Chapter 9
KORYN
I curled my hands into fists, knowing that would not be enough to control my power if it lashed out. Garrick tracked the movement. He knew it, too.
“How?” I demanded.
His eyes raked over my body, taking in the halo of my hair—a wild mess of dark waves—to my bare toes.
His gaze snagged on my arm, coated in my own drying blood.
His mouth tightened, and his eyes… they glowed.
There was no trick of the light to excuse the bright blue circle seated in the clover-green irises.
We were at opposite ends of the corridor, but I could see the turquoise clearly.
“Koryn.”
He spoke my name like it pained him. Like he was the one in agony. How dare he.
I did not want to hear his excuses. I did not have time for him. But I did need to know what had just happened.
A ring of frost spread from where my feet touched the tiled floor. “Lie to me, and I will freeze your balls off, and you can pray to whichever god will still listen that you have enough fae blood to grow them back.”
The frost spread in his direction, but Garrick did not move. He held my gaze. “I have a mind-gift. Compulsion.”
Magic, that’s what he was saying. He’d used his fae magic to get my guards—one of them his own brother—to drop their weapons and walk away. That was… it was incredible. I’d never seen power or magic like that, not in a witch or any other being.
And it shattered something within me that I had stupidly let stay intact.
“I thought you were a shifter,” I said aloud, while my mind screamed.
All of it was a lie. Every feeling I’d had for Garrick had been his mind-gift at work.
He’d been forcing my hand all along. This was deeper than the betrayal I’d felt before.
He hadn’t just broken my heart. He’d taken away my ability to trust in my own reality.
“I have never compelled you,” Garrick said.
Then how did he know the direction of my thoughts?
Because he knows you, my mind answered. I imagined freezing the thought and shattering it into a thousand pieces, just like I had shattered the doors.
Garrick lifted his hands, offering them to me, palms up. “My magic does not work on you. The same way that your spells do not work on me. I think it is because of the Lifebind.”
In the tavern, the spell I’d cast on the drinks had not affected him. Maybe he was telling me the truth. But he no longer had the courtesy of me assuming that. And I did not have the time to try to sort through his treachery now.
I forced the ice in my veins inward, forming a block in my chest, trying to lock out all feeling. Feelings were dangerous, and I could not trust myself any more than I could trust him. Not when it came to this.
But what if he was commanding me to think like this? What if these thoughts were not even my own… if Garrick was controlling my mind, surely it would have been more gracious toward him. If that was even how his compulsion worked. What did it mean to compel the mind, rather than—
“That is how the king controlled us at the Memory Gate,” I said as the thought entered my mind.
Garrick nodded. “Another mind-gift. I can compel the mind. He can compel the body.”
A nuance I did not plan on being in Balar Shan long enough to understand. I had to get to Isanara and escape. It did not matter that the two fae males had been waiting for me, nor that Garrick had intervened to help me escape them, whatever their purpose. None of it mattered.
“I am so sorry, Koryn,” Garrick said.
I blinked at him. It wasn’t that I had not expected an apology.
It was the simplicity of it that hit me in the chest, right where I’d built that block of ice.
Garrick did not offer a long-winded explanation.
He did not try to make me see his way. He said the words, and he did not reach for me.
He gave his apology, but there was no question in it.
His words were earnest, but they did not rise at the end.
They were not a request for forgiveness.
What was I supposed to do with that?
I am still trapped in the dark, Isanara’s voice rang in my mind.
As if I could possibly forget her, when she was as much a part of me as breathing. There is a complication.
My familiar’s voice went uncharacteristically flat in my mind. Bring him.
Garrick took a step in my direction. “Isanara.”
I hated how well he knew me. He recognized that I was conversing with my familiar.
A week ago, I would have thought I knew him just as well.
Both of us had kept our pasts close, focused on the present, the strange and precious suspended reality of the Seven Gates.
Maybe if I’d asked more questions, I would have recognized Garrick’s deceit before it took me out at the knees.
“She is in a dungeon because of you.” And me. Because I was stupid enough to trust you.
“Let me help you get her out.” Another step.
I should freeze him to the wall. Let the power burst out of me and spear through his heart with shards of ice, destroying it like he had destroyed mine.
But damn it all, the opposite was happening. Each step he took, my power calmed. My body had not processed the messages from my mind, the betrayal, and the fact that Garrick could not be trusted. Never, ever, again.
Garrick was almost close enough to touch me. “I know where the dungeons are.”
I still held the shard of porcelain.
My fingers twitched. I reinforced the block of ice in my chest.
I could not defeat him. We both fucking knew it.
Trying to keep him from following would only slow me down.
I did not know the limits of Garrick’s compulsion magic, but I could guess that sending my two guards away was only a temporary solution.
Maura had gone to the trouble of capturing me and my familiar; she would not let us go so easily.
She needed us for something—something other than the Seven Gates.
“Take me to her.”
My love for Isanara was greater than my hatred for him or my worries about Maura.
Garrick didn’t waste time with any more words. He spun on his heel, leading me in the same direction that the two fae guards he’d sent off had disappeared.
I am coming, I told her as I scrambled to keep up.
Garrick ran through Balar Shan. Two months of hiking through the mountains helped me keep pace, though my chest heaved while he was barely winded. Still, I did not slow down. Some of the corridors curved, only to be intersected with straighter ones like the spokes on a wheel.
“We should be going down,” I huffed as Garrick stopped at one of those intersections, whipping his head from side to side.
He only said, “We will,” and then grabbed my hand, hauling me against him.
I tried to scream in protest at the touch, even as my traitorous body sang at every point of contact. But Garrick’s huge hand curved over my mouth, cutting off any sound.
I sank my teeth into the soft flesh of his palm.
Garrick’s hand just tightened over my face.
