Page 27

In her, it had rotted.

Her small words would not hold the darkness on the horizon forever. Not when she did not know her true strength, not when the time to claim the full breadth of her power had passed. I’d been too docile, too subtle, and it had dulled her draw back to the beginning.

I should’ve been insistent the moment Annon earned his reward and went to dine with the king.

I should’ve carved out a place in her dreams until she could not resist returning to the first path of fate. The pain in her heart at Annon’s loss ached through mine like molten blood.

She’d needed time. She’d needed her folk. I’d waited all this time, and thought I could wait a little longer for the cracks in her bruised heart to heal. In all my misplaced optimism, I’d anticipated for the desire to find me, the damn yearning for the bond, to bleed as fiercely through her as it did me.

My teeth clenched. I slammed a palm against a back door and shoved into the dreary gardens behind the battered palace.

What a reckless fool I’d been. She’d drifted forturnsafter his death, almost hells-bent on avoiding this place, as though the call to return was a plague waiting to claim her. I burned, body and blood, for her. Yet my voice caused nothing but fear and apprehension.

“It’s allwrong.”

Mists wrapped around dark, mangled trees that returned no reply to my cries. No one ever answered.

Garden paths were lined in rune totems carved with sagas and poems and warnings of a past long forgotten. I ducked my head, crossing under a stone arch onto a moss-coated walkway in a shadowed part of the sprawling gardens. In the distance, golden flames sliced through the mist in layers of brilliant red from where torches perched on sconces.

One place shut out the darkness, shut out the endless screams in my head from endless deaths. Tree limbs parted, and the stone and sod mausoleum came into focus. A small mound with deadened grass on the top and river stones shaping the foundation. In one side I’d fashioned a crooked door from old birchwood to keep the sanctuary hidden from the shadows of this damn prison.

I paused at the arched doorway. Roughly carved runes decorated the face. Runes of power and joy, of strength and cunning. They’d long ago started to fade, the same as my hope. With a grunt of frustration, I shoved inside.

One step across the threshold and my shoulders slumped; a wave of relief filled me. Here, it was quiet. Here, I could breathe.

Old shelves were topped with scrolls of parchment. Most had scratchy symbols drawn incorrectly in childish writing. I read one, a practice scroll on how to shape runes and symbols when fate’s tales were written.

Three lines were crossed out. Off to the side were a few corrections and a note of encouragement:

Feel it more, Silas. Trust your heart. The song will come.

The tug of a smile built in the corner of my mouth. We’d tried for nearly three turns for seidr to give me words. Until it was obvious my song flowed with the words of another. Still, it hadn’t stopped the fate king from teaching me to write, to read, to find peace in music.

You’ve a gift boy, hone it. Not everything must be about seidr. What makes you sing inside?

I paused at the box of dried blood rose petals. Dark as mahogany and dry as parchment. What made my heart sing? It was her. Even in childhood, when I’d been mocked by other Rave youth for befriending a silly little girl, she’d been the warmest flame.

Calista Ode was my first friend. She took a place in my heart when our souls collided that wretched day. If I’d been wise, I would’ve sealed up the pain of it all. I would’ve had a heart of stone. Instead, I left my heart as delicate glass, easily splintered and shattered.

The torch in my hand cast a haunting glow over portraits and paintings from a world long forgotten. Scrolls of old heart songs I’d kept, of inkwells and quills used by the queen to write her prophecies. Never as potent as her daughter, but Queen Anneli had a gift of seeing short distances into a path of fate.

I paused at a dust-coated tapestry with the tale of the fate king’s heart song with his queen. Blue and burgundy threads were woven in vines of ivy and rivers and all the beauty of the first kingdom. A lost world. Forgotten through the lifetimes. Threads of gold spun the tale of how a son of seidr found his love match.

A beautiful tale, but even theirs was not the same as this.

This bond is new and strange. Never have I seen seidr use two souls as one. You must cling to it, Silas. Help her find the way back.Such a bond will live until the Otherworld calls.

I lowered to my knees and shook my head. “You were wrong, King.

I am never wrong.

“Ah, but you were.” I adjusted the mask over the aching scars on my face. “She took one look at me and made it clear she does not want me.”

Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

Bastard. I rolled my eyes. “I will do as I vowed and keep her safe. But there is no happy ending to this tale.”

Then you are not trying hard enough.