“Then why cast the curse in the first place?”
“Because there were no better choices.”
His eyes softened, but he still did not look at me. His mouth was a new shape. Not quite a frown, but heavy. He looked older than ever before, even though he was an immortal. He looked… guilty?
“What is waiting for us in the Unknown Gate?” I asked softly.
He heard me, even over the crowd and the music. Yes, that was guilt in his eyes. I swallowed back the emotion that clogged my throat—fear.
“I wish that I could tell you, sweetling.”
My breath stuttered in my chest. “How can you not know? You created it.”
“I did not say that I did not know. I said that I cannot tell you.” Syleris fixed me with an intensity that I’d thought only Garrick could muster. He was trying to say a thousand things with a single look, and I had no prayer of hearing them all. “Not even gods are all-powerful.”
What was powerful enough to coerce a god? I wondered. But not for long. I already knew the answer. I’d experienced it not once, but twice.
A bargain.
Syleris was bound by a bargain—but to whom, for what reason… that I did not know, and he could not tell me.
But he would have. If it were possible, I believed he would have told me. He did not want me to suffer. He lo?—
“Do not mistake my desire for balance as goodness,” Syleris said aloud. It was not a snarl. He was always much too composed for that. But there was a warning in those syllables as they scraped out of his throat.
He’d been in my mind. Hearing my thoughts even as I thought them.
Balance. Maura had spoken of it before, yet she sought to destroy it by creating a talisman to give witches precedence over the fae. I did not want the fae to have more power, either. But if I had to go through all Seven Gates, then at least the witches and fae would check one another’s power and magic once it was freed.
Balance was an excuse. Syleris could read into my mind, but I had no window into his. That did not change my opinion, and because he was privy to my thoughts, he knew it.
I lifted my brows in a challenge that he could avoid but not ignore. “I wouldn’t dare.”
His nostrils flared, his eyes flashing beneath the edges of his white mask.
This time, I tightened my hold on him.
But just as he opened his mouth to speak, a wide, familiar hand landed on the small of my back.
Garrick pressed into my back, pinning Syleris’ hand between us. Desire jolted through me, but I did not get long to savor it.
“The king has planned some sort of spectacle at midnight. Everyone is expected to attend. He will look for us,” Garrick said.
The heat that had built so quickly between my legs quelled. “What is he up to?”
“Nothing good,” Garrick said. “Our time is now.”
I nodded, even as I continued to pin Syleris with my stare.“We are not done with this conversation.”
“Yes, we are.”
I’d argue with him later. I slipped from his arms into Garrick’s. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 44
KORYN
“I will keep watch.”
