
Elle’s feet had stopped and she’d turned fully toward him, her jaw agape. “Jules never told me that.”
“It was gruesome—horrendous. After that Des took the box and hid it. And those of us that were there—we don’t talk about it. Not if we can help it.”
“But you just told me.”
“That’s because you still think this is a game, Elle. An adventure. You need to understand how the box can destroy things—people. No one is safe around that thing. Even if you don’t feel the power—the draw of it—others do. And others will always want to possess it. No one is safe.”
A frown set on her face for a long second before she shook her head, a weak smile curving her lips as she pinned him with a look. “But that’s what you’re here for—to keep me safe.”
He shrugged. “That mission is easier if you know exactly what you’re dealing with.”
She gave him a slight nod and turned, moving deeper into the chamber, her arm with the lantern lifted high. “Do you know anything else of it? Did your captain know?”
“The only other lore I’ve heard of it came from an old sailor in a tavern in the Port of Mogador that may or may not have been half mad on top of being soused.”
Her toe slipped on loose tile and she caught herself on the wall before Rune could grab her. She continued forward. “Lore? Tell me.”
“The old man said he saw the box once when he was in the Port of Benghazi, fifty years before when he was just a boy. It changed hands with the exchange of a beautiful woman—she was the price of the box. Flaxen hair, eyes of jade that held the souls of men. She knew of the box, knew its power—riches beyond compare—fortunes expanded by ninefold every third lunar cycle. But she warned of the curse of it. That the riches would only come at the pleasure of what the box held.”
Elle had stopped moving again, staring at him. “The ring?”
He nodded. “The ring, but it is more than a golden ring with a ruby. The ruby holds the soul of the last true Viking god. He traded his spot in Valhalla for riches on land. Riches and love. When he died, Valhalla was closed to him, so his soul was entwined in the Ring of Draupnir and it was set in the darkness. A tree grew in that darkness, grew through, around the ring, until the Viking’s lover found the tree. She couldn’t bear to be without her soulmate, so she carved a box out of the tree that held the ring—and her lover—inside of it. And then she disappeared onto the seas.”
“And she unleashed the curse onto the world,” she whispered.
“Exactly.”
Her shoulders lifted in a visible shiver. “That is a horrible story. Beautiful though—the love entwined within it.”
“From what I’ve seen, the box brings the curse of the riches, the curse of unimaginable pain, yet love to those that somehow survive it.”
“Like Des and Jules.”
“And Laney and Wes.”
Her eyes closed for a long second and she shivered again. “Jules—does she know this story?”
Rune shrugged. “I’ve never repeated what the old sailor told me. Whether or not another person overheard the story, I couldn’t tell you.”
She shifted the lantern in her hand, the shadows of the light sending dark streaks across her face. “She knew—Jules knew—this is what she saw in childbirth, what she saw in the pain of it. She saw that the box needed to go to its home.”
“That is the same thought I had when I heard her say that.”
“Why didn’t you say anything at Seahorn?”
His shoulders lifted. “The whole of it sounds crazy—even to my ears.”
Her eyebrows drew together, her mouth setting into a frown. “Rune, I wasn’t a believer before…but now…”
“Now what?”
“Now this.” She lifted her right hand holding the lantern to the wall next to them.
The orange glow of her lantern lit the wall, the circle of brightness bleeding into darkness along the edges. There, in the middle of the wall, the mosaic started to glow under the illumination—even through the dirt covering it.
A box.
An unmistakable picture of the box in the mosaic, but ten hand lengths high. The angry swirls of wood on the top of the box, surging and retreating, along with the shifting grains of wood on the sides were unmistakable.
“Hell.” The word slid past his lips in a whisper.
She lifted her lantern higher. “I wasn’t wrong, was I?”
His head shaking slowly, he lifted his own lantern to the wall, moving closer to it, his forefinger brushing the dirt from a tan tile in front of his nose. “No. No, you were not.”
His look shifted to the left and he moved his lantern to his side. “And what is this?”
“It’s a tree—step back.”
Rune did so, taking three long strides backward in the dirt, moving his lantern to see the whole of the mosaic beside the box. A definite tree, though not to scale with the box and with many tesserae missing.
“But this is the art that I think is more interesting.” Elle moved around the corner of the chamber to the adjoining wall, holding her lantern up.
“This is the ring.” She pointed along the wall at the clumps of gold tesserae as she talked. “Oh no, some more of it has fallen. See, it’s missing here and here, but it’s still attached to the wall here and here. And this spot must have just disappeared.” Her hand moved in a large circle as she motioned toward the tiles still in place.
“It is clearly the ring, but down here and up here—I’m not sure what this is, these masses of blues and then the lines of brown.” Her hand waved over the lower and upper parts of the wall.
Rune walked over to the wall and stood beside her, moving his lantern from side to side as he scoured the expanse, searching. Searching for anything that might be a clue.
