I sipped my water. “The grove cleanses the corruption?”
“The stag does it.” She paused. “You want to know why I never left the maze? I got horribly lost. And then I used what magic I had to build this place. It took me to the very brink.”
Her brows drew together. Her mouth turned down. For the first time, I saw something dark pass through her—a shadow of who she’d been.
She pressed her hair back from her neck. In the crystal’s ambient light, black threads marbled her skin, all the way down to her moss drape. They pulsed faintly with her heartbeat. I realized, with a breath in, they were her veins.
“If I’d used one more drop,” she said, voice low, “I’d have gone beyond cleansing.”
I swallowed hard. “But you said you know the way out.”
Her expression lightened. She leaned back and tapped her temple. “Now I do. Took me two hundred years, but I figured it out.” She gestured toward my cup. “More to drink?”
Two hundred years.Two hundred years to figure out how to escape the Eldermaze.
I lost my appetite, even though Thalassa offered me what she calledfloral delights—tiny red blooms in a bowl that smelled saccharine. She popped them between her lips like nuts.
She had been here for centuries, teetering between sanity and madness, her magic spent to carve out this place. Maybe she couldn’t leave now, even if she wanted to. Maybe she’d lost too much—her way, her strength.
Her courage.
Which made the riddle that much more poignant.
She sat across from me in her mossy shift, one ankle slung over the opposite knee, her milky eyes drifting. “Your partner—he’s got an enormous well of magic, you know. Flows off him in waves.”
I didn’t know. I wondered now if what I’d seen that first day—what I’d seen clearly in the right light—had been his magic like driven rain around him. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means he’s exceptional for a male fae.” She paused, touched a fingertip to her tongue, and raised it as though testing the air. “Specializes in manipulating flora, I think. And maybe air.”
I blinked at her, uncomprehending.
She leaned forward and drew a circle on the table with her finger. “This circle is feralis—nature magic. And within it”—she carved two lines through the circle like slicing a bread round into quarters—“are the elements: fire, air, earth, and water. Every Sylvanwild fae has an attunement to one. Sometimes a lesser pull toward another.”
I followed her movements like my life depended on it. Maybe it did. When I looked up, I asked, “You said he’s attuned to flora. That’s not one of the four.”
“It’s earth. Even us lowborn know that. Where do you think plants come from?”
I bit back a laugh. She reminded me more and more of people from the Dip. “How can you tell what he’s attuned to?”
“It’s in how nature moves around him. How it listens to him.” She sniffed once, gaze sharpening. “He saved your life, you know.”
From the other room, Dorian moaned again—though I doubted he’d heard a word of it.
“I know.” I watched Thalassa pop another floral delight into her mouth. It burst with a soft snap. “But he’s basically obligated to do that.”
“You think that’s the only reason he did it?”
I swirled the last of my water. “Yes.” If I knew one thing, I knew he despised me.
She hummed low in her throat. “Do you know the history of the Kingdom of Storms, Eurydice Waters?”
“Of course I do.”
“Tell me.”
I traced the woodgrain with one finger, suddenly feeling like a child being tested. “Long ago, the gods built us the walls to protect the last humans from whatever lay beyond. Thecreatures, we called them. More often we called them monsters. But maybe it was always just the fae. We’ve lived inside the walls ever since. Safe.” I paused. “Well, mostly safe.”
Thalassa’s white eyebrows lifted. “The gods built them, you say?”
