“How the hell should I know? You tell me. You’re the one who grew up in this place?” She stopped again, reaching out for a wall as another wave of intensity hit her. “I… it’s a feeling. Power. You remember the faerie ring and how you recognized the magic? It is like that. I can feel power being used. A lot of it.”
It was a lot of information, and she gave it to me freely. I hadn’t pried it out of her. Maybe she only told me because I was the one who’d grown up here, or because of the indelible connection of the Lifebind. But it was a connection, and I would not squander a single thing she gave me, not this time.
We weren’t following the spiral directly. We’d walk along the curve for a few yards, then Koryn would turn abruptly along one of the inner spokes. We were going down. The possibilities narrowed with every step.
I sifted through my memories of the Balar Shan. I’d never spent much time in these parts, but I’d mapped them as a matter of survival. “Lower-ranked nobility have the inner rooms, the ones without windows. A few more floors down are the servants, and then the dungeons. There are older suites of rooms at the very center of the castle, below the presence chamber.”
Koryn gave no sign that she heard me. She just kept going deeper into Balar Shan. Down.
“Is it the talisman? Did he tell you more about what you’re supposed to look for?”
I did not have to specify who I meant.
Loathing stole over Koryn’s features. There was that satisfaction in my chest again. I did not know if it was because she hated him as much as I did, or because I was glad to see that hatred directed at someone other than me.
But maybe I should have been worried. She’d hated me in the beginning, too.
She stumbled over an uneven piece of brick in the floor. I reached for her, but the wall did my job. She pressed her eyesclosed, taking several deep, measured inhales before she opened them again.
“He told me nothing,” she said, followed by, “Nothing useful.”
It felt like she wasn’t telling me the whole truth, there. He had said something to get her to sit on the bed with him, to close her eyes and offer him her hands. More manipulation.
But guilting her for doing what she felt was right was not going to earn me back a place in her affections. It would only hurt the image of herself she was fighting with everything she had to rebuild.
Panic flooded Koryn’s face. She doubled over, dry heaving. She hadn’t eaten yet today.
“We are close,” she rasped.
Her skin was no longer luminous. Sweat clung to her chest that had nothing to do with exertion. I held out my arm. She had every reason to push me away. But whatever it was that called to her, the power that summoned her, it was enough. She slid her hand onto my forearm. Her grip on the quilted sleeve of my surcoat was alarmingly weak.
I would kill whoever was doing this to her.
I slid her hand down so that our fingers were clasped, so I could support her weight more fully with my arm beneath hers. I gasped at the touch. Her fingers were colder than ice. On anyone else, they would have been black and frostbitten.
“Where?” I asked.
She did not speak. But her feet moved, and I let them lead, supporting as much of her weight as she’d let me. We took one more turn only to find ourselves before a set of wooden doors, layered with ornate golden filigree and a locking mechanism that was just that—locked.
Koryn lifted her eyes to me. I shook my head. I was good at picking locks by necessity of my chosen profession. But itwould take me at least an hour to work through something this complex.
She exhaled slowly, another carefully controlled breath. It took infinite measures of my own control to let her hand go when she slid it away. Her fingers shook as she closed them around the handle of the door.
“Brightest gold, heed my command. Freeze like ice beneath my hand.”
The door was gold. But gold was soft, and ice was hard. She summoned the water from the air, shaped it to her will until it crystallized around the locking mechanisms.
She turned the handle. The ice cracked—itshouldhave cracked. But no sooner had the ice broken the mechanism than it melted into water that fell in silent droplets to the floor. What would have taken me an hour, she’d broken through in a matter of heartbeats, in complete silence.
Pride surged in my chest, but it had a companion. Unease. What had passed between Koryn and the Dark God in the hour I’d been away?
The expenditure of power seemed to have given her strength, which made no sense in my mind. But she moved with certainty as she eased open the door, first only a crack, enough for us to listen. Distant voices—far enough that she opened the door the rest of the way.
We were in one of the internal suites I’d mentioned, a series of connecting rooms from the original palace that had stood on this spot for tens of thousands of years. Somewhere in the fae history that my eldest sister had tried to shove into my head, the names of its builders were recorded. Penruddock. My father’s surname was among the founders of the Old Fae Kingdom. Pendragon, Penrose, Penwraith—those were all gone now.
My understanding was that the suites had been out of fashion for several hundred years. Even before the curse, the highest faenobility had started to gravitate toward the sunlit outer suites of the newer parts of the castle, where they could have the coveted windows.
It appeared that the witches were not as selective.
