Silver Dragon Codex by R.D. Henham

at each onein turn. Every time she put one back on the shelf, she let out a little sigh as if she’d been holding her breath while she balanced the trinket in her hand.
    Then, just as Jace’s patience was about to break, the eastern door cracked, a sharp bark of sound. Jace whirled to find Ebano with his eyes closed, hands palm out on the door—which was shaking. The wood quavered and slammed back and forth within the doorway, the patterns quivering with every energetic shake of the wood. Ebano lifted his hands from the door and brought them together with a booming clap.
    The door shrank.
    Wood ripped away from frozen hinges, tearing from the steel with a quavering shriek. The door dwindled, first by inches and then, with a pop, in a shocking rush. As it opened, a cold gust of air hissed out from the room beyond. It was dark in there, without windows or other doors to let any light inside. The floor was crusted with a thin layer of ice, and the walls were patterened with spiderwebs of glittering crystalline frost. A damp wind fluttered past, raising the hairs on Jace’s arms and sending a shiver down his spine. “What’s in there?” he whispered.
    Belen took a step forward, standing in the doorway. “I don’t know.”
    “Was this where you kept your food? To keep it cold?”Cerisse bobbed her head over Jace’s shoulder, ducking back a bit.
    “Dragons don’t eat cold food,” Belen said, leaving Jace to wonder what they did eat. Belen shivered and rubbed her hand over her arm. The goose bumps rippled her flesh visibly, and she stared into the room. “I don’t want to go in,” she said suddenly, a helpless note in her voice. “Something’s very wrong. There’s something terrible in there. Something awful …”
    “It’s all right, Belen.” Jace brushed her shoulder, his other hand ready to reach for his sword. “Whatever was inside, I won’t let it hurt you. You don’t even have to go in first. Cerisse, step inside and see if you can see anything.”
    Cerisse shot him a wounded glare. “Go in yourself, you big jerk,” she muttered.
    “Wait. Something happened here … something that hurt.” Belen was struggling for words, searching her memory for the events that caused her pained feelings, but Jace could see that she had little to go on.
    “Perhaps you were attacked? Did someone break in? Did you lock them in there?”
    She hesitated, trying to remember. “I don’t know. But I can feel it—whatever’s in there, it hurt me. I feel almost”—Belen took a deep, shuddering breath—“afraid.”
    If Belen had a bad feeling about this …
    “We don’t have to go in there.” Jace tried to sound encouraging.
    “Yes, we do.” She glanced back over her shoulder at Jace, and then took a hesitant step forward. “Even if it hurt me then, even if it’s going to cause me pain now, I have to go in. I need to know what happened. If not for my sake, then for the sake of the village of Angvale. I can’t leave them to live in the woods like feral animals, their village in shambles. If I did that to them, then I had a reason. And I think the reason is in this room.” She took another step, then a third, slowly entering the cold, dark room.
    Jace would have stopped her, kept his hand on her shoulder, but Cerisse gently pushed him back. “Let her go,” the half-elf whispered. “She’ll be all right.” Whether it was some instinct that made Cerisse hold him back or whether she read something on Belen’s face in the shadowy arch of the doorway, Jace didn’t know. But her tone of voice was so serious, the earnest look in her brown eyes so rare and unexpected that he stopped dead in his tracks.
    Ebano stepped close to Jace in the doorway, carrying an ornate candelabrum with three half-melted candles in its twisted brackets. He’d lit them, and now he held up the light so that the soft glow illuminated the room beyond the ruined door. The room inside was smaller than any of the others at the top of the