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She laughed once, softly. "Very well, child. Take your path."

She lifted her hand again. The dark in front of Idonea split.

"But you will not touch the relic without paying. I made sure of that, too."

The split widened. Through it Idonea saw the chamber she'd been walking toward; the stone walls, the carved glyphs, the pedestal at the centre, and the relic resting on it in its low gold light.

Nellith was not coming with her. The dark was sending her back, alone, to where she'd been trying to go.

Idonea didn't thank her, nor look back. She stepped through.

The chamber was very still.

The dark behind her sealed itself. The cold-iron smell went. Stone walls returned around her, the warm gold light of the pedestal soft on the curved walls. The sound of her own breathing came back to her for the first time since the void.

No one else was with her.

Lysander couldn't be here. Balmo could not. Even Lance could not. She had crossed the threshold; this room was sealed off the way a sanctum was sealed. The seal at her back was something she could feel. Both a pressure and held breath.

The relic was on the pedestal.

It was smaller than she'd expected — neither large nor heavy-looking. The Heart of Ffyrnedd, the thing she'd crossed two countries to find, was the size of a child's fist. Pale gold, faintly veined with darker gold beneath the surface, the way a wrist has veins. It glowed, pulsing with a rhythm alongside her own pulse.

She didn't yet lift her hand to it; instead, she walked the pedestal once.

The glyphs at her feet were old, older than the wards that had sealed the rings. The light from the relic caught them and made them crawl. She'd seen a glance of them once before, in the dragon-eye chamber below the larder. The same hand. The same line.

Her mother's line. The realisation slammed into her chest, stealing her breath. Her fingers trembled against the cold stone, and the chamber tilted around her. Nellith. Even here. Even now. She forced herself to breathe, to steady, and set her boots on either side of the pedestal.

She stretched both hands out, palms down, and lowered them until they met the relic.

It was warm. Warmer than she'd thought it would be.

The moment her skin touched it, something rushed up through her arms.

She saw, for one fractured count, the Nexis: doors, more doors than she could number, opening and closing in slow waves. Daemons behind some. Light behind others. Shadows that were not exactly shadows. The Heart was a map. It was undeniable. The Heart of Ffyrnedd had been carved from a witchwyrm because witchwyrms had been the first creatures to walk between the worlds, and what they had been was path-finders. The relic was a key because their hearts had been keys.

Her own pulse stuttered against the relic's. Then a different pressure. The relic was looking at her. Looking for something. The relic knew who she was. Idonea wished it didn't.

The relic's will pressed against her own curiously. It wanted her to take it. She closed her hands around it, and it came up off the pedestal lightly.

Far behind her, somewhere underneath the seal at her back, a voice she'd been working not to hear since the dark went flat said her name.

Idonea.

She didn't answer.

Stepping back from the pedestal, she held the relic against her ribs. It was still warm.

She turned towards the door.

Chapter 38

The relic vibrated in her palms. Her breath steamed in the cold vault. The world beyond the seal waited for her to come back to it.

She stepped back from the pedestal. A hairline crack had opened in the stone where the relic had rested. Current bled from the crack into the air, the pressure of it constant.

A voice came down the chamber.