This is how you ended up with Margeaux’s diadem.
I ate that after a particularly difficult day of foraging. It was delicious.
I would not mourn its loss. Knowing it would not take another human life was a relief. It was one thing, at least, that I could clear from my conscience. But the knowledge did nothing for the pulsing pain in the back of my head.
The four talismans drew me back. They sparkled and gleamed. I imagined that if I closed my eyes, I might hear the spells they held whispering to me.
They were going to make me lose my mind.
Garrick’s hand slid down to the center of my back. He shifted his body, and with it, his attention, though his hand remained.
“Why couldn’t she feel the talismans?”
No one spoke. Syleris?—
“Because she is a dragon, not a witch,” the Dark God said, his velvety voice floating in and filling the smaller room. “She knew they were powerful. But she could no more distinguish a spell cast a millennium ago from one cast a week ago.”
Garrick growled low in his throat. He had better control than anyone I’d ever met. But it was possible that the power of the talismans weighed on him as well. “I meant Koryn. They have been through this door the whole time.”
Syleris continued in that unbothered voice. Not monotone, but not… feeling. “The dragon has magic of her own. She shields her hoard.”
I did nothing of the sort,Isanara protested.
“She is young and orphaned. It was probably instinctual, not intentional.”
She huffed in my mind but did not argue with the explanation.
I felt Garrick move, looking from Syleris behind us back to where Isanara rested, surrounded by gold and gemstones.
“You seem to know a lot about dragons,” Garrick said.
It wasn’t quite an accusation. What would he even be accusing Syleris of?
“I am immortal,” Syleris answered. He’d been here before the curse, and he’d keep on living forever even if we did not manage to break it.
But I could not think about that now. Not with those four objects pulsing with power in front of me, making my head throb.
“Four,” I said, speaking for the first time since regaining consciousness. My voice was raspy. My whole body ached. But I kept going. “You didn’t say there were four.”
Syleris was silent. That wasn’t fucking acceptable anymore.
He must have heard the thought in my mind.
“I have told you before that I have limitations,” he said. There was almost emotion in it.
My lower lip wobbled. I sank my teeth into it to stop, but then my body decided to shake instead. Garrick squeezed my shoulder with one hand and reached for a talisman with the other. He held up the salt cellar between us.
The porcelain was painted to depict a cityscape. A castle overlooked an orange-gold valley with a tower in the middle and smaller buildings in between. The mountains in the background were gilded with gold. On the bottom was the inscription.
“What do the markings mean?” Garrick asked. They were carved into the porcelain itself, their style totally different from the rest of the salt cellar’s decorations.
“To create a talisman, the witch must inscribe it with a rune. Consecrate it with a spell, then charge it with power. Channel her power into it, essentially,” I explained. My voice grew stronger as I spoke. The power was still there, loud and demanding. But having a purpose helped. I pointed to the straight line with two diagonal lines extending from it in parallel to one another. “This is the rune for fire.”
Garrick set the salt cellar down and picked up each of the other talismans in turn, finding the runes and showing them to me for identification.
The signet ring— “Earth.”
The jeweled comb— “Water.”
