And it shattered something within me that I had stupidly let stay intact.
“I thought you were a shifter,” I said aloud, while my mind screamed. All of it was a lie. Every feeling I’d had for Garrick had been his mind-gift at work. He’d been forcing my hand all along. This was deeper than the betrayal I’d felt before. He hadn’t just broken my heart. He’d taken away my ability to trust in my own reality.
“I have never compelled you,” Garrick said.
Then how did he know the direction of my thoughts?
Because he knows you, my mind answered. I imagined freezing the thought and shattering it into a thousand pieces, just like I had shattered the doors.
Garrick lifted his hands, offering them to me, palms up. “My magic does not work on you. The same way that your spells do not work on me. I think it is because of the Lifebind.”
In the tavern, the spell I’d cast on the drinks had not affected him. Maybe he was telling me the truth. But he no longer had the courtesy of me assuming that. And I did not have the time to try to sort through his treachery now.
I forced the ice in my veins inward, forming a block in my chest, trying to lock out all feeling. Feelings were dangerous, and I could not trust myself any more than I could trust him. Not when it came to this.
But what if he was commanding me to think like this? What if these thoughts were not even my own… if Garrick was controlling my mind, surely it would have been more gracioustoward him. If that was even how his compulsion worked. What did it mean to compel the mind, rather than?—
“That is how the king controlled us at the Memory Gate,” I said as the thought entered my mind.
Garrick nodded. “Another mind-gift. I can compel the mind. He can compel the body.”
A nuance I did not plan on being in Balar Shan long enough to understand. I had to get to Isanara and escape. It did not matter that the two fae males had been waiting for me, nor that Garrick had intervened to help me escape them, whatever their purpose. None of it mattered.
“I am so sorry, Koryn,” Garrick said.
I blinked at him. It wasn’t that I had not expected an apology. It was the simplicity of it that hit me in the chest, right where I’d built that block of ice. Garrick did not offer a long-winded explanation. He did not try to make me see his way. He said the words, and he did not reach for me. He gave his apology, but there was no question in it. His words were earnest, but they did not rise at the end. They were not a request for forgiveness.
What was I supposed to do with that?
I am still trapped in the dark,Isanara’s voice rang in my mind.
As if I could possibly forget her, when she was as much a part of me as breathing.There is a complication.
My familiar’s voice went uncharacteristically flat in my mind.Bring him.
Garrick took a step in my direction. “Isanara.”
I hated how well he knew me. He recognized that I was conversing with my familiar. A week ago, I would have thought I knew him just as well. Both of us had kept our pasts close, focused on the present, the strange and precious suspended reality of the Seven Gates. Maybe if I’d asked more questions, Iwould have recognized Garrick’s deceit before it took me out at the knees.
“She is in a dungeon because of you.” And me.Because I was stupid enough to trust you.
“Let me help you get her out.” Another step.
I should freeze him to the wall. Let the power burst out of me and spear through his heart with shards of ice, destroying it like he had destroyed mine.
But damn it all, the opposite was happening. Each step he took, my power calmed. My body had not processed the messages from my mind, the betrayal, and the fact that Garrick could not be trusted. Never, ever, again.
Garrick was almost close enough to touch me. “I know where the dungeons are.”
I still held the shard of porcelain.
My fingers twitched. I reinforced the block of ice in my chest.
I could not defeat him. We both fucking knew it. Trying to keep him from following would only slow me down. I did not know the limits of Garrick’s compulsion magic, but I could guess that sending my two guards away was only a temporary solution. Maura had gone to the trouble of capturing me and my familiar; she would not let us go so easily. She needed us for something—something other than the Seven Gates.
“Take me to her.”
My love for Isanara was greater than my hatred for him or my worries about Maura.
