The Ulk Bog leaned close. “He has been searching for a way to send the Moric into your world for some time. But for that to happen, it was necessary to find someone in your world willing to help. He found those people, and he used them as his tool. Whoever they were had no idea what the Straken Lord intended, but were only interested in disposing of you. That was what your betrayer knew—that using the magic would banish you to the world of the Jarka Ruus. That, and nothing more. Your betrayers knew nothing of the exchange, nothing of the way the magic really worked, nothing of the trade that was necessary to bring you here. The Straken Lord was careful to keep that secret hidden.”

As well it should have been, she thought. But she wasn’t sure that knowing a trade was required would have stopped whoever was desperate enough to send her into the Forbidding.

“But why was I brought here if not to mate with Tael Riverine?” she pressed.

“You miss the point, Straken!” Weka Dart snapped. “Bringing you here was never what mattered! What mattered was sending the Moric into your world!”

She shook her head. “Why?”

“So that it could destroy the barrier that keeps us locked away! So that it could free the Jarka Ruus!”

Now she understood. The Moric had been sent to complete the task that the Dagda Mor had failed to accomplish more than five hundred years earlier—to break down the walls of the prison behind which the dark things of Faerie had been shut since before the dawn of Man.

Her mind raced. To do that, it would have to destroy the Ellcrys, the magic-born Elven tree that had been created to ward the Forbidding. How would it manage that, when the tree was always so closely guarded?

More important, how could she stop it from happening?

“Does the Moric have a way to destroy the barrier?” she asked Weka Dart.

He shook his head. “It was to find one once it crossed over into your world. It is very talented and very smart. It will have done so by now.”

She ignored the fear that rushed through her at the thought that the Ulk Bog might be right. “Do you have a way to get me out of here?” she asked quickly.

On the landing above them, at the top of the stairway, a door opened and closed with a thud. Footsteps sounded on the stone steps, coming down.

“On the floor!” he hissed at her, and darted away.

She threw herself back down, sprawling in the same position in which he had found her, her heart pounding, her muscles tensed. Don’t move, she told herself. Don’t do anything.

The steps approached her cell and came to a stop. A silence settled in like morning mist.

Eyes closed, body still, she waited.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

TWENTY-NINE