Kingdom of Sea and Stone (Crown of Coral and Pearl #2) - Mara Rutherford Page 0,83
it stopped when her nursemaid appeared and scooped her up. Talin kissed Zoi goodbye and turned to me.
“Come find me later?” I asked.
He nodded and kissed my cheek before following his mother. I watched him go, oddly unsettled by his response to Zoi’s question. I knew I had made it clear I couldn’t make any promises yet, but his certainty about us had been a reassurance I now realized I’d taken for granted.
Shaking my head to clear it, I headed back toward my tent. Adriel was on her pallet, reading the spell book. We’d passed it around the camp at night on the road, hoping someone might be able to decipher the most confusing passages, but it had proved futile.
“Find anything useful?” I asked, sitting down next to her.
She stretched and yawned, as languorous as Fox after a nap. “Possibly? There’s a page that seems to be talking about a blood bond, but the ink is smeared and I’m not quite sure I’m reading it correctly.”
She passed me the book and pointed to the verse she was referring to. “It either says, ‘Bonds of blood will not be broken, ’less the blood spell...’” She chewed on her lip for a moment. “That could say ‘spill,’ though.”
“What’s the rest of the line?” I asked, squinting at the slanted writing.
“I’m not sure. Something about ‘twice is spoken.’”
“It must be ‘spell,’ then. You can’t speak a spill.” I handed the book back to her. “But we don’t know what the blood spell is, do we?”
“There are a dozen blood spells in this book,” Adriel said. “I’ve only done a very simple one, a long time ago, and I wouldn’t do it again.”
“What was it?” I leaned in, morbidly curious.
“It was a love spell, where the lovers cut their hands and tied them together with a cloth. I said the spell, and when the cloth was removed, they were supposed to be bound on a deeper level.”
“And did it work?”
She wrinkled her nose. “I suppose so. When the man believed his wife was having an affair, he nearly killed her.”
I shrank back in horror.
“Like I said, messy.”
I looked down at the book again. “Can a spell like that be undone?”
“Sometimes. In that case, I could have torn the fabric apart and recited another spell, and that should have undone it. But there’s never a guarantee a spell can be broken.”
The thought of being tied to Ceren like this forever was untenable. “Well, this one has to be.”
“Even if I do manage to break the spell,” Adriel replied, “it won’t stop him from wielding the bloodstones. He doesn’t need your blood to do that.”
“No, but as long as he has my healing abilities, he’s going to be extremely difficult to stop. And besides, I want the link between us severed as soon as possible. I don’t want to be in his head anymore, and I certainly don’t want him in mine.”
Adriel sighed. “It sounds like Talia’s plan is to overtake Old Castle tomorrow, then attack New Castle, regardless of what you and I accomplish with this book.”
“You should have left with Roan’s soldiers when you had the chance,” I said, angry with myself for endangering another person I cared about. “Now you’re stuck here with me.”
“I could have left, Nor. I chose not to. Despite Roan’s misgivings about Talia—which, by the way, I happen to share—I wasn’t going to leave without a solution to your blood spell problem. Besides, the thought of another seven days in the saddle was horrifying. And Shiloh promised to check on Foxglove for me, so there was no rush to get home.”
I smiled, relieved that this friendship, at least, wasn’t complicated.
The tent flap stirred, and a second later Zadie’s head appeared. “There you are,” she said to me. “We were looking everywhere.”
Sami entered after her. “Any word from Queen Talia?”
“I wasn’t invited to the strategy meeting. Where were you two?”
“Ebb took us with her to see Grig and Osius. They weren’t invited to the strategy meeting, either.”
“How can that be?” I asked. “Osius is the only one who has seen Old Castle.”
“He reported back and was dismissed,” Sami said. “Ebb was going to see if she could speak to Grig in private. Osius seemed reluctant to talk about it with us.”
“He’s a soldier,” I ventured. “We’re not.”
“Fair enough, but we have as much stake in this as the rest of them. More, if you ask me. And if they’re planning an assault on New Castle that could potentially endanger our