Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
Saoirse
Morning comes like a knife through my skull—or maybe it’s the relentless pounding of metal against stone.
I walk between tents as their sleepy inhabitants trickle out: Bríd and the seanchaí, families from every island, and far beyond them, the royal courts. Even the grannies who practically worshipped Faolan poke their heads out into the predawn, white hair piled into weightless nests.
“I knew that old prophecy was right.”
“It’s the dead! They’re rising!”
“Gods, Ailbhe, don’t lose your head. It’s the giants who are meant to wake one day, not the dead.”
Brona stifles a chuckle against her hand.
I can’t quite bring myself to laugh along.
Instead, I press on, lifting my pale lavender skirts over tent pegs and rocks.
We duck beneath a row of clothes strung up on a line; around fires freshly stoked for morning porridge; past Etain’s tent, where her voice rages through the thin walls about indecent hours; all the way to the inner curve of the sprawling bay where Brona suggested we focus our efforts on permanent structures to avoid winter runoff from the mountains or raging storms off the sea.
There, the sound triples, strong bodies flurrying amid log piles and rocks. Tall, brawny men strip the bark off felled tree trunks as a girl with a glorious mane of honey-colored hair shouts orders, keeping them in line.
“Stars,” Brona mutters, “Nessa will hate to have missed this.”
A smile creeps onto my face. “How many of them do you think she’d have rounded up by nightfall?”
“Three.”
I choke on a laugh. “Three all at once?”
“You’re a clever girl.” Brona adjusts the belt over her plain wool skirt, where a wicked dagger hangs. “Use your mind and puzzle it out.”
My eyes trace over two of the stonemasons, their shirts slung over a low-hanging branch nearby.
Hammers swing in near unison, beating the same chisel wedged into a rock.
But it’s the sight beyond them that captures me most: a woman heaving an axe through a single rough-hewn log, splitting it with one powerful swing of her arms.
“I think I’m getting the idea.”
Brona laughs and nudges my hip with her own, dark eyes sweeping past the laborers to the clay and wood lean-to beside them where smoke spirals into the air.
For a second, wind drifts off the sea to part it, revealing Maccus lit by the fire of a forge, his arm raised as though he means to command the sky.
But it’s an ordinary hammer he wields, and ordinary sparks that fly through the air before smoke obscures him again.
“Right.” Brona’s mirth fades into her old stern expression as dread prickles my skin. “Speak up and speak first. Don’t let him crowd you or make you feel small. And don’t forget what the seanchaí—”
“Told me about his wife, and the mark of Eamon.”
“Which is useless information unless you remember…?”
I grimace. “A wound is a way in—but it feels wrong to exploit it.”
Brona’s sigh holds an edge. “It was your idea, Saoirse.”
“All I said was soulstones call to me the strongest when they’re damaged, or broken inside. You’re the one who told me that’s how I should approach Maccus.”
“So I did.” Brona raises a dark brow. “Don’t forget, you’re a bloody pirate now, Wolf Tamer, no matter the polite, pretty shite you have to spin for the Ring of Stars. When you get an advantage, you press it. Play dirty if you have to. Do whatever it takes to keep him on the back foot.”
My chest caves in as I release a hard breath. “We both know I’m not really a—”
Brona grabs my left wrist and raises it pointedly between us so the woad tattoo catches the light: blue patterns weaving together into an elegant wolf with its head pointed back as though howling at the moon.
“Point made. I can handle it.”
“Damn right you can.” Brona starts to smile, but it falters—then slips away altogether as a wisp of worry passes from her skin to mine. “And if you need backup?”
I don’t speak, just whistle her swooping tune: like a skybird coasting the wind’s currents, mimicking her ship call.
Brona’s eyes glitter as she squeezes my arm once, then pushes it away. “Go on, then.”
Rubbing at that tattoo, I leave her out among the others and walk toward the fire and the monster coaxing its flame.
Rí Maccus stands in the middle of the lean-to, sweat mingling with ash and flecks of metal down the exposed line of his back.
Leather guards wrap over his forearms, gouged in scars.
One hand clasps a dark, plain hammer, the other an iron rod.
Pale gold strands of hair stick to his neck in wet trails beneath the knot he’s tied atop his head.
I could almost believe he was a statue—the god Eamon himself, preserved forever in stone—until he moves.
