Chapter Thirty-Seven
Thirty-seven
Saoirse
The Stone King crumbles like an avalanche at my feet.
All around the clearing, gray-cloaked figures buckle and call out, clutching at their stomachs or throats until the very last keels over, leaving only me, Brona, and Callen standing.
I can’t move. My feet are buried in silt as I stare at Maccus while his face relaxes, abandoning its wild contortions as the ember sparks fade from his eyes.
They shift as he watches me, losing focus—fighting to keep it before falling shut.
And even then I don’t move until his chest rises and falls, ancient hammer balanced haphazardly across its top.
Maccus is alive.
But I wish with every part of my being he was not.
“Sr-sh-mph!”
My head snaps up to see Brona, limp arm dangling as she staggers and pulls the other free from her captor’s grasp.
I crawl out of the soul pools on shaking limbs to reach her.
Callen gets there first. As they catch her by her good arm, I pull the gag free, stepping back only slightly as Brona coughs and spits out blood.
“What in the gods’ name was that?!”
“I don’t know. Callen—”
“I didn’t kill them, if that’s what worries you.” Callen’s voice is uneven as they stare at something in their hand: a bottle of lurid pink and yellow powder. “It’s only a paralytic.”
“Only?” Brona’s voice pitches high as I falter, then guide her back to sit on a rock. “You were only supposed to disrupt their building site—”
“I did!” Callen shakes their head and picks their way around the bodies to come by Brona’s side. “I mixed this with the dust after knocking that ladder over, so they’d all breathe it in. They should’ve collapsed where they stood.”
“Well, they didn’t.” Brona swears again, harder this time, but her voice is shaking. Her arm all wrong. “If you saw them carrying on, why didn’t you—”
“Brona.” My teeth clatter as I bend over double, the arm around her waist barely holding on. “Maccus surprised me. Surprised all of us, it’s no one’s fault, just…gods.”
The plan was to examine Eamon’s relic. Understand where it came from and how he was using it. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that he’d be breaking soulstones for it.
That he’d drink their essence.
That he’d make me…
A moan climbs out of the mangled mess of my lungs.
I was wrong. So wrong.
“All right—enough of that. Let’s not lose our heads.
” Callen rakes their white-blond hair back, sweat matting it at the temples.
“Saoirse? Try your best to…vomit or something, I don’t know, and see if that has any effect.
Brona?” Hesitating, Callen drops their hands to their leather belt and starts to tug it free. “Bite down on this.”
Swearing under her breath, Brona follows Callen’s orders as I stumble over the fallen bodies toward a patch of ferns and ram my fingers down my throat.
It works—and it doesn’t, my stomach heaving though none of the soulstone’s iridescent liquid comes up.
That empty, cavernous space inside me doesn’t fill back up either.
Panic starts to set in as I wipe my mouth.
Panic and so much disgust.
I pull Faolan’s coat closer—press my face into the lapel and try to breathe him in as tremors start down my spine. But it doesn’t keep me from feeling Maccus’s weight pushing me down onto the rock bed. Doesn’t stop the wrongness crawling in my mouth.
I drank a soulstone.
Drained a person of their life.
A sick pop tears me from my thoughts as Brona bites down on the leather with a garbled scream and Callen presses her arm back into the socket so it hangs right again.
My fingers are numb, wrist throbbing, as I reach for the ragged hem of my skirt and tear a length from the bottom, tying it around Brona’s shoulder and easing her arm across her chest.
She spits the leather from her mouth, breaths coming in sharp pants. “Right. That’s done now. We’ll just slit the bastards’ throats, and—”
“He’s a king.” My voice is weak even as I say it. “No matter what else he’s done, we can’t kill him.”
“We could.” Brona kicks the man who held her, turning his body over until she can get to her dagger, which he’d tucked in his belt. “One cut, and this would all be over.”
I can’t help looking at my hand. The soul-bargain mark, which has completely lost its sheen. “It would start a war.”
“A war we could win.”
“Brona—”
“Maccus attacked you!” Brona jabs her knife into the air, eyes wild with fury. “He harbored a god’s weapon and used it to destroy a soulstone—something none of us even knew was possible.”
Again my body convulses at the memory of that pain.
The mark on my hand lies still.
“And that’s beside the fact that I already stopped Etain from leaving,” Brona goes on. “There’s no feckin’ way she’d have us punished for—”
“What about Rí Tadgh?”
Brona blinks, her good arm slowly dropping through the air. “What about him?”
“He’s allied with Maccus. Probably possesses the vessel of Clodagh—”
“Definitely used it to heal the flesh waste in his hand.”
