by Grace Draven
It swung from her fingers, silver catching the candlelight so that it shimmered. At some point, after Imogen dropped it back in the box, the pendant had again reconfigured itself. The serpentine knotwork was now a lacy filigree that reminded her of crossing paths and roads that led to endless loops.
She eyed it closely. Keys bore many designs, especially magical ones. Set within the hidden spot of a wall or inserted into a decorative urn, any lock might open with the key made to match it. But a map as well? That was more of a puzzle, and Niamh’s journal had yet to reveal that small secret.
The pendant half rotated one way and then the other on its chain as Imogen admired its new shape. Except for the eerie propensity to shift and writhe, the key was a thing of beauty, made to catch the eye of woman or man. Despite her misgivings and coaxed by an urging she couldn’t explain, she slipped the chain over her head.
The silver lay warm against her breastbone, and Imogen wondered anew at the magic that made something so delicate in appearance feel so weighty. Wanting to see how the pendant looked on her, she opened the blanket chest at the foot of Niamh’s bed and pulled out an ornate hand mirror.
Backed in silver decorated with curving designs of scrolls and roses, the mirror had been an endless source of temptation and at least two swats to the backside when Imogen was growing up. Using it to play pretend-I’m-a-queen had consequences.
Niamh, usually generous to a fault in accommodating her only child’s wishes, had been uncharacteristically territorial with the mirror and had punished Imogen for sneaking it out of the blanket chest. She’d never explained her possessiveness, and after a second paddling and early trip to bed without supper for her transgression, Imogen lost any desire to ask why. Now, years later, with Niamh’s journal to enlighten her, she suspected the mirror had been a treasured gift from King Varn.
She lifted the glass and eyed her reflection. Hers was a forgettable face and one only Niamh had seen as it actually was. Strong enchantments fooled everyone else into seeing an old woman who might have been Niamh’s mother instead of her daughter. Imogen looked beyond the pale skin and brown hair to the pendant resting against her collarbones.
A truly lovely piece. She traced the new design with one finger, waiting to see if the pendant would do as it had with Niamh and wrap a silver tendril around her knuckle. It didn’t move but sent small vibrations across the surface of her skin.
Imogen jerked her hand away as silver threads of lace suddenly unraveled and spread across her chest like a contagion of climbing ivy. Imogen’s admiration turned to terror, and she cried out as the metal strands slithered up her neck and over her shoulders beneath her shirt. The mirror fell from her hand, shattering glass across the floor as she clawed at her skin.
The crawling feeling halted just below her jaw, and her flesh stung where her nails had torn at the metal tendrils. “Oh gods,” she breathed. “What is this? What is this?” She ran her hand over what was now a filigreed collar and came away with a bloodied palm.
Heedless of the glass crunching beneath her shoes, she wrenched the door opened and stumbled outside—only to be greeted by a world gone topsy-turvy. What should have been a blanketing darkness that concealed anything beyond the weak corona of light spilling from her open door, was instead a shimmering miasma of illumination, as if thousands of fireflies swarmed the clearing around the cottage and the dark forest beyond.
Imogen gasped and blinked. Surely, she’d been made either blind or mad by the parasite encircling her neck and shoulders. But no amount of blinking diminished the lighted mist, and like the pendant, it began to take a defined shape. Vaporous, it coalesced into rigid lines that widened to create a single brightly lit path leading straight into the heart of the forest.
She backed into the house and slammed the door. The action dulled the brightness from outside but didn’t shut it out. The illuminated path started at the tip of her toes. Imogen took two steps back and the path followed, moving where she did as if tethered to her feet.
Imogen breathed hard, grasping for a measure of calm and some small understanding of what just happened. Oh gods, why did she have to put on that cursed pendant? “Foolish, Imogen,” she snarled. “How could you be so stupid?”
A tingling spread, sliding across her neck and shoulders, and she whimpered. The collar was growing again. She touched a spot below her neck and shuddered. The metal was gone, leaving in its place raised scars that mimicked its design. The tingling remained, not painful but unpleasant in a crawling, prickling way. Imogen bent and retrieved a shard of the mirror.
