Page 33 of Crown of Darkness
I sit up. “But why?”
“I don’t know why. My informant can’t get close to Clydain. There’s a mist there that encircles the place and whenever he enters it, he wakes up miles away from where he entered with no recollection of what happened within the mist.”
Rumors of the place being haunted. A magical mist that wipes away memories.
“Fuck,” I whisper. “Sheishiding something.”
“Wagons go into the mist according to my spy. He’s seen enormous piles of metal in the back of them. And caught a glimpse of strange lights flashing in the skies over the keep, from a distance. At first I didn’t think anything of it, but his reports kept coming and any secret conspiracy your mother is involved in needs to be investigated. And so I sent Lysander. It was the last time we saw him until today. He vanished, and the first we heard of him was when you said you’d seen him curse-twisted into bane form.”
“Lysander got through the mist.” The only one in Asturia with the power to lay such a powerful curse is my mother. “And she cursed him so he wouldn’t be able to report. But how did he escape her? Why would she not simply lock him away?”
Or kill him.
No, that one’s easy to guess. If she killed him, then she could no longer use him as a weapon against us.
If she killed him, it only hurts once.
“Bane’s are unpredictable and Lysander is… was one of my best.” There’s a roughness to his voice that tells me he feels his friend’s loss too.
I catch his fingers and squeeze them. “We’ll get him back.”
“Vi.” Dark lashes flutter over his eyes, but he squeezes my hand. “You saw what he was like today. Lysander loved you. I would never have thought anyone could turn him against you, and yet he was going to kill you.”
I press a finger to his lips. “We’ll get him back. We arenotgoing to let her win this game.”
A sense of implacability sweeps over his face. “I won’t put you at risk. He could kill you.”
“Then he can stay locked away until we work out how we’re going to break his curse.” Rolling toward him, I press a gentle kiss to his lips. “If I can break one curse—”
Thiago captures my face between his hands, holding me there. “You arenotgoing to ask the Mother of Night to return him to his fae form.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to me.
I nip at his thumb. “I was desperate to save your life. This is different. We have time. We have opportunities. Surely someone knows how to break a bane’s curse. Unless you just happen to have his true love locked away in a tower somewhere, ready to bestow her kiss upon his lips? That might work.”
Thiago breathes out a laugh. “I forget how much you’ve forgotten.”
“Why?”
“Lysander has no true love. And certainly not one wearing skirts.”
“Ah.” Something tickles my memories just then. It’s just a flash of a sinfully devastating face swimming into view, a wicked smile sent from a man who looks disarmingly like Baylor—if Baylor ever met a smile he didn’t drag into a back alley and stab.
Singing in the background. Something ribald about a sailor named Thom, who had the prettiest lips a sailor ever did have.
And then it’s gone.
“Memory?” Thiago murmurs.
It vanishes like the ghostly flutter of butterfly wings against my skin.
“I think so.” I can never predict them. But I do know one thing. “Lysander gets along well with Finn, doesn’t he?”
There’d been too much mischief in his smile.
“Terribly well. I try to keep them apart as much as possible.”
I sigh as I push away from him. “We’ll get him back.”
