Chapter Thirty-Four
Thirty-four
Saoirse
I don’t get far.
Ferns lash my ankles and branches strike my skin as I sprint into the woods, as far away from the tents as I can. But even though I’ve walked these paths for weeks now—even though fear trails like lightning down my spine—I am no match for Maccus, or all his gray-cloaked men.
The crack of a twig is my only warning before an arm wraps around my waist, lifting me off my feet in an ironclad hold.
“You’re running from your oath again, Bandia Saoirse.”
“Let go of me!”
“Think of your duty to your people. You want to protect them, don’t you?” Maccus’s breath falls hot on my neck. “Or do you want to keep screaming until they come?”
The thought makes my limbs fall slack.
“Good.” Maccus lowers me to the ground. “Now. Walk.”
And I do.
Heart convulsing, breaths still shaky, clothes now damp with sweat, I walk through the forest until we reach the path between rows of silver-needled pines. I can barely smell their fragrance. Can’t hear any birdsong, insects, or frogs breaking through the night.
As Maccus holds my shoulder and the gray-cloaks fan ahead, I rub surreptitiously at the opalescent mark covering my palm and pray—though to whom and for what, I can no longer tell.
To Muireal for guidance?
To the Knowing Sea for power? Not to gift it to Maccus, but to be able to put an end to his own grasp?
Anger cycles through my panic as we draw near the soul pools, and the only face I can picture now is Faolan’s.
His smirk before I kissed him at the Damhsa.
The bewildered flush in Aisling’s Cove. The horror etched into his brow on my father’s isle, and the adoration in his eyes three nights before we reached the Isle of Lost Souls.
Faolan, whom I’ve never told I love.
It seems so stupid now, all the reasons I’ve swallowed it down. All the ways I’ve turned myself into a martyr.
The irony is cruel.
We reach the clearing with the soul pools, and finally Maccus lets me go.
“Now. Give me your hand.”
I turn on my heel, prepared to run once more—and a blow lands on my shoulder, forcing me to the ground. Pain roars through my entire body from the shock, water soaking my knees as pebbles dig into my palms.
But that’s not the worst of it.
The worst is hearing a familiar enraged scream cut off just beyond the edge of the wood.
“Don’t hurt her!” I shout, wrenching my head back, trying to see past Maccus’s shoulder—but he pins me down, the heel of his hand dug right over the top of my spine where the tattoo lies, deformed.
“Why shouldn’t I?” There’s a curve to Maccus’s voice, a smile. “A lone wolf, spying.”
“For me! She was doing it for me.”
“But you’ve done nothing for me, have you?”
Again his words hit their mark, and again I go limp beneath their weight.
Maccus’s hold relents at once—shifting to my waist to lift me with the confident ease of a man who knows he’s already won—but it doesn’t matter.
Because Brona is bound and bloody, caught in the hold of two gray-cloaked men.
“Brona!” I lurch toward her, but Maccus tightens his grip, burying a finger between my ribs.
“We all have our price. Surely the pirate taught you that. So tell me, Bandia Saoirse. What is yours?”
A sob builds in my throat as I frantically search my friend for injuries—her lip split, one arm hanging at an unnatural angle like it was torn from its socket, likely from burying the knife in her captor’s side. Ferocity glints in her dark brown eyes, but there’s pain and alarm there as well.
Without a sound, she shakes her head.
But there is no world in which I would sacrifice her life to save my own.
And no world in which Maccus lets either of us go.
This way, there’s a chance for her to make it. At least that’s what I tell myself as, arm trembling, tears slipping from my eyes, I slowly raise my arm and Maccus releases his hold.
“Bring us the hammer.”
There is no ceremony left in his speech, no lofty stories to share. But even still, Maccus takes my hand with a horrific sort of gentleness, as though he can’t feel the grit of sand and rocks pocking my skin. He guides me to the soul pools, standing at the edge as, reluctantly, I step in.
Light ripples across the water like a thousand stars trapped below the surface.
Like the Knowing Sea’s strange, beautiful realm.
I glance back up at Maccus, who looms over me, Eamon’s hammer in hand. It is hard-edged and cold. The bringer of storms and death.
A wave of revulsion sweeps through me.
I do my best to swallow it down.
“For three years,” Maccus says, “I have sought to awaken Eamon’s relic.
To harness its full power and rebuild Unbound Earth and the rest of the Crescent to what it once was.
But the sacrifice of mortals is a weak payment.
For such feats, it demands a god’s blood.
” He lays the hammer on the rocky edge of the pool between us, gentle as a lover’s touch, and then draws his blade once again.
“With the gift of your divinity, so let it be done.”
I am used to cutting myself open.
To bleeding to save the world.
I am still not prepared for this.
When Maccus flays my skin open, cutting a line beneath my wrist, every single ounce of strength I possess gives out, leaving me crumpled over Eamon’s hammer, gasping as faces, voices, memories, all unfurl.
But I don’t touch it. I can’t. I—
Maccus grabs my hand in his and forces it, palm down, over the hammer’s end.
And I see fire.
I see red.
—
Red splattered across Laoise’s pillow.