Sure enough, the reflection confirmed what she’d felt. The metal no longer shone as bright silver markings. Instead, it had melded into her skin, becoming part of her, leaving only a decorative scar marred by blood and scratches.
It was in her. Her heart banged against her ribs. Dear gods, whatever that thing was Niamh had received from the Tineroth mage-king, it had come alive and invaded her daughter. The thinnest thread holding Imogen’s panic at bay snapped. A high whine grew in her ears, and her vision narrowed to a single point that blurred with tears. She ripped at her clothes and her skin, weeping as she tried to claw the pendant out of her body.
“Get it out!” she shrieked to the silent walls. “Get it out!”
From a far distance, she thought she heard Niamh’s voice, stern, calming. “Stop it, Imogen.”
Respect and obedience for her mother came as second nature, and Imogen immediately halted her frantic dance of wounding and mutilation. She breathed hard, swiping at the tears dripping down her cheeks, leaving blood smears behind.
“Mother?” she called feebly. Silence answered her, but that one moment, when Imogen was sure she’d heard Niamh’s voice, broke the terror’s hold on her.
She inhaled slowly, regaining a measure of calm. The sharp pain of the scratches on her neck cleared her head a little more.
“One problem at a time, Imogen,” she told herself and set about heating water and laying out clean towels on the table. A bottle of lavender oil joined the supplies and soon she sat down at the table, hissing her misery each time she cleaned one of the scratches on her neck or chest and applied the oil.
The scratches, though painful, weren’t deep, and she’d been careful to clean them thoroughly, despite the discomfort. She had every faith in the lavender oil she’d extracted last summer. Lavender was a good wound healer, and Niamh had sworn by its medicinal properties.
The mirror still lay in pieces on the floor, shards reflecting the gold-lit path that still ran from Imogen’s feet and passed under the cottage door. A dull ache settled in the pit of her stomach. “Mother, if you rise from the earth this night to redden my backside for my carelessness, I won’t be in the least surprised. I am so sorry.”
She stood, cleared the table and set to sweeping the floor clean of the mirror’s remains. The strange tingling under her skin had lessened but also expanded to other parts of her body, an ever-present reminder something now shared space with the curse inside her. Revulsion surged into her throat, carried on a stream of bile that she fought down with effort.
A key and a map to vanished Tineroth.
Niamh’s flowing script replayed in her mind’s eye, and Imogen paused in her sweeping. How did one find a city that had vanished thousands of years earlier? She glanced down at her feet and the luminescent path. One looked with ensorcelled eyes.
She groaned and rested her forehead on the tip of the broom handle. “Ah, Mother. You might have warned me.”
The pendant wasn’t the key or the map to Tineroth. She herself was. It had only served as the trigger to activate a spell, one created by a mage-king and given with his blessing to an unwitting witch who’d bequeathed it to her unknowing daughter. Imogen’s disbelief in the Undying King’s ability to break her curse didn’t matter now. She had to seek him out simply to extract his nasty little artifact from her body and restore her eyesight to normal.
A simmering rage settled in her already queasy
stomach, and she wielded the broom against the pile of broken glass as if it were a weapon. “Just wait until we meet, Sire. The second you get this thing out of me, I’m going to make you eat it.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Since she’d have to travel to Tineroth on foot, she packed light, stuffing only the basic supplies into her knapsack – a wool blanket to keep her warm at night, dried rations to keep her fed, and two flasks of waters in case she traveled far from a water source. She tucked a small coin purse in her bodice and a strapped a skinning knife to the belt at her waist. Niamh’s journal found safe haven in a pocket of her cloak. The cloak would be a hindrance as she traveled through the forest, but Imogen never went without it if she ventured from the safety of their plot of land. It concealed her from head to toe in faded black, and without Niamh’s protective illusion spells, she needed it now more than ever. With her wide-brimmed, veiled hat, a sturdy walking stick in her hand and an affected hobble, she looked like an old widowed crone. Poor, sickly, and of no interest to anyone. Or so Imogen hoped.
