The Crown of Gilded Bones (Blood and..

Casteel…he had been right.
Nektas’s hands closed into fists. “Then your enemy is
truly an enemy of ours.”
Shaken by the revelation, I pressed the heel of my palm
to my chest. How had Isbeth lured a god? Had Malec shared
something with her? “Your daughter? Do you know if she
lives?”
Nektas did not answer for a long time. “I do not know.
She was young when we went to sleep, into statas. She was
barely on the cusp of adulthood when Ires woke her.”
“What is her name?” Kieran asked.
“Jadis.”
“That’s a pretty name,” I said, briefly closing my eyes. I
wished I hadn’t. I saw the too-thin man behind the bone
bars, his features mirroring the chaos of his mind. I saw the
far-too-intelligent eyes of the cat. My father. And I had left
him there. I shuddered.
I couldn’t…I couldn’t let myself go there.
The possibility that Isbeth had a draken locked away
somewhere was something I would have to file away for the
moment, right along with the knowledge of who my father
was and the questions surrounding how he and Isbeth had
come together. All I could focus on was what I knew now.
That my father was a victim of Isbeth’s, too.
And I thought of Malec, entombed beneath the Blood
Forest. “If a god of Primal blood was entombed, what
happens to them?”
“Entombed by the bones of the deities? They would
simply waste away, day by day, year by year, but they
would not die,” he answered. “They would just exist in a
place between dying and death, alive but trapped.”
Gods.
That was an even more horrifying outcome than the
deities slowly starving to death, but that meant that Malec
was still alive, and Isbeth still loved him.