Chapter 5
KORYN
The same person never delivered my meals twice.
At first, they came while I slept. While I technically did not need sleep to survive, the lack of it dulled my wits.
But once I figured out their schedule, I forced myself to sleep in the in-between times and to feign it when it was useful.
I used every other moment to study my prison.
I’d never seen the fae palace myself. Witches and fae were bitter enemies, both sustained by the lifeforce of the continent itself.
Fae were born with magic, and witches were gifted their power by the Dark God.
In the three hundred and seventy-seven years since my resurrection, I’d never set foot in the Old Fae Kingdom.
To do so would have been tantamount to a declaration of war that neither of us had enough magic or power to fight and survive.
I guessed that the bathhouse had once been fed by hot springs.
Like everything else in Velora, they’d frozen over.
I did not know whether the fae abandoned them immediately or only when their own magic faded enough to make heating the deep pools a wasteful expenditure. It did not matter to my calculations.
The wide, short windows along the ceiling further confirmed my suspicions that I was in the base of the palace.
It should have been a good sign—fewer floors riddled with fae to navigate on my way to the exit—except that I had no idea where they were keeping Isanara, and I wouldn’t until I could get out of the salt cell and restore our connection.
Dark God, please let Maura not have devised some other wicked enchantment to separate me from my familiar.
A long exhale caressed the back of my neck.
My imagination was running wild from the slow torture of the salt cell. I did not pray to the gods any longer. Not after what I’d seen and experienced at the Seven Gates.
There was no one left in this world that I could trust fully. I’d learned the lesson before, only to forget it. Never again.
With my head clear, I could at least trust my senses. So I waited and I watched.
I watched them through imperceptible slits between my lids.
A tall male with long, dark hair and too-familiar turquoise eyes brought a platter of dried fruit with cheese and bread.
Then there was the middle-aged female with eyes so stern they overpowered the beauty of her rich auburn hair and olive skin.
She dropped the silver platter with such a clang that I did not have to feign jolting awake.
But by the time I sat up, she was gone, whatever magic she bore carrying her away.
It could all be the same person, I realized.
If Maura put Elodie up to it, my sister witch could have been the one to deliver every single meal, wearing a different face each time.
Or the fae could have disguised themselves with glamours.
I kept the clover close, but I had no way of knowing if it did anything.
Alize did not come again.
Nor did the person I most expected.
I watched for a flash of silver hair or the hulking breadth of his shoulders. I hated the nodule of disappointment in my stomach that grew a little each time a new, unfamiliar face appeared. But Garrick did not come, and neither did the Dark God.
That nugget of disappointment was not desire. It was rage.
I wanted him to be stupid enough to reach across the line of salt that kept me imprisoned, as his sister had.
I would not hesitate this time. I would freeze the blood in his veins, wither his flesh with cold until his fingers and hand turned black and crumbled away, leaving nothing but a stump.
Maybe his half-fae blood would regenerate it.
But maybe not. The possibility was enough to sustain my hopes.
I’d always shied away from using my power to harm. But vengeance flavored my every thought. Maura had finally gotten what she wanted, after all.
Maura. The remnants of food in my stomach turned, but I knew that it was not from poison. At least, not the kind that could be ingested.
She’d broken the covenants. By our laws and her own decrees, she should have been ousted from the coven the same way I had. Yet Elodie and Aurienna had followed her commands without hesitation. And Maura roamed free somewhere above me in Balar Shan, while I ached in my cell of salt.
I was helpless while she made bargains with the male responsible for Velora’s downfall—
No.
I surged to my feet, graceless and ungainly. I was alone. There was no one to see or judge. Even if there had been, I was past caring what others thought. Measuring myself against the expectations of others had brought me nothing but agony and disappointment.
I was not helpless. Not anymore.
I reached for Isanara. They cannot cage us forever, I told her—and myself. This bondage is temporary. But the bond between us is eternal.
Dark memories curled around the edge of my mind. I shoved them away.
Power surged in my veins, pain shooting up my nerves as it searched for escape and found none.
I slammed my eyes shut, forcing in breaths. I imagined the pentagram, sacred to my kind, inhaling and exhaling as I traced its predictable lines within my mind’s eye.
The blood Maura had mixed with the salt allowed me to move within the cell, but it was also affecting my power.
It built inside of me, begging to be expelled, but the force was different than it had been when I’d been held immobile on the streets of Canmar.
Then, my power was almost painful, threatening to consume me in the need to escape.
That sensation was not gone entirely, but now it came in waves so intense I thought I would combust before ebbing away again to a subtler but still frigid burn.
I opened my eyes and traced the lines of my rectangular cell as I took another breath.
I had survived five of the Seven Gates of Velora.
Only because Garrick was there to help me.
I was still powerful, even after months separated from my coven.
But I cannot control that power.
The last dragon in Velora chose me as her familiar. She saw me as worthy.
And I proved myself unworthy when I failed to protect her.
“Stop!” I screamed at hundreds of years of others’ conditioning. And at myself.