The gold light running from her feet to some unknown, distant place beckoned her. She shrugged the knapsack over her shoulder, grabbed the rowan walking stick from the corner and shut the cottage door behind her. “Let’s get this over with,” she said and set off toward the glade, following the path that took her from everything familiar.
She made one brief stop at Niamh’s grave. The daffodils she’d left yesterday still looked freshly picked, and clusters of new grass blades peeked out between the crevices made by the stacked stone. By summer, the mound would be covered, a low green hill that housed the bones of the witch whose magic originated from the earth.
Imogen pulled back her veil, grateful for the cool breeze drifting across her too-warm skin. “A prayer to the gods for me, Mother, that your indebted king will remember your kindness to him.” She blew a kiss at the stones and set off for Tineroth.
After three days of trekking through the dense wood as she followed a path she suspected had doubled back on itself at least twice, she finally reached a deep gorge. The late afternoon sun sank below the trees behind her, casting sentinel shadows that stretched to the edge of the cliffs. Even this high up, Imogen heard the dull roar of water rushing below. She peered over the edge of the rock on which she stood to see the rope of a river snaking along the bottom of the gorge.
A powerful wind roared up from the yawning space, snapping her heavy braid like a whip. The gold path that had led her through dense woods and across fallow fields now stretched across the divide, cleaving a spectral road in thin air to the other side. A gathering darkness waited there, shaped by tall silhouettes rising out of ground fog that seemed to swirl with odd purpose.
Too tired to be frightened, Imogen groaned and rubbed the dull ache at her lower back. “Please tell me I don’t have to climb down this cliff to stay on the path.” Vertigo made her back away from her precarious perch, and she stared at the illuminated road, vexed by this sudden dilemma. “A key, a map and a road.” Her fingers traced the raised scars on her neck. “Can you be a bridge now? Or maybe a bird?”
As if in answer, a ripple of movement flowed down the golden path, rising in shimmers like summer heat off hot stone. Imogen squinted and stared harder, hoping what she saw was not a trick of the fading light but one of the pendant’s magic.
A bridge formed, stone by stone and stretched across the abyss like a giant’s broken ribcage, choked by weeds and climbing vines. A series of arches perforated by spandrels at its ends, the bridge looked as if it grew from the cliff face itself, a living anchor that bound the earth together and trapped the river below it. The bridge deck, constructed of pavers, looked wide enough to accommodate a heavy flow of carts and foot traffic. Parapets lined its edges, decorated at intervals with statues that stood watch over crowds and visitors who had long since disappeared.
Still wary of the pendant’s power and her altered eyesight, Imogen tapped the edge of the bridge with her walking stick. The crack of wood on stone sounded solid enough, and she took one cautious step onto the deck, praying fervently she wasn’t about to step out into clear space and a very long fall to her death.
The moment her feet touched the bridge surface, her ears popped, and the vertigo that plagued her a moment earlier struck full force. She staggered sideway, coming up hard against a parapet. Her vision swirled before clearing at the same time her roiling stomach lurched to a merciful stop. An ivy leaf tickled her nose, and she swatted it away.
The bridge hadn’t changed—still abandoned, and decrepit, and beautiful despite its flaws. Imogen leaned between two parapets to glimpse the river so far below. Were she not given the Blessed Sight by the pendant—“Blessed, my arse,” she muttered sourly—she’d die from the fright of finding herself floating in midair.
The intense vertigo left her sweating, and with a profound sense that, while the bridge hadn’t changed, her sense of place—of being—certainly had. Every instinct she possessed sounded an internal warning. There was magery here, old and powerful. She didn’t need such obvious visual proof or Niamh’s sorcerous talents to feel the almost suffocating weight of enchantment in the air.
