The voice caught me mid-step. Hurried footsteps, too. I turned.
Maura.
My first instinct was to keep walking.
Sera tucked her arm through mine and asked quietly, confidentially, “Do we want to lure her into the labyrinth and murder her?”
“Not today,” I said.
Her look of disappointment was almost certainly a joke. Almost. I was never wholly sure with her.
But Maura was almost to us, and I didn’t want her to see weakness, so I faced her. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“I know.” She stopped a careful distance back. She probably stopped because of Sera, bristling beside me with violent intent, rather than any concern about me. “But I have something to say to you.”
“Then say it.”
“Not here.” She tilted her head toward the waterfall which was both beautiful and useful. It swallowed sound and kept conversations private. “Let’s go somewhere no one can hear us. But where you can leave if you want.”
I looked at her. “I can leave right now.”
“You can.” She met my eyes. She didn’t flinch from them. “Do you know all the ways that Fear tricked you?”
Kiegan, frowning, crossed his arms over his chest. He was clearly my self-appointed bodyguard now and would keep watchif I did entertain Maura. I glanced at Sera, who watched us with open curiosity.
The lobby moved around us. Clan members crossing the floor, someone laughing distantly in a corridor, the ordinary machinery of an evening, even though some of us might die in the Last Hunt.
I looked at Maura for a long moment. Long enough to check whether this felt like a trap and yet not long enough to know the answer.
Then I walked toward the waterfall.
She followed. I chose the spot, close enough that conversation would be swallowed by its steady crashing but also close enough still to Kiegan in case anyone attempted kitten-squishing. Maura stopped when I stopped, a healthy distance between us.
When I glanced back, Sera stood beside Kiegan with her arms folded. Both of them were watching us, ready in case Maura tried something.
“Talk.”
She did not hesitate, and her words came out like a blow being swung. “Fear looked for years for anyone with the mark, anyone who could be what you are. That was why he flirted with you, why he kept you with him, why he charmed you.”
“He told me.”
Something shifted in her face. She had expected her cruelty to land more successfully. Then, she rallied. Triumphantly, she demanded, “Did he tell you about the tracking spell?”
“I know about the tracking spell.” Her fury at that could almost have been laughable. “A caster tried to kill me. Fear found me in time because of it.”
I watched her reconsider her route. “You’re not angry.”
“I’m not dead thanks to his plots. I might not be enthused about his deceitful ways, but I am enthused to be alive.” I knewwhat the queen had made him, and I believed perhaps he was different beneath the layers of deceits.
The two of us studied each other. Maura’s eyes had narrowed. “Did he tell you about the nightmares?”
The nightmares. Her words struck me like a blow, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I had questioned the nightmares, but I hadn’t wanted to believe Fear could have done such a cruel thing.
Then I managed to ask coolly, “What about them?”
“Do you know the nightmares were an enchantment?” She was watching my face carefully, and now she looked pleased with herself.
I hated that she looked pleased in some distant part of me that was not reeling. I hated her; I hated her more than I had ever hated anyone in my life.