I witnessed Maccus fight once before, my eyes caught on the arc of his blade as he pierced Faolan’s side, but even then I didn’t fully understand what we were facing. The raw power behind the man.
When Maccus brings down the hammer, it’s inevitable.
The cherry-tipped rod of iron bends beneath his strikes, over and over again. He rains blows upon it until the glow fades, red replaced by orange, then palest yellow-gray until at last, shoulders heaving, Maccus thrusts the iron into a dripping trough.
My body goes rigid as the water emits an unearthly shriek, a brutal wet heat flooding my lungs—but it’s not enough to drive out Brona’s reminders.
That I am a pirate, and a Soulgazer.
And that not once has Maccus ever played fair.
So instead of shrinking back, I stand in the doorway and wait for him to turn around.
“What did you have to sacrifice in your search for Eamon’s hammer?”
The Stone King goes rigid, his grip faltering as his eyes snap to mine.
“What do you mean by that, Bandia Saoirse?”
A heavy rush of satisfaction shoots through me, even as guilt nibbles on my tongue—but it’s not enough to stifle the rest of my question, no matter how cold it might be.
“You told the council that you drove into the heart of Mount Iolair to find Eamon’s relic, but I’ve never once reached the gods without having to give up something in return. So what—”
The rod falls out of his hand, striking the bottom of the trough with a heavy clang. But it’s not offense that causes Maccus to clench his jaw as he wrenches the iron free.
It’s a rigid calculation.
“What do the gods always want?”
The question stops me short. Fat droplets of water splatter the ground as Maccus meets my eyes, gaze as cold as the iron rolling across his palm.
“Our bodies? Our promises?”
Our blood.
Maccus shoves the rod back into the fire, stirring the coals so heat pours off the forge until the air grows hazy with it, painting sweat across our brows.
“We grow up with stories on Unbound Earth of babes cast into the mountain’s flaming core for good fortune.
Bloodlines ended over a single vein of gold.
Ruthless bargains made by a merciless god.
” As he speaks, Maccus arranges tools across the wooden table: wedges and pincers, a heavy-ended pick.
“Even after the slaughter, some of our people still attempt to reach Eamon through these…traditions. My own father was among them.”
Any gratification lingering in my belly dissolves at those words.
“No one would hear of it when I was freshly born, but over time, he convinced my mother and the court that the land required atonement: his heir—the last full-blooded descendant of the Daonnaí on our isle—for the dreaded blight to end.” Maccus grunts, adjusting the anvil with gray-streaked hands as another voice echoes through my mind.
Da, hard-faced and seething, fingers bruising my arm.
I should have cast you into the sea the moment you opened those eyes and I recognized you for what you were.
Maccus turns the rod in the fire, the flat metal length beginning to glow again. “I was barely in trousers when he led me into the depths of Mount Iolair and thrust me into its heart flame.”
A gasp lodges in my throat before I can stifle it.
Maccus looks up, a wrinkle forming in his brow. “Calm yourself, Bandia Saoirse. I burned, but I did not break. Do you know why?”
I can barely form the words, heat creeping up the back of my neck.
“The mark of Eamon.”
Maccus takes up the hammer and nods.
At the core of Mount Iolair, it is said Eamon established his great forge, stoked with a fire that never ceases burning, and veins of ore that never run out.
Only those descended from the Daonnaí were permitted access, and even those must survive the Slaughtered One’s blessing first. For it was said Dia Eamon bore keen eyes and a callous heart.
To forge raw material into the extraordinary—to stand in the embers, refining impurities and conducting alchemy—required precision. Unyielding focus and strength.
A willingness to sacrifice everything for the forge.
The seanchaí told me Eamon’s blessing was not unlike that of Clodagh’s, which they wear tattooed beneath their throats. But where the seanchaí’s collarbones are marked by needles and ink, those who would bind themselves to the anvil and embers are expected to bear its scars.
And only a few who’ve braved the unnatural fire have ever survived to wear Eamon’s mark.
“It appeared as they pulled me from the ashes,” Maccus says, “like the Slaughtered One himself had risen from death to brand my flesh.”
