But my secrets were unraveling, slipping free like a loose thread. Seren had figured out I didn’t have a Bloodbinding mark. And now her mother …
“How long have you known?” I rasped.
“Since the moment I saw that scar you carry on your back, just above your left hip. When I was treating your lashes.” Her eyes gave nothing away. She started forward again and I followed, helpless to do anything else, her answer only provoking more questions.
“How do you know about that scar?”
“I put it there, when you were an infant. Your mother came to me in a moment of panic and desperation, and I masked a birthmark with a rune, so that it would never be discovered.”
What in Solric’s name?
“Why?” I demanded. “What birthmark?”
“There’s a great deal we must discuss. The farther we are from others, the safer you will be.”
I clamped my mouth shut, despite my burning curiosity, following her into denser woods.
She didn’t take a path and I stepped through brush, thorns snagging my clothes while she simply parted them with effortless gesture spells. I missed those days—when magic had been at my fingertips.
Adjusting to life without the powers I’d been born with had been hell.
I’d spent the first few months in Pendara hating my father. Imagining the day I’d return, not to win his approval, but to prove I no longer wanted it. That his exile had cured me of any desire to be what he expected.
But had I been fooling myself?
Now that he was gone, robbed from me forever, something raw and hollow gaped inside my chest.
“The only one of my sons in whom I can find nothing to be proud.”
Some of his last words to me.
He had died still believing the worst of me.
Lucia and I reached an enormous fallen tree, its hollowed, moss-covered trunk large enough for us to both stand inside. What had seemed like aimless wandering now revealed itself as deliberate—the small altar and tools within the hollow told me differently.
This was her altar. A natural, woodland sanctuary for a priestess without a temple.
Lucia slowed as she approached the altar and pushed back her hood. “No one has followed us, right?”
I furrowed my brow. “Am I supposed to?—”
“You can smell them. Hear them.” With a quick turn, a knife flew from her grasp, straight toward my chest.
I knocked it away with ease, the clang of steel on wood echoing around us, then stared at her, wide-eyed. “What the fuck?”
She didn’t smile as she retrieved the knife. “You have new skills. Powers granted by the oath. But they aren’t from Seren. She’s more powerful as a sorceress than a fighter, but she always wanted to be like her father.”
I didn’t move, still staring at her, unblinking.
She unpinned her hair, letting it fall over her shoulders. She looked every inch the legendary Ibarran priestess I’d heard about. “You owe some powers to the blood of another present when Seren took that oath.”
What the fuck is she saying?
“I’m not following.”
Lucia produced a leather pouch and withdrew a gleaming amulet with a long chain, then came closer to me. Too close. I flinched as she raised her arms, slipping the chain over my head, before fastening the remainder of the chain around her own, facing me.
Her finger lifted to my temples.
