My fingers edged toward his birthmark.Hadit cost him nothing? He’d stolen a horse for my sake. Helped break Amryssa’s fall, then brought her to safety. And through it all, I’d tasted his urgency as sharply as my own.
No, that couldn’t have come for free.
At the realization, conviction hardened within me.
Eliana’s letter was wrong. It had to be.
I didn’t know how, or why, only that this man wasn’t the monster she’d described. I would’ve staked my life on it. I had, really, last night. And he’d acquitted himself.
Which didn’t answer even one of my questions. If anything, it only created more. Whowasthis man? What secrets was he keeping, if not those?
“Who are...” I started. “How did you... When the nightmare...”
Goddess. I couldn’t think properly with him stroking my hair like that.
He made a humming sound. “We both have rather a lot to explain, don’t we?”
I lifted my eyes. “Me? Why me?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps you’d like to tell me how a woman falling from a third-story window can come fluttering to earth as softly as a feather?”
I swallowed. Okay. Fair point.
But I couldn’t explain that to myself, much less him. I’d never managed anything like it before. In the past, the dagger had only ever worked subtly, and at close range.
Then again, I’d never channeled magic with last night’s desperation, or come so close to losing Amryssa. Still, something more had been at work. The nightmare hadjoinedme for a second. As if our agendas had aligned.
“I’ve seen magic before,” Kyven said. “In Hyperion’s temple, in Hightower City. People offer prayer candles, and the wicks ignite on their own to show he’s listening. But what you did last night... I’ve never seen magic wrought by human hands. I don’t believe itcanbe wrought by human hands. Which makes you...what? Some type of goddess? I don’t suppose you’re Zephyrine herself, hiding in plain sight?”
I blinked at the absurdity of that.
“Because if so,” he mused, “I supposeI’mthe one who married up, here.”
A chuckle warmed my throat. Now he was only teasing. “No, I’m just a person. And I can’t explain last night. All I can tell you is that the magic comes from the dagger.”
One eyebrow skewed upward. “The dagger?”
“Yes. The one Olivian gave me. There’s something inside it, an...enchantment, I think. But last night—well, I don’t know what happened. The magic’s never been that strong. I’ve definitely neverseenit, and I’ve never drawn power from the storm. I didn’t even know I could.”
Gears turned visibly in his head. “Maybe Zephyrine’s inside that knife of yours, somehow?”
I gathered a protest, then stopped. Huh. Why had I never considered Zephyrine?
Maybe because she’d vanished years ago. Or maybe because, in Oceansgate, the bayou seemed to harbor a magic of its own. While Hightower boasted a central, official temple, Oceansgaterevered its thousand-year-old oak, and, by extension, the marsh itself. Here, people believed in nature’s witchery, in a whole second world that lurked beneath the mirrored waters. They feared witches and wights, boogeymen and ghosts. Not to mention hexes and evil eyes and apparently abandoned little girls who couldn’t brush their own hair. Belief in the supernatural permeated Oceansgate’s collective consciousness, and I’d bought into that myself, ascribing the dagger’s power to some kind of witchcraft.
But someone from Hightower would analyze this thesensibleway—by setting aside superstition. And if magic indeed came from the gods, then Zephyrine might not be sleeping, but...stuck. Inside the blade Olivian had given me.
The idea rocked me. Seven hells. Had Amryssa’s mother snared the goddess inside her knife, somehow? If so, did Olivian know? And why did the dagger’s inhabitant feel so...incomplete?
“I can’t think of any other explanation,” Kyven said.
“No, me neither,” I said slowly. “Aside from witchcraft, which, you’re right, probably doesn’t exist.”
“Probably not.”
Facts wheeled through my head. The Lady Marche had died in the third nightmare, after getting caught out in the marsh. Back then, the storms had been weaker, enough that I’d survived the first two unchained, but by the third, everyone had known what to do. Which meant the Lady should never have ventured into the swamp without a way to protect herself.
What had she been doing out there?
