Why? Alize had asked.
Why? I’d repeated back.
Why… why… why…until it was not her higher-pitched sonorous voice, but my deeper, more resonant one.
Why send me through the Seven Gates, ensuring their completion with a protector, only to capture me after the Memory Gate? Why send me through at all?
The easiest answer was the one that I’d given to Alize. Maura wanted her full power restored, and she’d bargained with the fae king to give me the best possible chance of getting through the gates. Garrick had been the king’s half of the agreement—his bastard son, a half-human, half-fae with the ability to shift into a raven in addition to a reputation for negotiating dangerous situations.
But why capture me after the fifth gate instead of letting me attempt all seven?
Why separate me from my familiar, in violation of our sacred covenants?
Unless Maura was bound by another bargain.
I shivered.
It must have been colder tonight than it had been so far. The muted sunlight had disappeared completely from the windows overhead. Darkness fell quickly in the north.
I pressed my palms harder into the tile floor, shifting more of my weight to them this time, using the sensation to ground myself once again. I had to keephimaway.
Whatever bargains Maura had struck were of no concern to me. She was my elder by hundreds of years, more powerful, with the full support of her coven.
But was she more powerful?
My power had not diminished, despite my distance in months and miles from my coven. Was it because of my bond, or the pledge of my afterlife interfering in ways I had not predicted?
It does not matter, I reminded myself. Measuring myself against Maura would prove nothing. It would not further my goals of saving Isanara and Kyrelle.
But what if it could save them, and others?
I jerked my hands back from the tile.
The fae did not deserve to be saved. Maybe the witches didn’t, either. Or the humans. I’d seen humans do unspeakablethings in the last four hundred years. Men like Garrick the Red had facilitated them. The Justice Gate surfaced in my memory. Alize’s trial at the Memory Gate had shown her trying to smother an infant—she was the one who’d tried to commit infanticide. Which meant that Garrick had poisoned and killed an entire family—innocent, unborn child included.
I’d ruined my sister’s life when my frost ripped free and injured her beloved.
Maybe I did not deserve to exist.
But Kyrelle did. She, at least, was good. She loved and cared for her father, foolish though that made both of them. That was the real reason I had to save her. Not just for Rylynn’s sake—but for her own. Because if I myself could not be good, at least I could preserve something—someone—who was.
I shivered again. It was not the cold from the windows above, or my paltry attempts to shut him out. I would never escape him. That was the bargain I’d made. Eternity. But that was not what he breathed against my ear, as if he kneeled on the ground behind me instead of hiding in the recesses of my mind.
“You will be powerful enough to do anything,”the Dark God promised.
CHAPTER 6
GARRICK
I consideredall manner of subterfuge to enter the palace. But in the end, I returned the same way I had left almost twenty years before—through the front door.
Four soaring cylindrical obelisks reached skyward, supporting a domed roof some fifty feet above my head. Red stone stood at the base and apex of the white beams, each carved from a single piece of unblemished granite. I glanced up as I passed underneath the dome, just long enough to register the familiar constellation painted onto the mock sky. I’d seen it hundreds of times in the years I dwelt here. To my knowledge, no one had yet discovered its origin. It had never appeared in the skies above Velora.
Ice clung to the red and white pillars, dripping down the sides in icicle adornments that might have been beautiful in a world where they actually melted away in the spring. Snow was piled on the waist-high stone walls that buttressed the stairs, creating a tunnel-like effect as I climbed. Every person who entered Balar Shan had to climb these stairs. There was no life beyond these walls; no city sprung up to support the palace. There was a reason that most of the continent believed that thefae had abandoned these shores. And another for why no one had ever come to verify for themselves—not even the witches.
Until now.
I took each stair with careful purpose, tracking my surroundings for any clues to what awaited me inside.
