Liam swayed a little as he stared into the Fae Lord’s gray eyes and that voice wrapped around him. Safe. Yes, he wanted Breanna to be safe. There were nights when he had nightmares, when he saw again the things he’d thought were fever dreams during the days when Padrick, the Baron of Breton, had helped him get home after the Inquisitors had tried to kill him. There were nights when the nightmares were the same except that the faces belonged to women he knew—Breanna, Nuala, Fiona. Even his mother, Elinore. Yes, he wanted them to be safe. Wanted…With a little help, the Fae Lord could take them someplace safe, someplace…

“Don’t you want her to be safe?” the Fae Lord said in that so-persuasive voice.

Oakdancer suddenly reared. Thrown off balance, Liam struggled to keep his seat. He felt strange, as if the world had been muffled for a moment and now reappeared with painfully sharp intensity.

That persuasive voice was still talking about safety, still promising to keep Breanna safe.

Persuasive. Persuasion. Wasn’t that one of the Fae’s gifts, the ability to use persuasion magic to convince people to do what they might not do otherwise? That bastard was using it on him in order to have Breanna, was using his own fear for her safety as a hammer against his will.

Liam’s temper flashed. Heat flooded through him beneath his skin. He knew what it was now, knew he was drawing power from the Great Mother’s branch of fire. The heat cleared his head, burned clean in his heart. When he looked at the Fae Lord, that voice was no more persuasive than the eastern barons had been at the council meeting when they’d tried to convince the rest of them to follow their example and vote for the decrees that would turn all of Sylvalan into a horror for every woman who lived there.

“What happened to the other ones?” Liam asked, breaking the Fae Lord’s repetitious assurance of safety.

The Fae Lord studied Liam’s face and didn’t seem pleased by what he saw. “The other ones?”

“If Brightwood is an Old Place, what happened to the witches who were there?”

The man hesitated a moment too long.

Liam leaned forward, the power filling him becoming uncomfortably hot. “Where were the Fae when the Inquisitors showed up at Brightwood the last time? Where was this protection in the other Old Places where witches have died? If it didn’t inconvenience the precious Fae, you wouldn’t give a damn if they died or not. No, Fae Lord, I wouldn’t trust my sister to a man like you. So go back to Tir Alainn and stay away from us.”

The man glared at him. Then he disappeared and a black horse, with flickers of fire in its mane and tail, reared, wheeled, and galloped up the shining road.