Page 59 of The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora #1)

Isanara, of course, refused to stay up in the room behind a locked and spelled door.

What if you need my protection? I needed a moment to catch my breath, but between the broad-shouldered man in front of me and the stubborn teenage dragon winding between my legs on the stairs, of all places , I knew that was nothing but a fantasy.

I paused at the bottom of the stairs, ice coalescing in my chest.

The tavern had been busy by Velora’s standards when I went up hours before, but the numbers had swelled to at least twice as many patrons in the interim. More than had been in the tavern in Canmar, more than I’d seen in any of the taverns I’d frequented in the months since my ouster from my coven.

I could not recall the last time I’d seen so many humans gathered together in one place.

Garrick paused as well, even with me behind him. Was it the Lifebind that made him so attuned to my movements, or something else?

“This is the road that leads to the Sea of Forgetting and eventually to the Southern Fate,” he said.

I knew that. I’d traveled this road to reach Kyna and Kyrelle’s cottage a dozen times over the fifty years. Or rather, I’d avoided this road. But that was essentially the same thing in this instance. I’d surely seen this tavern at one point or another, if only from the outside.

“But why is it so busy?”

Garrick sighed, and I recognized the grimness in the sound. “They recognize the death throes of Velora the same way you do.”

Desperation and stupidity. That was how I’d come to characterize humanity over the last several hundred years.

But what I saw in that tavern… yes, both of those things.

There was something else, too. It looked suspiciously like hope.

These people truly believed they’d be able to escape Velora’s curse.

The drinks in their hands probably helped with that.

“Care to peddle your spells for coin?” Garrick smirked.

My hand flew to the coven mark between my brows.

Garrick caught my wrist, his hand encircling mine so fully his fingers overlapped by two full joints. “Do not hide who you are, Koryn. Not a single part of yourself. No one will touch you tonight.”

At the Mercy Gate, I’d used my teeth to rip the points from my nails, to hide the markers of my resurrection. They’d grown out in the intervening weeks, but I had not filed them to points. I promised myself that once we returned to our room, I would do exactly that. No more hiding.

I took the final step down into the tavern’s common room.

Garrick parted the crowd, leading us to a table positioned along the wall with quick access to the rear exit and an easy view of the rest of the room.

The lone occupant deserted their seat without us asking.

Whether it was my coven mark or Garrick’s stature…

more likely the weapons he’d insisted on strapping back on before we came down.

Garrick waited until I was seated with Isanara at my side. She was too large for a chair, though I half expected her to climb up into my lap.

“I would be better placed to protect you if I did,” she sassed, listening in on my thoughts.

“You are conspicuous enough as it is.” That might be the real reason the crowd had parted. Dragons were creatures of legend and lore. None of the beings in this tavern were long-lived enough to remember when they roamed Velora freely. Hell, neither was I.

Garrick’s eyes flicked between me and Isanara. I wondered if we shared some sort of strange, telltale expression when we spoke mind to mind. If we did, Garrick would certainly be the one to figure it out.

“I will order us food,” he said before tracing a path back to where the busy barkeep held court.

Sitting on her hind legs, Isanara’s head was almost even with mine.

I was not sure I enjoyed the experience of having her that close as I methodically scanned the tavern’s occupants.

I did not plan on selling any spells, but I applied the same skills of observation that I’d honed in the months before entering the Mercy Gate.

There were several prostitutes, probably in residence in the rooms on the second floor of the tavern.

All were rail thin. Despite the popularity of this stop on the way to the Southern Fate, the proprietor was not feeding them well.

My stomach twisted at the injustice, but I ignored it.

The only human left that I cared about was Kyrelle, I reminded myself.

“Maybe I chose incorrectly,” Isanara snapped.

“Excuse me?”

“I ought to have chosen a witch less given to delusions.”

Before I could argue back, she flicked her deadly tail across the scarred tabletop. I followed the direction of that point, across several occupied tables, a man kissing a prostitute’s bosom, until I found Garrick.

I could not even argue back, not with a being who could hear the thoughts in my head.

Instead, I ignored her and continued to examine the tavern’s occupants.

There were no children, though that was not surprising.

They were too precious to be out in public like this.

There were families, though. A woman in her twenties sat beside what could only be a brother, while across from them an older couple sipped from a shared glass of wine.

Perhaps the old woman’s fruitfulness, bearing not one child but two, had convinced them to linger longer in Velora, believing they would escape the ravages of the curse.

But here they were, on the road to a desperate salvation just like the rest.

I counted heads, trying to judge their potential paths.

This far south, anyone seeking reliable passage out of Velora would travel around the southeast curve of the mountains until they found a port with ships leaving across the Southern Fate.

But there were other, cheaper ways off of Velora.

For those who could not muster enough coin, the Sea of Forgetting beckoned.

The passage required a stop on the Dead Isle, the birthplace of the witches.

Not even I had been there, nor any member of my coven.

Tirybas was a name whispered in our darkest rituals, in the spells that called for offerings of blood.

