Chapter Thirty-Three
Ailith
The vision hit before she could brace for it.
Not the slow unfolding she was accustomed to, but the way Islay’s past usually came to her like tide-water rising, gradual, inevitable, cool. This was a crack of light behind her eyes, a sound like iron striking stone, and then she was there.
The scene came to her the way it always did, drifting before it landed, but a certainty settled in her bones. She knew exactly what she was about to see.
The year Edan was born.
The man running was not Edan. She understood that from his unsteady gait.
The build was different, the stride heavier, and the bundle against his chest was too small, wrapped tight in wool the color of peat smoke.
He ran low to the ground across the grassland, the salt wind flat and mean off the water, the sea below a dark, indifferent thing.
He clutched the infant as if a thousand boars chased him.
Behind him, the night moved.
Not the way wind moves, not the way shadow moves when clouds cross the moon. The dark at the tree line folded and unfolded like something breathing, and shapes emerged from it that had no business existing near daylight, let alone under an ordinary moon on the isle of Islay.
They were beautiful. That was the worst of it. She had expected ugliness, and they gave her something worse, a terrible elegance, cold and amused, a swaying in the wind meant to disguise what they were truly about.
They moved faster than a man could run.
He stumbled. She saw it exactly as it happened. His foot caught on something hidden in the grass, and he went down hard on one knee, the infant jarred enough to cry out. Not a wail. A single sound, high and sharp, a call to the bairn’s mother perhaps.
The Unseelie stopped.
She felt the change before she understood it. One moment the shapes at Reginald’s back were moving, chasing the poor man as a group. One against many, and the next they had drawn up short. Not cautious but confused. And then something uglier than confusion crossed those pale, terrible faces.
The infant’s arm had come free of the wool. Only his arm. A small fist clenched in the cold air.
The fae did not come closer.
Reginald had gone still on his knee, breathing hard, pressing the child back against his chest. Ailith watched him try to interpret what was happening. It wasn’t quick. It moved across his face the way grief moves, slowly.
He rose.
He turned to face them. He put his body between the Unseelie and the tree line, not fleeing anymore but drawing them toward the cliff edge, toward the water below, toward anything that was not solid ground where they could surround him.
The child was still making that small, high, insistent sound, and the fae were still not moving.
One of them spoke. She couldn’t hear the words. Vision never allowed her to hear the sounds reliably. But she saw the mouth shape something, and she saw Reginald’s face when he heard it. He had known. Whatever it had said, he had known it already.
He said one word back. She was certain of what it was.
Nay.
The Unseelie moved again. They split apart and flanked, and Reginald lunged left to cut off the angle, and in the turning the infant’s bare fist brushed the lead creature’s wrist in passing. She saw no strike. Only the barest of contacts.
The creature recoiled as if it had thrust its hand into a pile of stinging nettles.
Not pain. Panic. That was what crossed its face. Something rawer and older than pain, a fear of the unknown. It fell back into the others, and all of them stopped, and those beautiful, terrible faces were simply afraid.
The Unseelie had gone from confident and evil to a sheer terror of the unfamiliar.
The unknown was Edan. Gruin had looked the same last eve when Edan had dripped his blood near him.
Reginald stood on the moor with the child on his chest while the Unseelie retreated into the dark behind him, and his hand came up and covered the infant’s head. Not to comfort. Just to hold on.
The last shape disappeared into the forest.
Gone.
The night went ordinary again. Salt wind and a moon too bright. Edan’s father stood there a long time, long enough that his breathing slowed, long enough that the tide sound came back to her. Then he walked east toward the coast, toward the water, toward Jura.
He never looked back.
The vision snapped shut, and Ailith was in her own body again, in her own world with her own heartbeat hammering in her throat.
She knew she should move. Should speak. Should find Edan’s face and see if any of what she’d witnessed had written itself there the way revelations sometimes did on those they concerned. But she sat with it another moment instead.
Many years ago, a man had bargained his son’s soul to save his lands. But when the cost became real, a small, vulnerable face, he refused the terms. That refusal, Ailith now understood, had turned the child, Edan, into something the Unseelie feared. She had never witnessed their fear before.
She wasn’t sure if that was a comfort.
Ailith finally spoke, her voice still hoarse.
“Edan, the iron is in your blood. When you were born, your father bundled you and ran, heading to Jura.
The Unseelie followed, not just Gruin but many more.
You fought against the evil, and your wee fist came out of your swaddling, and when it touched the Unseelie, your verra blood became iron, scaring them away.
“The Unseelie can never hurt you, Edan,” Ailith continued, “but that’s why the ground shudders when you approach the faery hill. Your touch could burn them or even kill them.”
Edan surged to his feet. “Then I’ll kill them all and save my daughter!”
Lia looked at him and whispered, “If you go into that hill, the entire world will collapse, killing all the bairns in the cages. You cannot go in.”
Ailith’s head tipped back. “And I recall something else. John, do you recall? When Gruin called it the Dark Hollow, he said something else.”
John scowled, deep in thought. When his eyes finally lit up, Ailith knew it had come to him, but then his face darkened again. “He did,” John confirmed. “He said, ‘Two days, lass! Two days till the threads start to thin!”
Lia paled and fell onto a tree stump. “Nay. Please. No more.”
“What, Lia?” Dyna asked, her voice hard as steel. “Tell us.”
Lia cleared her throat, taking a linen square to mop her brow. “The underworld can hollow a child. That’s what the ‘Dark Hollow’ refers to. It can take parts of their soul. I feared it could be true, but I would not voice it until I was certain. That explains it.”
Edan bolted up from his tree stump. “What?”
The news of the Dark Hollow’s true meaning hung heavy.
Tora let out a strangled cry, reaching for Ailith and her mother.
The three fell to the ground, clutching each other, just as Ailith’s head tipped back again, another vision racking her mind.
“The moon,” Ailith gasped, her eyes unfocused.
“That’s what controls it. The cycles of the moon. ”
Tora’s head rested on her mother’s shoulder, but it was Ailith who continued, her voice distant, still caught in the vision’s afterglow.
“The bairns are held until the full moon. Then, each fortnight, a part of their soul is hollowed out. First their memory, then their will, their voice… and finally, they become empty.”
She saw the flash of a child, not Heilyn, with eyes like polished stones, empty of light or recognition.
The group took in her words, the shock echoing in silence where only the movement of the leaves above could be heard.
Ailith sat up. “But I can help them.”
Lia said, “Go on. Do not interrupt her. She’s coming out of a vision.”
“They unravel like threads,” Ailith explained, her breath hitching. “If I can hold the frayed edge, I could prevent the total loss. But it doesn’t happen just once a moon. It’s twice, on a half-moon and a full moon. Each time, the Dark Hollow claims a piece of their soul.”
Dyna whispered, “The full moon is in two days.”
Edan cried out, “Heilyn is going to lose part of her soul in two days? We have to go back. Now!”
No one argued with the man this time.
She didn’t share what else she saw, that holding a frayed thread would cost her. In what way, she wasn’t certain.
It could be sheer pain.