To overthrow the cruel King who brutally slaughtered her foremothers, the last surviving water witch Elara Consuli must team up with novice warrior Juda Vikaris from the Serpent Order and realise an ancient prophecy, before the blood-thirsty ruler d...
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Juda stared into the water, letting his fingertips test for its warmth, and seeing images of her—her hand in the pool, her as she waded into it, her as she went under, sinking into its black depths.
On resurfacing, she hadn't even realised how long she'd been down there, but Juda had known. He'd felt the time as if it was a torture, something that had torn at his chest as if he were in the bloody square of the training yard, his opponent's scimitar slicing and stripping pieces of his flesh from his body. Slowly.
She'd not told him how long it would take if she were a Chosen, nor had she said when to give up all hope of her resurfacing.
He wondered then, as his fingers lingered in the warm water, what she would say if she knew that he had relinquished hope? If she knew what he had done while she had been discovering her story? As the waters had torn at her chest, torturing her with the truth of her mother's death?
Even if I do not resurface, do not look for me. Take whatever treasures remain here and leave the temple.
But Juda had only ever been interested in one treasure held within the Naiad temple. It's all he and Roth had ever been interested in. And now he had it. They had it.
He should have felt elated. All the planning. All the time spent opening the shaft, digging in the pitch darkness, with only Aleina to whisper light into his ear and show him the way.
Bachaeia es elidan. My blood is the way. It's the only way.
It wasn't. And he wished with his entire being that he could tell Elara it wasn't, but that would mean telling her what he'd really been searching for in the cavern under the citadel, and maybe worse, tell her that he'd not loitered long at the pool's edge after she'd disappeared under the surface. Was it a lack of hope that had taken him from her side, or a desperation to complete the task set for him by his guardian? To finish what they had started there?
Juda roused himself from his thoughts as she walked into the bath chamber, peeling her sodden undertunic from her skin, and dropping it to the floor.
There was no sweet musk and redberry here—Roth had never been one for perfumed oils and such luxury—but there was damson soap, and the subtle, fruit-infused scent was a familiarity that Juda hadn't realised he'd missed so much since living in the novice barracks.
The bath itself was no grand thing like that of Mica Koh-Miralus' house, it was just a free-standing marbled basin, large enough that the people of Grimefell would stare at it in envy, and more so at the waters it contained. Even Juda had the decency to hold a sense of shame to look at the water he had warmed, knowing that just yestertide he had slaughtered those who had fought with him to possess such as this.
Kneeling at the head of the bath, he watched Elara remove the last of her clothing, his gaze finding that wound on her back he had stitched with a hot needle and silk thread when they had returned here not so long ago. He'd left her lying on her stomach on his bed, recovering from the pain of the stitching, her breath like the shallow whimpers of a wounded animal, as he'd come to heat the water. This time, he'd had no velam root to give her to dullen the pain and it had taken until the bath had finally been filled for her soft gasps to fade.
