“Where you can’t reach her, mage.”

Dradus scowled. He’d phrased his question carefully, or so he thought. Ghosts, like the fae, were bound to tell the truth, but sometimes their truth omitted important information. “Tell me her name and where she is at this moment.”

“Her name is Imogen, and she stands before the king of Tineroth.”

His eyes widened before narrowing to annoyed slits. “You cannot lie, spirit.”

“I do not lie.”

Tineroth and her last king were nothing more than fable. A favorite tale told by mothers to children and bards to villagers and townsmen, everyone had grown up with the story of old King Cededa, corrupted by immortality and doomed to imprisonment in a city caught between worlds. Dradus had been fascinated by the story as a child. He had no time for fairytales now.

He recited another spell, this one a geas of truth. “Tineroth isn’t real. Where is Imogen now?”

Niamh’s decaying, broken body shuddered a moment but remained upright. “Tineroth is real,” she insisted. “Imogen stands before its king.”

Dradus stroked his chin as a pulse of excitement shot through him. Maybe, just maybe the ghost told the truth. His eagerness to find Varn’s daughter trebled, spurred on by the possibilities of discovering the lost city. And all the treasures hidden within her. “Who is Tineroth’s king?”

“Cededa the Fair.”

He fired off several questions after that, no longer bothered by the reek emanating from the grave or the sharp scent of smoke filling his nostrils as the soldiers set fire to Niamh’s hovel. By the time he extracted the information he wanted from her revenant, Dradus had to bite his lip bloody to keep back the howl of triumph welling in his throat.

He reversed his spells and Niamh’s body crumpled in a heap in its resting place. The stench intensified, and he backed away to whistle for his makeshift gravediggers to return. They approached reluctantly, covering their mouths and noses with their hands. “Rebury her,” he ordered. “And do it right. I may have need of her bones later and don’t want some scavenger spreading them through half the woods.”

Their muttered curses fell on deaf ears as Dradus strode back to the clearing where fire consumed the last bits of the witch’s house, sending black plumes of smoke into the sky. Caught in visions of wealth untold, he hardly noticed. He’d return Varn’s daughter to Hayden, humbly accept the monarch’s gratitude and promptly disappear with treasure to make Hayden look like a pauper by comparison. This fool’s endeavor had suddenly turned in the right direction.

The troop’s captain approached him. “Nothing much to loot and no girl to be found. What do you wish to do?”

Dradus smiled. “Mount up. Thanks to a dead woman, I know where she is.”

Frustration blunted his initial giddiness now. Niamh’s answers to his questions had gotten him this far but no further. He had ridden to the cliff’s edge, expecting to find a lost city rising up from the landscape, an easy ride to its gates, an easy conquest once he and his men stormed through them. He hadn’t expected a wind-blasted gorge or an endless forest undisturbed by a village much less a city.