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It’s my first sense that something is wrong, and panic climbs my spine and wraps itself around my throat. I suck in a sharp breath and try again. Still nothing.
“She wakes, my lady.”
I freeze at the sound of voices. Someone is inside my cabin with me. Someone who’s restrained me or drugged me. Pramis. It must be his guards. How did they find me so far south of Pramis’s territory? And so fast?
Pramis prefers public executions. Sometimes hangings, sometimes beheadings. A few summers ago, he had a thief drawn and quartered simply for trying to explain why he stole a loaf of bread.
I swallow hard around the lump in my throat. Whatever the sun god has in store for me will not be pleasant. Not for killing one of his high priests in cold blood. No matter how much the bastard deserved it.
The voices come closer, and even though I know it won’t work, I try to scoot away.
“Stand there,” a second voice says, and something about it is familiar, although I’m unable to place it. “I don’t know what might happen when I coax out this power.”
Power?
A warmth begins at the top of my head and flows down my face and neck, over my shoulders and stomach, and past my hips and legs until it reaches the tips of my toes. It might be soothing if I wasn’t braced for imminent death and unable to move.
As the warmth slowly subsides, it’s replaced by a different sensation, a heavy one. Following the same path as the warmth, it prickles over my skin until I’m on fire from it. When it finally wends its way down to my toes, my whole body feels as if it’s pulsing with energy, lightning in a bottle, snapping and striking.
Fingertips brush gently over the skin of my wrist and then wrap around it, anchoring me in place. A second hand presses into my shoulder as the prickling intensifies into pain. Like when all the feeling rushes back to a numb limb.
The sensation gathers from my head to my toes, but it concentrates in my stomach until it’s unbearable. Sweat beads on my forehead and drips down my temples while my insides rend themselves apart and knit themselves back together with agonizing slowness. I grit my teeth against it so hard I’m afraid they may crack.
By the time it stops, I’m panting, chest rising and falling with each labored breath. The pressure on my wrist and shoulder disappears, and then someone is holding something against my lips.
I turn my head, surprised when it actually moves, and wrench my eyes open to see two women staring down at me. The one closest to me with a vial of clear blue liquid in her hand smiles even while a frown creases her brow.
“Can you drink this?”
I shake my head. “No,” I tell her, and my voice is stronger than I expect it to be after being drugged and tortured for gods know how long. “What did you do to me?”
“I removed power that lingered after you were cut.” She sits down on the edge of the bed, vial still in hand. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she adds when I shuffle away from her, eyeing what could very well be poison. “This is just a potion for your wound.”
Maybe I’m not going to be dragged away and hung for killing the priest. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to drink whatever they give me. At least not without them drinking it first.
“I’m not wounded.”
“You are,” she insists, gesturing to my stomach. “A long, deep gash here. Do you know how it happened?”
I look down at myself, hands flying to my chest when I realize the clothes I was wearing this morning are gone, replaced by a long, thin nightgown the color of elderberries. I scan the room, looking for my things, but nothing stands out against the endless black. Everything from the shiny floor to the tapestries on the wall is black, and it feels both comforting and suffocating at once.
My gaze lands on the woman perched on the edge of the bed. She’s dressed in a royal blue gown that shimmers when it catches the light. Her bright red lips are curved into a soft smile and her black hair spirals down her back.
“I know you.”
“Yes, we’ve met. Elora of Dremen.”
It comes flooding back to me in an instant. Meeting the goddess, her warning about the forest and its dangers, my stubborn desire to catch a rabbit for dinner. An image of the creature I encountered flits across my vision, and I shudder.
It was unnatural, its body contorted until it was both man and beast, unable to tell where one ended and the other began. I shake my head to clear it of the nightmarish sounds the thing made as it feasted on the doe.
“I was in the forest hunting. I followed a deer too far in, and there was a…thing. An animal of some sort.” I’m not sure how to describe it without sounding like I’ve lost my senses, so I don’t try to. “It clawed me, and I ran. I thought I was heading back toward the village. To Rhagana.”
“Unfortunately, you wandered in the opposite direction,” Kaia says. “You’ve been asleep for three days.”
I frown. That’s impossible. I’d know if I lost that much time. Wouldn’t I? If I’ve been here for three days, that means Meera…
“I have to go.”
