Solstice. She had great plans for that day. Despite the trappings of luxury and privilege, she was a prisoner of Castagher and Hayden her jailer. He had sent soldiers to abduct her and bring her to him. She had been the proof he required to claim rights of trade from Berberi, the bride promised to him when he was merely a child and she a babe hardly a week old.

She had listened, numb, when he explained why a small army had scoured two kingdoms to find her and deliver her to his care. Even his knowledge of her curse didn’t deter him from planning their union. She wasn’t a beloved bride, merely a means to an end, as many aristocratic women were in matters of marriage.

She despised Hayden for his single-minded ambition and casual disregard of her feelings, but she reserved her greatest loathing for Dradus, his sorcerer. Sly, deceptive and calculating, he made Imogen’s skin crawl with revulsion. He’d earned her enmity when he used her to break Cededa, intensifying it to hatred when he revealed how he found her on their return trip to Castagher.

“I raised Niamh’s body from the grave for a little chat.” He smirked at her horrified inhalation. “You can learn a lot of from the dead if you ask the right questions. The witch told me where to find you.”

“You’re fouler than the bottom of a privy pit,” Imogen spat. “I hope she curses you from her grave.”

His smirked deepened. “Like she cursed you?” Imogen froze, and the smirk turned to a full-blown shark’s grin. “She didn’t tell you, did she? Took her secret to the grave.” Dradus folded his hands under his chin. “Niamh of Leids became the castoff mistress of King Varn when he married your mother. A woman scorned is a dangerous creature; a sorceress scorned, a lethal one. She laid a death geas on your parents, but something went wrong, and you inherited the curse. You killed two wet nurses, a maid and your parents before someone figured out you were the assassin.”

Imogen wondered when all the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room. She couldn’t breathe. Dradus watched her with a reptilian gaze and the smirk she so badly wanted to strike off his face with one killing blow. “You’re lying,” she said. “Niamh would never cast such a geas, if only because she loved me and liked children. She’d never put me at such risk.”

She did believe; however, in her foster mother’s need for revenge. Niamh’s journal revealed how much she loved Varn. Broken-hearted, enraged, she might well have sought vengeance against him and the woman he took to wife.

The mage shook his head. “Niamh didn’t know Selene was pregnant. When she discovered what happened and that Varn’s sister planned to have you drowned, she stole you away and disappeared.”