Page 44 of Heart of the Summer Queen

But none of that makes my guilt any less real. Ididtry to kill Elaric. And had I succeeded, everything I just witnessed could be my current reality.

“Adara,” Elaric says again, frown deepening, “are you all right? Can you hear me?”

I force myself to respond. A small nod.

He helps me up into a sitting position. Everything spins around me. Pain stabs through my temples.

“Gloomshrooms,” Elaric says gently. “Belinda has surrounded the woods with them. They weren’t here on my previous visits. Or if they were, I did not trigger them.”

When my senses return, I notice that we’re sitting in a cave, and the stone floor beneath us is coarse and hard. A blanket drapes over my lap, and another is folded up behind me as a makeshift pillow.

“How are you feeling?” Elaric asks, peering at me intently.

It is then that I realize tears flood my cheeks. Hastily I wipe them away with the back of my hand, though there’s no point since he’s already seen them. Did I call out during my hallucinations? Did he hear me crying for him?

“I’m fine,” I say quickly. “How long was I out cold for?”

“A few hours.”

I wince. “Didn’t the gloomshrooms affect you?”

“Only briefly.”

“I didn’t think poison worked on you?” As soon as I speak, I inwardly cringe at the memory of wielding poison against him myself.

“The gloomshrooms are a result of Belinda’s magic,” Elaric says. If the same awful thought flickers in his mind, he doesn’t show it. “While neither poison nor steel can harm me, magic is a different case.”

“I see.”

Perhaps the reason the gloomshrooms didn’t affect Elaric for as long is because Isidore’s magic already floods through his veins. Did the shorter duration also cause his hallucinations to be less severe than mine? Or did he receive no such visions?

Intrigued though I am, I don’t want to risk him asking me the same in return. Or else I’ll have to relive all those torturous moments again.

sixteen

We spend the rest of the night in the cave and then continue through the woods at first light. As we trudge on through the brambles and leaves, I take great care with every step. While Elaric is convinced Belinda will have only installed her gloomshrooms around the woods’ perimeter, I don’t want to take my chances. Not with the headache I woke up with this morning.

Elaric makes no comment about my slowness, however, and simply waits for me to catch up when I fall behind. If he’s growing impatient, his expression doesn’t at all show it.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” I say after a while. “When you sought Belinda to aid you in defeating Seraphina, weren’t you at all concerned by how she would react to your request? How did you know she wouldn’t instead capture you or kill you to protect a fellow witch?”

“I suppose it was a risk,” Elaric admits, sweeping aside a low-hanging branch and holding it there until I pass. “But Belinda and I were already on cordial terms.”

“You met her prior to asking for the sword?”

He nods. “It was while I was traveling beyond the kingdom, near a town in the far north called Midmore. I noticed an elderly woman huddled by the side of the road and called out to her, but she did not respond. When I dismounted and tapped her shoulder, she fell to the ground, unconscious. Fearing the worst, I hauled her onto my horse and rode into Midmore to find a healer.”

“I wonder how she was injured.”

“She never shared the reason with me.”

“Perhaps she was fighting another witch?”

“Perhaps.”

“So, did you find her a healer?”

“I did,” he says. “By morning, she had miraculously healed, and it was as if she had never been hurt. She granted me an invisibility potion for my aid, and though I asked if she was a witch, she merely laughed and told me her name was Belinda before disappearing.”

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