muck from the bottom of the ship, with dirt and salt and sand. Her wrists were bruised from the manacles they’d used, even after they had subdued her with magic.
Her treacherous stomach heaved again, but there was nothing left inside her aching body. Valara collapsed onto the stone floor. It was cool and damp against her fevered skin. Fragments of her surroundings intruded. She smelled damp straw, overlaid by crushed herbs and the sickening reek of stale vomit. Her guts pinched harder. She bit her cheeks to stop another bout of retching.
She was a prisoner, taken by the Károvín invaders. That much remained clear. They must have landed safely, then. She dimly recalled being roused from a magical stupor and hauled onto a ship’s deck. Winds were howling with unnatural ferocity and the scent of magic had overpowered her. There’d been a coastline in the distance—Károví, she’d thought. But that general, that duke, Miro Karasek, had roared out orders to the ship’s captain, demanding they steer north, north, damn it, even while the shore rushed toward them. Then came a terrible rending noise. The shock of water closing over her head. After that her memory blurred.
It took her several tries before she could stand up. She shuffled over to the cell door. The corridor was empty. Torchlight stippled the stone walls. It reminded her of another prison, from another life.
She wanted to break open the doors, flee the prison, but she remembered enough from those previous lives to make her cautious. She ran her fingers over the iron bars, then the lock and keyhole, probing for traps and alarms. Slow, slow, slow. She approached the magic and the bars as she would a wild deer in the mountains. As she had first approached magic five years ago.
Needles pricked at her skin, as though the dead iron could read her intentions. So. They had placed a magical guard on her cell. That argued for Károví and Leos Dzavek. The last time he had taken her prisoner, many lives ago, she had escaped by slashing her wrists and throat with magical fire, drawn to a sharp burning edge. It had been a painful victory. Leos would have remembered that incident and prepared against it.
Not that death is my choice. Not with Lir’s emerald in my hands.
She touched the ring on her second finger. Magic hummed at her fingertips, the only trace of the emerald’s true identity. How long before Leos Dzavek discovered the jewel his duke had stolen was false? How long before he thought to strip her of all possessions and force the truth from her throat? Then he would possess two of the three jewels. Morennioù would be helpless against a second invasion. (And he would invade a second time. She knew the man who was, who had been her brother. He did not suffer disappointment.)
She had to escape, before he found out her secrets.
There is only one way. Only one choice.
It was a gamble, attempting to make a leap across the magical void in the flesh. She had managed the trick dozens of times in previous lives; she had done it last summer when she recovered the emerald from Autrevelye, and again that last fateful time when Dzavek confronted her. But she had never tried to when so drained of strength. She would have to concentrate hard if she wanted to land in Morennioù and not lose herself in other worlds.
Ei rûf ane gôtter. Ei rûf ane Lir. Ei rûf ane Toc. Komen mir de strôm.
Magic rippled over her skin, clearing her head and easing the cramps in her gut. She murmured the phrase again, her sight narrowing down to a point on the stone floor, to a single speck of water gleaming in the torchlight.
Komen mir de strôm. Komen mir de vleisch unde sêle. Komen mir de Anderswar.
The world tilted away. A narrow edge, a bright sharp line, arced through the darkness. She glimpsed a hundred worlds refracted in all directions. Just as she caught sight of Morennioù, of Enzeloc Island and her home, a force, like a massive hand, struck her backward.
The shock of return drove the breath from her body.
She lay there, gasping. (There? She had no idea where.) Eventually she coughed, spat out a mouthful of blood. Her ribs ached sharply. Her throat felt bruised and sore. Voices yammered inside her skull. Outside, too—voices shouting curses in Károvín and another language. Veraenen.
Valara hauled herself to sitting. Just as she feared, she was still a prisoner