Chapter Fifty-Two
Fifty-two
Faolan
In thirteen years of sailing together, the wolves have never been so silent.
Kiara’s ship cuts through the water like glass—smaller than any vessel we’re used to, meant for quick jaunts between Ashen Flame and Frozen Hearth.
There are two sails, and no cabins to speak of, only a hull to carry cargo but not much else.
The wolves had managed to square away our handful of bags, a few bedrolls, one crate of food, and two barrels of fresh water with the little warning they’d had to prepare, but even that’s barely enough.
Lorcan hefts the sails, Brona studying the single map she managed to snatch as Tavin mans the wheel, and Saoirse, as pale as a slip of moonlight, tends to our wounds.
I curl up at the stern, useless, looking for all the places Nessa’s not.
It took two hours to clear the coast of Ashen Flame, skating the narrow strait through smoke and heat that spit off the land, all those rolling dunes and grasses catching fire.
At some point, the carnyx fell silent.
Or maybe at some point, I stopped caring if it sang.
Saoirse looks over at me, fingers trembling as she wraps Brona’s cuts, a tiny clay jar tucked in her soul-marked hand.
Brona keeps sniffling, shoving a sleeve over her face, eyes blank, until she screws them tight and fixes them on the map and sky again.
Lorcan heaves on a rope and just…hangs there for a while, not bothering to hide the agony on his face. And Tav—
“Your turn.”
Saoirse kneels in front of me, nudging my arms down.
“I told you to wait. The wolves—”
“They’re taken care of.”
“Your head?”
Saoirse bites her lip. “The pain and dizziness comes and goes. I’m fine for now.”
I try to sit up, but my muscles refuse to work. The climb, the fire and smoke, losing Nessa, fighting Maccus—all of it’s caught up to me, stealing every ounce of strength I have. But Saoirse doesn’t say a word, just leans over, reaching for a scrap of fabric she cut to serve as a cloth.
“Are you sure I can’t—”
“Leave it. Please.” Her hands clench, then fall at her sides. “It’s done. Maccus has the soulstones. He has Róisín’s relic, and Clodagh’s and Eamon’s now too.”
I frown, shaking my head to clear away some of the fog from the last few hours. “He…got the hammer?”
“Tavin couldn’t carry it.” Saoirse’s lip trembles, but she takes a breath and reaches for me again.
I start to duck away when she grabs my collar and pulls me close, wiping at the soot and blood and sweat coating my face. My hand falls pointlessly over my chest, a keening sound building in my throat, then dying away. “He doesn’t have your blood, though.”
Saoirse frowns. “But he has Aidan. Do you think…gods, I don’t want to think.” She stops again, hand and cloth curled against my throat. “I don’t want to feel. I—”
Someone moves just past her—Brona, stopping her calculations with the map to bury herself in Saoirse’s arms. My insides spill out like someone’s cut my stomach, but I have nothing left in me to reach out to her.
To tell Lorcan I’m sorry, that I tried. To promise Tavin a fresh dawn’s going to light the horizon tomorrow, with new stories to tell.
It’s all so fecking hopeless.
Maccus won.
Saoirse, tears streaming down her cheeks, pushes the cloth into my skin.
Dunks it in a wee bucket and repeats the movement over and over until water runs down my chest, my arms, my lap.
I stop fighting her, staring at the sails as they snap and fold in an irregular pattern, the winds tricked by the land nearby.
Aisling’s the one to finally break the silence, still sitting tight in a corner, clutching the shield to her chest.
“What do we do?”
I stare at her blankly, and she frowns. Stands on shaking legs, the shield too heavy for her to bear—but still, Aisling manages, somehow. “You’re the Wolf.”
The name used to send a thrill through me. Now all it does is wound my already bleeding heart.
“That doesn’t matter anymore.”
She shakes her head. “What about the legend, the stories—”
“That’s all they are, Ash. Stories.”
“You have to know—”
“I don’t know anything!” I shout, rounding on Aisling.
“I don’t know what the feck to do, or where to go, or how in shade’s realm to come back from this.
Nessa is dead. Etain is dead. Kiara’s been taken, the whole bloody Ring of Stars has shattered into a thousand pieces, and after two hundred years, that would be a pretty damn impossible thing to fix. ”
Aisling’s mouth snaps shut. Saoirse’s knuckles press into my heart.
I hang my head, anger dissolving into nothing but grief.
“I don’t know what to do.”
The words are simple but damning. Ones I’ve never spoken before.
I’ve always had a second plan—a third or fourth, contingencies and humor, convincing us all that we’ll be just fine. That the next corner will bring treasure, or wonders, or something worth living for.
But I can’t be that creature.
The Wolf might as well be dead.
There’s quiet again, needling into my skin like it’ll shred it before the night’s through.
I wait for Brona to snap at me—to rightfully strike me with all her fury because I couldn’t save her closest friend.
I want her to hit me. Want Lorcan to shove me overboard, Tavin to drive the knife in deeper so at least then I could make sense of some of this pain.
There once was a nameless boy who longed for a cloak of wolfskin.
“I have a story.”
Saoirse drops her cloth in the bucket and sits back, looking at the sky. There’s a streak of ash on her jawline. Blood in her hair. But even hurt—even filthy, and terrified, and angry—something soft stays in her eyes.
