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His eyes narrowed. “My magic didn’t leave a loophole that big.”
“Oh, but it did,” I said, unable to hide an eager smile. “One you didn’t even see. Come on, I’ll explain as we go.”
His brows lowered briefly, then his eyes bored into me with renewed vigor, like he could see what I’d seen in his mind—the secret he hadn’t known was there. A secret he’d locked away.
“You mean the door,” he muttered.
I grabbed his hand, and his eyes widened at my deliberate touch. “Yes, the one you buried!”
His eyes pinched at the corners. All around us the mist zigzagged in angry little fits.
Linking my fingers with his, I muttered quietly, “I’ll show you.”
This time, his eyes closed slowly, his hand tightening around mine. Then his jaw fixed with a tight frown.
“I saw it when you built this place,” I admitted. “But I don’t know how to get there. You’ll need to show us the way.”
For eighty years he’d been lying to himself. There was a way out of this place—I’d seen it in his memories. There was a bit of madness in him, after all, the kind of madness that could turn a lie into the truth.
He fixed me with a serious expression that bordered between hurt and hungry. I studied his face, trying to memorize every plane of it. Then, his mouth softened and he brought my hand to his face. His lips brushed my palm, and I gasped.
“You deserve to have a life, to find happiness.” His words whispered against the soft skin on the inside of my wrist. “If there were a way out, I’d take you there. But there’s not.” He lowered my hand. “Stay here with me. I will do my best to keep you safe.”
For a second, it was hard to breathe.
My mind flooded with memories. Sitting in the schoolhouse, listening to our instructor rattle off war stories his father had told him. Phrases like the villain of our age and a man with a heart of pure evil were a sharp contrast to the image before me. A man broken from his choices, literally trapped in guilt and anguish and heartbreak. Stories of what he’d done to increase his power by stealing it from others had laid the foundation for my fear of mind magic.
He was the reason I had feared the magic in my veins, and yet he was also the reason I’d finally found it. I shook my head. No, it was stories of him that had founded my hatred of mind magic. This man, the one standing in front of me, had saved my life, taught me how to access my magic, and shown me I wasn’t a piece of straw to be tossed out or burned.
He was the reason I no longer feared mind magic.
“Come with me,” I begged. “We can all get out of here. I can show you what you never allowed yourself to believe.”
He watched me with piercing eyes, trying to read my thoughts as my expression shifted.
“Isn’t it funny,” I added, “that the king, in his effort to eliminate us all, threw me in here, the key that would unlock the Labyrinth?”
His thumb brushed my lips, and I breathed in against his calloused touch. He bent his head toward me so I was temporarily blind to everything else. “Ironic, indeed.” He kissed the skin beside my ear, his beard scratching slightly as he moved to kiss the other side of my face. “Okay, little key, I’ll take you to the door.”
We walked quietly back toward the fort, picking our way over brambles and around trees. Somehow, the silence we shared felt more intimate than all the words we could have said. I trailed my fingers through the blue mist, its cool sting reminding me of the memories he’d shared with me. It was strange to recall someone else’s memories as if they were my own, but the longer I pondered them, the less tangible they became.
The tall trees, the vine-covered walls, the eerie narrow paths to my left and right, all of this—all the monsters and the madness—was the result of a broken heart.
My magic’s silver mist alternated huddling in droplets on my arms and leaping into the air to turn little circles around me. If it weren’t for Ash, I’d never have realized the truth about my magic. I’d never have survived here long enough to know I was a mind mage, and a powerful one at that. I had lived within a prison of sorts for years, thinking I had no place in this world but one of rejection and failed magic. He’d been the one to tear that prison down.
Anger bubbled up inside me at the way the king’s sister had treated Ash. She’d had a man’s entire heart—something I’d only dreamed of—and she’d thrown it away as if it meant nothing to be loved.
But that didn’t excuse what he’d done. It didn’t erase the atrocities he’d committed in his attempts to gain power. Nan’s words echoed among Ash’s memories. Try to forgive him.
The Labyrinth seemed particularly agitated today, as walls kept popping up, funneling us through a part of the forest with a larger concentration of evergreens. Despite the ever-changing path, Ash directed us with ease. All around us, his blue magic sparked in the air.
As one wall leaped up to block our path, I whispered to Ash, “Let me try something.”
I approached the stone wall and ran my hand over it, picturing a door like the one I’d seen in that wall by the creek days ago.
Behind the netted ivy, a door materialized.
Ash coughed and stepped up beside my shoulder. “How did you do that? These walls are impassable.”