His breath held, and he reached up, rubbing his forefinger across one of the golden tiles, cleaning it. The light from the lantern caught the tile and it sparkled, catching on fire as if it were alive. Any closer and he might get burned.
He exhaled. “Maybe it’s perspective.”
She looked to him. “Perspective?”
“We can only see little bits of it at a time in this light.” He kicked aside some tiles by his feet to make a flat surface, then set his lantern on the cleared spot. He grabbed the leather strap on his shoulder holding the satchel across his back and he removed it. Opening the bag, he pulled free paper and pencils, handing a stack to Elle while keeping some for himself. “But maybe if we can see it as a whole, the parts that still exist will make more sense if we bring them into the daylight.”
Her eyebrows lifted but she didn’t argue, instead, turning and finding a spot to set her lantern down. “I’m willing to try it. So we sketch?”
He nodded. “We sketch all we can see.” He picked up his lantern and moved back to the wall with the box. “I’ll start on this one and you start on that one.”
Elle nodded, moving her lantern to the far right of the wall with the ring, then stepping back a few steps before making a nook in the dirt on the floor to sit in and sketch.
Rune duplicated her movements at the other wall. “Also, I should tell you, but I don’t want your hopes to rise.”
“Tell me what?”
“Before we left Seahorn I sent for something in London that may help us in our search for clues.”
“What could help us in the search?”
“Papers from Captain Folback. They were a bunch of nonsense—all of us thought that—except maybe they aren’t. I’ve kept them for years for some reason, and I’m having them sent. Maybe somewhere in them there is a clue about the box and the ring.”
“I’m willing to entertain any idea.” Her right hand motioned to the wall, a chuckle at her lips. “The reality is, as interesting as this chamber is, I feel we’re pinning our hope on a very thin thread in here.”
He paused in his motions, his stare settling fully on her. “I don’t.”
She stopped, looking over her shoulder at him. “You don’t?”
“I don’t think it happenstance that the box and you showed up in the same room together at Seahorn.” His voice turned somber. “I don’t think it happenstance that—of all things—you’ve been down in these chambers and even knew they existed. I don’t think it happenstance that Jules had that dream—that vision of where the box needed to go to. I don’t think any of it is happenstance.”
Her head shifted back slightly, her lips pursing for a moment, then she gave him a crooked smile. “I like your faith, Rune. I do. But forgive me if I am more skeptical than you. Maybe if I felt the power of the box or had seen its power over others. But I haven’t. Nonetheless, I will try and share your hope.”
She turned from him and picked up her sketchpad and pencil, silently getting to work.
Two hours later, Rune stood behind Elle, his thumb rubbing along a rogue tile in his palm as he looked down over her shoulder. She’d found another solid spot of rubble to sit upon farther along the wall and was nestled into the dirt of the chamber.
She looked perfectly content, like she was sitting on the finest throne. She hadn’t complained once about the dirt, the muck, the dankness of the chamber. Or even about the occasional splotches of mud that had dripped onto her face from above.
She’d said she loved working down in these chambers and it hadn’t been an exaggeration. And it’d only increased his esteem for her tenfold. She could get dirty and like it.
Before his wayward thoughts yanked him in the direction of rolling about on the piles of dirt with her, smearing mud into parts of her body that should remain covered, he swallowed and focused his attention on the sketch of the lower right corner of the mosaic that she was completing.
Rune assessed the lines of her pencil on the paper in the dim light, then looked up at the half-crumbled mosaic of the ring and the lines behind or around it—he was
n’t sure. He looked back down, bending over her, his arm going over her shoulder to point, his forefinger tracing the edge of the ring she’d sketched and then downward. “There, that line, capture that—it leads off from the ring in the oddest way.”
Elle nodded, her gaze staring for long seconds at the wall, and then she put pencil to paper.
She was good at this—much better than his sketches, as she was capturing the whole essence of what these mosaics would have been hundreds of years before.
Still nodding to herself, her focus stayed forward, drifting up and down from the mosaic to the paper.
She smelled good. Too good. Distractingly good.
No. Not the time.
Proper bed. Proper room no matter how he wanted to drive into her at the moment.
He clamped down on his rebelling cock and stood, looking at the tessera in his fingers that had fallen from the mosaic of the box when he had touched it. The slightest pressure from him and the tile had tumbled to the ground.
This room was close to crumbling. It was a miracle that it had been found in the shape that it was in.
“Elle, did you ever notice these tesserae look different than the ones you showed me in the upper chambers? They seem to be cut different.”
Her focus broke and she craned her neck to look up at him. “They are?”
“I think. They’re rougher, maybe a different tool used to cut them?”
“How odd.” She reached up and plucked the tile from his hand, leaning toward the light of the lantern. “You’re right, though. Can you find a few more of them from that wall and we’ll bring them with us?”
He motioned to the ring mosaic. “You have most of it on paper? The lanterns aren’t going to last much longer.”
The Soul of a Rogue (A Box of Draupnir Novel Book 3) Page 8
