Chapter Thirty-Two
Thirty-two
Saoirse
The gray-cloaked figure Maccus summoned approaches, and in his arms lies the relic that started this all.
Eamon’s dreaded hammer.
The cursed weapon that brought storms down upon his own people and drove cracks throughout the land.
The bronze-black metal is old and fragile but carved with patterns of the sun and stars.
Its handle extends as long as my arm, wrapped in silver-tinged leather barely clinging to the wood. It’s beautiful and horrible, and…
Different.
The scars are less prominent. Pocked holes cut shallow where they’d been deep and ragged at the autumn council.
“Give me your hand, Soulgazer.”
I turn my focus back to Maccus, honing in on the knife in his grasp.
Tight-lipped, I shake my head.
“You agreed before the council—”
“I did not agree to this.” My jaw trembles, head pounding under the crush of so many desperate spirits in my hands. I raise them between us, soulstones glinting madly as they tumble over my fingers to the ground. “Maccus. What. Is. This?”
Instead of responding, Maccus…laughs.
Rich and resonant, with the satisfaction of someone who thinks they’ve won, it slides under my skin like a blade of ice. It’s the same sound he made when I’d offered him marriage the night he cut us open. The sound that’s haunted my dreams ever since.
Soulstones spill through my fingers like water as I rise to my feet—and that’s when I see it.
A stone fallen among the others.
Blanched of all color.
Cracked.
Drink the bones dry, oh, drink the bones dry.
The air shifts, growing hot and stifling as Maccus kneels before me, dagger balanced in his palm. When I refuse to look at him, he lays the blade flat beneath my chin, wrenching my head up until our gazes lock.
There is a blazing furnace behind the Stone King’s eyes.
“Ask me again, Bandia Saoirse.”
My throat runs dry.
His lips twitch, caught halfway between a snarl and a smile. “Ask me again what I’ve sacrificed to wield Eamon’s hammer. What I’ve given to bring magic back into this world.”
Even without touching him, I know.
I know, because I released the souls of every descendant of the Daonnaí at my coronation, vessel after vessel filled with their stones, but Maccus brought only one for me to release.
And it wasn’t his wife’s or son’s.
“You…are you saying you used their…”
Soulstones.
Even as I try to choke the words out, tangled by fear and the blade digging into my skin, they don’t make sense. No one would risk the madness or death that comes from tampering with a person’s soul.
Not unless they were desperate.
Like Róisín, crouched over that body, whispering that there was no other way.
Like Maccus, witnessing his mother dying—his wife and their infant son.
Drink the bones dry, oh, drink the bones dry.
I stare at Maccus without seeing him, remembering Etain’s warning and Muireal’s sacred charge as the final piece of this mad, twisting puzzle falls sickeningly into place.
If what I witnessed in the stars’ vision can be trusted, then the Knowing Sea—the source of magic itself—gave the gods their power, blessing their relics as channels to be used. But the soulstones…
The soulstones were given to us by the Knowing Sea itself.
Raw vessels of untouched magic.
Power, ready to be harvested by anyone willing to pay the price.
“Oh. Oh gods.”
Maccus watches me in the partial darkness, then slowly lowers his blade. “You understand. At last.”
“How?!” I wrench myself backward, gaping down at the soulstones littering my skirts like fallen snow. “How did you—when did you—”
“Three years ago. After crawling through the belly of Mount Iolair while my wife and child lay dying above.” Maccus studies my movements like a cat might a mouse, unbothered as he turns the knife over once in his palm.
“My ancestors had buried the hammer deep below the mountain, in Eamon’s chambers, where they’d killed him while he slept.
I’d hoped finding it that I could…restore the mountain.
Collapse the empty channels—redirect its blight. ”
“But that wouldn’t have stopped Laoise from dying.”
A fracture appears in Maccus’s careful expression, lips drawing back as his eyes blaze again. “With a god’s full power, I could make time stop itself.” He blinks. Frowns. “In the end, though, it didn’t matter. I had Eamon’s hammer, but my wife and son had passed on.”
I wait to feel grief washing over him. Wait for even a shred of sorrow to slip from Maccus’s soul to mine.
Instead, I watch his face smooth over as he turns the dagger thoughtfully, then presses its tip to his thumb.
“Nothing happened in that first year. I plagued my seanchaí with questions. Made sacrifices to Eamon. Laid Laoise’s stone and the baby’s on an altar and waited for power to emerge.
” He turns his gaze on me where I remain bent over, toes clenched tight in the sand.
“That was my mistake. Waiting. It was in the second year that I started asking new questions. What was Eamon’s corruption?
The veins of ore that sprang up after his death were drying.
Mount Iolair was breathing poison over our people every night.
What had he done that was so terrible, and why did he do it? ”
“He was a monster.” My voice shakes as I speak. “I saw it myself. He strangled my ancestor—killed his own people with storms and rockslides. Eamon—”
“Was a blacksmith. Forging new creations, beating out impurities, testing the strength of a thing by putting it through the fire first.”
I stare at Maccus, mouth falling open. “How delusional have you become?”
Another laugh pours free from the Stone King, this one edged as fine as the blade in his hands. “No more delusional than you were, abandoning our wedding altar for the notion you could awaken the Isle of Lost Souls.”
“But I actually did it. You just—”
“Dared to do what no one else would? To attempt the impossible.” Maccus glances down at his hands just as the knife pierces his skin, drawing forth a thin stream of blood. “To become a god.”
It’s my turn to laugh—hard and fast, unable to hide the terror within the sound. “If you fancy yourself a god now, Maccus, why the feck do you need me?”
It’s the wrong thing to say: flippant and sharp, like the Wolf’s taken over my tongue.
Maccus seems to notice too, glaring as he turns his dagger over, balancing the bead of blood on its tip. “Because breaking soulstones is only temporary, and the cost…”
Again his expression flickers, and I think of those twisted pieces of emotion that have bled between us. The memories that seemed distorted, even within the bounds of his own mind.
“The cost is not enough to grant me what I want.” Maccus shakes his head. “To truly wield the god’s relic, I need a god’s blood.”
A chill slides down my spine.
Locks behind my rib cage until it feels as though my chest is enclosed in ice.
“I won’t give it to you. I won’t.”
The grin Maccus gives will haunt me for the rest of my days.
“Weren’t you listening, Saoirse? Power is not something you beg for. It’s a thing you hunt down and take.”
I don’t hesitate this time. Don’t freeze or flounder.
I grab up my skirts and run.