The twilight deepened, turning the sky lavender, then indigo as night fell fast. Imogen didn’t want to risk losing the bridge if she stayed on this side of it until morning, and she had no intention of camping on the deck. She inhaled a breath, clutched her stick in a white-knuckled grip and strode across the span. The feeling of otherness strengthened as she traversed the deck and was soon accompanied by the certainty that something watched her. Her scalp prickled. She held the walking stick with both hands, turning it from journey aid to weapon.
Only her footsteps echoed back to her ears. No calls of nightbirds or the buzzing chorus of insects broke the silence that swallowed the bridge. Even the wind that almost blasted her off her spot on the rock had died. The ivy strangling the bridge beneath its entwining hold rustled, as if commanded by a different, softer breeze. An unpleasant smell drifted to Imogen’s nose: rotted vegetation and stagnant water.
The statues she’d glimpsed earlier stood sentry as she passed. Her curiosity overrode her fear of the bridge disappearing beneath her feet, and she paused at a few of the carved images that were still whole and unbroken. Men and women were represented, some crowned, others not, their haughty, aristocratic faces captured forever in ageless stone. Imogen wondered if these were long dead rulers of Tineroth, their graven forms set to stand guard over the entrance to a forgotten city.
One statue made her pause. It differed from the others in that its visage had been chipped away, scored and blunted until the features were no longer distinguishable. Violence, not weathering, had obscured the face, as if those who had defaced the statue had left it standing as a message—and a warning.
Drawn by invisible cords, Imogen approached the statue for a closer look. A man by the look of the sculpture, slim but powerful. She smiled at such vanity. “More like a gut from too much roast chicken and good wine. But who would want to be remembered that way, eh?” She winked at the faceless statue.
He loomed above her, raised on a square pedestal like his compatriots. Chiseled inscriptions decorated the base, ancient runes and symbols she couldn’t read. She reached out to trace them and just as quickly yanked her hand back as sharp pinpoints of pain penetrated her gloves and snapped against her fingers. Whatever sorcery cloaked this bridge, it didn’t want anyone touching the statues.
Still feeling as if she were being watched and afraid she’d committed a major offense, Imogen bowed to the statue. “My apologies,” she said and backed away. Niamh’s childhood reprimand of “keep your hands to yourself,” had far more layers of wisdom to it than safeguarding others from Imogen’s curse.
She resumed her journey across the bridge, picking up the pace until she reached the other side. Her relief at stepping on natural earth was short-lived. The luminescent path guiding her way dimmed beneath the fog she’d seen from the other side of
the gorge. White tendrils hugged her ankles and slipped over her knees, like ghostly hands of a crowd of children. The notion made her shiver, and she pushed the miasma away with Niamh’s walking stick.
“Stop that,” she admonished, and to her astonishment, the mist obeyed, rolling far enough away so that she could once more see open ground and the brightness of the enchanted road.
Imogen glanced behind her and forgot to breathe. The bridge faded, losing solidity until it was no more substantial than the fog before disappearing altogether. Fear threatened to overwhelm her hard-won calm. She crushed it down. Too late to turn back now. She gripped the walking stick, put her back to the gorge and followed the lit path, traveling deeper into vegetation that was more jungle than forest. The vines smothering the bridge grew here as well, carpeting the understory in a damp mat of tangled strands and leaves turned black with rot.
The trees themselves were far different and infinitely stranger than those across the gorge. Massive trunks and exposed root systems created crevasses the size of small caves, and they dripped a constant stream of moisture in air suddenly warm and saturated with water. Imogen’s cloak hung on her in a sodden shroud.
The exhaustion that had kept her fear at bay vanished, and she gritted her teeth to keep them from chattering as she struggled through the dense undergrowth to reach the silhouettes of buildings in the closing distance. The wood’s unnatural silence unnerved her. Even at night, forests came alive with evening predators. Those she was familiar with kept away, their instincts naturally warning them away from a human who carried Death under her skin, but she didn’t detect even the distant hooting of an owl or see the glow of small eyes from burrowing rodents in the shelter of the great trees.