Chapter Thirty-Four
Dyna
The day had proven to be more than she could handle. She wondered how Alasdair was faring. If anyone had said Sylvi, Tora, Halli, or Sandor were going to the Dark Hollow, Dyna would have drawn her bow and declared they’d have to get through her first.
An unknown world and a man with iron blood were enough, but the thought of what Edan’s father had been forced to do—run from the Unseelie with a bairn in his arms—was incomprehensible to her.
She had no words.
And stealing a bairn’s soul? Their will, voice, memory? How cruel could the Unseelie be?
Her mind reeled with all they’d discovered. Unable to stop tossing and turning, she decided to let Derric sleep. Donning her night rail, she crept down the stairs and stepped outside into the chill night air. The cottage had gone quiet an hour ago.
Dyna sat on the low stone wall at the edge of Magni’s yard, her back to the front door, watching the dark water lap against the shore.
The loch held the moonlight in scattered pieces.
She hoped the peaceful setting would help her sort things out in her mind.
If not, she’d be no help to Ailith or anyone else on the next trip to the faery hill.
But something, or someone, was out there.
She sensed the change in the air before she noticed anything else. A particular stillness, the kind that did not belong to wind or water, that pressed against her ears and made the small hairs on her arms stand.
Then Erena was simply there, beside her on the wall.
Dyna did not startle. She was old enough that most things startled her only internally.
“You’ve been waiting for me to be alone,” Dyna said.
“Aye.”
The queen did not offer an apology, and Dyna did not expect one.
Erena’s presence beside her was different from her usual appearances, no light, no cold authority, no sense that the air was being arranged around her.
She was simply a woman on a stone wall, and that alone told Dyna whatever she was about to hear was not meant for anyone else.
“Tell me.”
Erena looked at the loch for a moment. “I need you to understand what I am about to say before you respond to it. It is not only a confession. It is a weight I am placing on you, and I will not do it without asking first.”
Dyna considered that. She was too old and too tired for the pretense of uncertainty. “Then place it.”
Erena turned to face her. Her eyes in the moonlight were the color of winter grass, holding no warmth at all. “I fear the evil overlord in the Dark Hollow was to be my husband. His name is Morvran.”
The name didn’t mean anything to her until Erena continued.
“Morvran is Taranis’s brother.”
Dyna had heard Lia speak of Taranis, but never Morvran. She realized that if he were dead, it would explain Lia’s silence. She sat with that for a moment, not long, but long enough to feel the full weight of what it meant before she let herself respond.
“Lia has only mentioned Taranis, not Morvran. But they are brothers?”
“Aye.”
“Does she know the overlord of the Hollow is Morvran?”
“Nay.” Erena’s voice did not waver. It had the quality of something rehearsed, something practiced. “I bound him. And then I told Lia he was gone, because I could not tell her the truth of what I had done and why.”
“Why are you telling me now?”
“Because you are going into the Dark Hollow tomorrow.” Erena paused, and in that pause, Dyna heard the unspoken, held back not by cruelty but by a restraint built over years.
“You may see something down there that does not belong to the hill. If you do not know what it is, you will react, and your reaction will reach him. He has been watching. He has been patient. The grief Lia carries for Taranis, her certainty that Morvran is gone, her solitary mourning, the true overlord of the Hollow has been feeding on it. Three centuries of that particular sorrow, and he has grown stronger on it than on anything else. And Morvran might now be his assistant, I fear.”
Dyna said nothing. How could she? Erena’s words were more confusing than ever. How does an overlord feed on grief? “There’s more you aren’t telling me.”
“Allow me to start from the beginning. Lia and I were to marry the brothers. She was madly in love with Taranis, and I with Morvran. He and I were to become King and Queen of the Seelie, Taranis and Lia the Sworn. Before our wedding day, bairns were stolen. Taranis, knowing Lia was the protector of bairns and took any failure too hard, attempted to stop it. He almost freed their bindings and was nearly killed for it. Morvran put him in the crystal cage to keep him alive.”
Erena paused. The loch made its small night sounds.
“What I am about to say, I did not understand at the time. I have understood it in pieces, over three hundred years.”
Dyna waited.
“After Morvran caged his brother, he was alone. Grieving. He did not know how to explain to Lia what he had done, or why. The evil overlord of the Hollow found him in that hour, and he is the one that feeds on grief, the grief of parents and more. That is how he survives. If the bairns were freed, then he could not survive. To stop the bairns from being freed, he had to stop Taranis. His own existence depended on it. But then his evil soul did something even more despicable. He whispered to Morvran that he was the one who had taken Taranis. He offered a bargain. Serve me, and I will tell you how to free your brother.”
“Morvran took it?”
Erena arched a brow. “Before he understood what it was. He believed he was bargaining for Taranis’s freedom.
Instead, he was bargaining for his own corruption.
The thing that whispered to him did not only take his service.
It turned his sight. By the time the bargain was done, Morvran believed Lia had caused Taranis’s imprisonment.
That her failure to protect the bairns had brought all of it down.
His love for his brother curdled into rage at her. ”
Dyna had to set her hands flat against the cold stone of the wall to keep them still.
“I saw him moving on her. I did not know about the bargain. I did not know what he had become. I knew only that my sister was in danger and that the man I loved was the danger, yet I could not kill him. I bound him.”
She let that sit.
“What I did not know, until much later, was that I had also bound the thing inside him. The overlord was already in him by then, lodged in the corruption, and my binding closed around them both. They have been trapped together for three centuries. Neither strong enough to break free. Neither dead. Both patient.”
“Then he is not the overlord’s assistant,” Dyna said slowly. “He is the overlord’s prisoner.”
“Aye. And the overlord is his.”
Lia’s rage alone would split stone.
“She cannot know,” Dyna said.
“Not yet. Not here.”
“You’ll tell her yourself. Eventually.”
Erena did not answer that. Which was its own kind of answer.
Dyna looked at the queen’s profile. She had known Erena long enough to know her silences, their different shapes. This one was not the silence of a woman who had not yet decided. It was the silence of a woman who had decided something she was not yet ready to say aloud.
When Erena spoke Morvran’s name again, asking Dyna once more to hold the secret, to carry it through the Dark Hollow and past it, to say nothing to Lia or to anyone who did not already know, Dyna heard the underlying truth.
Not hatred. Not triumph. Not the satisfaction of outlasting an enemy.
Something older than any of those things, and considerably more complicated.
She did not ask.
She had carried other people’s truths for most of her long life. She had learned that the ones people were not yet ready to name were the ones that cost the most to ask about.
“I will keep it,” Dyna said.
Erena was gone before Dyna finished turning her head.
She sat alone on the wall in the graying morning, the weight of a queen’s three-century secret settled across her shoulders and thought about how she would look Lia in the eye today, and the day after, and all the days that followed.
She told herself that she had done harder things.
She was not sure she believed it.