“One problem at a time, Imogen,” she told herself and set about heating water and laying out clean towels on the table. A bottle of lavender oil joined the supplies and soon she sat down at the table, hissing her misery each time she cleaned one of the scratches on her neck or chest and applied the oil.
The scratches, though painful, weren’t deep, and she’d been careful to clean them thoroughly, despite the discomfort. She had every faith in the lavender oil she’d extracted last summer. Lavender was a good wound healer, and Niamh had sworn by its medicinal properties.
The mirror still lay in pieces on the floor, shards reflecting the gold-lit path that still ran from Imogen’s feet and passed under the cottage door. A dull ache settled in the pit of her stomach. “Mother, if you rise from the earth this night to redden my backside for my carelessness, I won’t be in the least surprised. I am so sorry.”
She stood, cleared the table and set to sweeping the floor clean of the mirror’s remains. The strange tingling under her skin had lessened but also expanded to other parts of her body, an ever-present reminder something now shared space with the curse inside her. Revulsion surged into her throat, carried on a stream of bile that she fought down with effort.
A key and a map to vanished Tineroth.
Niamh’s flowing script replayed in her mind’s eye, and Imogen paused in her sweeping. How did one find a city that had vanished thousands of years earlier? She glanced down at her feet and the luminescent path. One looked with ensorcelled eyes.
She groaned and rested her forehead on the tip of the broom handle. “Ah, Mother. You might have warned me.”
The pendant wasn’t the key or the map to Tineroth; she was. It had only served as the trigger to activate a spell, one created by a mage-king and given with his blessing to an unwitting witch who’d bequeathed it to her unknowing daughter. Imogen’s disbelief in the Undying King’s ability to break her curse didn’t matter now. She had to seek him out simply to extract his nasty little artifact from her body and restore her eyesight to normal.
A simmering rage settled in her already queasy stomach, and she wielded the broom against the pile of broken glass as if it were a weapon. “Just wait until we meet, Sire. The second you get this thing out of me, I’m going to make you eat it.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Since she’d have to travel to Tineroth on foot, she packed light, stuffing only the basic supplies into her knapsack – a wool blanket to keep her warm at night, dried rations to keep her fed, and two flasks of waters in case she traveled far from a water source. She tucked a small coin purse in her bodice and strapped a skinning knife to the belt at her waist. Niamh’s journal found safe haven in a pocket of her cloak. The cloak would be a hindrance as she traveled through the forest, but Imogen never went without it if she ventured from the safety of their plot of land. It concealed her from head to toe in faded black, and without Niamh’s protective illusion spells, she needed it now more than ever. With her wide-brimmed, veiled hat, a sturdy walking stick in her hand and an affected hobble, she looked like an old widowed crone. Poor, sickly, and of no interest to anyone. Or so Imogen hoped.