Chapter 32
Esme shivered uncontrollably. Her fingers were clammy; her toes were going numb. Ariane’s face was turning blue. Then she heard Mare’s voice cry out, and the flow of freezing air stopped.
She looked up to see a shadow spreading throughout the cave; the same shadow that had warned her about the pearl, the same shadow that had followed her here, all the way from Esperance. It grew quickly, blackening the already dim interior, swallowing the limestone shapes around it. In the gloom, it thickened, until it was neither shadow nor form, but somehow both.
As it shifted and swayed, a figure became recognisable within its folds: a woman, her form indistinct, as if she could dissolve back into the blackness at any moment.
Mare drew up to his full height, and tentatively addressed the
