Instead, four soldiers escorted a woman in a dirty blue gown toward the dais.
A woman with curly blond hair and blue eyes set in a heart-shaped face I’d spent my life staring at.
My face.
My body.
My hair.
I watched myself kneel in front of a wooden stump, holding my breath as the executioner lifted the axe . . . and let it fall.
A head with mahogany hair landed in the basket.
Bloody hell.
That bastard had just died for me.
The floorboards behind me creaked, but I couldn’t pull myself from the gruesome scene.
“I told you to stay away from the feckin’ window,” Tadhg snapped, ripping the curtain from my grasp. “Do you know what would happen if anyone found out what we’ve done?”
“His glamour is gone. They already know it wasn’t me.”
Tadhg knelt, giving my shoulders a shake. “It’s not meant to be you, remember? It was a fictional witch named Brian.”
The trial.
Rían had told the judge my name was Brian.
Had he been planning on saving me from the beginning?
Would he have saved me even if I hadn’t accepted his bargain?
“Let’s go.” Tadgh helped me to my feet.
He brought me back to the portal in the cathedral’s cellar. Instead of emerging from a linen closet, we ended up at the bottom of a dry well and had to evanesce out into the gray day.
The well sat on an incline leading down to the sea.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“About thirty miles north of Hollowshade.”
Hollowshade. A town on the north-west coast of Airren.
Nestled at the base of the incline sat a whitewashed one-story cottage. Burnished gold vines swallowed nearly the entire façade, ending at dark slate roof tiles dotted with moss. The sea crashed in the distance.
Tendrils of gray smoke curled from the chimney, yet the four pane windows remained dark. “Who lives here?”
Tadhg withdrew something from his pocket and pressed it into my palm.A key. “You do.”
35
The short gatecreaked on its sagging hinges when I opened it. Weeds devoured the ground on either side of a stone path leading to a blue door. A one-horned goat raised its head from the patch of grass next to a well, oogling us like we were intruders.
“This is mine?”
The cottage, the well, the goat, the weeds . . . all mine? The crooked door, the hideous rug that reminded me of old striped wallpaper, and the single-pane windows that would shatter with a gale.