3. Eirene
THREE
EIRENE
The boy sleeps.
I’ve carried him back to my cottage—if you can call it that, this single room at the edge of the stones with its leaking roof and perpetual smell of herbs and blood.
He weighs almost nothing, this child who stumbled through the Gate.
Light as a bundle of sticks. Someone hasn’t been feeding him properly.
The fire died hours ago, and I haven’t had the strength to relight it.
The cold seeps through the thin walls, through my sweat-damp clothes, through the bandages wrapped around my palms. I should eat something.
Should rest. Should do any of the hundred small things that might keep me alive long enough to bleed another night.
Instead, I stand at the window and watch the stones.
Someone was singing him to sleep. Someone loved him enough to chase away nightmares.
He’ll remember that someone loved him. He just won’t remember the song.
I tuck a blanket around his thin shoulders and return to the narrow window, staring out at the Veil stones. They’re quiet now. The boundary has accepted the tithe, however inadequate, and settled into its usual restless hum. But the air feels wrong.
The air is too still.
I wrap my arms around myself, ignoring the throb of my bandaged palms. The cuts are deep tonight—deeper than usual. I’ll have new scars by morning, more thin white lines to add to the ladder climbing my forearms. At this rate, I’ll run out of unmarked skin before I’m thirty.
If you make it to thirty.
The thought is old, familiar, worn smooth by repetition. I don’t dwell on it. Dwelling takes energy I don’t have.
Outside, the Veil shudders.
I go still. Every sense sharpens, the exhaustion burning away in a flood of adrenaline. That wasn’t normal settling. That was—
The shriek splits the air.
I’m out the door before the sound fades, running toward the stones on legs that threaten to buckle with every step. The sky seems darker than before, the moons dimmer, their light struggling to penetrate a haze that wasn’t there an hour ago.
The Veil is screaming. Not the stones—the barrier itself, the invisible wall between our world and the shadow-realm. I’ve never heard it make this sound before. In all my years of bleeding and sacrifice, I’ve felt the Veil tremble, shudder, groan. Never scream.
I reach the central stone and press my palm against it. The bandages soak through immediately, fresh blood seeping into old channels, but I barely notice the pain.
The Veil shows me.
Not with images—the boundary doesn’t communicate that cleanly.
It shows me in sensations, in feelings, in the gut-deep knowledge that comes from being part of a vastness, a dying immensity.
I feel the tear before I see it. A ripping, tearing agony that runs from the eastern stones to the western, splitting the barrier in a wound wider than anything I’ve ever encountered.
Then I see it.
The Veil is visible now—an impossibility made real. A shimmering curtain of pale light stretches between the stones, translucent and wavering, and running through its center is a gash. Not a tear. Not a crack. A wound, bleeding that sick luminescence into the darkness beyond.
Through the wound, I see the Shadow Court.
Faces press against the barrier from the other side—dozens of them, hundreds, a writhing mass of stolen features and hungry mouths.
They’re the victims. Everyone the Veil has consumed over centuries, every traveler who couldn’t pay the tithe, every memory that was taken and devoured.
They exist in there, trapped, eternal, and now they’re pushing.
Pushing to get out.
“No,” I breathe. “No, no, no—”
I tear the bandages from my palms. Slash fresh cuts into already-bleeding skin. Press both hands to the stones and pour everything I have into the boundary, every drop of blood, every scrap of power, every fragment of stolen memory still lingering in the corners of my mind.
Close. Close. CLOSE.
The Veil drinks and drinks and drinks. I feel myself emptying, feel the darkness closing in at the edges of my vision, feel my legs start to give way. The wound in the barrier begins to shrink. Slowly. So slowly. But shrinking.
Then a presence on the other side notices me.
The faces stop pressing. The hungry mouths go still. The entire mass of trapped souls parts, drawing back from the wound, and through the gap left behind, another entity looks through.
Not a face. Not exactly. A presence—vast, old beyond reckoning, made of shadow and stolen moments and a malice I can’t define. It has no eyes, but it sees me. Has no mouth, but I feel its attention, its interest.
The wound stops closing.
I pour more of myself into the boundary, screaming now—with effort, with terror, with the desperate need to seal this thing before whatever is watching decides to do more than watch. Blood runs down my arms, soaks into the earth, floods the ancient channels until they overflow.
Not enough. It’s not enough. Nothing is ever enough.
The presence on the other side of the Veil smiles. I don’t know how I know that. It has no face. But I feel it—satisfaction, hunger, the unshakeable certainty of an entity that has been waiting a very, very long time.
Then it speaks.
The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, from the stones and the soil and the darkness pressing in from all sides. It speaks in a child’s voice—the boy’s mother, the lullaby I stole and fed to the Veil not an hour past.
“Little witch.”
The melody carries through the darkness—a lullaby turned inside out.
Ice floods my veins.
The wound in the Veil holds. Doesn’t close. Doesn’t widen. Just… holds. A permanent breach. A door left ajar.
And somewhere in the Shadow Court, an intelligence begins to plan.
I collapse against the central stone, bleeding, trembling, terror clawing at my throat. The Veil is weaker than it’s ever been. The boundary is failing. And whatever lurks in the Shadow Court—
It knows my name.
The moons hang overhead, cold and distant. The purple sky offers no comfort. And in the darkness, I feel the presence watching, waiting, certain of plans I’m too exhausted and terrified to guess.
But danger will come. Soon. I feel it in my bones, in the hollows of my stolen memories, in the wound that refuses to heal no matter how much blood I give.
The executioner is coming.
I don’t know why the thought rises, unbidden and certain, in the same moment the thing in the Shadow Court speaks my name. But I feel it—a second presence at the edge of my awareness, distant but approaching. Dark and dangerous and inevitable.
The Veil-wardens have been watching me for years. I’ve known that. Felt their eyes on me during the rare occasions travelers bring word from the outside world. Heard the whispers about the border witch who cheats death, who steals memories, who practices magic the order outlawed centuries ago.
They call it treason. I call it keeping the damn barrier intact.
But the order doesn’t care about results. They care about control. About obedience. About making sure that everyone bleeds exactly the way they’re told to bleed, in exactly the places they’re told to bleed.
Someone sent to end me.
I pull myself upright. Force my shaking legs to hold. Press my bleeding palms against the stone one more time and whisper promises to the boundary—that I’ll keep feeding it, keep bleeding, keep holding the darkness back for as long as I can.
The Veil doesn’t answer. But it steadies. Just slightly. Just enough.
I turn my back on the wound in reality and walk toward my cottage, where a stolen child sleeps and an executioner’s blade waits somewhere in the darkness.
Tomorrow, I’ll have to face whatever the shadow-realm has awakened.
Tonight, I have one more duty.
I check on the boy. Adjust his blanket. Watch his chest rise and fall with the steady rhythm of dreamless sleep. He doesn’t stir when I brush the hair back from his forehead. Doesn’t react when I whisper an apology he’ll never remember receiving.
“I’ll get you home,” I tell him. “I promise.”
Another debt. Another promise. Another piece of myself given to someone who won’t remember to thank me.
I sink into the chair by the cold hearth and close my eyes.
Sleep doesn’t come. It never does, anymore. But I pretend anyway, counting the phantom beats of songs I’ve stolen, remembering griefs that don’t belong to me, waiting for whatever dawn will bring.
The Veil hums against the edge of my consciousness, hungry, watchful.
Then, in the moment before sleep can take me, something cuts through the haze—distant but real. The sound of horses on the ridge.