Chapter Thirty
Ailith
Ailith screamed when John shoved her behind him, his sapphire sword already drawn by the time the warrior burst from his cage. The blue light flared in a single, piercing pulse, flooding the clearing with light and casting shadows across the dark underworld.
“Ailith, I’ll handle him. You go for the bairns. Find Heilyn and see if you can free any of them.”
Without hesitation, she ran to the first cage and pressed her hands against the surface, searching for a latch or a seam or anything she could manipulate.
The child inside was a lass of around four, motionless, her gaze fixed straight ahead on the warrior in the green block opposite.
Ailith moved her hands across the entire face of the cage, top to bottom, side to side.
Nothing. No seam. No hinge. No break in the surface at all.
It was smooth as river ice and faintly warm, and she told herself the warmth meant the child was alive, trying not to think of what it meant that she couldn’t open it.
A shriek of laughter erupted from somewhere down the long row, high and grating, unmistakably Gruin. Then it cut off sharply with a sound like a quick scream.
She left the first cage and moved down the line, running her hands over each one as she passed.
They were all the same. Identical surfaces, identical seams that were not seams. The children inside didn’t blink, didn’t turn toward her, showed no sign of her presence at all.
Red hair, she told herself. Blue nightgown.
Flowers at the neckline. She scanned each small face in turn and kept moving.
“Ailith, hurry.” John’s voice, sharp and breathless, came from behind her. “Find the two, and we’ll go, then come back with more warriors. I can’t keep him at bay. His sword sometimes disappears from sight. Then it casts shadows that blind me.”
“I can’t find a lass that young.” She kept moving, cage to cage. “How do I open them?”
She grabbed the cage of the smallest child and tried to shake it. What if she knocked it off the shelf? Would the cage pop open?
Or break? It might hurt the wee bairn inside. She shook it, then tried hitting it with her fist. “Ouch!”
“Ailith?”
“I’m fine. I tried to punch it, but it was like hitting a boulder. Any suggestions?”
Steel rang behind her. “I don’t know. Keep looking. Keep trying anything you can think of.” Her brother grunted from the thrust of his next swing, his voice amplified in the silence.
She stopped in front of a lad who looked about the right age. Brown hair. Brown trews.
The clash of John’s sword grew louder. “What the hell? Ailith, the warrior’s gone, but the next one is waking. He’ll be stronger than the last. Hurry.”
“How did the warrior’s cage open?”
“It just dissolved. You have a few moments, then we’re leaving. I don’t like these invisible swords. It swings and doesn’t appear again until it’s about to slice me open.”
The second warrior came at him, and the sound of it made every muscle in her back tighten, but she forced herself to face the cage in front of her.
“Milo?” She pressed her hand flat against the surface, directly over the boy’s chest. “Is that you?” There was a rock a few steps away so she grabbed it, though it was cold as ice, but she ran at the cage, throwing the rock at the side of the cage so as not to hit him if it broke through.
The rock bounced back and hit her arm.
“Damn it!” She stared at the wee lad in front of her. She was failing terribly. He was right in front of her. Then it came to her. She’d carry the whole cage out. She bent her knees and reached under the shelf, trying to lift the cage from it. John could help her get it up the staircase.
It didn’t budge. She pushed against it, unable to move it.
No movement. No recognition. She put her face close to the surface and studied him the way she studied a vision, looking past the stillness for what was underneath. Her gaze locked on the piece of plaid clutched in his tiny hand.
The cold crystal threw her back in time to a different cage deep in a cellar. Her ankle chained to a stake in the corner of the cage, dirty water in a bowl, the sound of tiny feet racing in the next cell. She closed her eyes and willed the vision away—for Milo, for Heilyn.
She opened her eyes and looked at the wee bairn suspended above a ledge in front of her. “Milo, you look like your Uncle Edan.”
The next vision came without warning, the way the true ones always did.
Two men and a boy on a wooden dock, sun on the water behind them, the smell of brine and fresh catch rising off everything.
One of the men was Edan, smiling, more at ease than she had ever seen him.
The other had the same jaw, the same set to the shoulders.
Milo’s father, Arne. And the boy between them reaching up with both hands for something small and silver and wriggling.
She followed the vision without thinking. “Are you going fishing?”
In her mind, Edan set a small fish into the boy’s cupped hands.
“Good catch, Milo! He’s wiggly but the fish won’t hurt you.” It was as if she stood on the dock with the laddie.
Milo squealed and squirmed, and the fish leaped free, bouncing off the dock and into the water. The boy’s wail of grief lasted exactly two seconds before Edan caught him under the arms and swung him over his head, turning the wail into laughter.
She leaned against the cage, wrapping her arms around it. “It’s a lovely fish, Milo.”
The cage dissolved.
