Chapter 29
KORYN
The ache between my legs would not let me forget the night before. But it was the horn pressing into my shoulder blade that woke me up.
You are getting too big for this, I groused as I rolled onto my stomach and away from the dragon who took up the other half of the bed. Goodness, she’d grown more than I realized in the last month.
Movement on the other side of the room announced that Garrick was awake, too.
Waiting for him to wake up and leave had not done me much good.
So instead we’d replaced that with awkwardly dressing in silence while looking in the opposite direction—as if we were not intimately familiar with one another’s bodies.
As I’d lain alone the night before, I’d come to a decision. I couldn’t avoid Garrick any longer. Not physically. He was one of my few allies in Balar Shan, dubious though that alliance was. I had too few to squander even a single one.
Isanara wriggled around behind me, stretching her wings and rolling her head side to side in that eerie, serpentine motion. Her lavender scales shimmered in the diffused morning light that leaked in from the window. But it was the glint of gold behind her that caught my eye.
A goblet sat on the bedside, its wide brim gleaming in the morning light.
I frowned, sifting through my lust-addled memories of the night before. Neither the Dark God nor I had drunk anything.
What is that?
Isanara flexed her claws and hopped down from the bed, circling toward the window. I am going.
Garrick glanced in her direction, caught my eye for a moment, and then determinedly turned away. Great.
I pressed the heel of my palm to my forehead. It was too early for a headache.
Have you been stealing again? I asked, even though a large part of me did not want to hear the answer.
The magic here is all stolen, Isanara huffed. And the diadem was merely a snack.
Her wing had already healed. Dragons cannot be felled by puny fae princesses, or something like that. But I would never forget finding her like that. Stay away from Margeaux.
She snapped her jaws at me. You want me to stay so you are not alone with your Lifebind.
I ignored her—and tried not to look at Garrick—as I pulled a dressing gown over the shift I’d been wearing as a nightgown.
New garments appeared in the wardrobe in the corner almost daily, all of them a perfect fit, despite the distinct lack of variation in fae bodies.
But questioning the provenance of my clothing was so low on my list of priorities that it barely registered.
At least partially dressed, I walked to the window and pulled at the latch. This had become part of the morning routine, too.
If we find the talisman, I may need your help to destroy it, I reasoned.
She leapt onto the windowsill in one graceful motion. Excuses.
Coward, I thought in her direction. But she’d already launched and, based on the sound of disgust that echoed in my mind, I was glad of it. I did not know what it looked like for an adolescent dragon to stick out their tongue, but I doubted Isanara was above it.
I heard Garrick’s footsteps behind me. The room just was not big enough to ignore each other completely, even without both of our heightened senses.
“Do you want me to go with her?” he asked.
He could, I realized. There’d been no occasion for it, but he was a shifter.
I had not even seen it, I realized. Not since the Memory Gate, when the fae king had forced him to shift.
But I could pinpoint the moments. When I’d followed him up the mountain between the Justice and Sacrifice Gates, and he somehow still made it back to camp before me… it was because he’d flown.
I could picture it. The two of them, soaring through the muted gray sky.
Isanara’s scales shimmering between lavender and turquoise, her keen citrine eyes surveying the landscape.
Garrick, his black feathers as lustrous as the ones inked across his shoulders.
The beauty of it clogged my throat with emotions that I did not have the luxury of feeling. Not now. Maybe not ever.
I shivered, but I recognized it for what it was. Not the Dark God, but Velora itself. The reminder was plain. I reached up and closed the window.
“I am going hunting for the talisman,” I said, turning around and resting my back against the same wall where the Dark God had pinned me the night before.
Garrick loomed over me, his frame dwarfing mine as always. The Dark God had been all smooth, sensuous touches. Garrick was raw, unadulterated power. I missed the way his body enveloped mine so completely. Standing in his shadow like this was a sorry echo of what I truly wanted.
“I see,” he said, watching me carefully. “Is that an invitation?”
I bit the inside of my lower lip, then released it. “Do you want it to be?”
Shadows filled the hollows beneath his eyes as they drew together. He was thinking deeply. I had expected him to leap upon the suggestion. Maybe I’d been wrong, and he’d finally given up on me.
I was still in my nightgown, but he was already dressed. While I was rubbing sleep out of my eyes and stretching, he was ready to face the day. Efficient as always.
Except, apparently, when it came to answering my question.
I was about to open my too-big mouth and ask why it was such a difficult question, when the battle on his face disappeared and his brow smoothed.
“Yes. I want to be with you,” Garrick said.
Oh.
What was I meant to say to that?
Nothing, I admonished myself. That was not new information. Garrick had been adamant from the moment he met me outside of the bathhouse and used his compulsion powers to send away the fae prince, Edmund. But a part of me had just been waiting for him to waver.
Yet here he stood, hands folded neatly over his chest, silver hair tied back, ready.
While I was still in my damned dressing gown.
Garrick’s gaze dropped to my throat. Dark God help me…
he had helped me, right to a climax. I turned before my cheeks could start to burn.
But I had a feeling that if I looked down, I would see the marks the Dark God had left with his mouth.
I would not be ashamed. Embarrassed, maybe. Ashamed, no. “I should get dressed.”
Garrick cleared his throat. I did not reach for the belt of my dressing gown until I heard him returning to the hearth.
Despite the mouth bruises and the pleasant ache between my legs, my movements felt lighter than they had in days.
My tryst with the Dark God had not erased the bone-deep exhaustion that trying to save an entire fucking continent had caused.
