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“Jagaros?” I lurched to reach for him, only to cringe back at the touch of the mist. “What are you doing here?”
I couldn’t tell if it was horror or relief that smashed into me at the sight of him. Maybe both. He’d come for me again, but how could he possibly save me when he’d taken an oath to never fight against the Good Council?
Dyonisia read the question hovering on my lips. “He has offered to trade his life for yours. To remain here in your cell—forever—if I let you go.”
“No.” I shook my head immediately. “N-not happening.”
“I agree,” Dyonisia said, fingertips pressed together. “It’s not. But there is something else he can give you instead. That truth we were talking about. The one he has kept hidden from you your whole life.”
My head whipped toward Jagaros, whose own head rose from its bowed position, pupils narrowing on my mutilated fingers. “Jagaros? What’s she talking about?”
A growl rumbled from his chest, but too many strings of antipower separated us, blocking my Wild Whispering magic. I couldn’t understand him.
“Let him go closer,” Dyonisia told the elites.
They led him into my cell, skirting around Bilderas’s unconscious form so that Jagaros could pad up to me. I knew the only reason he wasn’t writhing in pain as he passed through all the strings of mist was because he was in this tiger form. In this moment, he wasn’t a faerie at all, but an actual wild animal.
An animal whose head could just barely fit in the mist-less space with me as I slung my arms around his neck, pulling him close until my Wild Whispering connected us once more.
“Forgive me, Rayna Drey,” Jagaros muttered then. “On my way back to the Uninhabitable Zone, I heard you had been taken and could not just abandon you again.”
“What do you mean again?” I pulled back to survey his drooping ears, the stripes collaring his neck, the chains around his limbs.
“I think it would be better if I showed you.”
Jagaros dipped his head again, and I understood. For the first time since I’d developed Mind Manipulating, he was giving me permission to access his memories. Part of me hated that it was at Dyonisia’s urging, while the other part of me had to admit that escaping this bleak cell where my body felt like it was on the verge of collapsing at any moment…
It would be a nice reprieve, no matter what secrets lay in wait.
So with a faint nod, I plummeted into Jagaros’s mind.
CHAPTER
51
RAYNA
Walls of shimmering ice stretched out on either side of me, although it was nothing like the frozen wasteland my own mind had once been.
Here, flecks of eddying fire swam within the ice, and flames roared along the tops of the walls like dancing razor spikes. The sky itself tumbled with a dark molten orange, and the ground was…
I peered down at my yellowish reflection. Frozen fire. Like something that might have once burned the world to a crisp had been locked into place. Trodden on and trapped here forevermore.
Jagaros—or, more accurately, his consciousness—padded up beside me. He’d retained his tiger form in here, but when I tried to look at him directly, the edges of the feline shape warped and flitted with snaps of other forms, never quite solidifying.
He didn’t look at me directly either. Without Mind Manipulating of his own, he wouldn’t be able to see his own mind or the maze before me like I could.
Instead, he simply said, “Go as far as you like. Find what you must.”
A sudden sense of foreboding prickled my skin at the way his voice drooped with haunting sadness. I nodded, wrapping my arms around myself. “Okay.”
Turning away from him, I made my slow way toward his open gate. The ground creaked beneath each of my footsteps, tiny cracks sprawling out wherever I stepped. My breath jammed in my throat when I passed through the gate and found myself facing a maze of sweeping stripes of flaming ice.
Jagaros must have conjured the memories that mattered to the forefront of his mind, because a swirl of mist burst to life immediately before me.
There he was in his brother’s form, in the domed palace of the Uninhabitable Zone surrounded by hordes of other faeries. Obviously younger with smoother skin and a smaller stature, perhaps in his mid-twenties—though it was difficult to tell, what with the pointed ears already sticking out from his flow of electric-white hair.
He’d already matured, so this memory could have been decades or centuries ago. I couldn’t pinpoint anything beyond the fact that no crown perched on his head.