My feral cry echoed off the tiled walls of the bathhouse, unable to be held back by salt, even laced with blood. I screamed again, louder. Louder and louder until the sparse windowpanes that remained shook, or I imagined them to.
My knees buckled. I did not fight the force that brought me to the ground, my kneecaps taking the brunt of my weight against the unforgiving tile.
Tears burned at the back of my eyes, but I refused to let them fall, blinking rapidly, wishing for that ice that had frozen my eyelids together before.
“Temper, temper.”
A shiver of dread racked my body, forcing my shoulders to roll forward and my whole body to shake. The tremor reached all the way to my bare fingers and toes. For the first time in my cell, I felt cold.
He’d never bothered me before. I’d felt him, from time to time, at the edges of my awareness.
He was there in the darkness between the trees or the harsh blackness of my worst memories before I shoved them away.
But I’d only spoken to him directly twice—once when I’d bargained for Kyrelle’s life, and then again for Garrick’s. I always came to him in supplication.
“But now I’ve come to you.”
His voice was so cold; colder than any frost I’d ever conjured. It was the cold of emptiness and stretching eternity. The cold fear of the unknown. Dark God. Unknown Gate.
I hated the sound of it almost as much as I hated him. Go aw—
“You are powerful, sweetling. But not powerful enough to banish a god.”
Awareness prickled all of my senses, as if they were no longer wholly my own.
“They are not. Remember our bargain. You belong to me.”
It was different than speaking with Isanara. He heard the thoughts before I even formed them. There was no way to reply, no give and take. He was simply inside my mind. Which meant I didn’t have to think before he said—
“The second death will come for you, and then we will be together in mind and body. But I did promise not to hasten your arrival. Consider this a compromise.”
If ice was not endemic to my veins, my blood would surely have begun to boil.
Laughter bubbled up inside of me, but it did not belong to me. It was his.
“Get out of my head!”
The only one who belonged there was Isanara. But the Dark God just laughed again, the sound sinuous as silk as it wrapped around my throat and threatened to choke me.
I could ignore him. I had to ignore him, or it would not matter what Maura mixed into my tea or what spells she used my sister witches to cast. If my mind was muddled, I would be of no use to Isanara or myself.
I sank down to my bottom, folding my legs and spreading my hands across the tile floor.
I focused on my fingertips, then the first knuckle, another inch, the second knuckle, and then my palm.
I grounded the taut expanse where my fingers joined the palm, then the softer center and the fleshy mound beneath my thumb. No more thoughts intruded upon my own.
But with my gaze soft and my hands rooted to the floor, another voice slipped in.
Why? Alize had asked.
Why? I’d repeated back.
Why… why… why… until it was not her higher-pitched sonorous voice, but my deeper, more resonant one.
Why send me through the Seven Gates, ensuring their completion with a protector, only to capture me after the Memory Gate? Why send me through at all?
The easiest answer was the one that I’d given to Alize.
Maura wanted her full power restored, and she’d bargained with the fae king to give me the best possible chance of getting through the gates.
Garrick had been the king’s half of the agreement—his bastard son, a half-human, half-fae with the ability to shift into a raven in addition to a reputation for negotiating dangerous situations.
But why capture me after the fifth gate instead of letting me attempt all seven?
Why separate me from my familiar, in violation of our sacred covenants?
Unless Maura was bound by another bargain.
I shivered.
It must have been colder tonight than it had been so far. The muted sunlight had disappeared completely from the windows overhead. Darkness fell quickly in the north.
I pressed my palms harder into the tile floor, shifting more of my weight to them this time, using the sensation to ground myself once again. I had to keep him away.
Whatever bargains Maura had struck were of no concern to me. She was my elder by hundreds of years, more powerful, with the full support of her coven.
But was she more powerful?
My power had not diminished, despite my distance in months and miles from my coven. Was it because of my bond, or the pledge of my afterlife interfering in ways I had not predicted?
It does not matter, I reminded myself. Measuring myself against Maura would prove nothing. It would not further my goals of saving Isanara and Kyrelle.
But what if it could save them, and others?
I jerked my hands back from the tile.
The fae did not deserve to be saved. Maybe the witches didn’t, either.
Or the humans. I’d seen humans do unspeakable things in the last four hundred years.
Men like Garrick the Red had facilitated them.
The Justice Gate surfaced in my memory. Alize’s trial at the Memory Gate had shown her trying to smother an infant—she was the one who’d tried to commit infanticide.
Which meant that Garrick had poisoned and killed an entire family—innocent, unborn child included.
I’d ruined my sister’s life when my frost ripped free and injured her beloved.
Maybe I did not deserve to exist.
But Kyrelle did. She, at least, was good. She loved and cared for her father, foolish though that made both of them. That was the real reason I had to save her. Not just for Rylynn’s sake—but for her own. Because if I myself could not be good, at least I could preserve something—someone—who was.
I shivered again. It was not the cold from the windows above, or my paltry attempts to shut him out.
I would never escape him. That was the bargain I’d made.
Eternity. But that was not what he breathed against my ear, as if he kneeled on the ground behind me instead of hiding in the recesses of my mind.
“You will be powerful enough to do anything,” the Dark God promised.