“You asked for the truth. Truth bends, Ravyn Yew. We must all bend along with it. If we do not, well...” His yellow eyes flared. “Then we will break.”
He spoke with his own voice into Ravyn’s mind once more. Before your lifetime, he said, before the story of the girl, the King, and the monster, I told an older tale. One of magic, mist, and Providence Cards. Of infection and degeneration. His smile fell away. Of barters made.
“I’m familiar with The Old Book of Alders.”
“Good. For you’re about to step into it.”
Ravyn drew in a breath, the ice in the air nesting in his lungs.
“The Twin Alders is the only Card of its kind,” the Nightmare continued. “It gives its user the power to speak to our deity, the Spirit of the Wood. And it is she who guards it. She will have a price for the last Card of the Deck. Nothing comes free.”
“I’m prepared to pay whatever price she asks.” Ravyn pressed against the bars, his voice lowering. “And when I do pay, Nightmare, the Twin Alders Card will be mine. Not the King’s, not yours. Mine.”
Something shifted in those yellow eyes. “What is the second thing you wish of me, Ravyn Yew?” the Nightmare murmured.
Even with frost all around them, Ravyn could smell blood on Elspeth’s clothes. He took a step back, but it was too late. A light tremor had begun in his left hand. He knotted it into a fist. “When I bring you to the King’s chamber, you are not to harm him. You are not to do anything that might jeopardize me taking you out of Stone in search of the Twin Alders Card.”
“Rowan has agreed to my offer, then? To trade my life for young Emory’s?”
“Not fully. Which is why you need to be on your best behavior.”
The Nightmare laughed. The sound shifted through the dungeon, as if carried on dark wings. “My best behavior.” His fingers curled at his side. “By all means. Take me to your Rowan King.”
Along the dungeon wall were hooks with varying weapons and restraints. Ravyn retrieved a pair of iron cuffs fixed to a chain and opened the cell door. The Nightmare held out his wrists.
Pale, bruised skin peeked out from beneath tattered sleeves.
Ravyn bit down. “Pull your sleeves down so the iron doesn’t sit directly on your wrists. I don’t want to give Elspeth any more bruises.”
“She can’t feel them now.”
Muscles bunching in his jaw, Ravyn took care not to touch the Nightmare’s skin when he locked the cuffs in place. “Let’s go.”
Even with chains, the Nightmare’s movements were eerily quiet. It took all of Ravyn’s control not to look over his shoulder. The only reason he was certain the monster was behind him at all was because he could feel him there, wraithlike, as the two of them crept out of Stone’s frozen underbelly.
They climbed the stairs. Ravyn shook his hands, the dungeon’s icy numbness shifting into prickles along his fingertips. He was still wielding the Nightmare Card—he used it to call for Elm. His cousin did not answer.
But another voice did.
She’s dead, you fool, came a familiar, derisive tone from the depths of his mind. Why cling to hope? Even if you unite the Deck and lift the mist and cure the infection, she will not come back. She died in her room at Spindle House four nights ago. A low, rumbling laugh. All because you were ten minutes late back from your patrol.
Ravyn ripped the burgundy Card out of his pocket and tapped it three times, quelling the magic. His pulse roared in his ears. It hadn’t been the Nightmare’s voice, but another—one that mocked him, uttering his worst fears every time he used the Nightmare Card too long.
His own.
The clicking sound of teeth ricocheted off stone walls. “There was no need for your Nightmare Card, Ravyn Yew. I am the only one for a hundred cells.” He paused. “Unless you were hoping to hear another voice when you reached into my mind.”
Ravyn stopped in his tracks. “Were you there,” he said, keeping his eyes forward, forcing ice into his thinning voice, “when Elspeth and I were alone together?”
“What’s the matter, highwayman? All your rosy memories beginning to rot?”
Ravyn turned—pushed the Nightmare against the wall, his hand closing around the monster’s pale throat.
But it felt too much like her throat. It was her throat.
He ripped his hand back. “Everything was a lie.” He hadn’t let himself think it until now. And now that he was thinking it—
He’d taken knife wounds that hurt less. “Every look. Every word. You lived eleven years in Elspeth’s mind. There’s no knowing where she ended and you began.”
A smile snaked across the Nightmare’s mouth. “No knowing at all.”
Ravyn was going to be sick.
“If it is any consolation, her admiration for you was entirely one-sided. I find your stony facade excruciatingly tedious.”
Eyes closed, Ravyn turned away. “And yet you were there. When we were together.”
There was a long pause. Then, quieter than before, the Nightmare spoke. “There is a place in the darkness she and I share. Think of it as a secluded shore along dark waters. A place I forged to hide things I’d rather forget. I went there from time to time in our eleven years together. To give Elspeth reprieve. And, most recently,” he added, tapping his fingernails on the wall, “to spare myself the particulars of her rather incomprehensible attachment to you.”
Ravyn opened his eyes. “This place exists in your mind?”
Silence. Then, “For five hundred years, I fractured in the dark. A man, slowly twisting into something terrible. I saw no sun, no moon. All I could do was remember the terrible things that had happened. So I forged a place to put away the King who once lived—all his pain—all his memories. A place of rest.”
Ravyn turned. When his eyes caught the Nightmare’s yellow gaze, he knew. “That’s where she is. It’s why I can’t hear her with the Nightmare Card. You have Elspeth hidden away.” His throat burned. “Alone, in the dark.”
The Nightmare cocked his head. “I am not a dragon hording gold. The moment Elspeth touched that Nightmare Card and I slipped into her mind, her days were marked. I was her degeneration.”
No. Ravyn wouldn’t accept it. “Tell me how to reach her.”
“Why would I when it is such a delight, watching you unravel?”
Ravyn’s hand fell to his belt and the ivory hilt upon it. “You will. When we leave this wretched castle, you will tell me how to reach Elspeth.”
The Nightmare’s smile was a thinly veiled threat. “I know what I know. My secrets are deep. But long have I kept them. And long will they keep.”
King Rowan was not in his chamber.