I raised a brow, breath quickening. “He forgets that I am a whole wicked witch who might just punish him for such ideas.”
“Tempting.”
A shiver of something I’d well subdued swept over me. An echo of a moonlit night on a marble balcony, of the taste of peaches and the tides on my lips. Adrik’s eyes darkened and it was, for once, not the darkness of grief.
I retreated, frightened of how quickly he burned through my fences. Had I not decided, in the dark hours, that whatever unspoken thing lingered between us was better left to rot? Had I not sworn to be cautious and sharp, and to guard my heart above all? I could not afford such distractions, and neither could he.
“Fine. Where are we going?”
Adrik lingered in the space where we’d stood tangled. “The mountains. Almira will fade come moonrise without another vial of healing water.”
There was a pond, not far, Adrik told me as we hiked up the castle hill and made for a path hewn into the rock behind a squeaking iron gate. A pond, and a well that had existed long before the lovers first arrived in Wildemire. It lay tucked into a hidden gorge of ice and snow, and it hummed—as we neared—with a strange power. We trekked a winding path deeper into the snow, until Mount Briarfell loomed over us like a vulture, and the path disappeared into a fissure in the ice.
“How much time will the healing water give Almira?” I asked.
Far above the town, the air was crisp and sweet with dawn. I drew the cold deeply into my chest. I’d been holding my breath for the better part of a moon. The stench of blood had gnawed at me. The doubting eyes watching me from a deathbed of leaves; the withered roses, dead willow, the black-veined earth.
Up here, I breathed freely.
“A week, perhaps. The water strengthens her, but it cannot cure her. She does not suffer an illness. She is simply… old. She is old and she carries this weight—” Adrik shook his head, guilt drawing shadows over his face. His gaze darted to the fissure. From within came a soft, fractured glow. “I must go alone. The spirit of the water is feeling vicious. The magic it guards blurs the lines between life and death, and such magic demands a price.”
I shivered, struck with unease. “What is the price?”
“A test of will. You must promise not to follow me.”
“I will do no such thing.” He was mad if he thought I’d hiked through rock and snow just to watch him do something foolish from afar and leave. “You have five minutes. If you are not back, I amhaulingyou out. I am a whole wicked witch, remember?”
Adrik drew a sharp breath, braced his shoulders, and grinned. “A wicked witch set on tormenting me. I will be back withinfour.” He bowed low, voice light with mischief as he murmured, “How about a kiss for luck, Ana?”
I gave him a saccharine smile, heart fluttering like a startled bird. “How about one for triumph? I will make it well worth it.”
A low groan slipped from his throat before he withdrew to muster me with one raised brow. “One kiss to be called in whenever I wish, fulfilled on the spot?”
“I thought you had no love for bargains.”
“Not for bargains, no.”
He vanished with a wink into the cracked ice—leaving me alone to ponder his words, spoken so carelessly and rashly, hemust have meant them in jest. I counted the seconds, mind frayed with nerves.
Adrik did not return.
Dread coiled my stomach tightly as I approached the fissure. A gasp slipped from me as I stepped inside, echoing crisply between mirrorlike walls of ice. Pink dawnlight caught in the facets, shrouding the aisle in the softest morning glow. I pressed a hand to the pale blue ice, wonderstruck. Icicles, thick as trees, sprouted from the frozen floor and as the breeze danced past, it drew a harplike tune from them.
I treaded cautiously deeper, alarmed by such loveliness. In these lands of faeries and trickery, beauty existed only as a warning—a snare better appreciated from afar.
The aisle narrowed as I went and spit me out at its end into a vaulted cavern of blue and pink. A pond of silver stretched before me, as if starlight had bled from the skies. Around one side of the cavern ran a crescent shelf of ice, broad enough to allow passage to a frozen terrace on the far end.
It was there, Adrik kneeled.
He was not alone. A woman stood before him, bare-skinned and achingly beautiful—wild as the sunlit tides and soft as a peach blossom. He watched her with rapture, that woman, with a dreamlike smile.
As if he knew her.
As if he…
An ache that had no right to exist yanked sharply at me. Through the cavern swept a mournful wind, stirring the woman’s dark curls. In her copper-brown eyes gleamed such life, such power—
I blinked, struck.
