Chapter Twenty-Seven
Twenty-seven
Saoirse
Shadows pass over the cave wall as I swirl my fingers half-heartedly in front of the lamplight, trying and failing to replicate the animals Faolan’s created nearly every night.
“Long ago, in a time before kings and queens, goddesses and gods, there was the simple hare trouncing about the world all alone.”
“Really?”
“Well, it’s the easiest one to start with anyway. Curve your fingers like this. No, this. And lay your thumb down—there’s a good girl.”
I bend my hands like he’d shown me, knotting the two together with a twist, but all that appears on the wall are formless smudges.
“I’m no good at this.”
“You just have to try again. But better, because winds of fury, you really are quite shite at—oi, you cheeky wench! Where did you learn that disgraceful gesture?”
“From watching you!”
My throat seizes, heart giving a heavy lurch as I think of how he’d caught me round the middle that night, wrestling me down into the bedding that crackles even now as I shift closer to the flame, elbow digging uncomfortably between the ferns and blankets to press against cold, damp stone.
I raise my hands higher, bending them between the lamp and the wall until a creature some might consider animallike appears.
“Forget the hare. What I should’ve started you out with was the hound. Ball up your fist like this, and then—”
“I can think of some better uses for those hands.”
“Oh, can you? Show me a half-decent hound, love, and they’re all yours.”
My fingers cramp, the lines of my shadow-creature breaking.
I give up and roll onto my back once more.
Without the stories playing across them, the cave’s walls are flat and dull. They stretch higher than the lamplight or the fading sun can reach, patches of lichen fading with distance until all I can make out is a hazy sort of abyss. It’s lonely, and suffocating, and—
I wrench to my feet, rubbing at that old, hollow ache nestled deep in my chest. My sole companion for those seven long years, banished by the sea.
Somehow, between my time on the ship with Faolan, and our crowded existence on the Isle of Lost Souls, I forgot. How thick the air gets when you’re the only one breathing it. How silence can wrap like a chain around your throat.
I’ve craved the quiet—a place without dozens of people’s spirits reaching out with the constant need to touch me—but I didn’t realize this is what alone would feel like now.
Desolate. Empty.
Wrong.
“Enough.”
Dodging the lamp, I pace past the offerings that have only grown larger in Faolan’s absence, to the swollen trunk and its pile of clothes and belongings we salvaged from the ship before it sank too deep.
The bronze knitting needles I cast aside, as well as a pile of those gold fish’s gills and my silver sling from the Scath-Díol.
I dig until I find my old satchel: still full of jars, needles, bandages, and the other supplies I’d gathered before heading to my father’s keep.
And then I curve my fingernails into the bottom of the trunk, pulling until a wide, flat animal hide comes free.
Earth-colored and unassuming, it’s belted around the middle and folded close together at the ends to keep water—and Faolan—out. Tucking it beneath my arm, I haul the satchel over my other shoulder and start toward our bedside when something else catches my eye.
The Wolf’s green coat.
Crumpled up and discarded, it lies nearly invisible by the trunk’s edge, blending with the moss growing there and a handful of other trinkets Faolan left behind. Heart lurching, I scoop it up with gentle fingers, dwelling on the last time I’d seen it on his back.
The night Maccus attacked us and we awakened the Isle of Lost Souls.
I sink back onto our bedding, running my fingers over the stained, ragged wool as my mind drifts to that morning Faolan coaxed me to join his journey in a sun-dappled forest, whispering of legends and magic.
I remember the warm weight of it on my shoulders, the night he scooped me out of the water and our lives became one.
Tears sting my eyes as I turn the coat over, taking in the damage: a scar where I’ve sewn up the place Maccus’s sword cut straight through. Bloodstains still matted in the creases, muddying the vibrant color it once held.
I’d repaired it three nights after we’d settled on the island—once Faolan had found the cave for us and crafted ferns into a bed. But he’d waved my gift off, shoving the coat into a corner, face pale with regret.
Leave it, Trouble. That’s all done now.
Anger flickers in the place guilt had been.
And he’d called me a martyr.
Fingers clenched around memories, I force myself to release them and set the coat aside, turning my focus instead to the cured pouch of animal hide. Tugging at the strap, I move the cover aside and pull free a length of wool whose color is a near perfect match to the ink-spilled sky.