A second later, the reason appeared around the corner.
I recognized her face. She’d stood at the fae king’s side while he took me captive. She’d worn the same diadem that had killed my sister.
But her straw-blonde hair was adorned with a different set of jewels now, alternating oval sapphires and rubies the size of chicken eggs, each framed in a halo of diamonds. I wanted to rip it from her head and feed the gems to my familiar.
Garrick’s quick reaction was not quick enough. She stopped in the middle of the corridor—one of the curved ones—and stared directly at us. Too bad my death hadn’t been a disappearance. Maybe then I would have had the power to make myself invisible.
The tall, slender female lifted her golden brows, considering the strange sight we made, pressed against the wall. Garrick’s hand was still clamped over my mouth.
“Neither of you are where you are supposed to be,” she said. The depth of her voice surprised me. She appeared middle-aged, but fae immortality made it difficult to truly judge.
“Your Majesty,” Garrick said, inclining his head, while not relaxing his hold on me even an inch.
This was his stepmother, I realized. The fae queen. Was he protecting me from her, or the other way around?
“Your father will not be pleased,” the queen said, though she made no move to retrieve her husband or anyone else. Whatever magic she had, she was not using it. Or it was not visible.
The same could not be said for Garrick.
“You should return to your quarters, Your Majesty. You are tired,” he said. I sensed it was for my benefit, rather than because his magic required it. He’d compelled the minds of the two fae males without a single spoken word.
The queen pursed her lips, as if considering Garrick’s words. There’d been no time for me to interrogate him as to how his magic worked. Did he plant thoughts in her head or sway what was already there? Did it work on some people? All? Was there a way to repel him?
If there was, the queen did not use it. Or could not.
My pulse stuttered as the otherwise elegant woman lifted her arms and stretched with the abandon of a toddler, a massive yawn claiming her delicate features.
“I shall go lie down,” she declared. For a second, her eyes were slightly unfocused before settling again. She turned in a smooth swish of silk and crushed velvet, floating away down the curved corridor from whence she’d come, ignoring us completely.
I stumbled forward when Garrick released me. Disbelief turned into horror. That kind of magic… it was a violation. Nausea churned in my gut. He said he’d never used his compulsion on me.
But I had to amend that thought. He said he had never compelled me, and that his magic did not work on me, not that he’d never tried. My blood pounded in my ears as I took a step back, putting space between us.
Garrick’s throat slid, but he did not flinch under my gaze.
It was like I’d never seen him before. His compulsion magic reframed every experience we’d had together in the Seven Gates, every interaction in the temples and outside of them.
“We have to get to Isanara,” he said after a moment.
He was right.
“The corridors are a spiral. At this level, they intersect with straight lines radiating out from the center. But if you are caught on one of the higher floors, there are fewer intersections to allow for bigger rooms. The spiral will be your only way out—and the king knows that.” Garrick walked as he spoke, following those straight lines as he did, occasionally turning to take a curved section of the spiral he’d described before returning to the radiating straight corridors.
I tried to visualize the details. It must be important. He was not offering me irrelevant facts about his home.
My eyes centered between his shoulders, marking the tension there. I was too aware of his body. Balar Shan was not his home. From the set of his shoulders, I could see that he was almost as uncomfortable here as I was.
Perhaps he had told me some truths. He’d implied his birth had resulted from his mother’s rape by a fae male. The fact that the male was the fae king did not make it less abhorrent. Neither did truths woven in with the lies excuse him for deceiving me.
But why would he help me escape only to lie to me? Trust was different from belief. I could believe he told me the truth about the palace, without trusting his motivations for doing so. We reached another intersection, then turned. The curve here was subtle. We must be near—
I plowed into Garrick’s back as he stopped. With only a shift between us, I could feel the full heat of him burning against my cold skin.
I jerked away. It felt too right to be touched by him now that I knew everything between us was a lie.
Wrong.
But there was nowhere to go. The corridor ahead of us narrowed to a point and then ended, a wall of brightly painted stones on one side, and a window-like wall of glass so thick it was opaque on the other.
The end of the spiral.
Questions raced through my mind. Why would Garrick bring me here? We had to get to Isanara. Was this all a game to him, a ploy to serve me up to his father? He could have just left me in the bathhouse or let his brother and his companion have their way with me.
But the expression on his face—fuck, I hated how familiar his face was, that I knew his expressions—was not malicious. It was an expectation with a hint of pride. “My magic will not help us now,” Garrick said.
He needed my power.
I turned toward the outer wall. I reached out, already knowing what I would find.
Not glass, but ice.
We’d reached the edge of the palace. There were no outer walls. Not true ones, anyway.
That was why Garrick had described the layout of the palace. I only had to get to the edge of the spiral, follow the spokes if there were any, and I would be able to get out. The foot-thick wall of ice was an effective barrier against most, but it could not contain me.
It only took a thought, and the ice began to melt.
It dripped away from my fingers, cracking as veins of ice turned into water.
There was no time. I pushed my power outward, now with more force.
I knew it was not instantaneous, because I felt every fracture, but one moment there was a wall of thick ice, and then the next there was nothing but air and darkness.
I sucked it in, the taste feeding my soul in a way that food never could. Freedom.
A witch was not meant to be a captive. Neither was a dragon.
I turned back to Garrick. “How do we get to Isanara?”
He stepped up to the edge. This close, I could see the distinct rings of clover green and cerulean blue in his eyes.
They traced over me, a ring of light glowing around the pupil, pride and such knowing shining out.
He knew me, because I’d shown myself to him.
Begrudgingly and then willingly. But I did not want to be seen anymore—not by him.
I jerked my gaze away.
Garrick remained steadfast at my side, leaning his head out over the edge. “We climb.”