is mine,” I told Pressina. “I won’t give it to you.”
Again the stench of anger. Her tentacles sizzled and flicked back at Nat. “Then we will kill the other one.”
Kill Nat? I almost handed the stone over then and there. But even as my hand went to its chain, I checked myself. Once the stone was off, whatever protection it offered would be gone. And then how could I trust Pressina to live up to the bargain? What if she killed Nat anyway? At best, it seemed, I could hope that she would send him back to Earth, to be drowned with all humankind.
By my mother.
And by me.
Yet if Pressina could make threats, so could I. “If you kill him or maim him or hurt him in any way, I will never help you.”
Blue lightning flashed from the tips of Pressina’s hair, driving me back into the far reaches of the cave. But she did not strike at Nat.
My threat meant something, then.
“Take off that stone,” Pressina hissed.
More confident now, I said, “No. Not until he is freed.” And not even then.
But it seemed my confidence was misplaced, for Pressina’s face cracked into a needle-sharp smile. “Oh, you will give it to me before then, Chantress. And believe me, you will wish with all your heart you had done it sooner.”
Her tentacles flicked out, and she pulled away from me. The other creatures followed her, carrying Nat. They vanished into a dark hole, leaving me alone in my cave, my mother’s endless song dimly thrumming in my ears.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
FLIGHT
I had the stone, but Pressina had Nat. Where had they taken him? What were they doing to him?
It was unbearable to imagine, but I couldn’t stop myself. From what I’d seen of Pressina, she was capable of almost anything. She might starve him, or torture him, or possess him as she had possessed my mother—or commit all kinds of horrors that hadn’t even occurred to me. And I could put a stop to it, if I just gave her my stone. Or so Pressina had said.
Had I done right to defy her?
Racked with guilt and fear, I could think only of Nat and nothing else. But at last I pulled myself together. All the feelings in the world weren’t going to free Nat, and they weren’t going to save the Earth from drowning either. For that, I would have to start thinking—and doing something.
What if I took off my stone just for a moment, to see if I could hear some trace of Wild Magic? Perhaps I had a chance of defeating Pressina that way.
My hand went to my stone, then dropped back. Even when I’d been in my own world, my Wild Magic hadn’t worked very well against the strange music of Pressina’s realm. And Penebrygg’s warning made me doubly cautious: They had to be careful never to take their stones off while they were there, or terrible things could befall them.
Tucking my stone back into my bodice, I tried to recall the Proven Magic that my godmother had taught me—the only kind of Chantress magic that could be worked while wearing an undamaged stone. But her dismal prediction—that if I indulged in Wild Magic, I would soon forget the techniques of Proven Magic—turned out to be true. Either that or Proven Magic didn’t work in this realm. I failed with even the simplest song-spells.
After that depressing experiment, I turned to exploring every fissure and rift I could find in the cave, in search of a way out. Pressina and her kind could swim in this ether, but I wasn’t able to, and even on tiptoe I couldn’t reach the ceiling. Everything else, however, I went over minutely. At the back of the cave, where it was too dark to see, I groped at the walls with my fingertips, fearing at every moment that something might bite off my hand. Nothing did, but despair swamped me when I was done. Every inch of the walls had proved solid.
My only chance of escape, then, was through the latticework. Although it burned my hands, it left no marks, so I kept probing at it. I tried covering my hands with my damp cloak, but that didn’t work either. I even pulled the stiff center busk out of my stays and rammed it into the lattice. The result? A broken busk—and a lattice that looked utterly untouched.
I paced round and round the cave, trying to think of something else I could do. Without