Chapter Thirty-Six
Thirty-six
Saoirse
I break away from the vision gasping—choking on silver water as my body crumples over Maccus’s arm. He staggers back, Eamon’s hammer still clutched in one hand, the fingers of his other latched on my wrist like iron, blood pooling beneath his nails.
But the look on his face is resolute.
Calculating.
I stop pulling and turn to face him instead.
“Please, Maccus. You don’t understand—”
“I understand enough.” He looks from the hammer to my arm, then slowly raises his eyes to meet mine.
“You are nothing but a gateway to magic. A channel. A key.” He drags me up against him, raising my arm so that blood paints a shallow map to my elbow—one he traces with his gaze.
“And you will unlock the Knowing Sea for me.”
“What?” He starts to walk back to the pool’s edge, and I stumble after him—head pounding, heart splitting, focus torn between the madman dragging me like a rag doll and Brona, bound and gagged on the edge of the woods. “Maccus—I don’t even know where the Knowing Sea is!”
“Your magic comes from its waters. Surely they will call to you as the Isle of Lost Souls once did.”
“That’s—” My words falter, mind racing through options as he reaches the pool’s edge. “That’s different. I shared a connection with this island. I…”
I blink. Release a shaky sigh of relief.
“I share a connection with this island. Took a vow to guard its shores. Even if I wanted to, I-I couldn’t leave.”
Maccus stops, halfway out of the soul pool, water streaming down his back.
“…Unless you broke your oath.”
Something sinks in my stomach as the Stone King lowers himself back into the water. Turns, and considers me with violent eyes, fire licking at their edges. “What have you sacrificed for magic, Saoirse?”
My mouth falls open—partly at his question, and partly because of the way my wrist throbs as his fingers clench tighter, bruising me to the bone.
“Tell me.”
“My—my childhood.” The answer falls lamely between us, one word impossible to contain the loss I felt all those years. The myriad ways my father turned on me, my mother abandoned me, my brothers avoided me. Touch-starved and heart aching like a bruise that would never heal.
It’s clearly not enough.
“What else?”
I scramble for another answer as he surveys the edges of the soul pools, eyes landing on a series of baskets holding untouched stones.
“My body.” I think of the tattoo Father gave me. The way visions take me over, contorting me sometimes to the ground. “My mind. My future. My—life.”
My voice breaks as I realize the future holds no glow to it—not since I spoke with Etain and understood the full weight of what this role means.
What I would pass on to any children. What I will spend the rest of my days doing: bleeding for the world.
“Everything. I’ve given everything to this magic. ”
“Then it would be a burden lifted, to take it away.”
Alarm thrums at my throat as Maccus nods to a gray-cloak, hammer raised toward the basket—but before I can react, he wrenches my arm upward, turning me—twisting me—until my body is bent backward over the pool’s edge, his hand pinning my wrists to the rock.
Immediately, I struggle against him. To scream.
But Maccus is a mountain, and I’m the stupid, fanciful creature who thought she could bring it down.
“What are you—stop! Stop!”
“Hush, Bandia Saoirse. It is the only way.”
The only way.
There was no other way, damn you.
I thrash my head side to side as the gods’ voices tumble over Maccus’s: weak justifications for a horrific cause. There has to be some other path to show him. Some way to stop this before it’s too late.
“Maccus!” His name cleaves my mouth open as I stare, wild-eyed, at the basket he reaches for with one hand.
At the object, glimmering, between his fingers.
At the soul screaming inside.
“I-I’ll try to summon a vision. Ask the Knowing Sea for help. I can try to find it for you—to see where the gods went wrong! I can—”
“You can guide me to the Knowing Sea and summon it forth with your blood.” Maccus lays the stone down beside me, raising Eamon’s hammer instead.
“Please—please don’t!”
My mind empties as he drives the hammer down, splitting the soulstone nearly in two, then thrusts its broken pieces into my mouth.
It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. No loss I’ve ever known.
As the spirit within the soulstone bleeds out of the swirling rock, pouring down my throat, their essence shining and silver and raw, I can feel their death.
Witness it as though it were my body dying, just as I did in the gods’ chamber, with Eamon choking my ancestor against the ground.
I feel my bones grow brittle. Feel my lungs stretch with bile and blood.
Feel them burst and myself drown.
Feel the person’s nothingness—because there is nothing on the other side of this act.
No relief or kindness or rage.
Nothing.
That emptiness plants itself like a seed inside me, my oldest fears made reality and given roots. The soul that was and isn’t any longer seeps down my limbs like the unholy child of ice and fire. I see Muireal and my ancestors—see the choice I made to bind myself to the island, and—
I see it all dissolve.
Feel some untenable piece of me break.
Power surges through me, yes, but I am no longer whole.
I am—
Maccus releases my arms and I rend my body upward, gagging on the soulstone, which falls, blanched of all color and empty, into the soul pool. Immediately, the waters recoil, the lights usually glimmering in their shallows fading, then winking in and out.
I stare at them in horror, wiping my mouth—looking at the abalone sheen on my fingers left behind.
“What…” I can’t breathe. “What have you done?”
Maccus pushes free of the soul pools, standing at their edge. “I’ve freed you, Saoirse.”
The word is a perversion on his lips.
Maccus has never cared for my freedom, only Faolan—
Faolan.
My heart wrenches in half as I remember my husband’s name. Picture his face, his hands at the ship’s wheel, his eyes flooded with pride every time I made a new choice, or defied his stubborn logic, or whispered my hopes and dreams.
Faolan, who bound himself to me when I released him from his soul bargain.
Faolan, who I wanted more than anything…now left in the wilds alone.
This is not freedom.
I open my mouth to speak the words, but an ugly, broken cry is all that comes out as Maccus takes my jaw in his hand.
“Now,” he murmurs, leaning down close enough to me that it could almost be a kiss. “You will lead me to the Knowing Sea, Bandia Saoirse. Summon it with your blood. And I will finally take magic from its waters. I will rebuild the Crescent, and I—”
Shock crosses Maccus’s features.
His grip goes slack.
And then like a rockslide, Maccus tumbles to the ground, leaving Callen standing like a ghost behind him.