“I hope all this was worth it. Did Stefan tell you anything before the Atrika came for him?” Sarafina asked Claire, kneeling to check the pulse on a dark-haired male water witch. He had a nasty burn wound in his side, the material of his shirt seared onto the poor man’s skin.

Doing something like this—checking for someone’s pulse and half expecting not to find one—would have seemed inconceivable to her a month before. Hell, she probably would’ve tossed her cookies on viewing a wound like this one or having the scent of charred skin in her nose.

After all, that particular scent brought back some pretty bad memories.

But now not so much. She was finding out there were plenty of ways being a witch benefited her life. Still, this was not one of them. Luckily, the wounded witch still lived. He was only unconscious. Good thing for him, judging from the severity of his wound.

They needed to get these people beyond the prison walls so the fire witches could do their work.

Someone handed her a wet rag and she went on to the next victim, a small redheaded female earth witch, and wiped away some blood from a gash on her forehead.

“Yeah,” Adam answered for Claire, “get Stefan into Gribben and the sheer force of this place breaks him. That’s why we did it. We found out something really interesting.”

Sarafina paused in her work to glance at him. “So, are you going to tell me?”

Claire did it instead. Her voice was tight and her expression even tighter. Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Somehow, some way, Stefan got hold of the elium. That’s how he’s commanding the Atrika. He’s got it stashed somewhere, protected and hidden. The Atrika would do anything to get the elium, so they’re acting as Stefan’s personal army to gain it.”

Sarafina noticed now that Claire’s face was pale. She didn’t think it had much to do with treating the dead and wounded, either.

The elium was a ball of daaeman magick that worked as a neutralizing agent against power. It was the nuclear bomb of magickal weapons. Whichever daaeman breed controlled the elium controlled Eudae. Last the witches had known, the Ytrayi had possessed the elium.

Sarafina frowned and went back to her work. The earth witch she treated was sliding in and out of consciousness, babbling incoherently. “The Cae of the Ytrayi holds the elium, though, right? It’s inside him, isn’t it?”

Claire’s face twisted for a moment in anguish. “Yes, Rue holds the elium. Or he did, anyway.”