Chapter 16 The Wolf Queen of the Gods #2
“Wolfennite Amanda?” Sadie asked. Like all the other kidnapped brides, the mean girl had taken Irish Wolf husbands and decided to stay in the secret kingdom.
“Yes, though now she makes everyone address her as the Wild Queen,” Naomi answered. “I let her have the title. I didn’t want it without Wild.”
“Seriously?” Sadie frowned, hating the idea of Naomi giving the insufferable Wolfennite who’d made Sadie’s life miserable anything. “But what does she have to do with—”
“She was trying to campaign for her twins to read the prophecy instead of my kids. Apparently, that’s a thing all the princes and princesses are supposed to do on their sixteenth birthday. So I guess she was getting the campaign going early, but that’s beside the point….”
Naomi stopped walking at the end of the long hallway. “It got me thinking. No one knows how to read the gods’ language. But Wild and Sea always talked about reading it—like, actually reading it. So that got me thinking, did they mean literally?”
“Did you ask Dublin?”
Naomi waved her hand dismissively. “He and the kids are in the city for the summer. And his father didn’t raise him to respect the old ways, so he never made the trip down here to see it himself. He didn’t even know the secret kingdom existed until we met….”
Naomi trailed off. For a moment, her madness ebbed and softened with the memory of a better time. The few months all four of them had been together before she lost Sea and Wild.
“Maybe I could ask my guys,” Sadie offered. “I know the Shadow King definitely has—”
“We don’t have to ask any of your males.” The softness cleared from Naomi’s face.
Then she spread her hands toward a large room with walls of emerald and a high ceiling. “Look! Just look!”
It was obvious Naomi had completely lost the plot, but Sadie played along, doing as asked for her best friend’s sake.
But then she froze, her eyes flaring wide. “Is that the prophecy?”
Naomi nodded. “The very same prophecy the Sanctuary Kingdom hybrids have been maintaining for millennia—not centuries, but millennia.”
“But…”
Sadie continued to gape at the words chiseled into the emerald wall. Not because of their grandiosity. The way her kings talked about it, she’d expected the ancient prophecy to be nothing less than this cinematic.
What shocked her was… “I can read it!” She’d always thought it would be in some ancient form of Irish Gaelic, which she still couldn’t read, despite over a decade of study. But…
“It’s in English!”
Naomi’s smile was almost feral. “It’s in English!” she confirmed. “Can you imagine this prophecy being here this whole time? Of the Irish language rising and giving way to English and these words suddenly making sense? No wonder Sea and Wild believed in it so fervently.”
Sadie nodded. She’d never quite understood how her Shadow King came to follow it to the letter. But it being chiseled in English thousands of years ago would explain why even Declan—her no-nonsense and decidedly unmystical husband—had committed to the idea of Sadie being their prophesied queen.
“But here’s the part I wanted you to look at!” Naomi moved Sadie a little farther right and pointed to a section just above their heads. “See, it says that the Irish Wolf Queen will have pale brown skin and spots upon her face the same as the Wolf Queen of the Gods.”
Sadie frowned. “The Wolf Queen of the Gods? But how? Was there another biracial person here when the bear and wolf packs were established back in the Bronze Age?”
Naomi squeezed her shoulder. “That’s what I thought at first. But then that wouldn’t make any sense because this prophecy makes it sound like this wolf queen belonged to the gods—or maybe the other way around.
Honestly, the ‘of the’ as possessive does my head in.
But the entire last prophecy is about returning her to the gods to repair the broken circle…
around twenty rotations after the wolf and bear queens’ arrival.
I’m pretty sure rotations are their way of saying years. ”
Sadie shook her head. She could barely keep up. “Hold on, there’s another prophecy?”
Naomi took her hands. “Sades. There’s one more Final Prophecy. And I’m not going to lie, what the gods are telling us to do is truly nuts. But not as nuts as that.”
Naomi pointed to the wall opposite from where the hallway had spit them out.
And Sadie’s mouth once again dropped open.
She couldn’t believe she’d missed this when she first walked in. She’d been too staggered that the prophecy was in English to register it.
But now she turned fully to face the larger-than-life portrait etched into the emerald wall.
And her eyes widened farther when she saw that the portrait was of someone who looked vaguely familiar. Heart-shaped face, chiseled dot freckles sprinkled across her nose. Intelligent eyes, coily hair, and a knowing smile.
“Is that… is that Leora?”
“I don’t think so.” Naomi came to stand beside Sadie. “The cheekbones and jawline don’t match up, but look at those freckles and that nose and the eyes. I knew right away she had to be related to us.”
Sadie furrowed her brow. “Do you think your daughter—”
“No, it’s not her.”
Naomi’s face sobered, and she pulled the phone out of her leather crossbody satchel. “I never met my niece, Dorcas, but after seeing this, I looked her up on my holophone. Found a picture of her, and look what happens when I put an emerald-green filter on top….”
Naomi held her phone face up between them so they could both see the projection.
Sadie gasped. Dorcas… the little girl she’d met fourteen years ago, the one who’d told Sadie to call her Dorie, stared back at her from the projection.
And she looked exactly like the Wolf Queen of the Gods depicted on the wall.
There was no doubt about it then.
And there was no doubt about it six years later when Sadie insisted the Tiger Cleric escort her and Naomi back into the Sanctuary Temple’s most sacred room.
Naomi was steadier now. The wildness in her eyes had calcified into something harder and more certain.
A hush fell over all three shifters as they looked up at the chiseled portrait of the she-wolf Sadie had pushed into the Three Gods Lake, as commanded by the instructions carved into this very wall several millennia ago. In English.
This had been the first clue, which had led Sadie to the second in the caverns beneath the fortress.
Since the Mountain Prince was no longer living there, the Shadow King, who tended to obsess over all things involving the gods, had decided to conduct a thorough excavation of the caverns beneath the fortress.
They’d found a few god tech items and lots of unidentifiable remains that had degraded into dust through the millennia.
But in one room, they found an artifact that sealed Sadie’s suspicion Dorie was the she-wolf etched into the emerald wall.
A bronze key, still intact, with a message in Wolfennite carved into its shaft: finnt mei tür.
An artifact.
However, the directions chiseled on the emerald wall had been clear. Tell her nothing of her fate.
And for weeks, Sadie had told herself to just obey those instructions to the letter. She packed the god tech bag, preparing everything Dorie might need without telling her why.
The prophecy had been right about everything else. She shouldn’t chance ruining whatever repair it was talking about with an artifact that wasn’t mentioned on a wall.
A artifact that a Wolfennite had left behind. For herself?
At the last minute, standing over the god tech bag with the key in her hand, she decided she just couldn’t send Dorie into the past with nothing.
Sadie had slipped the key into the bag she’d packed for Dorie and sealed it shut before she could change her mind.
She could only hope it helped Dorie… wherever she was in time.
“It’s her. It’s definitely her,” Sadie whispered now, looking at the portrait for the first time since meeting the adult version of the Wolf Queen of the Gods in person.
Relief filled her heart, edging out a tiny portion of her worry.
Naomi took her hand. “You did the right thing, Sades. I believe in the prophecy. I believe this will repair the broken circle once and for all.”
Whatever that meant.
Sadie nodded anyway, tears welling in her eyes. “For the three gods,” she whispered.
“For the three gods,” the Tiger Cleric and Naomi repeated after her.
Above them, the chiseled portrait of a happy, smiling Dorie continued to beam down.