Page 114 of Soulgazer

I shove the entire row to the side, kicking shoes and scarves out of the way until there is space to run my hand along the smoothwood of the back. But there will be a seam, a knot, and when I press just so, a door will open and reveal—

Nothing.

“Feck!” I pitch myself against the wall of mortar and stone that was once a small tunnel meant to save my life in case of an attack, but it doesn’t give. My heart climbs in my throat as I try again. Racing to the fireplace for the poker, I wield it like the crew wield their swords and thrust it against the mortar again and again until sparks fly and all I’ve accomplished is a few shavings on the wardrobe floor.

My breaths are ugly, desperate things now, full of dust and decay.

Rot.

The air is rotting here—so full of the dead and dying. OfmemoriesI no longer wish to have. But the window is latched like the door, and I cannot breathe.

I cannot breathe.

I—

Sprays of glass cascade over the room and down the castle wall as I lower the iron poker and cling to the window frame, allowing the wind to consume me. It’s only when my head stops spinning that I catch sight of a woman reflected in a stubborn shard of glass clinging to the side. Raw anger burns in the line of her broad shoulders and tilt of her chin—strength in the set of her strange eyes, the muscles that weave in harmony with her curves.

A sound catches in the back of my throat as I fight the urge to reach for her, because she is intimate and foreign, yes, but she is alsomine.

“Saoirse?”

The voice lands like a slap. An impossibility. But glass crunches beneath a heavy step as my bedroom door creaks shut, and then Iseehisface. Pale and sharply angled, warped in the glass beside mine. Not Conal, the brother I spent seven years believing I’d killed, but the other—my favorite.

The wind blows our hair wild as I face Aidan at last.

Seven years have stretched and hardened my gentle brother into a warrior. A weapon. I remember how Da used to push him to keep up with Conal. How Mam would sneak Aidan away from the sword to play the harp for her instead, claiming his elegant fingers were better suited to the strings. When Mam and Da argued over it, Aidan would take my hand and we would run to hide among the faerie pools. Da had little patience or consideration for a second son.

Not until the first one was lost.

I search for the laughter that used to play a constant dance in Aidan’s eyes, the lips that were always seconds away from a smile. I find nothing but a fraught sort of curiosity, and a tiny wrinkle to his brow.

“Aidan?”

He startles, raising his hands defensively before he curls them into fists and drops them by his sides. I’d laugh if it didn’t hurt so much. Of course he’s afraid of me. The last time we saw each other outside the hall below, I was half-mad on the beach, screaming with shifting eyes, and he was dragging Conal’s corpse from the waves.

Now he’s spent seven years under the weight of our father’s sole focus, determined to make him fill the space his heir left behind.

“What has Da done to you?” The words are out before I can swallow them down. For just a moment, something like regret crosses his face. But then Aidan wipes his expression clean in a way he could never manage when we were children.

“I’d think with your curse, you’d know better than I could ever tell you.” His voice is a shock to my system—familiar enough to have crossed my dreams a hundred times, lofty enough to be a stranger’s.

I shake my head, rolling the fire poker against my palm. “My magic doesn’t work like that.”

The word cracks through his mask. “Magic?”

I release a heavy breath edged in mirthless laughter. Glance at the shimmering blanket of glass on the ground. “Aye. Gods-given, like the mushrooms and the painted crane feathers and all the rest. It was never a soulstone curse.”

Aidan’s brows knit a furious line. “Da says you’re like a bean sídhe. That it was a mistake to ever let you walk among us.” He casts a look over his shoulder, then takes a step inside. “Are you a death bringer? Is that why Conal—”

“No.” Biting my lip, I carefully lay the fire poker down. “I thought so, too, because of my first vision—it happened that day on the beach. I thought…I thought I caused it. That something in me killed Conal, or that I brought it about.”

“You didn’t?”

I have to fight myself to hold his gaze. It’s been such a long time, and Aidan looks so much like Conal now. “I only saw that it would happen in my mind. Just as I see things now—in glimpses or flashes, or a feeling of what’s coming to pass. But if I could bring about death with my sight…” Something sour climbs my throat, remembering Da’s lips against my forehead, and all his gentle lies. I swallow it down. “Do you truly think it would have been Conal’s that I sought?”

Aidan takes a step back, and I catch the sides of my gown to keep from reaching for him, cuffs weighing my wrists down.

“I tried to change Conal’s fate,” I say, “running out of the water and begging you to join. And I swear if I thought for a second that I could go back and trade my life for his—”