She stood back and stared at it, at the empty space where the clear walls had been.
What had just happened? Dissolved. Just as John had said, the cage completely evaporated until the child stood free in front of her on a small ledge.
The boy swayed where he stood, blinking slowly, the way a person looked when they had been asleep for a very long time and the world was not quite real yet.
He glanced around at his surroundings, fear building in his gaze.
His breathing changed from even and rhythmic to an uneven pace, hitching once he locked on John and the warrior across from him. “Mama!”
She reached up and took his hand in his, diverting his gaze back to her. “Milo?” How she prayed it was Edan’s nephew.
He looked down at her and said, “Mama. Where Mama?” His gaze scanned the area again, his body trembling in fear at a place he didn’t recognize. “Da?” His hand reached out to her, still shaking more than the leaves on a tree on a windy day.
She calmed her voice the best she could. “I’ll take you to your da and Uncle Edan.”
“Aye.” He lifted his arms and she caught him up, then he burrowed against her shoulder with the boneless certainty of a child who decided he was safe.
She turned to look for Heilyn, scanning the row in both directions. Red hair. Blue nightgown. None of the nearby cages held a lass that young.
“John, I have Milo.”
“Nay!” The lad pointed to the warriors.
“I won’t let them hurt you. We’re going up the stairs to your da.”
She looked over at her brother, and the sight stopped her cold.
The first one had appeared back in his cage.
The one warrior John now fought had become three.
As she watched, a fourth stepped free of his cage, and then a fifth, and the air in the clearing shifted, taking on a charge she felt in her back teeth.
There was an endless row of a score or more warriors down the length of the underworld.
Countless warriors. A sea of fighters appeared in front of them.
“Ailith, run! They’re all unlocking. I can’t fight them all off myself. We’ll need help to come back. Head up the stairs and I’ll be right behind you!”
She ran. Milo’s arms locked around her neck, and she held him tight against her chest as the path through the purple trees opened ahead.
The strange branches swayed faster now, reaching lower than before, and she ducked and pushed through without slowing.
The crackling sound from the trees had grown louder, higher, as if something within them was waking.
“John, are you behind me yet? Hurry!”
The staircase appeared at the end of the path, and she took it as fast as she dared, one hand on the cold railing, Milo clinging and crying softly against her ear. “Mama.”
“I know, sweetheart. I know. Hold on.”
“I’m here. Go and don’t slow for anything.” John’s close presence calmed her more than she’d admit.
The sapphire sword lit the way from behind her, its blue light bouncing off the wet stone walls, though she could hear him fighting at the base of the stairs, the impact of steel, a grunt, the sound of something heavy hitting the wall.
When she reached the halfway point, she turned and saw him swing twice in rapid succession, then whirl and take the stairs two at a time.
“I said don’t slow, Ailith.”
Miraculously, the warriors didn’t follow John up the stairs. She glanced back, surprised to see a shimmer across the bottom step of the staircase, like a gate they couldn’t cross.
“Get him out of here!” he shouted up at her.
She hurried the best she could on the uneven steps.
The world below them erupted. Cackles and screaming and something low and rhythmic that was worse than both, rising up the staircase behind them like a tide. Milo pressed his face against her neck and wept, his grip so tight that she said a quick prayer to get the lad home. She didn’t look back.
John was at her heels when she hit the door.
She threw herself through it and he came after her, knocking into her hard, and they both stumbled and nearly fell before the light of the real world swallowed them.
The door disappeared the moment John cleared it.
The hill shrank behind them like a held breath released, and their friends all rushed forward, ready to help.
Edan was there before she’d fully stopped.
“Milo!” Arne was directly behind him.
“Da! Unca Eda.”
Edan took him from her arms and hugged him. The boy grabbed hold of him with both fists and didn’t let go, smiling at his father behind him. For one moment Edan’s face was pure relief, and Ailith watched it and felt something loosen in her chest.
Then Edan looked up, handing Milo to his father.
His eyes moved past her to John. Back to her, then to the disappearing hill and back to John again. The relief drained out of him like water from a broken vessel, a silence remaining that told her exactly what his thoughts were—Heilyn.
“Heilyn.” His voice was barely a sound. “Where is my daughter? Tell me you found her, Ailith. Where is she?”
Ailith’s legs gave way. John caught her, and then her father was there, pulling her against him, one arm solid around her shoulders. She couldn’t speak. She pressed her face against her father’s chest and let the tears come because there was nothing else left.
“I’m so sorry, Edan. I searched for her. I couldn’t find her.”
The wail that came out of him burned a hole in her soul.
She’d failed. A total, utter failure. A row of bairns she could not help. What would they do next?
Ailith couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t bear to see the hatred that must lie in Edan’s eyes. She couldn’t stand to see his affection for her slip away.
It would break her heart.