Still wary of the pendant’s power and her altered eyesight, Imogen tapped the edge of the bridge with her walking stick. The crack of wood on stone sounded solid enough, and she took one cautious step onto the deck, praying fervently she wasn’t about to step out into clear space and a very long fall to her death.

The moment her feet touched the bridge surface, her ears popped, and the vertigo that plagued her a moment earlier struck full force. She staggered sideway, coming up hard against a parapet. Her vision swirled before clearing at the same time her roiling stomach lurched to a merciful stop. An ivy leaf tickled her nose, and she swatted it away.

The bridge hadn’t changed—still abandoned, and decrepit, and beautiful despite its flaws. Imogen leaned between two parapets to glimpse the river so far below. Were she not given the Blessed Sight by the pendant—“Blessed, my arse,” she muttered sourly—she’d die from the fright of finding herself floating in midair.

The intense vertigo left her sweating, and with a profound sense that, while the bridge hadn’t changed, her sense of place—of being—certainly had. Every instinct she possessed sounded an internal warning. There was magery here, old and powerful. She didn’t need such obvious visual proof or Niamh’s sorcerous talents to feel the almost suffocating weight of enchantment in the air.

The twilight deepened, turning the sky lavender, then indigo as night fell fast. Imogen didn’t want to risk losing the bridge if she stayed on this side of it until morning, and she had no intention of camping on the deck. She inhaled a breath, clutched her stick in a white-knuckled grip and strode across the span. The feeling of otherness strengthened as she traversed the deck and was soon accompanied by the certainty that something watched her. Her scalp prickled. She held the walking stick with both hands, turning it from journey aid to weapon.

Only her footsteps echoed back to her ears. No calls of nightbirds or the buzzing chorus of insects broke the silence that swallowed the bridge. Even the wind that almost blasted her off her spot on the rock had died. The ivy strangling the bridge beneath its entwining hold rustled, as if commanded by a different, softer breeze. An unpleasant smell drifted to Imogen’s nose: decomposing vegetation and stagnant water.

The statues she’d glimpsed earlier stood sentry as she passed. Her curiosity overrode her fear of the bridge disappearing beneath her feet, and she paused at a few of the carved images that were still whole and unbroken. Men and women were represented, some crowned, others not, their haughty, aristocratic faces captured forever in ageless stone. Imogen wondered if these were long dead rulers of Tineroth, their graven forms set to stand guard over the entrance to a forgotten city.

One statue made her pause. It differed from the others in that its visage had been chipped away, scored and blunted until the features were no longer distinguishable. Violence, not weathering, had obscured the face, as if those who had defaced the statue had left it standing as a message—and a warning.