I blinked again. Broken tile walls. A damp floor. Diluted light that filtered in from a series of small windows just below the ceiling of the…. bathhouse?
Carved rectangular pools dropped away into chasms of darkness on either side of me. I lay in the middle of them, wet tile beneath my face. The gray light from the windows reflected off the puddles. It could not be water, though, not when that perfectly straight line sparkled like?—
Salt.
But I could move. What trickery was that? It should have held me frozen in place, my power trapped within me. None of it made sense. Where was I? Where were Garrick and Isanara? No, I would not think of my Lifebind, the man who’d betrayed me.
Why washelingering?
The grains had a strange pinkish tint…
My eyes fluttered closed again, the urge to fall back asleep almost pulling me under. The world had shifted so that I preferred the nightmares to my reality. Closing my eyes sharpened all of my other senses. Every place where my body touched the tile floor ached, but that was nothing compared tothe ache inside of me, the carved-out part where Isanara should be.
A slow, steady drip echoed through the cell. It came from somewhere behind me.Drip. Drip. Drip.Each droplet louder than the last. Intruding on my mind. Forcing the swirling thoughts to collide with each other.
I threw my hand out behind me, rolling from my front to my back in a painful, jolting motion. My shoulder blades scraped against the ground. My leather vest was gone. So was my wool dress. They’d stripped me down to nothing but a shift. My feet were bare.
Drip.
“Aghhh!” My abdominals screamed as the sound ripped from my throat, as I pushed myself up to sit, throwing my hand out toward that infernal sound again.
But nothing happened.
No ice flowed from my fingers, no frost condensed in whorls across my skin.
The salt. The drip.
Dark God below, was the salt muddling my mind? It was meant to contain, but if Maura had worked some other strange?—
Blood.
The granules of salt were stained pink. The smell assaulted my senses, cutting through the fog created by the incessant dripping and the pain. The coppery tang told me everything.
Maura had mixed blood with the salt. She’d modified its power using a spell—using blood magic.
Such a spell was outside of her bind. She needed an earth-bound witch to manipulate that sort of power. Which meant that Elodie and Aurienna were nearby, as well.
My mind struggled to fit everything into place. I remembered the Memory Gate and Garrick’s betrayal. I ached with Isanara’s absence. Maura and the fae king had imprisoned me. But where?
Yawning exhaustion clawed at the edges of my consciousness.
“Stay awake, sweetling.”
I knew that voice. But I could not quite find the energy to tell him I hated nicknames before I fell back asleep.
CHAPTER 2
GARRICK
I’d promisedmyself I would never return to this place. Even when I accepted the terms that led me over the threshold of the temple and into the Seven Gates, it had not been here. That bargain had been struck in the stinking back room of a tavern, exactly where it belonged.
A frigid, punishing wind whipped across the top of the cliffs, brutally wiping away anything that attempted to lay down roots or carve out a bit of life. The land around Balar Shan was barren, nothing but dead brown hills crusted with frost. The waters of the Northern Death stretched out in the other direction, promising an icy death to any who attempted them. Some fae had fled across the water in the centuries after the curse. They were never heard from again.
But I did not care. The fae had brought this curse down on themselves and everyone else. They deserved to suffer.
Koryn did not.
Icicles longer than I was tall hung from the decorative spires of the palace. It only took one the length of my arm to fatally harm a human or witch. The fae occupants of the castle would recover, short of the frozen spear severing their head from their body.