“There was a girl arraigned in laughter, wicked with her knives.”
Brona’s head lifts just a touch, light catching on the tears in her lashes as Lorcan eases his grip on the ropes, the sails.
“Wherever she roamed, that girl set the world to howling. With a wink, she’d have them eating out of her palm.”
Brona sniffs. “She liked her pleasures, and in turn they loved her.”
“Friends in every corner of the Crescent,” Lorcan adds, his voice breaking. “There wasn’t a bloody ship out there that didn’t know her name.”
Tavin grips the wheel tighter, wood groaning beneath his weight. “She kept a cheeky hand with the law, always in its pocket.”
My neck convulses. Chest caving like rocks are being hurled at it, one by one.
But still, raw though the pain is, I somehow manage to collect the right words.
“Nessa was her name.”
Saoirse looks at me, lips quivering before she draws them into a smile. “Stories matter. Even if the only people who tell them are the ones we used to love.”
It’s like she’s peered into my heart again, without the magic. Without the soul bond.
Without even really trying, Saoirse sees me.
My head drops onto her shoulder as a harsh wave of grief works its way up from my stomach—but this time, I don’t fight it down or flee.
I release it all in one long, shuddering breath, wrapping my weak arms around her waist as Saoirse curls into me, holding on.
After a minute, jaw clenched, I fumble for the leather clasp at my hip, my fingers stiff, joints swollen as I flick it open.
Biting the cork between my teeth, I spit it onto the deck and raise my flask high.
“For Nessa.”
I drink, slow and deep, feeling every drop burn down my smoke-scorched throat. Then I pass it to Saoirse, who drinks and hands it off to Brona, Lorcan, Tavin.
Aisling barely manages a sip, her bloodshot eyes closing tight as she swallows and then whispers. “For Etain.”
“For Etain,” I echo, standing to take it back.
Gently, remembering the feel of Nessa’s limp form in my hands, I turn the flask over and empty the last of the whiskey into the sea. It falls in a brilliant arc, here and gone again in a few seconds’ time, throwing light like the prisms of those stupid stones that hold our lives.
My fingers twitch at the memory of scraping her jaw.
Watching it fall slack.
“I couldn’t even get her soulstone,” I finally say, the admission burning like fire in my throat. “I saw it. I could have taken it, released her—”
“She’s not the only one.” Saoirse looks at the others, wiping at her eyes. “I thought about it when we fought the oilliphéist. How many sailors fell into the sea. How many stones are never recovered. And how…how Nessa might be trapped in those burning woods even now.”
Brona’s whole body shakes as she buries her sobs in Lorcan’s shirt.
“Maccus was wrong about so many things,” Saoirse says, voice low. “But the soulstones…it’s time for them to be done.”
I crouch and draw Saoirse’s hand to my mouth, pressing my face into her palm.
Across from us, Aisling holds the shield tighter, dropping her forehead to its rim.
“What he said, though…” Tavin rubs the bridge of his nose. “About the sacrifice—”
“Anything but that.”
Saoirse’s quiet again, fingertips curled into my jaw. “…What if it’s the only way?”
Opening my eyes, I take one of those fingertips and bite it gently, just once. “Then I guess I’ll be fighting the Knowing Sea. Should be one hell of a way to—” The tease fades as a fresh stab of pain shoots through me. Nessa’s blank eyes stare back from the spray of mist off the bow: flat and gray.
Gray as an ugly frieze tunic.
Slowly, grimacing from the ache of it, I unfold my body and walk over to the single map unfurled on top of the food crate. I study the dots where stars ought to be, the lines of currents—the odd shapes of the islands themselves.
And there it is. Small and obscure.
Tucked at the top of Ashen Flame and Frozen Hearth like the gods themselves are mocking me.
Peeling the map free, I hobble over to Lorcan and Brona and lay it over their legs. “Can you get us there?”
Brona looks at me in confusion, then at the map, before giving one small nod. “Can’t be too far off.”
Lorcan frowns. “What exactly is ‘there’?”
“The Gan Ainm.”
Both of them startle, pulled out of their misery by the name I’ve always danced around, shrugging it off as an obscure sort of cult—one I’ve made sure our routes avoided all these years. Tavin raises his head but says nothing as I grab on to a rope, leaning heavily into it for support.
“The seanchaí there hold the purest histories. Records going back to the earliest days of the gods.”
Brona looks from Tavin to me, her brows bunched. “…And why haven’t we used them before?”
“Because—” I balk from it for a moment, this truth I’ve hidden from for years. Glancing at Saoirse, I open my mouth and shut it again, faltering. Hearing those nasty whispers again.
Do you even believe in yourself anymore?
You’re no hero.
And then—her voice, soft and sure.
I love you.
“Because I haven’t been honest with you. About my upbringing. Who I am.”
My chest rattles as I breathe in, but it’s growing easier the more the sea fills it—ironic, considering all my damn dreams. Still, that snarling beast that’s sat in my chest for months now is quiet, the Wolf perking its ears instead. So I do what I do best.
I tell a story.
“There once was a boy with no name, who longed for a cloak of wolfskin.”