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There was sobbing in the distance.

My fingers twitched. Painstakingly, I dragged them against my side. The fabric of my trousers stretched flat against my thigh. No compass. No coin.

A swell tipped my surroundings, and my eyes rolled back into my head.

When I woke again I couldn’t open them. A blindfold had been fastened over my eyes, its tight knot pulling at the back of my hair. I wanted to scrape it away, but my limbs were too heavy, dangling unresponsive in a damp, sickly-smelling breeze. I was being carried—tucked against a hard body, my face burrowed against soft fabric.

His crunching steps soon became a harsh, clipping gait. The roar of the sea dulled and faded. The air grew bitter with cold, and I felt a scream climbing up my throat.

But only a muffled whimper escaped. Because a thick cloth had also been secured between my teeth, slightly damp and saccharine-sweet in my mouth.

I whimpered again when I recognized the taste.

He’d wetted the gag with nightmilk, to keep the sedative on my tongue. To keep me on that painful edge between sleep and consciousness. To keep me quiet and pliant and weak.

A teardrop squeezed between my lashes and bloomed hot against the blindfold. His arms tightened around me, and then I was slipping, drowning, dreaming—

Dreaming of that moment again. The frantic sprint through the palace passages, my foot catching on the impossible bump on the ground. Impossible, because I’d never stumbled over that bump before. Because I’d never seen it during my practice runs, when I’d memorized each step by heart.

New images spliced through the scene now, flashes from my life: my power slipping under the shoe of a nobleman, a baker, an assailant—all of them tripping one by one.

All tripping, like me, over a bump that had never been a bump at all.

It had been a specter.

Then the nightmare shifted, planting me back inside the dungeon, with the darkness and the iron chains. Only this time, when he said those velvety words, I heard the bright mischief I hadn’t recognized in them the first time.

In Daradon’s history, how many bastard Wielders have worn the crown?

Who wouldn’t love to be the first?

The world returned with the brush of cold fingers. They lifted the blindfold off my eyes, untangling the knot it had formed with my hair; they eased the fabric out of my mouth. Then the opening of a bottle pressed against my lips, and clean water flowed over my fuzzed tongue. I swallowed, washing away the taste of nightmilk, and then I drooped forward, my forehead finding purchase against a sturdy shoulder.

That was when I noticed the burning in my arms. The unnatural strain on my back. I tried to move, but my ankles were locked together.

Those hands found my face again, thumbs grazing my damp cheeks. “Deep breaths.” His voice was a lulling whisper. “Take slow, deep breaths.”

I had no choice but to obey.

My eyelids fluttered open. His face was close to mine, the only anchor against a swimming backdrop of light gray stones. Something in his expression contradicted his gentle touch—something livid and predatory, creeping over his sharp features like frost over glass.

He scraped my hair from my forehead and met my wavering gaze. “You and I,” he said slowly, “are going to have a talk.”

37

I lurched back, hissing as pain shot through my abdomen. A wave of lightheadedness swept over me, and I blinked rapidly to fight it off. The dark spots dissolved, and with them went the bleary effects of the nightmilk.

Amid the horror of my clarity, I felt an odd, morbid relief at the inevitable coming to pass.

Because I would no longer have to fear a nightmare I was already living.

Erik had strung me up in a stone-walled room. My arms stretched above me, hands drooping over manacled wrists. Bandages wrapped my palms, and my sleeves gathered around my elbows. A blood splotch had dried stiff across my blouse, and I knew he’d stitched up the knife wound Holden had left me. Forcibly stretched out in this position, the sutures pulled and smarted with every breath I heaved into the chilled air.

And yet none of the physical discomfort was worse than the dullroot flowing once again through my veins.

I tried to block out the sensation, to keep my heartbeat steady as the poison pulsed alongside my specter, keeping it confined. But already, my panic was rising like bile, my breaths hitching in a short, frantic rhythm.

Erik’s cold hand guided my chin forward. “Don’t focus on the poison,” he said. “Focus on me. The sound of my voice. The color of my eyes.”