Chapter Thirty-Seven
Dyna
Dyna stumbled out the door. Her daughter ran up to her, so she handed the two bairns into her capable hands.
“Mama? Are you hale? You look frightened. You’re never afraid of anything. What is it?”
“Naught. I’m fine. It is a different world down there.
Just give me a few moments, if you please.
” She shook her head, her gaze scanning the landscape, grateful to be back.
The area was filled with a few happy fathers and many happy bairns, pleased to be out of the hellhole below.
Pride filled her heart as she watched all the ones she loved taking care of the wee ones.
Uncle Connor already had a wee lad on his shoulders and Alasdair hugged a lass who was crying.
Dyna couldn’t tell Sylvi what she’d just witnessed, nor would she tell anyone else. “Go tend Magni and the bairns. Give them the hugs they need.”
Sylvi snuggled both bairns and rushed back to Magni’s side. Dyna found a spot on the ground and sat, her legs crossed, still reeling from what she had just seen, something no one could have prepared her for.
Seeing the true image of Aunt Gwyneth and Grandda when they were young had shaken her, but not nearly as much as what else she’d seen.
Only moments after Edan and Ailith had destroyed the roots, the three of them had headed for the staircase.
Once John took Ailith, she’d caught something out of the corner of her eye and stopped, telling the others to go ahead.
The Hollow had narrowed into a side passage to her right.
A stillness came from it. Though she hadn’t stopped walking, her eyes had turned.
She had slowed without meaning to, her bow shifting in her hand as she hefted a bairn high on her hip.
He had been visible through a gap in the rock.
A man, suspended a hand’s breadth above the cavern floor, stared directly at her.
Tall. Fair-haired. He was bound within a thick network of silver threads that crossed his wrists, chest, throat, and ankles, threads darkened from centuries of waiting.
The threads connected with the cavern walls.
She couldn’t make it out at first, but then understanding dawned, the stone had grown around the threads.
The hill had taken the thick, woven network and made it part of itself.
He should have looked weakened, but he did not.
He looked patient.
His eyes were open.
His gaze had found hers through the gap before she had even decided whether to look or not.
Pale. Steady. A man’s eyes, not a creature’s, which was somehow worse.
Erena’s words echoed in her mind. Morvran had been bound to prevent him from killing Lia, he’d then been tricked and held captive by an evil overlord.
Erena’s name sat in her mind like a stone, and she knew, with an unsettling certainty, that the man was Morvran, and he knew exactly who she was.
Dyna’s hand tightened on her bow like a bairn reached for its blanket.
Do not react.
Dyna hurried down the path behind Ailith, adjusting the bairns on her hips, revealing nothing.
Three more paces. The gap closed behind her.
The cold eased, and her knuckles on the bow had gone white.
Frantic with unwanted knowledge, she refused to react, refused to look back, and continued out of that hellish underworld.
“Mama?” Sylvi stood before her, Magni at her back, his tunic bloodied but hale. “What is it?”
She remembered the way his eyes had tracked her, not with surprise, but with a chilling ancient patience, the faint hum that came from the silver threads more like a trapped hornet.
“Naught,” she replied, grateful Sylvi’s voice drew her back to the present. Yet Erena’s words—Morvran has been waiting for centuries—still echoed. She rejoined the group, but one chilling detail refused to release its hold on her mind.
She had carried other secrets over her life, true.
But never one with eyes.