Faolan’s new coat is glorious.
The cut is more fitted than that of the last one—less of a chance it might snag on branches or catch over his arm when he’s slinging his blade.
Bronze buttons fall in a pile from its lining, ready to be sewn to the wrist cuffs and down its front.
I smooth the fabric over my lap, checking the gold-thread embroidery for missed stitches, but for all those hours Faolan disappeared each morning, my work’s had plenty of time to be done.
Hours in which I’d stewed over our choices, and whatever the feck we’d both become.
The Magpie and the Wolf.
Gods.
I gather the buttons, thread a needle, and set about attaching each of them in turn.
“Daughter of the Knowing Sea, gaze sworn long ago to me…” The song comes easily to my lips, flowing verse to wretched verse. “Captive soul, your blood shall free the isle of the lost.”
Yes, and a lot of good it’s done me. Arm, bandaged. Vials of my blood tucked neatly in a crack of the cave wall. Crate after crate of soulstones lined up by the mountain pools all waiting for my release.
“Silver streams our great moon wept while mistress fate for cent’ries slept. Rot across the lands has crept…”
A face flashes through my mind: Róisín, hunched over the mangled corpse like an animal, curved relic in her hand.
The magic is dying. There is no other way.
“To claim their wicked cost.”
Maccus’s mother joins Róisín: colorless and hollow, like the soulstone Lorcan found. The same one Etain flinched from after I’d asked if it was possible to corrupt them like the relics—after she’d implied the soulstones weren’t even given to us by the gods at all.”
“A thousand years it gave us, by…blood, and…”
I stop my sewing, finger poised beneath the last button as that song tangles, unfamiliar, on my tongue.
It’s Faolan’s.
The tune he’d been thinking of during the council, when Maccus revealed Eamon’s hammer and turned our world upside down.
Carefully, I push the needle through one last time as my lips try to form the lyrics.
Forget half the words. “A thousand years it gave us, by blood and sigil, tied.” Right.
That was the word that made me think of the gods’ relics and create this whole wayward plan in the first place. “ ’Til mortal gods…feck.”
For the hundredth time today, a pang wracks my chest as I think of Faolan.
As I wish with every bone in my body he was here.
I bite down on the thread to break it, then set the coat aside and stare down at my empty hands: opalescent mark shimmering in the lamplight as Faolan’s wolf ring and Muireal’s bone cast sparks of their own. But even when I press them together, or kneel down like I used to pray, it doesn’t work.
I can’t reach him. Can’t reach Muireal, for all times I’ve tried.
Questions swarm me like a cloud of midges: irksome and draining as they flit between visions I’ve witnessed and words I’ve spoken or heard—and still most infuriating of all is the fact that in this chaos, I know there’s a piece I’m missing.
Some vital, elusive bit of information that will make it all clear.
But I can’t find it in this cave.
Can’t summon it from Maccus’s memories or Roísín’s talon or…
Or Muireal’s ring.
Easing it from my finger, I turn the seventh goddess’s relic over once in my hand.
Slender and pale, the ring, I’d learned, was carved of my ancestor Muireal’s own hand.
A stone lies at its center, as silvery blue as the soul pools outside.
It survived centuries passed down through my family, being broken by my father and restored by my blood.
Wearing it had made me see this island as it could be. Visions of my grandmother.
A memory, and a song.
But though I’ve worn her relic every day, painting it countless times with my blood, the ring has been quiet ever since.
I drop it to my lap and lie back with a heavy groan.
What is the point of all of this? Of gathering the Slaughtered Ones’ relics when they were what nearly broke our world in the first place?
The legend of the Daonnaí is practically branded into our brains from birth: an angry people rising up against powerful but fallible gods, draining their magic into the islands and casting their relics aside so that all might have access to the magic—not within their bodies, but within the land itself.
The soulstones were the only enigma, a punishment by the rest of the gods against Muireal, hoping to erase her prophecy by erasing her island, her history—her very name.
“Daughter of the Knowing Sea, gaze sworn long ago to me.”
Eamon had looked murderous, lightning scattered through his hair, when he’d accused Muireal of summoning their downfall, and Clodagh had urged her to read the stars upon the sea again.
The Knowing Sea does not lie. Our time is coming to an end.
My fingers play with the ring on my belly, lips forming a soundless prayer to see the pattern clearly.
