Page 9 of The Nymph King

With open space, running water, and dappled light, the clearing should have brought relief. But it set Imani on edge.

A stream ran clear over the stones, but its burbling carried a faint, dissonant distortion, like heat rolling off the ground. When she knelt closer, the moss along the bank dimmed. Esa appeared at ease, but Imani felt the Draswood pressing against her magic signature.

Her gut clenched. The Draswood was not deciding whether Imani belonged here. It had already answered that question. She was Norn, and the forest had recognized her as its own. What made its signature press uneasily against hers was the darkness inside her. Ever since she had tested her shadows with the moss, the forest had reacted to that particular current with caution.

“Something still doesn’t feel right,” Imani murmured, braiding her damp hair.

Beneath the Crown’s branches, a sprawling, foreign awareness slithered around. “You sensed me following you?” Esa asked.

“Not you,” Imani replied, her gaze sweeping the tree line. “Something else.”

Esa frowned. “The Draswood is feeding you.”

Imani didn’t correct her, although the word sounded inaccurate. The Draswood was pressing down on her, constantly assessing the magic she carried ever since she released her shadows to experiment with the moss. The immense, almost unfathomable magic needed to meet its own—to become something around which the Draswood orbits—teased her mind’s limits. It called for patience she doubted she had, making it hard to predict and risky to manage.

Still, they would need to rely on the Draswood’s protection a bit longer. They dressed and hurried on.

The light beneath the canopy grew thin, and the moss lining the path flickered, struggling to maintain its bioluminescence. Whatever was happening to the Draswood no longer felt like natural decay. Magic was putting sustained pressure on the Fabric here, repeatedly disturbing the same currents until the forest couldn’t recover between assaults. How they were doing it—and what they were using—remained hidden to her.

Kiran hunting her came to mind in a rush of worry. So did Tanyl. Imani had no evidence that either man was responsible, much less that they were working together, and the thought irritated her because she still couldn't separate reasonable suspicion from fear. Kiran had been searching for her through these woods, but that was not the same thing as attacking the Draswood.

Esa stumbled. Her foot caught on something nearly invisible, stretched between two ancient trunks. Imani grabbed her arm before she fell, catching a shimmering glint of spell-thread woven directly into the forest’s undercurrent.

When it snapped, a concussive pulse spread outward.

Imani gasped as her glamour detached, peeling from her skin. Her true features reasserted themselves instantly, the brands blazing hot against her arms. Moss darkened in a rapidly widening ring, and the stream shivered violently. Air compressed as the Fabric tightened around her in a targeted, suffocating grip.

Her magic flickered, then flared in defiance. The snare had exposed her.

“This trap is anchored to the Fabric,” Imani breathed.

Before Esa could respond, a voice cut through the trees. “Move!”

They bolted, but the forest no longer moved in harmony with them. The birds fell silent, and the trees froze as the breeze dissipated. Imani tripped over a second filament, and the resulting pulse cracked the earth beneath her hand.

And the men moving through the brush did not seem to notice the traps. Still pumping her legs, Imani stole a glance over her shoulder, recognizing the insignia on the first dark leather before Esa fired a spell: Vathis. These were Ellisar’s soldiers.

They had probably been sent into the eastern territories for the same reason everyone else was searching—to find the Norn woman whose face Tanyl had spread across every wanted notice.

Whatever magic had woven the invisible filaments through the Draswood belonged to someone else, though. The soldiers had simply followed the hunt into the same ground.

The distinction did little to help when one of them raised his wand at her.

“Imani Aowyn,” he shouted. “By order of High Sentinel Ellisar, surrender your wand.”

Esa spun first. Her wand flashed toward the movement behind them, and a blast of pixie magic struck the nearest soldier hard enough to throw him backward into a tree. A second man came through the brush from her left. Esa ducked beneath his spell, drove her elbow into his ribs, then snapped her wand upward and sent him sprawling beside the first.

“Run,” she barked.

Imani barely made three strides before more figures emerged ahead of them.

The men had spread through the woodland routes ahead of them, using the roads and settlements to narrow the search. She didn’t think they had known about the spell-threads any more than Imani had. No, they had simply closed around her at the worst possible moment.

A spell tore past Imani’s shoulder. She turned and raised her wand, shadows answering before she consciously called them. Darkness rushed up her arms and pooled around her boots, eager enough that she could already feel how easily it would become lethal.

Then the moss beneath her feet went black, and a fracture opened beside her boot with a brittle crack.

Imani stopped with a gasp.