The word echoed around in my head as we resumed our procession. But when Nash turned back, looking over the supplicants behind him with lazy perusal, my stomach turned. He found Nimra and a smile crawled up his face, a smile that I recognized easily.
Men had been looking at women like that far longer than my four hundred years. Suddenly, it did not matter that Nimra was neither my coven sister nor a descendant of my long-dead sister. She was a woman, and that was enough.
“You turned him away,” I said, already knowing the answer.
Nimra nodded but said nothing more. The procession began to move again.
Nash’s eyes found mine. I kept my frost in check, but barely. I let all of the rage flood my gaze. I held it as I sheathed the dagger back at my waist.
He laughed soundlessly before turning back to follow the priestess out the rear entrance of the temple. He had no idea that he’d just made an enemy of a nearly four-hundred-year-old frost witch. But that did not matter.
My power would kill him just the same. And this time, I would not let myself hesitate.
Warm breath lifted the hair from the back of my neck, the looming wall behind me moving closer.
“I won’t even have to spill your secret. You seem determined to reveal yourself all on your own,” Garrick said, his cinnamon and wine scent overpowering the altars of burning herbs.
“I can manage myself just fine.” A lie, most likely. I’d struggled to manage myself even with the help of six powerfulwitches. In fact, I’d done the opposite ofmanage myself. I’d lost control and gotten myself cast out from my coven.
But I’d rather spend the next three gates listening to my own stomach growl from hunger than admit that fact to him.
“There won’t be a priestess in the gate to pass off your power as an act of divine intervention,” Garrick said.
I stumbled over his words, the toe of my boot catching on the hem of my cloak as we moved to the next altar in procession. But before I could hit the ground, a hand caught my shoulder. Engulfed it.
That first touch was as intense as his gaze and more than I’d imagined lying alone in my bunk the night before. But it was his words that had tripped me up.
His tone was acerbic, but the thrust of the words themselves… they sounded like a warning, not an admonition. That was almost as unsettling as the warmth radiating from where his hand still gripped my shoulder.
Thanks to the Dark God, he removed it and I was able to breathe again. But thinking still eluded me. That could be the only explanation for the words I let slip.
“Sometimes the use of power is justified,” I said over the rush of my own blood in my veins. I could not stop my gaze from lifting with the words, my chin with it, until I found the back of Nash’s head.
Garrick shifted behind me. I hadn’t realized how close he’d gotten, moving in so that no one else could hear our whispered words. Even though he was no longer touching me, the weight of his presence was inescapable.
The heat from the night before returned, hotter than before, kindled with the anger already simmering in my veins. But if Garrick felt that same burning attraction, he gave no sign I could detect, even with my heightened awareness. I allowed myself tolook over my shoulder long enough to confirm that his gaze had followed my own.
He glanced from Nash, to Nimra, and then back to me. The grim tilt of his mouth told me that he’d heard Nimra telling me about Nash’s threats.
“A witch with a functioning heart. Who knew such a thing was possible,” Garrick said.
I opened my mouth to tell him that he clearly knew less about witches than he believed. But I doubted Garrick the Red would have made such a mistake, which was even more unsettling. My heart was nothing more than a decaying, atrophied organ in my chest. To believe anything else went against everything Maura and my coven had taught me. To wish anything else was doom.
“I like it better when you do not speak,” I hissed between my teeth.
Again, his warm chuckle filled the space between us. “What you like does not concern me, witch.”
I could not keep his mouth shut, but I was done running mine. I pressed my lips together and spent the remainder of the procession imagining possible ways to stage Nash’s death without revealing my power to the other supplicants.
I was so busy plotting that I almost missed the incongruity before me. The Mercy Gate was located in the heart of Canmar, the capital city of Velora. There were very few humans left to populate it, but most of the buildings remained.
What certainly did not exist was a fifty-foot wall of ice that expanded as far as I could see in either direction. A single, precarious-looking rope ladder ascended up the sheer face before disappearing over the top.
We’d reached the Mercy Gate.
I had no doubt my muscles would be screaming for mercy by the time I hauled myself up that ladder. Beside me, even Nimrawas speechless. Whatever I’d imagined… it was not this. And I doubted the gate required nothing more than climbing a ladder.
“You will ascend in the order you now stand,” the priestess said.
