‘Perhaps he really is linked to one of the witches who died,’ Olivia suggested. ‘He’s older than your friend, maybe old enough to really remember what happened. Perhaps it’s still revenge.’
Gwen coughed again, but her voice was a little less raw when she spoke this time. ‘Why would he put all this effort into making the town somewhere that people want to visit, and then terrify them?’
‘Fair question,’ Isobelle allowed. ‘He must be playing some larger game.’
‘Whatever that game is, Tabitha’s still his prisoner,’ Gwen said softly.
Isobelle’s heart clenched, thinking of their friend up in the tower, watching midwinter draw ever nearer. She had no way of knowing if Gwen and Isobelle were even still here, whether they were still trying to rescue her.
Isobelle sat up straighter. ‘I don’t know what his game is,’ she admitted. ‘But this has always been about fear, and I refuse to be afraid of him.’
‘You don’t have to be afraid of him, but I am.’ Olivia’s voice was quiet. ‘We’re leaving. All three of us, as soon as we can catch a good tide.’
Isobelle found herself on her feet, outrage coursing through her. ‘Are you mad? We can’t leave these people under the spell of some—’
‘As soon as I have you safe, I’ll contact the Order and have them send a team,’ Olivia replied in tones as crisp and cutting as any military leader addressing their troops. ‘But I am not letting you, either of you, face someone with that kind of power.’
‘I am not running away.’ Gwen’s voice was low and calm, and though she was still in bed, her hands were balled around the blankets.
‘And what do you intend to do?’ retorted Olivia, dropping the laundry bag and whirling on them. ‘Enlighten me as to your glorious plan. How will you defeat this sorcerer? Even if you can get close to him without him taking you down, what then? Chop off his head? Tell me, Sir Gwen, how many men have you killed?’
Gwen’s face had lost the hint of colour the heat had brought back to her cheeks. Now, she stared back at Olivia, white and silent.
Isobelle squared her jaw. ‘Stop it, Olivia. We’ll find a way. We always do. Now you’re here, you can help us—’
‘I’m no witch,’ Olivia retorted. ‘I’m a spy – I know how to spot magic, how to report it to the paladins and how to keep my people safe. You think I arrived here with some convenient artefact in my pocket that would handily negate a man’s magic long enough for you to politely take him under arrest?’
Isobelle’s heart was sinking all over again. It was one thing not to wholly trust Olivia, but she wished she could at least trust she’d have the answer to the hopeless situation in which they’d found themselves. It was quite another to have the woman who had once been her most dependable ally in the world tell her there was no hope.
‘I intend to help you, I do.’ Olivia straightened up, looked between them, and said in tones as final and heavy as a stone slab settling into place, ‘I intend to help you get the hell out of here before you’re both killed.’
31
Her champion is a bloody coward, deep down
Galanty-Uponne-the-Sea had become a ghost town.
With the pass snowed in, the people were stillthere, but all the windows were tightly shuttered, and in the hour that Gwen had spent gazing out of the window, she hadn’t seen a single soul. Rosamund and her staff had fled the Paladin’s Rest, and even the meal trays had stopped coming, which left Olivia and Isobelle to sort out food from what was left in the inn’s larder. Gwen had been allowed out of bed only to move to the window and back; she’d put up a protest, saying she was fine, but deep down she felt a numb relief that all she was expected to do was nothing.
The sun sparkled off the powdery, crystalline snow dusting the roofs and cobblestones. The water reflected the glorious winter-blue sky. There was no sign of the terror that gripped the place – nothing, that is, except the aching emptiness of the streets.
Gwen’s eyes moved past the houses across the way and fixed on the harbour. The clothing shop opposite the inn blocked her view of the shattered pier, but she knew it was there, could feel it like a splinter in her body. Somewhere out at sea, beneath the waves, the monster waited to be called once more. She hadn’t killed it, not once. None of what she’d done had mattered.
Instead, it had killed her.
She swallowed, unprepared for the swell of despair that reached up to grip her. Much of what had happened the night before was a blur of cold, of wet, of pain, of eerie blue-green light dazzling her eyes.
But she remembered the end with brutal clarity. The darkness enclosing her as the glow of the moon vanished above. The pressure growing on her ears and lungs as the monster dragged her down, down into an icy grip that paralysed her whole body.
When she’d fought the dragon on the fields outside Aberfarthing, and it had frozen her with its gaze, she’d felt that same paralysis. And in that moment, as the dragon methodically stripped her mind of all hope, she hadchosento surrender. She had chosen to leap into the abyss. Chosen to die.
Last night, as the creature dragged her down into the depths … had there been a moment, a last, fleeting flicker of relief? At a burden lifted, a struggle ended, the freedom from fear.
She shivered, pulling the blanket around her shoulders, her body tense with the fear she’d been unwilling to face since that fight. Every nightmare about the dragon had brought her to the same question, and every time she’d wrenched herself awake in horror at the thought.
Isobelle’s cry the night before was still ringing in her ears:You’ve got some kind of death wish …
A sound from behind her interrupted her thoughts, barely a whisper of a footfall, but Gwen half leapt from her chair as if it had been a shout of alarm. Shaking, she saw Olivia, standing with one foot half raised, mid-step, staring at her.
