I mentally rolled my eyes.Salt did the job just fine.
Until I’d outsmarted the clever spell.
Only to find Edmund—and then this tableau—waiting. Which meant Maura had known I would find my way out. Or that Garrick would come for me.
As if summoned by the thought, Garrick stepped closer to my side. My damned, stupid, dead heart strained against the block of ice I’d built around it.
Maura lifted her head, dark curls skimming her chin as she fixed her gaze upon me. There was the familiar reprove. My stomach lurched. Ice, I reminded myself. Cold. Frost.
“I told you that she is resourceful, despite her occasional intransigence,” Maura said, shrugging her shoulders. Dismissive. Performative.
The king’s half-smile flattened. “She cut a hole in my castle.” And I’d happily let Garrick drive his sword into this monstrosity again and again until the fae capital came crumbling down. If it took down Maura and the king with it, all the better.
If only they were that easy to kill.
But now was the time for words, not actions.
“I was not trying to escape,” I said.
A dark chuckle filled my consciousness, rife with triumph. I pushed on.
“I sought my familiar.” I reached for Isanara, wrapping my hand around the base of one of her dangerously sharp spikes once more. I’d stewed for days in that salt cell, and a part of me had known that it would come to this, even as the other part had dreamed of freedom. I knew what to say next. “No one can fault me for that. Not even the Dark God himself.”
A spark danced between Maura’s fingertips. She had absolute control of her power. This was a threat. “You do not have to invoke the Covenants to me, Koryn. I was the one who taught them to you.”
She waited, her deep black eyes sparkling with gold and challenge, waiting for me to lose control like I had hundreds oftimes before. A flick of my hand, a thought, and my frost would answer. I curled my hands into fists.
Maura dismissed me from her gaze as easily as she’d held it, bowing her head to the king.
“I do not think all of these guards are necessary. Koryn has been sufficiently reminded of her place.” And who she answers to, Maura’s eyes finished. “Allegiance to coven. It is one of our sacred covenants.”
There were three, and they were meant to be disclosed to no one. Hadn’t Maura told me so herself? The depth of her betrayal made my fingertips tingle. Yet Aurienna and Elodie stood there behind her at the foot of the dais, stone-faced. I doubted that Elodie had any emotions of her own. She’d shifted her face so many times, I’d always suspected that she’d lost pieces of herself along the way. But Aurienna had warned me in the forest…
The fae king made a noise low in his throat. “You expect me to let a rogue witch and her dragon roam Balar Shan at their leisure?”
That was what Maura wanted?
It made absolutely no sense. Why capture me? Why send me through the gates at all? Did Maura think I was so scared and subservient that I would accept her dictates without a single question?
Worse… had I been?
“The dragon is an unforeseen complication,” Maura allowed.
I will complicate?—
Keep your fangs where they are, I cut off Isanara.
They’d planned on Garrick becoming my Lifebind, but they hadn’t known about Isanara. Maybe that was why they’d fetched me from the gates early. No familiar had ever chosen a witch in the Midnight Coven. Did her presence give Maura some sort of leverage in her negotiations with the king?
I am not an object to be leveraged, Isanara hissed.
If anyone tries to touch you, eat them.
She snapped her jaws in Maura’s direction.I will learn to like the taste of humans.
Maura was not human. It was hard to believe she ever had been.
Though as she dipped her head to the fae king for the second time in as many minutes, it was hard to believe her a head witch, either. “A witch at your mercy must answer three questions,” she said. “It is a little-known truth. I will use it to prove her allegiance.”
