Another man might accept defeat, but Dradus hadn’t risen to the status he occupied by giving up so easily. Somewhere, on the other side of the gorge, Tineroth hid in plain sight. He was certain of it, felt it in his bones, heard it in the strange, wordless cant filling his ears.

He turned his horse away from the edge and back toward the newly erected camp. Nothing stayed hidden forever. He would find Tineroth and the girl who hid there. He had time.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Imogen stared up at the remaining two spires of a tumbled-down temple. Ivy dripped from their roofs in lacy curtains, creeping toward the flat table of an altar open to the sky. “Tell me of this temple. What god did you build it for, and did you worship him yourself?”

“Not a god,” Cededa said beside her. “A goddess. And no, I didn’t worship her. I worshipped no one, except myself on occasion.” His amused look held more than a touch of self-mockery. “I don’t even remember her name. A deity of spring maybe, or fruit trees. I recall her supplicants offering pomegranates.”

“And you weren’t a supplicant.”

“Hardly.”

In the three weeks since her arrival in Tineroth, Imogen occupied her time with exploring the fabled city and killing its king with her touch. He stood at the top of the temple steps with her, looking none the worse for her fatal caresses. Dressed in worn silk that had once been finer than any ell of cloth she’d ever seen, he surveyed the fallen worship house with a bored expression.

She didn’t truly believe he could lift her curse, but she couldn’t discount what she saw. What she felt. Cededa had touched her face with a bare hand and didn’t drop dead at her feet. That alone had stunned her almost speechless. And she had touched him many times since then at his invitation. He might not possess the ability to break the curse, but his resistance to it left her almost as euphoric as he when he discovered the nature of her malediction, though his joy was a macabre thing. Never had she met anyone so thrilled at the idea of dying.

He was a mystery. Sublime, beguiling, malevolent. Cededa had been a model host to his unexpected guest, but Niamh’s words were never far from her thoughts.

“His people called him Cededa the Fair, then Cededa the Butcher.”

Even without those disturbing words, she recalled the effigy on the catafalque, the cruelty captured in marble, untouched by time or weathering. He stole her breath, and not just because of his physical beauty.

Cededa motioned her to follow him, and they picked their way through the cascade of rubble spilling across the temple floor. “The father of one of my wives designed this temple,” he said. “This one and several others throughout the city. I’ll take you to see them, if you wish. One is still mostly intact.”