Chapter 39
Elara could breathe.
She did not understand it at first—she drew a cautious breath, half expecting water to flood her mouth, and instead air filled her lungs, cool and faintly sweet, tasting of silt and deep current.
The serpent’s filaments drifted back around her shoulders and along her arms, and she understood, in the wordless way she had come to understand everything this being offered her.
Uisce was breathing for her. Giving her the breath she had been taking for years. And now, at the bottom of a canal in a city she had never thought to see, she was returning it.
Elara’s breath left her in a soft, astonished laugh, and she laid her hand against the broad, smooth plate of scale beneath her palm.
Was it always you? Every water that should have taken me and did not—was it you keeping me, because you knew I would be needed here?
She carried Elara south through the dark run of the canal, beneath three bridges and past drainage arches, beyond the point where the channel deepened and the old stone opened into something wider—the sea-mouth, where salt began to thread through the river in slow, pale braids.
Ancient ruins lay scattered in its depths. Broken columns. The stripped bones of a ship. A broad paving of flat stones that might once have been a road before the sea claimed it and forgot its name. The serpent bore her over that drowned road.
Then she saw it.
An Aelfhenge.
And yet this one was wrong.
She had seen three before this. The standing stones at Talamh na Sí, which had breathed of time.
The henge beneath Osin’s keep, which had carried death.
And the broken ring in Arwn’s Void, stripped bare of Epona’s breath—of life.
Each had held, in its own way, one of the three great powers the goddesses had laid through the world.
Aine. Rhiannon. Epona. Time. Death. Life.
There were only ever meant to be three in a realm.
And still, as she looked upon the stones rising from the deep, Elara knew with a certainty that settled cold and whole inside her: she was staring at a fourth.
The stones rose from the seafloor in a rough ring, twelve in all, each one towering high as three men. They bore the likeness of an Aelfhenge. The same solemn arrangement. The same sacred proportion. But the stone itself was wrong.
Here, the water did not answer its ancient power.
Here, it drew back.
Elara knew it in the hush against her skin, in the breath Uisce had lent her, in the wrongness moving through the water around them: a corruption sunk too deep to be natural.
It was not time, death, or life, though it wore pieces of all three like stolen skin, made from what had been taken, broken, and forced back together by a will that cared nothing for wholeness.
Whatever waited at its heart was not divine.
It had been forged.
It was Osin’s.
At the center of the false ring, a slit stood in the water.
A wound in the world. Narrow as a body, vertical and faintly green, it throbbed with a dim, sick light.
It was open. Beyond it, she could just make out the suggestion of another place—another body of water.
Along the seafloor, the pale green current ran from that opening back toward the canal, toward Luirigh, toward Tieran.
The serpent slowed and came to rest beside the ring of stones, her great body settling upon the seafloor in a hush of drifting silt.
Elara slid from Uisce’s back, her boots touching the paving below and sending up a pale cloud that curled around her ankles. Water pressed in on every side, but the deeper pressure came from the false henge itself, a cold that had nothing to do with the sea.
Still, she walked toward it, and the moment she stepped inside the circle, the wrongness grew worse.
The stones loomed overhead, their too-smooth faces catching the gate’s pale green light in ways that made her eyes skid away, while the markings seemed to crawl whenever she looked too long, trying to resolve into meaning and failing like a word turned strange from repetition.
Her stomach turned, and she kept her eyes on the seam, not the stones.
Epona’s dagger left its sheath with a low whisper. The instant it came near the gate, warmth bloomed through the hilt into her palm—the same living warmth it had known in the alley, as if this place, this wound in the world, was something it had been fashioned to recognize.
Elara raised the blade and laid its tip against the seam.
This time, she did not close her eyes.
She had learned in the alley that the dagger answered want, and she wanted now with all that remained in her.
Tieran. The girl in the well. The horned girl sinking in that drowned realm, her silver eyes turned upward as the water swallowed her whole.
