Tidy bundles of clothing with surprisingly modern-looking undergarments had been placed beside three of the individual baths. I toed the top layer, a thin towel for drying off, revealing a simple tunic and dark brown breeches below.
“This is incredible,” Cabell said, turning to look around. “What makes the water glow like that?”
Otherworldly light shimmered from the depths of each pool, creating a soothing ambiance in what might otherwise have been a creepy, cavernous space. I set the wrapped Ignatius down on the bottom step, well away from the pools.
“The water is said to be tears of the Goddess,” Betrys said. “Flowing from her heart, which resides at the center of the Mother tree.”
I cringed. “I think I liked it better before you brought up bodily fluids.”
To my surprise, Betrys laughed. “It’s restorative—healing in a different way than what Olwen can do.”
Neve breathed in deeply, as if relishing the rain scent. Her wide eyes glimmered with wonder.
“I need to take my hour on the watch,” Betrys explained. “I trust you don’t mind waiting until I return to show you to your rooms?”
“Honestly,” Cabell said, “you’ll probably have to drag us out of the water.”
She turned her back to us. “I’ll take your clothing to be laundered if you’ll leave it there beside the baths.”
We undressed awkwardly, careful not to look at one another. Covering myself with my arms, my face burning from being so exposed, I stepped down into the water and tentatively stretched a foot out.
I shivered with pleasure at its warmth. The longer I stared into the swirling mist gathering on its surface, the more intolerable the chilled air around us felt. I descended farther into the pool, then plunged, immediately finding its smooth bottom with my toes.
There was a weight to the water I hadn’t expected, as if it were thick with salt. A ledge had been carved into it at the perfect height to sit with my head and shoulders above the surface.
Days of dirt and blood lifted away from my skin. My whole body softened, and my mind was quick to follow. I breathed in deeply, then dunked my head beneath the water, scrubbing at my hair and face with my hands.
I surfaced again with a gasp, wiping the hair from my face. Cabell sighed as he settled fully into his pool. He turned to face me, bracing his arms on the rocky edge. “This beats the Roman baths in Algeria, eh?”
“And we didn’t even have to break in to use them,” I said. “A novel concept for us.”
I hadn’t realized Betrys was still standing there until she breathed out two words: “Those symbols . . .”
I followed her gaze down to Cabell’s tattooed arms and shoulders.
“Why would you cover your body with curse sigils?” Neve asked, pulling herself up to look over the side of her bath. She had carefully twisted her braids up and away from the water.
To show off all the curses he’s broken, I thought. To seem cool and mysterious to girls who have no idea what they mean.
“To remind myself curses are only dark because of how they’re used,” Cabell said.
Betrys looked as if she might say something else, but she only turned, hurrying up the steps with our things.
“You have to stop doing that,” I whispered to Neve, coming to the edge of my own bath.
“Doing what?”
“Telling them everything before we figure out how they’ll react,” I said. “The whole leap-before-you-look thing with you is getting old. We need them on our side if we’re going to be able to look for Nash.”
“You really don’t trust anyone, do you?” Neve said, shaking her head.
“I trust people will always lash out when they’re afraid,” I said. “And that they’ll do anything when they’re desperate enough.”
Neve sank back down into the water with a grateful sigh. Guilt, my least-favorite emotion, bit at me.
“Are you all right?” I asked her. “You’ve had a rough few hours.”
That was putting it far too kindly. In truth, I’d seen a lot of the world and expected the worst of it, but I’d been shocked by the malice toward her.
“Yes,” she said with her usual resolve. “But I’ll be better once I have my wand back and we find Nash and the ring.”
I nodded.
The thing was, you spend so long being afraid of sorceresses and all the ways they can hurt you that you don’t necessarily think about the way the world hurts them back. The way it punishes them for that same power.
I’ d brought her here, to a place where sorceresses were reviled. Where she was outnumbered and just as much at a loss about what was happening as Cabell and I were. A place of monsters.
I sank down, letting the water rise above my chapped lips. The stinging there eased within a heartbeat, but the regret lingered.
“Avalon is a place of beauty,” Neve said softly. She stared straight into the mist gathered in front of her and recited from memory. “The most beautiful of all of the Otherlands, for it was born of the Goddess’s heart, as dear as a child. The groves are ripe with ancient secrets and a bounty of golden apples . . .”
“Not the noxious stench of impending death?” The joke was grating, even to me.
“After everything I’d read,” Neve started again, keeping her back to us, “I had this vision of it in my mind for years. It was as sacred to me as the stories my auntie told me about my mother. They were both distant and beautiful.”
I leaned my head against the edge of the pool, my hair dripping over my face, curling around my cheek like a tender hand. “Does it really feel like a curse to either of you?”
Before the One Vision, I’d been able to sense magic the way you could feel a shift in the air’s pressure. It had been amorphous and ever-changing. Sometimes, with the older curses, you could even feel the fury or spite radiating from the sigils. Gaining the second sight had ripened those senses, making them fuller, and it was still expanding in ways I couldn’t completely comprehend.
“It does,” Cabell said, “and then it doesn’t. I’m not sure how to explain it.”
Neve finally turned to face us, drawing herself up. I did the same, watching their faces in the cerulean light.
“It feels similar—icy and harsh—but somehow more concentrated?” Neve groaned. “I’m not making any sense.”