Griffin places his hand over mine and gives my fingers a light squeeze. “Can you help us, or not?”
“Us?” The witch’s head jerks up from studying her concoction. “I wasn’t aware the magic concerned you.”
“Everything about Cat concerns me,” Griffin answers, his expression as stony as the Deskathi peaks.
Unfazed, the old woman turns to her herb corner, takes three vermillion berries I can’t identify from a glass jar, crushes them, and then adds them to her mixture. “Cat,” she mutters under her breath, stirring again. “How pedestrian.”
A chill slides down my spine, landing like a block of ice inside me. My hair tries to stand straight up, and my scalp tingles all over. She sounds just like someone I know. And hate.
“That potion is for me, right?” I eye the revolting concoction. What if Ishoulddrink it? What if it works?
“Of course.” She pours it into a cup. The transfer makes it smoke. “But I expect payment first.”
“We brought gold,” Griffin says.
Her upper lip curls in contempt. “I have no need for gold.”
“I can hunt for you,” he offers. “Bring back a stag or a boar. Cure it, and it’ll last you the winter through.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t need food.”
Her words pluck at my already tightly strung nerves, making them play an off-key note in my head. Everyone needs gold or food. They’re the most important commodities. They buy her comfortable-looking furniture and perfect windows and keep her belly full. What old woman living alone in a remote area turns down an offer of food?
“Weapons?” I ask, frowning. I don’t want to, but I could give up my blades—if that’s what she really wants.
She shakes her head again, her green eyes scraping mine.
I have a jeweled crown I’d easily give her, but it’s not here. The emerald and gold ring Griffin gave me the night of the realm dinner winks on my finger, but there’s no way I’m handing it over. I won’t give up my ice shard necklace, either. Or my wedding band. Not in this lifetime, or in the next.
I pull a three-tiered string of fat Fisan pearls from my pocket. I’ve been carrying it around for weeks.
“I have this.” My heart not happy about it, I hold out Ianthe’s circlet. She gave it to me to hold when she went off for a bath and forgot to get it back. That was the evening before we met up with Lycheron on the Sintan border.
More quickly than I thought she could move, the hermit snatches the royal heirloom from my hand. Her eyes shine as she runs the lustrous pearls through her fingers, making them softly click.
“This will do.” She tucks the pearls into a drawer under her herb table, quickly hiding the circlet away. She hands me the cup.
Potions are universally disgusting. The smell hits me fully the second it’s in my hands, and I almost choke. My eyes start to water. My gag reflex preps for battle, and I try to calm it by swallowing the sharp bite of acid in the back of my throat.
“Will it work?” I ask in a rough, unenthusiastic croak.
“It will do what it’s supposed to do.”
Well, that’s cryptic.“Unlock my magic?” I ask, fishing for a precise answer. “Make it so I can control my lighting?”
She shrugs and doesn’t elaborate, almost like she knows I’m a walking lie detector. With a thump, I set down the cup.
She pushes it toward me, right under my face, and noxious vapors sting my nose again. “The potency won’t last long. Tarry, and it will take longer and be more painful to reach the desired outcome.”
I don’t detect any lies in her words, but something about them makes me sure that she’s twirling around the truth.
“What will take longer?” I ask.
“The effects.”
“What effects?”
“The effects inherent to the potion I just mixed for you.”