Red like the mountain, weeping a constant stream of blood.
Red like the forge that spilled out of Eamon’s belly after those weak-willed cowards dug their blades in and cut it free.
—
Agony tears into me like a wild animal burying its fangs in my gut—decay eating away at my lungs. I paw at my chest with my free hand as scraps of red flare and gutter before my sight.
Just as they did when I held the talon of Róisín.
As I try desperately to breathe again, the shards fly toward me faster and angrier until, all at once, they form an image—one I’ve seen before.
Dia Eamon.
Sculpted as though from stone.
—
“Drink the bones dry, oh, drink the bones dry.” His voice crumbles like a mountain falling, weary and ragged, as he brings his hammer down. Blood marks its side. Each strike sings against the anvil until it starts to…weep. A slow, silvery liquid that drips down its sides.
Faint trickles of iridescent light cling to the hammer as the god of the forge stops.
“There was no other way, damn you.”
A glimmer rises and fades atop the anvil, as if in response.
Eamon growls. “You gave me no choice!”
This time, there is no responding movement.
The things he beat lie still.
Howling with outrage, Eamon gathers the objects up, bright tears leaking between his fingers. “I will break the sea for taking you away from me! I will destroy every rock on that island, break every star open, drink magic from the deep.”
And as he says it, Eamon brings the objects to his mouth and tips them back.
Draining the soulstones dry.
—
Water bursts up around me as Maccus lets me go, my scream cutting short as I tumble into the soul pool.
My hands meet the bottom, stones shifting beneath my touch.
Their surfaces gleam, edges black and still: vessels emptied of the broken spirits I healed and released one after the other into the next realm. Lives able to continue on.
The full horror of what I’ve witnessed hits me at once.
Eamon drank the soulstones.
Poured their magic down his throat.
As Maccus shifts above me, raising the hammer to the patchy moon’s light, rain starts to fall around us and still I struggle to comprehend the full weight of the vision—of what true power will cost. It’s a secret buried deeper than Mount Iolair, or the stories of corruption we grew up with, because for the gods—
For the gods, harvesting soulstones to bless their relics was not the end of it.
To attain true power, they’d consumed them as well.
I jerk my head upward to see Maccus turning the ancient hammer over, eyes narrowed as he studies the places my blood has touched.
Where red streaks its surface, the metal looks freshly forged, wooden handle sleek and solid.
Without warning, Maccus turns to strike a rock at the edge of the soul pool.
It splits without effort, emeralds gleaming inside.
But Maccus frowns, dissatisfaction rolling off him in waves.
I can see it now—feel it—even before he looks my way.
It is not enough, anymore, for him to wield the relic of a god.
To ask for my blessings, in front of the council or in my own sacred woods.
Power is not something you beg for. It’s a thing you hunt down and take.
Dread curdles my stomach even as resolve solidifies in Maccus’s eyes. He tightens his hold on the hammer, my blood dripping down its side. Desire is clear on his face now—not for me, or my magic, but for the thing he’s truly been after.
To become a god himself.
“It’s you.”
I scramble back, hands sinking in the silt of the pool—flinching when they encounter something sharp that digs into my palm. But Maccus is the portrait of calm as he descends into the water, his own disgust shivering across its surface to brush against my skin.
“You are the link to lasting magic. You are the one that’s been blessed. You.”
He stops in front of me, Eamon’s hammer grazing the water.
“Insignificant. Weak-willed. Wretched. You.”
My fingers close around the jagged rock even as a humming roots itself in my jawline, then radiates across my rib cage, leaping from bone to aching bone. Where the hammer touches the soul pool, visions threaten to spill forth.
Still, I fight to stay present.
To keep my eyes on Maccus as he looms over my head.
“How do I take it from you?” the Stone King muses, tapping his blood-slick blade against his thigh. “Do I break you open? Drink of your blood, your soulstone, until the magic is mine?”
“You’d—kill yourself trying!”
“Right.” Maccus smirks and slowly bends closer until all I can see are his eyes. “What is that stupid phrase your Wolf always sings? ‘Think of the reward, never the—’ ”
I rip my arm up from the water and plunge the rock into Maccus’s throat.
Its pitted edge catches and tears at his skin like it’s made of lamb’s hide, leaving a gash that’s bloody and exposed—an ugly match for the clean scar at my own neck—but it’s not nearly deep enough.
I try again, frantic, aiming for his eyes, but Maccus drops the dagger to capture my wrist, squeezing until the tendons crush against one another and I’m forced to let go.
Blood spills between us, mine seeping between his fingers and his dripping from the wound at his throat. But that’s not the worst of it.
The worst is how the waters light up below us.
How stars seem to play within their depths.
“No! Please don’t—”
I wrest my entire body against Maccus’s hold on my wrist, clawing and biting, but it doesn’t matter.
In this bed of discarded soulstones, with a relic grazing the water and our blood swirling together as though it comes from the same vein, my wants and the Stone King’s are indistinguishable.
His desire rings clear as though he’s shouted it, and with a sickening lurch, the magic answers its call.
Make. Me. A. God.
All I can do is take a sharp breath before we’re both thrust into a vision, and the world falls away.