The Blood Spell (Ravenspire, #4)(83)

“I am too.” He smiled.

And then Grand-mère was making a fuss over both of them, getting Pepperell a breakfast of thinly sliced pheasant, and feeding Kellan again, though Blue rolled her eyes and said he’d already eaten enough that morning to feed a small army.

“I would stay and eat at your table all morning long, Miss Destri, but I’ve promised to take Blue on a picnic out west, so we must be going,” Kellan said as he pushed away from the table and carried his plate to the sink.

Grand-mère’s eyes sharpened. “What’s this about going west?”

“We’re looking for Ana,” Blue said. “And I need to leave Pepperell with you because I don’t trust Dinah with him.”

“If that girl hasn’t already shown up, Blue, I doubt you’ll be able to find her. It’s been too long,” Grand-mère said. “And if you go too far west, you’ll reach the Wilds, which is too dangerous. You know that.”

“I’ll be with her,” Kellan said. “And so will my guards. Including at the Wilds. My mother needs assurances that the wraith is still in its prison.”

Grand-mère grabbed Kellan’s hand. “Promise me you two won’t touch the wraith’s gate.”

Blue frowned. Of course they weren’t going to touch the wraith’s gate. She didn’t plan to get close enough to be an arm’s length away from the thing in case the wraith could somehow reach through the bars. She didn’t have a death wish.

Kellan squeezed Grand-mère’s hand and met her eyes. “On my life, I swear we won’t touch the wraith’s gate.”

And then they were out the door, down the steps, and heading back to the lane, where Kellan’s guards waited to escort them west.





THIRTY-FOUR


SCATTERED ALONG THE road that led west away from Falaise de la Mer, there were a handful of cottages, a number of farms, and a small road that snaked north to skirt the mountain range that loomed ever closer. A long, dark shadow spread across the base of the mountains, growing larger as they left the city far behind.

“Are you nervous about seeing the Wilds?” Kellan took her hand and gave it a comforting squeeze.

Blue nodded and tried not to pay attention to the fact that he still hadn’t let go of her hand. “More nervous about the wraith than the forest my mother grew to imprison it.”

“She used magic for that, didn’t she?”

Blue squinted against the glare of the sun. Surely that was the cause of the heat dancing along her skin like tiny bits of fire. But just in case, she slowly pulled her hand free of Kellan’s. “Yes, she did. I know she created the potion that locked the wraith away, but Grand-mère said she had help from the witch’s sister, so I have no idea where one magic started and the other ended.”

And she wished she did. Her magic worked differently from her mother’s. Mama’s magic had encouraged things to grow and ripen quickly, which would explain how she grew a dangerous fae forest from a handful of seeds in minutes—but didn’t explain how she’d managed to create a lock the wraith’s powerful magic couldn’t break.

“I don’t understand how the lock held. Nothing is ever permanent,” she said as they crested a hill and stared at the landscape spread before them. Orchards, vineyards, and a few farmhouses dotted the plains, with the road cutting through the center. In the far distance, the Giant’s Fist mountain range was a smudge of green against the sky. And at the base of the mountains, spread along the fringes of the plains, the dark shadow of the Wilds waited for them.

“What do you mean?” he asked as they began moving down the hill, his guards behind them on horseback. Kellan’s horse had a large bag of food strapped to its back behind its empty saddle. He’d offered to let Blue ride in the saddle with him, but she’d opted to walk. If she sat that close to him on his horse, she was going to start imagining things that would never be true for her.

“I mean even the most closely bound ingredients can be unbound if you can find something strong enough to break them apart.”

He gave her a troubled look. “That’s not very reassuring.”

“Mama didn’t write down the potion she created for the lock. Without knowing the list of ingredients, it would be really hard to find a way to reverse the spell.”

“And someone couldn’t figure out the ingredients used? Maybe by taking a sample or by experimenting or something?” he asked. “You figured out the ingredients for the fire spell just by smelling it.”

Now she sent him a troubled look of her own. “Actually . . . that’s not impossible. It would be difficult if the ingredients were uncommon, but certainly not impossible. Mama must have planned for that, but I can’t figure out how.”

“Let’s hope her plan worked,” he said as they passed the next farmhouse. He reached for her hand again, and she gave up pretending she didn’t want to keep her hand in his. They spent the next hour walking in silence, his skin warm against hers.

“Let’s stop here,” Kellan said abruptly and gestured toward a lovely patch of wild meadow grass dotted with purple and yellow flowers. “We need to eat before we go into the Wilds.”

Blue didn’t argue. Her knees felt strangely shaky, and her heart seemed to tremble in her chest when she looked at the yawning expanse of darkness that spread out before them just past the edge of the meadow they were in.