To try and negotiate the Sea of Forgetting without stopping to pay homage to the witches was to court death. To set foot upon the Dead Isle meant facing whatever horrors remained after thousands of years.

I continued scanning the room. The faces with hope would seek the Southern Fate. Those with only desperation were bound to an even more dangerous fate. And none of it was a concern of mine. If I made it through the Seven Gates, everyone in Velora would be better off.

A knot of onlookers had formed around two men and a woman playing thrall.

The triangular board between them was drawn onto the table with chalk, their pieces each unique.

Even after hundreds of years, thrall was still a popular game, in part because it could be played using items of little value.

Carved rocks or wood could make the pieces.

Anyone could draw the board. And playing the game of skill gave the desperate humans of Velora the illusion that they still had some control over their lives.

There wasn’t much coin left, so other items changed hands as the onlookers placed wagers. A bit of ribbon, a heel of hard cheese. Two men bickered over the value of a prostitute.

But it was the quiet patrons lurking in corners that worried me more.

“You are a quiet patron lurking in a corner,” Isanara pointed out.

“Exactly.”

She made her own perusal of the tavern, then finished by snapping her fangs at the woman seated nearest to us, who quickly vacated her chair. I rolled my eyes.

I understood her point too well. Garrick was dangerous.

I was dangerous. Even without Isanara at my side, we were conspicuous.

I’d learned during the months between leaving my coven and entering the temple that the less conspicuous someone tried to be, the more they tried to hide, the more dangerous they were. The more unpredictable.

My eyes snagged on a head of overgrown wine-red hair framed between two blonde women.

Nash.

“I hate being right.”

“No, you don’t,” Isanara snorted.

We should have stayed up in our rooms. I should never have brought Isanara down into this fray. The handful of people who’d seen her on the way up spreading rumors about a dragon could not be more dangerous than two dozen drunken, desperate humans having confirmation of one.

One of the blonde women threw back her head in an overzealous laugh.

Nash watched her breasts bounce, the hunger on his face turning my stomach.

I knew his crime from the Justice Gate. I should have let Garrick kill him after the Mercy Gate when I’d had the chance.

Any crime he committed from then onward could be laid directly at my door.

Nash tossed back his red waves and looked past the woman who’d climbed into his lap. His eyes locked with mine. He’d known I was there, had surely seen us enter and now knew we’d taken one of the rooms above the tavern.

Slowly, with malice curling the corners of his mouth, he shifted his gaze from me to my familiar. He examined her with open, deliberate leisure, just to remind me that he could. I’d brought her down here, I’d exposed her to him.

A low, threatening growl rolled out from between Isanara’s jaws.

I made a sound to match it.

Garrick emerged from the crowd, two metal platters balanced in one impossibly large hand while the other lingered near the hilt of his greatsword. He only had to look at my face before the implied threat became real and his hand closed around the weapon.

“Back corner, third from the left,” I said, forcing myself to stay in my seat.

I watched as Garrick found Nash, though his brow barely creased before he turned back and set the food on the scarred table between us.

“It seems we were not the only supplicants drawn by the promise of a soft bed and a meal we did not have to cook.”

Garrick lifted one silvery brow. “How many meals have you cooked since the Mercy Gate?”

I blinked across the table at him. What a luxury it must be to feel so confident in one’s own abilities that the threat of impending death was no more than a nuisance.

He slid a set of utensils wrapped in a threadbare napkin across the table. When I did not reach for it, he leaned forward, bracing his forearms against the wood and crowding into my space so that I could see nothing but him.

“No one will touch you.”

Garrick did not touch me, but his words did. I felt them in the crevices of my body, setting the delicate hairs on end, in the recesses of my soul, where I’d only ever been alone.

Beside me, Isanara decided that the occupants of the next table were getting too comfortable.

She snapped her tail, swinging the spiked end close enough to take a chunk out of the wood of their table.

The woman fainted, her companion gathering her up and dragging her away as Isanara hissed through her teeth.

“You are drawing too much attention.” I reached for the bundle of utensils as Garrick settled back in his chair.

Isanara wove her head side to side in a threatening serpentine motion. “Let them look. If they try any more, I will take their hands and then their eyes for good measure.”

“For someone who does not eat humans, you seem to enjoy imagining how you will eviscerate them.”

“Everyone needs a hobby.”

I could not keep my exasperated huff inside. Garrick tracked the motion, his gaze lingering a beat longer than was necessary on my pursed lips.

“My promise extends to your familiar,” he said, reaching for his own fork and knife.

I paused with a bite of nondescript meat halfway to my mouth. “What happened to proving to you that I can defend myself?”

“Just because you can protect yourself does not mean that you should always have to.”

I’d been protecting myself for four hundred years because I had been alone for four hundred years. Even when my family was alive, even when I was dead. I heard what he said, but I was not sure I was quite ready to believe it.

We ate in companionable silence, the din of the crowd more than making up for our lack of conversation.

I tried and failed not to watch Garrick, who was busy tracking my every bite.

The boiled potatoes and stringy meat were not seasoned or prepared to the standard Garrick had accustomed me to.

I did not risk inflating his ego by telling him.