I rolled over.
“Never mind.”
Lee laughed and helped me up, and I sort of bumped into him as I stood up, my stomach pressed against his. I was about to pull away, but he held me there for a moment, his eyes serious.
“You have to be aware of everything,” he said seriously. “I don’t want to find out you were killed in your first battle. Understood?”
“Yeah,” I said, shyly meeting his eyes. Did he actually care? “I will be.”
He released me and went to scoop up his hammer again. “Let’s do it again.”
I felt eyes on me, and glanced over to see Allison watching me from the corner. She looked even more sour than usual, sharpening her blade on a whetstone. I gave her a mock smile and returned to training, wondering what was wrong with her this time.
Eldon let me finish a bit early and surprised me with a couple of beautiful brown horses waiting outside the gate of Arnwell. He led me over to the horses.
“What’s this?” I asked, looking at him.
“I want you to see what you’re protecting.”
After a bit of a struggle to actually get up on the horse, I followed Eldon on his horse for a tour of Derwin, sometimes trotting along the cobblestone streets, smelling the rich scents of roasting beef and fresh bread and the perfume wafting in from the meadows. We circled the lake, our reflections staring back at us, and I saw silver fish darting along beneath the surface, their scales like diamonds. In fact, I saw a lot of diamonds. They were glinting out from exposed rocks and flashing beneath the water in the winding streams, bigger and more beautiful than any I had ever seen on earth. Eldon saw me staring.
“You value different things when you have them in abundance,” he said. “We have mountains of diamonds and oceans of crude oil. For us, we value the sweet taste of a peach, which we’ve never been able to grow here, or coconuts, my personal favourite.”
Everything rolled by in a beautiful blur, like I was riding through an oil painting. Eldon showed me some of the tunnels, including the huge one where the train came and went, currently empty except for the wooden tracks that ran off into the darkness. He showed me one of the boring machines they used—a massive steam-powered contraption with a diamond cutting wheel that sliced through the rock like butter. He said there were hundreds of those machines in the Under Earth—different sizes for different tunnels.
“Do you live in Arnwell Castle?” I asked him as we continued on.
He nodded. “I live there, along with the ten Swords of the Protectorate. We also have rooms for all the Monster Crushers and their Swords from around the world, the ones who stay here for days at a time. There are housekeepers and staff as well, of course, but it can be a cold and lonely place. It wasn’t always for Monster Crushers: once it was a home for a king and his armies, a long time ago.”
“Who rules Derwin now?”
“There’s a mayor elected by the people; democracy is an idea we liked from the surface.” He laughed. “But he’s a portly old fellow who spends much of his time in the tavern. Most of the people here are farmers and blacksmiths and tailors: they like simple things, though they all have weapons, because our enemies are all around us. Monsters have only gotten into Derwin once before, and thankfully they were completely destroyed before they could share the location with others. The monsters want to destroy Derwin very badly, and end the training of their most feared enemies.”
He glanced at me as we rode.
“But magic still rules in Derwin, as it always has. The Brotherhood, the three that are left, are the main authority in the five realms. The leader in Eran is a powerful man, but the Brotherhood still have the power to overrule him. But there are only three left, and they are getting very old. The Under Earth will have to make some choices when those three pass away.”
As we continued our ride across Derwin, I even got to see some more of the animals of the Under Earth: many were brought from the surface—wild horses, dogs, cows—while others they had found down here in the shadows. There were rats as big as house cats, long dark lizards with flashing white eyes, and birds that soared around in the cavern, eating the rats and lizards. The birds were huge, as big as albatrosses, and richly coloured with red and blue plumage. I watched them soar overhead, weaving in and out of the hanging stalactites.
“I see why you like it here,” I murmured.
“Eran is even more beautiful,” he said softly. “And Oren, which is beneath your China, is the strangest and most fascinating place you will ever see. Lakes pockmark it like puddles after rain, some bubbling hot, others brutally cold. Waterfalls spill from every wall, sending a mist across the realm like a jungle. Houses are built on stilts or nestled on jutting spires, and some are even perched right on the walls. I’ll take you there one day. Of course they also have the most giant spiders and that’s where wolf hawks come from, so we’ll wait until you’re a bit better with your weapons.”
“Thanks,” I said, rolling my eyes.
Finally Eldon led us back to Arnwell, and I climbed off the horse, sore from the two-hour ride, but nearly speechless from everything I had seen. If his plan was to make me love Derwin enough to fight for it, then his plan had worked. I was almost reluctant to leave. There was a vibrancy here—you could feel the energy of the life that somehow managed to survive down here.
Eldon had said the people of the Under Earth had
