My heart—it faltered. I felt it. Oh, gods, I felt it miss a beat, skipping two, and then sluggishly trying to keep up, to restart. And then it failed. Everything seized in me. My lungs. My muscles. Every organ. My eyes were wide, my gaze fixed as my entire body strained for breath, for relief, and then…death swept in so sweetly, it swallowed me whole. I drowned in its lush, dark spice.

Chapter 8

There was no light, no color, and I floated in there for a while, untethered, hollow and cold. I didn’t think. I didn’t feel. I just existed in the nothingness…

Until I saw a speck of silvery light that seemed a world away from me. The illumination throbbed, and with each beat, it expanded. Wispy tendrils seeped out from the edges, stretching across the void. Slowly, I drifted toward it.

Sound came back without warning. A voice so deep and powerful that it found me in the nothing, caught hold of me so I was no longer slipping toward the silvery light. The voice held me captive.

“Drink. Keep drinking,” it ordered. “That’s it. Keep swallowing. Drink, Princess, drink for me…”

The words repeated themselves over and over for what felt like an eternity before they faded away, and I was once again in the stillness. There was no silvery light now. Nothing but a warm and empty darkness with the sweet, comforting scent of…lilacs.

I stayed there until flashes of muted color surrounded me. Reds. Silvers. Golds. They swirled together, and I slipped through them, falling back through the nights, through the years, until I was small and helpless, standing before my father.

I could see him clearly, his hair a coppery red in the lamplight. His square jaw covered in several days-worth of a beard. Straight nose. Eyes the color of pine.

“What a pretty, little flower. What a pretty poppy.” Papa leaned in, kissing the crown of my head. “I love you more than all the stars in the sky.”

“I love you more than all the fish in the sea.”

“That’s my girl.” Papa’s hands trembled on my cheeks. “Cora?”

Momma came forward, her face pale. “You should’ve known she would find a way down here.” She glanced over her shoulder. “You trust him?”

“I do,” he said as Momma took my hand in hers. “He’s going to lead us to safety….”

Wind roared like thunder through the inn, coming from a place that was not here. Voices rose, ones that didn’t come from Papa or Momma, but from above, somewhere beyond the whirlpool of colors at the other end of the nothingness.

“Who remains?” a male voice reached me, the same one that had found me when I was drifting toward the silvery light, but it was now hoarse and faint, weary and weakened.

“Just us,” another deep voice replied, this one strained. “We don’t have to worry about the guards. I think Jasper decided it would be best if they were…no more.”