Tabitha met her gaze without blinking. ‘My father.’
Isobelle clutched more tightly at Gwen’s hand. ‘Your …’
Tabitha’s eyebrows rose. ‘Why did you think there was a secret tunnel between my mother’s house and this tower of paladins? Narrative convenience for you?’ She barked a quick, sharp laugh. ‘I remember he was kind, and very tall, and he would bring me presents when he visited my mother. That was, until he started arealfamily. His real wife, his real child. The ones he didn’t have to hide from his precious Order.’ Her eyes shone with bitter tears of conviction and many, many years of heartache.
Gwen drew a long, quaking breath – Isobelle’s warmth had reached her lungs. ‘Gargery said something happened one day to drive the sorceress mad … make her start attacking with her summoned animals …’
‘Love makes us do strange things.’ Tabitha’s eyes held as much anguish as fury.
Gwen could almost see Tabitha as she had once been, a little girl abandoned by both parents – one through indifference, the other through heartbreak and rage.
A little girl who, in order to make her way in the world, learned to use the very thing that haunted the recesses of her spirit: fear.
For a long moment, the only sound was the cheerful crackle of the fire and, very faintly in the distance, the whispering waves against the rocks far below.
Then Tabitha clapped her hands briskly. ‘Now, you two can stay here and cower for as long as you like – I don’t actually want to hurt either of you, despite what you might think. I am going to go have a conversation with that operative of the Order who arrived in such dramatic fashion the other night.’
Gwen found, all of a sudden, that she could move again. She took a step forward, still holding Isobelle’s hand, and raised her sword. ‘I’m not going to let you leave,’ she said, firming her voice.
Tabitha glanced at her over her shoulder. ‘You’re going to stop me?’ Her smile was, strangely, a little sad. ‘Oh, Gwen. Don’t you know you’re my creature?’ Her eyes locked on Gwen’s, and a shock of horror ran through Gwen’s body; Isobelle’s hand suddenly felt like glowing iron, burning her. Gwen flung it away with a gasp.
Tabitha whispered, ‘You stand upon the stones where my mother died. This ismyspell, and you’ve walked straight into it.’
She snapped her fingers, and the world tilted sideways.
Gwen never felt herself hit the ground.
34
And then she fell
Gwen fell like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
Isobelle dropped to her knees beside her, ignoring the pain of hitting the stone. She grabbed at Gwen’s hand, cradling it between her own. ‘Gwen!Gwen!’
Gwen was horribly pale, and as limp as she had been when they pulled her from the harbour’s icy-cold waters.
A wave of fear ran through Isobelle, stealing her breath, setting off a distant buzzing in her ears. Her mind, seizing on the smallest of details, saw that the water from the shattered spell jar was running through the gaps in the flagstones, a tiny river of it trickling down to pool against their joined hands.
‘Gwen!’ she tried again, squeezing her champion’s hand helplessly. ‘Gwen, please!’ Remembering Tabitha with a horrible jolt, she looked up, rising to her knees, preparing to shield Gwen’s body with her own if needbe – but Tabitha was gone. Isobelle prayed Olivia hadn’t managed to track them, that she wasn’t just outside the tower within Tabitha’s reach.
She looked around, seeking something, anything that might help. The shadows cast by the fire flickered and seemed to lengthen. The silence within the stone tomb of a tower was absolute.
She was alone.
Gwen’s lashes fluttered, and Isobelle’s heart leapt – but her beloved was unconscious. Asleep. Dreaming. Her head moved in a sudden, small jerk. Her lips parted, and a harsh breath slipped out.
Isobelle’s heart sank. This was no dream – she’d witnessed it enough times. She knew what it was, now. This was one of her nightmares.
She lifted one hand to cup Gwen’s cheek, the drops of water from the spell jar clinging to her skin like tears. Panic was coursing through Isobelle now – heart pounding, gut twisting, breath coming too fast – and so she almost missed the first hint of the spark.
Then her fingertips tingled, flickering with the first hint of that buzzing, humming energy – the feeling of the spell – wrapping itself around her hands where they touched Gwen’s skin.
Magic is mostly about intention.
Well, then. They lay in the remnants of a spell jar full of magic she and Gwen had made together. She hadintention. She haddetermination, of the sort that had made things come true for her all her life.
What good was any of that if she couldn’t use it to rescue the girl she loved?
