Page 104 of Spring Guardians & Songbirds

I turned her chin to me. “I will not let you manipulate yourself into thinking you were in the wrong. I can easily hate something or someone, Nia, if it is only for the way they breathe. For you to hate something or someone certainly takes more than their lung capacity.”

“Children or not,” Kilian said. “You were hurt from it.”

Nia frowned at him. “Don’t join the bunch.”

“I am not saying you need to kill my Councillor,” he said, giving me and his brother what looked like a warning stare. “I’m saying you owe no one forgiveness. Certainly not to those that were not apologetic at all.”

That had been why Nia had acted as she did. She’d seen Nesrin’s shadows. And that made me even more rageful.

“Sister-in-law,” Mal said, taking an apple and extending a hand for me to take. “We have business to attend to. Think very loudly of the place where you want me to take us.”

After pulling the hood of my dress up and the gossamer veil over my face, I linked my hand to his across the table and immediately our surroundings changed. The green and warmth of Amaris turned to blistering white snow and dull grey skies. There was a crashing sound and the swirl of waves in the background that suddenly blurred before me. The smell of salt and fish along with the remnants of fading made me retch all I ate out on the murky waters of the Seer Sea.

Mal pulled my hair up and rubbed a hand over my back while I leaned over the small cliff. “That bad, huh?”

I took the handkerchief he offered and wiped my mouth. “What is?”

He gave me a look of apology. “I might have asked Cai and he might have told me. You took mud foam one too many times when we went to sea line cities.”

“Don’t fret, I wasn’t keeping it a secret.”

He looked around and then frowned. “Why have you brought us to the middle of nowhere?”

It wasn’t exactly the middle of nowhere. I had been here many times before. “Ulv Islet. It’s a small island by the shores of Casmere.” Only a couple of miles in dimensions, the small rocky land was more barren than the deserts themselves. There was no vegetation and no other life besides the seagulls occasionally taking respite to eat their catch. The Islet was a perfect hidden gem of my father’s. One that no one paid attention to either.

I pointed to a wall fort toward the empty north. A towering giant that stuck out like a mushroom in the middle of the small rock. “It used to be a prison. Aryan adored this place.”

Mal squinted into the distance. “A prison? An odd thing to adore.”

“An undisclosed one. If evil could hold his pets somewhere, he definitely would have held them here,” I said. “Aryan could do all the twisted things he liked to the men and women imprisoned here without no one knowing or caring.”

Mal tensed, shadows crossing his russet eyes, turning them to black. “How would you know what he did here?”

I got to my feet. “Because he brought me here many times to show me. To prepare me. My kills rot somewhere in here too.”

His eyes widened just slightly, enough to see his anger flash through. The Night Prince was different from his brother in more than one sense. But the way they reacted toward me was somehow one of the same—almost protective. It was funny if you thought about it well. The man who sent to kill me and his brother felt protective over me. Out of all the clownery in this realm, this had to be the winning act.

Another waft of sea air carried from the brisk wind, and I winced, attempting to hold down whatever was left in my stomach. “The place showed in my memory from when I took Visha’s elixir. Now I think I know why. The prison building had a Dark Crafter buried in its foundations. It fed the place with magic. Magic that disguised a lot of other magical essences. Possibly the ones my siblings have.”

Mal and I pushed through the snow-covered rocky paths leading to the stone fort charging with a skin creeping feel of the dead. The kind of dead who spooked evil itself. The prisoners who resided here were the crop of the cut. The horror of all criminals. And it did make killing them somewhat gratifying. I just wish killing was all I did to them.

Mal suddenly pulled me back, staring downward where I almost stepped. “The hells is with this place?”

A stream of black viscous fluid like tar gushed over the blinding snow, gliding in a long path that spilled over a rock and onto the sea. When we reached the tall moss-blanketed dark tower Mal hissed and winced. “Fuck.”

The hells. The same creosote liquid dripped from the stone onto the wall gutters that chased down the stream—it came from the tower. It leaked from the tower stone.

Just before I reached to touch it, Mal wrapped his hand around my wrist. “Bad idea. It’s soul remnants. Very bad souls if I might say so. This place needs to be set on fire and exorcised by a good Crafter. Then set on fire again.”

He kicked the main door open, sending the damp wood to splinter in pieces and a chilling crack reverberate through the desolate space.

“What on the bloodied hells died here?” he asked, lifting a hand toward the corridor ahead. The musky scent was replaced with a sharp sweet smell of roses and a blast of a white cloud erupted from Mal’s touch. Odd scent for what his magic did.

I lifted an arm to cover my face when the wuthering impact of whatever magic he unleashed sent saw dust, soot and cobwebs blasting in the air.

“Your shadows are white,” I said as matter of fact, staring downcast at our two different shadowy figures.

“When I tie strings to the dead, my magic forms a habitat of protection around me by outcasting any darkness from me, including my shadows—anything the dead can cling to. I don’t have an affinity with death like Kilian, I only control it through tugs of emotion that linger over the dead and into the spiritual mana. And if I am unprotected, it may attempt to form an affinity with me. By killing me,” he said like it made perfect sense.