Sure enough, the reflection confirmed what she’d felt. The metal no longer shone as bright silver markings. Instead, it had melded into her skin, becoming part of her, leaving only a decorative scar marred by blood and scratches.
It was in her. Her heart banged against her ribs. Dear gods, whatever that thing was Niamh had received from the Tineroth mage-king, it had come alive and invaded her daughter. The thinnest thread holding Imogen’s panic at bay snapped. A high whine grew in her ears, and her vision narrowed to a single point that blurred with tears. She ripped at her clothes and her skin, weeping as she tried to claw the pendant out of her body.
“Get it out!” she shrieked to the silent walls. “Get it out!”
From a far distance, she thought she heard Niamh’s voice, stern, calming.“Stop it, Imogen.”
Respect and obedience for her mother came as second nature, and Imogen immediately halted her frantic dance of wounding and mutilation. She breathed hard, swiping at the tears dripping down her cheeks, leaving blood smears behind.
“Mother?” she called feebly. Silence answered her, but that one moment, when Imogen was sure she’d heard Niamh’s voice, broke the terror’s hold on her.
She inhaled slowly, regaining a measure of calm. The sharp pain of the scratches on her neck cleared her head a little more.
“One problem at a time, Imogen,” she told herself and set about heating water and laying out clean towels on the table. A bottle of lavender oil joined the supplies and soon she sat down at the table, hissing her misery each time she cleaned one of the scratches on her neck or chest and applied the oil.
The scratches, though painful, weren’t deep, and she’d been careful to clean them thoroughly, despite the discomfort. She had every faith in the lavender oil she’d extracted last summer. Lavender was a good wound healer, and Niamh had sworn by its medicinal properties.
The mirror still lay in pieces on the floor, shards reflecting the gold-lit path that still ran from Imogen’s feet and passed under the cottage door. A dull ache settled in the pit of her stomach. “Mother, if you rise from the earth this night to redden my backside for my carelessness, I won’t be in the least surprised. I am so sorry.”
She stood, cleared the table and set to sweeping the floor clean of the mirror’s remains. The strange tingling under her skin had lessened but also expanded to other parts of her body, an ever-present reminder something now shared space with the curse inside her. Revulsion surged into her throat, carried on a stream of bile that she fought down with effort.
A key and a map to vanished Tineroth.
Niamh’s flowing script replayed in her mind’s eye, and Imogen paused in her sweeping. How did one find a city that had vanished thousands of years earlier? She glanced down at her feet and the luminescent path. One looked with ensorcelled eyes.
She groaned and rested her forehead on the tip of the broom handle. “Ah, Mother. You might have warned me.”
The pendant wasn’t the key or the map to Tineroth. She herself was. It had only served as the trigger to activate a spell, one created by a mage-king and given with his blessing to an unwitting witch who’d bequeathed it to her unknowing daughter. Imogen’s disbelief in the Undying King’s ability to break her curse didn’t matter now. She had to seek him out simply to extract his nasty little artifact from her body and restore her eyesight to normal.
A simmering rage settled in her already queasy stomach, and she wielded the broom against the pile of broken glass as if it were a weapon. “Just wait until we meet, Sire. The second you get this thing out of me, I’m going to make you eat it.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Since she’d have to travel to Tineroth on foot, she packed light, stuffing only the basic supplies into her knapsack – a wool blanket to keep her warm at night, dried rations to keep her fed, and two flasks of waters in case she traveled far from a water source. She tucked a small coin purse in her bodice and a strapped a skinning knife to the belt at her waist. Niamh’s journal found safe haven in a pocket of her cloak. The cloak would be a hindrance as she traveled through the forest, but Imogen never went without it if she ventured from the safety of their plot of land. It concealed her from head to toe in faded black, and without Niamh’s protective illusion spells, she needed it now more than ever. With her wide-brimmed, veiled hat, a sturdy walking stick in her hand and an affected hobble, she looked like an old widowed crone. Poor, sickly, and of no interest to anyone. Or so Imogen hoped.
The gold light running from her feet to some unknown, distant place beckoned her. She shrugged the knapsack over her shoulder, grabbed the rowan walking stick from the corner and shut the cottage door behind her. “Let’s get this over with,” she said and set off toward the glade, following the path that took her from everything familiar.
She made one brief stop at Niamh’s grave. The daffodils she’d left yesterday still looked freshly picked, and clusters of new grass blades peeked out between the crevices made by the stacked stone. By summer, the mound would be covered, a low green hill that housed the bones of the witch whose magic originated from the earth.
Imogen pulled back her veil, grateful for the cool breeze drifting across her too-warm skin. “A prayer to the gods for me, Mother, that your indebted king will remember your kindness to him.” She blew a kiss at the stones and set off for Tineroth.
After three days of trekking through the dense wood as she followed a path she suspected had doubled back on itself at least twice, she finally reached a deep gorge. The late afternoon sun sank below the trees behind her, casting sentinel shadows that stretched to the edge of the cliffs. Even this high up, Imogen heard the dull roar of water rushing below. She peered over the edge of the rock on which she stood to see the rope of a river snaking along the bottom of the gorge.
A powerful wind roared up from the yawning space, snapping her heavy braid like a whip. The gold path that had led her through dense woods and across fallow fields now stretched across the divide, cleaving a spectral road in thin air to the other side. A gathering darkness waited there, shaped by tall silhouettes rising out of ground fog that seemed to swirl with odd purpose.
Too tired to be frightened, Imogen groaned and rubbed the dull ache at her lower back. “Please tell me I don’t have to climb down this cliff to stay on the path.” Vertigo made her back away from her precarious perch, and she stared at the illuminated road, vexed by this sudden dilemma. “A key, a map and a road.” Her fingers traced the raised scars on her neck. “Can you be a bridge now? Or maybe a bird?”
As if in answer, a ripple of movement flowed down the golden path, rising in shimmers like summer heat off hot stone. Imogen squinted and stared harder, hoping what she saw was not a trick of the fading light but one of the pendant’s magic.
A bridge formed, stone by stone and stretched across the abyss like a giant’s broken ribcage, choked by weeds and climbing vines. A series of arches perforated by spandrels at its ends, the bridge looked as if it grew from the cliff face itself, a living anchor that bound the earth together and trapped the river below it. The bridge deck, constructed of pavers, looked wide enough to accommodate a heavy flow of carts and foot traffic. Parapets lined its edges, decorated at intervals with statues that stood watch over crowds and visitors who had long since disappeared.
Still wary of the pendant’s power and her altered eyesight, Imogen tapped the edge of the bridge with her walking stick. The crack of wood on stone sounded solid enough, and she took one cautious step onto the deck, praying fervently she wasn’t about to step out into clear space and a very long fall to her death.
The moment her feet touched the bridge surface, her ears popped, and the vertigo that plagued her a moment earlier struck full force. She staggered sideway, coming up hard against a parapet. Her vision swirled before clearing at the same time her roiling stomach lurched to a merciful stop. An ivy leaf tickled her nose, and she swatted it away.
The bridge hadn’t changed—still abandoned, and decrepit, and beautiful despite its flaws. Imogen leaned between two parapets to glimpse the river so far below. Were she not given the Blessed Sight by the pendant—“Blessed, my arse,” she muttered sourly—she’d die from the fright of finding herself floating in midair.
The intense vertigo left her sweating, and with a profound sense that, while the bridge hadn’t changed, her sense of place—of being—certainly had. Every instinct she possessed sounded an internal warning. There was magery here, old and powerful. She didn’t need such obvious visual proof or Niamh’s sorcerous talents to feel the almost suffocating weight of enchantment in the air.