To understand its call.
Isn’t it odd that the Isle of Lost Souls was hidden for two hundred years, but the soulstones continue to exist?
A furrow notches my brow as Etain’s words hum through my memory, shifting…something within it.
Something that’s rapidly begun to take form.
Odd that the relics lost their power once their gods were slaughtered, but our spirits remain trapped until Saoirse releases them with her blood.
I stop playing with Muireal’s relic, sliding it above my knuckle as the swell of magic creeps below my rib cage, into my lungs. They expand with a dozen different voices overlapping, but when I release my breath, Etain’s is the one that wins out.
Almost like the soulstones weren’t given to us by the gods at all.
I lurch upright.
And see a vast, unknowable world around me.
The stars are the first thing I can make any sense of—silvery pricks of pure fire that wink out from the ripples and currents dancing across the sky.
They don’t follow the patterns Brona taught me, or any of the constellations I learned at Aidan’s and Conal’s knees.
They are almost…alive. Laughing and furious, brilliant and wretched. Beings in their own right.
Legends in the sky.
Only there’s not a sky. Instead, the air contorts around itself gently, like waves cresting and falling in a constant rhythm that should be disorienting but cradles my body instead.
I wait to feel frightened or wary, but that same thing in me that shifted before tugs again like a smile on my face.
And even without asking, my tongue shapes its name.
“The Knowing Sea.”
Its edges ripple as though in delight.
Its.
A gust of shock blows through me, nearly knocking me to my knees.
The Knowing Sea isn’t a place, or just another name for the ocean. It is…a living thing. A being? A presence, a—
Words fail before I can truly manage them, but I feel no anguish at their loss. Only an awed sense of belonging—the same way I felt the night I woke the Isle of Lost Souls.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” Again, a pleasant shiver wracks my spine. “You are the source of magic. But how…”
The stars swirl around me—faster than I can comprehend—and I might drop to my knees if there were any ground to fall onto. Instead all I can do is cling tight to my own body while the lucent creatures mold themselves into…
A ship.
A ship made of starlight.
The ache that pulses through me is stronger than any I’ve felt, as though I glimpsed Faolan among their number and lost him in the same breath. It doesn’t stop the scene from playing out, though.
Doesn’t stop me from watching as one, two—seven figures walk along the deck.
But one of them slips off from the rest.
One of them with eyes swirling round and round as though shifting colors, as mine are prone to do.
She walks up to the ship’s bow, raises her hand, and…slices off one of her fingers. It falls into the water, which shivers and then swirls. Faster and faster, it nearly tears the ship asunder until one by one, the people on deck join hands and jump.
The stars shift their positions—faster this time.
All seven figures walk on a bed of what looks like shimmering sand. The one with churning eyes—Muireal?—gestures to the ground and they all kneel. One by one, objects are offered: a hammer, bowl, shield. I mouth along with them: Eabha’s veil, Róisín’s talon, Odhrán’s antler…Muireal’s ring.
As she bends over her cut finger, it transforms, growing round and glittering, while off in the distance, an island appears.
No. Not just one island.
As each person—each god—picks up their relic, a new island emerges in the sky until the entire Crescent hangs over our heads. Seven islands forming an imperfect ring, though this one has something at its center. A small circle marked with three swirling lines.
The mark of the soulstone.
I’m reaching for it when the world suddenly contracts around me, scattering the scene and all those glistening stars. A voice—the first I’ve heard outside my own in this limitless space—echoes across time and stories, sounding out my name.
“…Saoirse…”
My palm lights up.
I stare at the bargainer’s mark as the air shudders—undulates like water, pressing heavier against my skin.
The Knowing Sea is still calling me.
It wants me to stay.
But again that voice drifts past the rumblings around me, desperate and urgent. Impossible to ignore.
“…Saoirse…”
“Faolan?!”
I whirl around and there he is, swimming in the abyss.
Not swimming. Drowning.
Without thinking, I kick my legs and push against the boundaries of this world even as it presses back in—not violent but desperate. Wanting me to stay.
“I’m sorry—I’m so sorry. I have to—”
“SAOIRSE!”
Hand outstretched, feeling the Knowing Sea’s displeasure as its tendrils release my skin, I grasp Faolan’s hand and we go plunging into darkness, swirling through the ocean once more.