CHAPTER 60
Bristol forced her hand to stop shaking. She couldn’t risk wasting a single drop. There were barely four left in the bottle. She carefully squeezed one drop at a time onto the marble, whispering the spell in her head, but not saying it until the last drop touched the stone.
“Aira mathemis.”
The drops smoked, as before, and then began spreading, searching for the prisoner within.
“This has to be the right pillar,” she whispered.
Please let it be the right one. How much time had she wasted already?
What if someone came along and stopped her?
She willed the glistening drops to move faster. Her nails dug into her palms.
The process repeated itself, and finally a human form pressed and stretched against the magic casing of the pillar.
She still couldn’t tell if it was her father.
But then an arm broke through . . . a leg, and then there was a horrible moan.
It shivered through Bristol. Finally, a man fell to the walkway in front of her, on his hands and knees.
He shook his head as if dazed, still looking down at the marble floor.
“Daddy,” Bristol said quietly. She grabbed his arm and tried to help him stand. “You’re free. You’re free.”
Logan Keats dragged himself to his feet, then looked into Bristol’s eyes like she was the whole of the universe.
He drew her into his arms. “You’re safe,” he said, rubbing her back.
“Thank the gods.” His chest jumped as he muffled a sob.
“How long have I been in there? I tried to count the days, but it was impossible. Every time I closed my eyes, I thought another whole day had passed and knew I had a thousand years of them to go.”
Bristol shivered. A thousand years. How could they do this? “I don’t know how long you’ve been in there, but the Choosing Ceremony is in four days. You have to find a safe place to hide until it’s over. I’m bloodmarked, Daddy—just like Mother. I can stop all this.”
His face clouded over then, his dark eyes glistening, and Bristol’s heart stabbed with all the pain she saw in them.
Even if he had made mistakes, in that moment she was certain there was never a man who loved his family more.
He understood what being bloodmarked might mean for her.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “We didn’t want this for you. We never wanted this—”
She cupped his face in her hands, his skin damp with tears.
“I’ll be fine, Daddy. I am not Mother, and Tyghan is not Kormick.
I can handle this, but I need you safe. No one knows I’ve released you yet.
They still want you imprisoned.” She couldn’t bring herself to mention Tyghan’s name.
She refused to believe he was part of this.
It had to have been the council. Tyghan would not do this to her.
The pain of it burned inside her, a scream wanting to tear free.
She grabbed the cloak and supplies from the floor.
If there was one good thing she had learned from a lifetime of being on the run, it was to move faster than what hunted you, find the next safe place.
“You need to go quickly. Take these and hide,” she said, handing her father the sword and pack.
“In five days, return to the barn where we last met. From there, I will take you and Mother home.”
“Brije—”
“No arguments this time.” She swept the cloak over his shoulder, telling him it was an invisibility cloak. He already knew how to invoke its magic, and nodded.
But before he kissed her goodbye, before he pulled the hood of the cloak up and disappeared, she saw the familiar determined glint in his eyes, the one that made her chest swell with pride.
She saw the powerful, skilled knight he had always been, and the creative artist who had raised and protected her, but mostly she saw the worry he still had for her mother.
And in the tilt of his head, she saw the certainty he possessed that only he could save her.
And maybe he was right. He was a man who loved deeply and beyond reason.
He couldn’t help who he was, and really, she didn’t want him to be anyone else.
Free. He was free now.