The lists. The names. The vanished. Every life taken cleanly from the world and hidden where no one could call it back.
She gathered them all inside herself and pressed.
Close.
Her teeth clenched. The dagger trembled in her hand.
Resistance met her at once—a flat, furious refusal, like a door held shut by both hands on the other side.
She leaned into it, driving her whole weight behind the blade.
Her jaw ached. Her sight dimmed. Around her boots, the silt lifted and began to wheel in a slow, tightening spiral.
The opening would not yield to her.
And she knew why.
Osin.
His imprint ran through the stones and the current feeding them, reaching from his keep all the way to the sea, and the feel of him struck something furious inside her.
Elara bared her teeth and drove the blade harder.
Warmth spilled from her nose.
Then more of it—down over her mouth, across her cheek, one hot trail after another until the salt of the sea was touched with iron and she tasted blood on her lips. Her arms shook, the dagger trembling in her grasp.
Before her, the opening in the world widened by a breath.
No.
The pale green current running back toward Luirigh gave a violent shudder.
Somewhere far away, and yet all at once terribly near, Osin’s notice found her.
It landed whole. Utter. A full turning of his will upon her, where a moment before she had only strained against him half-seen.
Now he knew her there. Knew where she stood.
At once his face rose before her, unbidden and revoltingly clear—that mouth curving with its private satisfaction, those pale glacier-blue eyes watching as if he had known, from the beginning, that she would come here in the end.
To the bottom of a canal. To bleed herself dry for a world that did not want her.
And the force pressing against the gate swelled until it seemed it might crush the bones in her hands.
Her cry broke and was lost in the deep. The resistance in the blade sent a violent shaking through her, until she could no longer tell whether it was her own body trembling or the force of the gate battering back through the hilt. Before her, the slit in the world widened by a hair.
Panic struck her all at once. She was not strong enough, and now Osin knew she was on the other side of this gate. He would wrench it open. He would come through. Or, worse—take hold of her, of the others waiting beyond, drag all of them into whatever horror he had built here.
She needed to warn them, to turn and somehow tell them to run, but something cool and immense touched the small of her back.
Uisce pressed her nose there, light as falling rain, and power moved through Elara.
It was nothing like fire or wind, nothing she had ever carried before.
It came with the ancient pull of river after river finding the sea, with the moon drawing tides from the dark, with the memory of water before any living thing had thought to name it.
It entered her spine and poured outward, filling her limbs, her hands, and the hilt of the dagger itself.
The blade answered in a burst of light.
The gate screamed.
It rang through her teeth, through the stones, through the bones of her face. Across the divide, Osin’s hold faltered.
Now, she thought. Now.
Elara drove the dagger down, and the green current snapped.
At once, the opening shuddered and began to close, drawing inward upon itself in a long, terrible seam, the two sundered halves coming together the way flesh might close under a healer’s hand.
One last wave of ruin pressed toward her—Osin’s will stripped bare of all disguise, furious and ravenous—and Uisce met it with the full burden of the deep.
The waters above them answered.
And the gate collapsed.
Elara’s knees gave way beneath her. She sank to the seafloor with the dagger loosening in her fingers and one hand braced flat against the old paving stones, breathing as the silt settled slowly around her. Blood still slipped over her mouth, warm and slow, but she had nothing left in her to care.
The touch at her back receded, and Elara turned to find Uisce lying along the old stones beside her, her vast body gathered in a coil, the light within her dimmed almost to nothing.
Elara reached for her at once—for the pale, branching horns, for the broad plate of her brow—and her hands passed through.
The great eye opened.
Slowly. So slowly.
It looked at her as it had above the canal: old and certain.
Go.
Her eye closed, and Uisce dissolved as gently as water reclaiming itself. Her long body loosened, scales softening into current, pale horns unwinding into ribbons, her mane drifting apart in glimmering strands until only the stir of water remained.
Elara’s lungs seized at once.