I blink heavily, searching his exposed skin for the scars. “Where—”
Without warning, Maccus lifts his shirt, exposing a heavy map of raised white and pink lines mottled into a macabre map over his abdomen. There, at the center, lies the mark of Eamon’s great hammer, branded permanently into his chest with harsh purple lines.
Tears jump into my eyes unbidden as Maccus sweeps me with a cool appraisal, eyes narrowing before he releases his shirt with a slanted breath.
“Spare me your pity, lass.”
“It’s not pity, it’s”—a wet laugh bubbles up my throat—“empathy. No child should go through that. No person. Gods, we—”
“Bandia Saoirse—”
“—we are alike, you and I.”
That gives him pause.
Swallowing, I step closer. “We were both forged by pain—”
“And made better for it—”
“No.”
Maccus stares at me for a long moment, then scoffs as he withdraws the iron from its bed of coals.
“I was able to find Eamon’s hammer because I first burned.
I will spare my island from his wrath, because of the pain I withstood.
” Raising the hammer in his other hand, he lays the rod across his anvil and rains down a series of heavy blows.
“Would you say my father was wrong in his convictions?”
I don’t hesitate. “Yes.”
Beads of sweat form at his temple as Maccus drives his arm down harder, metal ringing through the air. “Then what of your own father? Are you not better for his actions that led you to this place?”
I have to fight to keep my body from recoiling.
No, I am not better for the damage my father gave me. If I could turn back time and be loved, I would. Da’s cruelty and Mam’s apathy are a poison my body is still purging—one I wouldn’t have recognized if not for the wolves and their impish captain’s laughter to act as my balm.
But something about Maccus’s answer…his avoidance…cracks the rigid wall open between us, revealing what I’ve been looking for: a wound.
“Did you sacrifice your wife and son?”
Maccus falters between one blow and the next, hammer striking the wrong place so that the iron rod breaks in half with a brutal snap.
There is quiet, save for sparks cracking in the forge. Heavy breaths that send metal flakes drifting toward the ground like starfall. My skin prickles with heat and nerves as something simmers in the air between us—something like loathing. Resentment. Disgust.
The Stone King is vulnerable.
I have my way in.
“Maccus, did you kill—”
Maccus whirls on me, grabbing for my arm—and I don’t fight it.
But the vision is unbearably violent when it comes.
—
Poison lies at the heart of the mountain and in the empty shell of my father’s eyes.
“It is done,” he says as he lays down his pickaxe, the iron-wrought point split by hard stone.
“It is done,” he says as he touches my mother’s cheek, withered and hollow and gray with death.
“It is done,” he says as he crowns me with cold metal and leaps into the chasm below.
The earth cracks. Crumbles with every strike.
Fumes weep through the crevices, encasing our villages, cradles, homes, and still I drive deep.
Deep until not a gemstone is left. Deep, seeking answers or healing or help.
Deep, hoping to break myself—deeper into Mount Iolair than any other mortal has gone before.
I dig until I emerge weeks later to a radiant light, and the softest creature I’ve ever known.
Laoise was her name, and she would be my sun—my guiding star.
Until the poison stole her too.
Like my father.
Like my son.
I watched her belly swell, and her cheeks hollow, and I knew. So again, I drove deep, and deeper still. Until there were no gods or mortals, no sun, no stars. Only the bare bones of the earth.
That is where I awakened it.
At the feet of—
—
Maccus steps back, breaking contact with a harsh swear as the fire pops in the forge, sparks licking across my skin.
I wait for it to hurt.
Wait for my mind to empty of his memories—for the murky, hollow images to clear and some sense of triumph to take over because for once, I got the better of him.
So why does a pit form in my stomach instead?
Maccus looks just as taken aback, staring at his hand like it’s betrayed him before slowly, he turns those furious eyes on me.
Eyes that flicker like embers, calculating exactly what to burn.
Chills erupt down my spine as I take a step away from the Stone King. Another, until a gust from the ocean washes over my back. Suddenly, I’m less certain that was the right path forward. The harder he looks at me, the more I wonder if I’ve played entirely the wrong hand.
“Maccus, I—”
“Bandia Saoirse.” He fairly spits the name out, any thread of reverence gone from the title. “Get out.”
Heart sinking, head still heavy with visions of his loss, I turn on my heel and walk, knowing damn well that for whatever ground I’ve just gained, he’s already moved ten paces past.