I pause, thinking of how shriveled and sallow Tadgh was on his arrival to the island. How he’d disappeared with Maccus that first night and came to the morning council bright and smiling, with a hand free of blight.
Humiliation joins hands with my loathing and dread.
How had we not seen it before?
“You’re probably right.” My lips feel numb as I speak. “But we don’t know how long this paralytic could last—”
“Long enough for me to board Tadgh’s ship and go looking for his relic.” Callen brushes a hand down their lean frame, plum-colored silk at stark odds with our sodden, filthy attire. “None of his court will bat an eye if I show up with enough whiskey.”
“Unless, of course, they heard the accident we already staged?” Brona asks, her voice sharp but shaking. “Or Saoirse’s screaming?”
“The trees are too thick to let it travel all the way to the beach,” Callen says, “and Maccus got her up here quietly enough to not raise an alarm. Look—” They raise their hands, pale lines against a charcoal night.
“I don’t have to search for Clodagh’s relic any more than I had to drop the Stone King to the ground.
I could go back right now, get roaring drunk in my tent, and claim ignorance come morning while the rest of you battle over some dusty old relics—but I won’t.
It’s like you said when I signed on, Saoirse.
” Their eyes darken as they look my way.
“I want to keep the Crescent from another reign of power-hungry, egotistical, selfish feckin’ gods. ”
“I…” My heart quickens. Head squeezes. “All right. Just—please don’t get caught.”
At once, the seriousness vanishes from Callen’s face, a smirk twitching their thin lips instead. “As if I’d ever. Now, you and Brona get your things and meet me on my ship—”
“Absolutely not.” Brona kicks a fallen man’s arm aside, marching closer. “If you won’t let me cut their throats, can you take one guess who they’ll come hunting for the second we’re on the sea?”
Callen blinks. “Well, what other ship is there?”
“I just told you, I kept Etain from leaving. Saoirse can tell her what Maccus did, and maybe the old girl will take pity on us.”
I scrub a hand over my face. “Even if she does, Brona, I can’t…”
But the word leave falls, stillborn, in my mouth.
That emptiness inside me grows.
I don’t feel the connection.
Not to the island.
Not to Faolan.
Not to myself.
Brona looks at me with a face torn between pain and pity, blood still dripping from her split lip. “We’ll make it work. Take over another ship if we have to. We’re getting you off this bloody island.”
My head reels again, and I stagger back on my heel—foot brushing against a firm shoulder.
Maccus, sprawled at my feet.
“…What if he hurts the people here to spite me?”
“He won’t bother.” Callen looks to Brona for confirmation; she nods. “They’ll be safe once the relics are off the island.”
Brona snorts. “Safer if we could destroy the damn things for good.”
I stand on shaking legs, staring at Maccus before I make my way toward him, every muscle flinching at the nearness of his form. At the great hammer that cracked open a person’s existence. Cracked the very foundations on which I was formed.
“You’re right,” I breathe. “None of us are safe so long as we have the relics.”
So long as we have the soulstones as well.
Bending down, I wrap my fingers around the worn leather overlapping ancient wood, shivering at the way it responds to my touch: oil-slick tethers sliding beneath my skin.
Bronze-black metal gleams like a serpent’s scales as I haul the hammer into my arms, staggering beneath its weight.
It’s almost impossible to think he managed it one-armed over our heads with ease.
“Bleeding skies,” Brona swears, then nods to the fallen men. “Fine. Callen, go after Clodagh’s vessel if you’re so confident, and we’ll plan to meet on Etain’s ship if it’s still there. At the very least, it’s not like she’ll throw you into the waters.”
“Done.” Without another word, Callen slips off into the shadows and across the forest floor.
“Saoirse, we’ll grab what we can from the cave—” Brona looks from me to the bodies, to the soul pools beyond, where the silver falls sliding up the mountain have slowed. “Quickly. And cut through the woods to the bay.”
I glance back down at Maccus. At the smooth-cut line of his nose, his jaw.
Imagine swinging this hammer into them.
A shudder wracks my spine.
“All right.”
“…You’re sure you can leave?”
Biting my lip, I heave the hammer over my shoulder, Faolan’s coat straining before falling gently down my back.
“We have no choice now.”
—
Brona and I race down the trampled paths, avoiding my people and Callen’s alike, until we reach the trail I coaxed Aidan down that leads to the bay and its full host of ships.
It’s only once we’re safely ensconced in the trees, staring out at those bobbing shadows, that the full horror of what just happened descends.
Pressure on my rib cage as Maccus weighed me down.
Cold, numbing fire sliding down my throat.
My hands empty. My heart the same.