Read Online Mind of the Magic (Arhel Book 3) by Holly Lisle - Free Book Online

then opened them. Still she was blind.
    “Faljon says,
’Only fools walk in darkness/ When light is at hand,’
“ she muttered. She conjured a faeriefire. The bright spot of light cast long, dancing shadows, and showed her a rounded little cave with tunnels leading in three directions.
    Witte seemed to have vanished. She worried that he might be lost, or that she might not be able to locate him if he wandered too far. “Witte!” she shouted. “Where are you?”
    “Stay where you are!” Because of the echoes in the tunnel, Faia couldn’t tell where Witte’s voice had come from, but he was nearby. She waited, and before long, he popped out from a side passage, his own faeriefire following him. “I’m right here. I was beginning to wonder if you’d fallen off the side of the mountain.” He grinned at her. “I was exploring a bit,” he said. “Trying to figure out how this place is put together.”
    Faia nodded. “I have an idea about that. I can cast a seek-and-find spell—I used to do something similar when my sheep scattered. I can call hundreds of faeriefires that will seek through all the passageways, looking for a tunnel that goes where we need to go. When one finds the way, the others will follow it back. The spell is difficult, but I’ve done it before, and I think it will work here as well as in searching for sheep.”
    “That seems reasonable, but what will you send your spell in search of?”
    Faia thought. “One of my friends, I suppose. Medwind, perhaps. I know her best, and can give the faeriefires the best description of her.”
    Witte smiled. “That should work just fine.”
    Faia closed her eyes and summoned the magic—easy, when the whole of the ruins thrummed and crackled with it. But while the summoning was easy, the control was hard; harder now than it had ever been when Arhel’s magic was weaker. Still, she focused. She’d learned control in the past years—never again would she accidentally melt a stone village into glass.
    Thousands of faeriefires appeared and swarmed for a moment around Faia, Kirtha, and Witte. The faeriefires coalesced suddenly and hung in the air. Then they burst apart, as if they were a flower budded and bloomed and gone to seed in an instant. The individual fires raced away in all directions.
    “Just wait,” Faia said. “This will take a while.”
    For a few moments, only Witte’s and Faia’s faeriefire lights lit the cavern. Then Faia noticed flickers along some of the cavern walls, and in a rush, the faeriefire swarm reformed. It hung in front of the three of them again, and after an instant, took off down one passage. Witte, faster than she would ever have imagined, turned and raced after it.
    Faia shifted Kirtha around to ride on her back, and hooked her arms beneath her daughter’s legs. Kirtha wrapped her arms around Faia’s neck and shouted, “Go, horsy!”
    “Not so
tight
,” Faia grumbled. She took off through the labyrinth of connected stone caverns, all carved out of the living rock by the First Folk. Each domed room had three or four arched paths leading to other rooms. All of them looked exactly like every other one.
    How could even the First Folk have found their way through this place? she wondered. Perhaps they had done it the same way she had—with magic. No simpler solution occurred to her.
    Witte abruptly shot around a corner and dropped out of sight, chasing the faeriefire swarm that plunged ahead of him into a low, wide tunnel that twisted downward, spiraling into blackness. Faia dashed after him and nearly toppled; the tunnel was uncomfortably steep. Just more proof that the creators hadn’t been anything like humans—people would have built stairs. She found the sensation of chasing shadows in circles, with darkness riding hard on her heels, dizzying. Occasionally she’d catch a glimpse of Witte’s braid bouncing as he ran down the steep grade ahead of her, but she never had more than that tiny reassurance that he was