She wasn’t surprised she’d apologized in her sleep; she had spent every day of the last three years apologizing silently for the awful things she’d said. But there was an edge to Quin’s words she didn’t understand.
“I don’t trust your father,” he said, apropos of nothing. “Neither does my father, for what it’s worth. There has been a remarkable shortage of Gwyrach caught in recent years, though they seem to be reproducing beyond the walls of the Kaer just fine.”
The conversation she’d overheard in the drawing room came rushing back. She weighed the benefits of telling the prince she had been eavesdropping, but that was a delicate confession. She decided to bite her tongue.
“My father has been an invaluable resource to the crown. If not for him, the kingdom would be crawling with Gwyrach.”
“The kingdom is crawling with Gwyrach. Yet another reason I don’t trust the Hunters. The Circle has turned against us—and against each other, as we’ve seen.”
She felt suddenly protective. “Domeniq du Zol is the only reason we’re here right now. He saved our lives.”
“By taking two others.”
“Sometimes that’s how it works. Heart for a heart, life for a life.”
“For someone so obsessed with justice,” he said, “you sure do have a funny way of doing math.”
Irritated, she held out her hand. “Oar.”
He stood, gave a sardonic bow, and slapped the oar into her waiting palm.
“The lady wins.”
As she passed him, his shoulder brushed against hers, and for a second, the boat tipped, uneasy from the weight of their two bodies. The coldness pouring off him was stippled with little sparks of warmth.
Then it was gone. He jerked away and leaned over the edge of the boat to twang the fishing line. Of course he didn’t want to touch her—she had the power to take his life. But she’d also saved his life. Did he really think she was going to hurt him? What more did she have to do to prove her good intentions?
She’ll kill him soon enough, Lyman had said. That’s what they do.
No. They wouldn’t. She wouldn’t. She wasn’t that kind of girl.
Mia revised. Wasn’t that kind of Gwyrach.
When she put it that way, it sounded so ridiculous she almost laughed.
While a glowering Quin busied himself with the fishing line, Mia got to work. It was time to subject the journal to a series of experiments. She could see the writing and the prince couldn’t: that much was clear. But how was the book doling out ink at its leisure? What made it tick?
She’d spent the last three years subjecting magic to careful scrutiny, treating it like she would a scientific theorem. Yes, magic was magic, but it also existed in the natural world: surely magic subscribed to its own set of laws. If she could crack the code and delineate those rules, maybe she could understand it, and if she could understand it, she could master it. For Mia mastery meant precisely one thing: a road to eradicating magic.
The book was as good a place as any to start.
She had several theories. A Gwyrach had clearly found a way to bewitch the book through some kind of mysterious ink-dispensing device. Was it magnetic? Did an internal lodestone siphon ink from a secret compartment in the book’s spine? Or was it mechanical, a widget or a compass that activated the ink reserves?
Mia angled her body away from Quin. She was subtle, tilting the journal in all four cardinal directions to see if the ink revealed itself. It did not. She tapped the book gently against the boat’s edge, in the hopes that she could dislodge the widget and shunt more ink onto the page. No luck.
She knew nothing. She hated not knowing. Her only grounded theory was that Gwyrach could see the ink and non-Gwyrach couldn’t, though her sample size—herself and the prince—was woefully small.
And her mother, of course. An uneasy truth slithered through her thoughts. How could her mother write in Gwyrach ink unless she were a Gwyrach herself?
Quin let out an exaggerated sigh. “If you’re following something you think you see in that book, then we truly are on a path to nowhere.”
“Oh? And where would you have us go?”
He shifted in the boat but said nothing.
“Good, then. Lucky for you, I’ve always been good with maps.”
“To be good with maps,” he muttered, “one must actually have a map.”
She shot him a withering glance. But he was right and she knew it. She was letting herself be tossed on an unpredictable tempest, biding her time until the magical map deigned to reveal the path to “safe haven.” Mia Morwynna Rose was a rational thinker, a scientist, a Huntress—and apparently a lost little girl, twiddling her thumbs as she waited for invisible ink to appear.
Safe haven. What did that even mean? For a Gwyrach, nowhere was safe.
The rage was inching back into her sternum, a coil of crimson fire. Why was she so angry? And at whom? She didn’t understand why her body now vacillated between extreme temperatures. In the lists of crimes committed by Gwyrach, she’d read about how they could conjure up diseases of the flesh that began with icy-cold sensations, followed by sharp, burning pain, then vesicles on the skin, topped off with putrescent limbs that eventually dropped off the body completely. She shut her eyes, not wanting to believe it. Magic really was an infection. For all she knew, her own magic was eating her alive.
How much farther to the Twisted Forest? The trees were beginning to slope to the east, a pinch of winter in the air. In light of her failure with the journal, she comforted herself that they were headed toward answers. No. Toward justice. Heart for a heart, life for a life.
“I didn’t mean to be cruel,” said the prince. He was more mercurial than the waters flowing beneath them. “I told you as long as we were headed in the opposite direction of the Kaer, I wouldn’t complain. And I meant it.”
She nodded. “Good. You needn’t worry; I’m taking us somewhere safe.”
He was watching her again. If he were aiming to unnerve her, two could play at that game. Her eyes scraped over his face, looking for flaws. What she found instead were long lashes, piercing green eyes, sharp cheekbones, a slightly upturned nose, bowed lips, a fine collarbone, sloping biceps, and the smooth plane of a chest tapering into lean stomach muscles. His shirt was gaping at the waist; she could see the top of his hip bones cutting a sharp V, like a bird taking flight.
She felt a flutter in her belly. Butterfly or dove, she didn’t wait to see—she reached inside and strangled it.
They were silent a long time, day sinking slowly into night. The sunlight on the water was golden, then salmon pink, then dusky as the moon put on a white veil and walked the sable sky.
When the boat ran aground, Mia wasn’t expecting it. The jolt wrenched the oar from her fingers, and she tumbled forward. Her arms were sore and swollen, her hands so numb she could no longer feel them. Quin caught her before she pitched over the side, his hands firm around the curved mounds of her shoulders.
“You should eat more skalt,” he said, though she sensed he’d been about to say something else. Then he pulled his hands back sharply. For a moment he had forgotten the dangers of being skin to skin.
Mia stepped shakily onto the shore, willing her river legs steady. She stared up at the forest. The Natha dead-ended into a small cove where the Sunbeam’s bow was lodged on a bank of cracked gray rocks.
The prince massaged his neck. “I guess this is where the river ends.”
But the river had not, in fact, ended. Above them was a sight that defied logic: the Natha burbled upward over the cascading boulders in an inverted waterfall. As she stared in awe, Mia realized she had never truly believed this place existed. But here was the proof, incontrovertible. Water running up instead of down.
She felt disquieted, curious, and—against all reason—hungry.
“Four hells,” the prince murmured. “Would you look at that.”
In the woods beyond, the crooked swyn trees clung to one another, swathed in a canopy of sultry blue.
The Twisted Forest beckoned, too lovely to be believed.
Chapter 20
Awful Bloody Work