But it had changed something. Not between Garrick and me, but within myself.
My mind had been spinning until late in the night. As I dressed, I let the thoughts start to tumble loose.
“Aurienna told me that the talisman is hidden in the castle,” I said as I draped the dressing gown around the bedpost and replaced my shift with a fresh one.
“And you trust her?” Garrick asked.
Irritation burned the back of my throat. But it was a fair question, and if I wanted Garrick back…
Was that what I wanted?
I should have asked the Dark God. But he’d disappeared so quickly in the aftermath that there hadn’t been time for a kiss, let alone delicate questions about my mental state that I was not entirely sure I even wanted him to answer.
I pulled a gown over my head—this one made of dark turquoise velvet alternating with panels of lustrous silk in the same shade. The waist cinched in with a cleverly woven leather belt.
“I used the same trick that Maura used against me in the throne room,” I said. “Her answers were truthful.”
The other two answers burned just as brightly in my mind. Isanara was the reason Maura and the fae king had taken me from the gates. Until we figured out why she was important to Maura, I was glad she kept her distance. At least, that’s what I told myself to ease the ache of missing her.
As for the fae woman’s murder… power and protection. They amounted to the same thing. If I could stop Maura, break her alliance with the fae king, I could stop any more women from being murdered. Which brought me back to the talisman.
I walked to the hearth to join him as I finished lacing the belt across my abdomen.
Garrick nodded, accepting my answer without further question. Faint lines formed at the corners of his eyes, his mind already spinning through possibilities.
“There are many possible hiding places within Balar Shan. Do you know what we are looking for?”
“No,” I admitted. “But I know Maura.”
I reached up and began to comb out my thick waves with my fingers as I spoke.
The one thing that had not appeared in the wardrobe was a hairbrush.
“In technicality, a talisman could be anything. The object only has to be large enough to be inscribed with the requisite runes. Then it is consecrated with a spell that directs its purpose, and charged with power from a witch within the bind of the spell.”
As I spoke, Garrick went to the pack he’d stashed in the corner behind the wingback chair that was his bed.
“The bind?” he asked with his back to me.
“My power is frost. I am water-bound. Maura…” I paused, sucking in a breath, mentally quieting the surge of power that rose at the memory of Maura using her power on that young fae woman.
“You’ve already seen her power is flame.
She is fire-bound. Elodie and Aurienna’s powers are earth-bound.
We no longer have an air-bound witch in our coven. ” Because I killed her.
Before I could freefall into that spot, Garrick straightened. When he turned back, he held out his hand. I blinked down at him.
A hairbrush.
Tangled amid the bristles were a few strands of unmistakable silver hair.
My hand tried to shake. I flexed my fingers and ordered it to stillness. It mostly obeyed as I reached out and took the hairbrush.
Garrick watched me draw it through my tangled strands. Once. Twice. He cleared his voice and turned away, so I could only see his profile.
“There must be a dozen objects in this room alone,” he said.
“That would be too easy,” I said. A particularly stubborn knot resisted the bristles of the hairbrush, but I worked it through. “A talisman can be an everyday object, but that does not mean it will be. Maura is the creator. She will choose an object of importance.”
Garrick stroked a hand across the stubble on his chin. “The king has a treasury.”
“Not to the fae. To the witches.”
He huffed an unamused laugh. “I would not put it beyond the king to hoard objects of significance to the witches.”
“Fuck.” My hand fell away from my hair, but the job was mostly done, anyway.
Was there no end to Maura’s treachery? Was it truly possible that she’d not only made an alliance with the king, but also made a talisman and then entrusted it to him? And somehow, I was the one who’d been ejected from my coven.
Garrick took the brush gently from my hand. “My thoughts exactly.”
My humorless, exasperated laugh matched Garrick’s from a moment before. “Breaking into the king’s treasury was not what I had in mind for today.”
Garrick set the brush on the mantle, where I could easily access it if I needed it again. When he turned back, his expression was resigned. “If that is what we must do, then we will do it.”
I lifted my chin, trying to get a better look at him. Shocked. “Did you hit your head?”
“I meant it when I said I would do anything to help you, Koryn,” he said.
He was not looking away or avoiding me, now.
He stared down with those intense eyes, the circle of blue burning in the sea of green, demanding my attention.
“I will be at your side no matter what happens. Stealing from my father is the least of the sins I would commit on your behalf.”
Why did that send a bolt of desire straight between my legs?
My throat was uncomfortably dry. My lips, too. I swept my tongue out to wet them. I heard Garrick’s teeth grind together.
“I had another thought,” I said quickly.
Garrick’s shoulders loosened with palpable relief. “Anything.”
“Balar Shan is built in the form of a spiral.”
His silvery brows notched closer together. “Yes.”
“So are the Seven Gates.”
Garrick nodded. “The entire continent.”
“There is a reason it is called the divine spiral. It was formed by the gods,” I said.
Maybe it was sex with the Dark God that had made me think of it.
I tried to dismiss that disconcerting thought as I continued with the line of thinking I’d ventured down while lying alone in the dark.
“It is sacred. And the most sacred of all is its center. It is where the first temple is, the first gate.”
“But the other witch said that the talisman is in Balar Shan,” Garrick pointed out. A thought I’d had, of course. But I’d also thought beyond that.
“And where is the center of the spiral in Balar Shan?” I asked, hoping I was wrong about the answer.
“The presence chamber,” Garrick said grimly.
Damn.