It took me a moment to see it, among all the other branches and swirls of gold. But as Garrick swept our hands along the curved border, it came into focus. The pentagonal pennant shape, containing a stylized bird in flight and a flower I wasn’t sure about. A poppy, maybe. Penruddock was the family name—the one Garrick would have been entitled to if he were legitimate.
“I could destroy it the same way I did before.” But even as I said it, my power reacted. The ice that should have spread from my fingertips stalled. It coalesced inside of me instead of streaming out. There was somethingwrong.
“The fae are not strangers to blood magic, either,” Garrick said. “He’s sealed the door so that only blood of the Penruddock line can open it.”
“He trusts you all that much?” I did not trust Garrick’s siblings even when I had them firmly in my sight.
“He thinks he has us all under his control,” Garrick said.
There was something he was not telling me about his siblings; I could feel that. Margeaux could freeze and die, for all I cared. But Garrick cared about Alize, whether he acknowledged it or not. He’d tried to send her away from the Seven Gates months ago. I did not know how he felt about Edmund.
Garrick leaned down and pulled something from inside his boot. A knife. He swiped it across his palm before I could comment, then lifted his hand so he could smear blood across the crest wrought in gold.
For a moment, I thought we’d have to ask Syleris to intervene. He could appear and disappear at will, it seemed. Maybe he could appear himself behind the doors and do the searching. I did not care if he had to filter out the influence of thousands of other witches. That is what I told myself.
But thankfully I was saved from such an act of desperation.
A low hum filled the air. The sound seemed to come from the gold itself. It quivered, blurring slightly in my vision. Then there was a snap, and the mechanism jumped into action. The lock was open.
“Whatever we take from here, he will know. We will not have much time to act,” Garrick warned. “Another enchantment.”
“That would have been useful information before we made this plan.” I pushed on the door. It gave easily under my fingertips. “How long?”
“There is a lot here. That helps us. A few days, I think,” Garrick said.
As usual, no comment from Syleris. Not when he could offer insight, a solution, or otherwise be even slightly helpful.
I squeezed Garrick’s arm. “Your mother is ready.” I’d checked on her myself that morning. I knew Garrick had, too.
“Are you?”
To leave Balar Shan? To enter the final gate, knowing that it would change everything? If I lived, I would see Velora reborn. If I died… Garrick would, too. And my afterlife with Syleris would begin much sooner than I imagined. I would not die. I would not lose Garrick. Somehow.
“Yes,” I said. For better or worse.
We stepped together into the treasury. I gasped loud enough that Syleris surely heard it, even from outside in the corridor, where he was supposedly on watch.
The footprint of the room wasn’t much larger than the antechamber where Maura had tortured the fae woman. But this was not a series of connected rooms. It was a hollowed-out core. Stairs made of the same red-orange brick as the floors and walls led up to two more floors laden with treasure. Gold. So much gold. But also jewels on display, walls of ancient texts, and statues taller than Garrick gilded with gold and gemstones.
I swallowed hard. “How much time do we have?”
“It’s a few hours to midnight.” Garrick sighed.
“That won’t be enough.”
I was wrong.In every possible, conceivable way, I was wrong.
It took less than an hour for me to know, with complete certainty, that Maura’s talisman was not in the king’s treasury.
My power was completely dormant. Even as my frustration rose, it remained at a steady ebb in my veins. Damn Syleris for teaching me to control it. Two months ago, I would have encased half of the fucking room in ice. It would not have helped, but it might have made me feel better.
“We will go over everything again,” Garrick said. But I could hear him grinding his teeth even from the other side of the room.
I sank down to sit on the stairwell between the first and second floors, after taking my third lap around the tiered perimeter and feeling nothing.
I pressed my palms against my eyes, mask long discarded. “There is nothing here. Damn it all to the Dark God’s eternal hell.”
“You called?”
