Page 12 of Soulgazer

“I-I know. But, Da—” My words come to nothing when my mother enters behind him. She’s shrunk herself to a waif, blue-green eyes grown too wide in a face as delicate as bird bone. Still, her hand flies to her stomach as it almost always does when she sees me. Like she feels the ghost of me, there in her empty womb.

“Dermot. Her eyes.” Mam reaches a shaking hand toward my cheek. Stops only a breath away. “It’s happening again?”

My vision blurs as I nod, peeling my hands apart so the amulet drops to my chest. I wipe at the smears of blood with my skirt. “Aye—but I swear I didn’t take it off this time. You saw me put it on, didn’t you?”

Da scowls as he hooks the chain away from my skin, until the amulet dangles between us. I force a breath before his closeness steals the rest. “I wore it all night, and I keep praying, but it still won’t—”

He breaks the chain with one hard tug.

I claw at my throat as the amulet drops, but for the first time in seven years, all I touch is bare skin.

“Enough of this.” He straightens, and I struggle to my feet as well—until it hits me. Idon’thave my protection. And the tides are pressing in, andgods, it’s too much to feel. Even without touching me, Mam’s panic weaves through mine alongside Da’s resolve and fury, and a dozen other sensations that force me low until my forehead scrapes the ground.

I want it to swallow me whole.

“Dermot, what are you doing?! Saoirseneedsto wear it. You said yourself it was blessed by the druid on Eabha’s cliff, dipped into her well! We could offend the goddess if she doesn’t—”

“I said enough!” I look up in time to see Mam cower as Da paces forward, his boot ripping a hole in the rug. But he doesn’t strike her. He’s never had to. “Wise up, Leannon. It wasn’t the gods’doing—it never has been. Thisthing”—he shakes the amulet—“was only ever meant to smother her magic until I could find a permanent solution. And I have.”

Mam’s hurt collides with my own confusion, threatening the boundaries of my mind. I dig my fingers into the rug with one hand and wrap the other around my throat until I find something that makes sense—something angry and scared andloud.

The frantic pulse of my own heart screaming at me to run.

Dimly, I hear Mam say, “What are you talking about? The gods spared her the night she touched the soulstone. She was marked for death, but they allowed her to live. Youtoldme that’s how you discovered the amulets. You said—”

Da’s laugh ripples through the cell they kept me in. “I lied.”

I squeeze until my heartbeat becomes a tether, snapping the world back to rights.

Da stalks to the doorway, amulet fisted in one hand as he barks an order to the guard outside. Mam stands in one corner with her arms tucked like clipped wings, praying under her breath. Each of us is an island, encircled by musty barrel rings worn into the ground.

Except here on my knees, there is a sickly hue to the color I hadn’t noticed before.

I scrape my smallest finger along the ring’s edge and stare at the milky blue-white stain left behind. The same unsettling white embedded in each swirl of the amulet Da holds in his fist—the one mimicked in the mushrooms sculpted of crystal and metal dotting his crown.

The color of the caipín baís.

“You…you used the death caps?”

His body goes stiff, but even with his face in profile, I see the twitch of his lip. The one my brother pointed out to me once, likea forest going silent when the owl is near. “What else do you think would be strong enough to stop you?”

My hands fall uselessly to the ground.

The gods never helped me. It was only ever the mushrooms.

I want to laugh.

Weep.

Rage.

Vivid as moonlight, growing deep in the caverns he’s selling me to protect, the death caps are all we have left of the goddess’s magic on our island—the last creation to spring forth once our ancestors spilled her blood on the ground. For centuries we’ve used the caipín baís to heal and forget, ease pain and quicken death. But there are also rumors. Whispered reports I wasn’t meant to hear, of workers in those caverns who spend their days harvesting mushrooms and forget their children, their homes. Their own names.

It wasn’t until Da found an apothecary when I was three that he discovered new, powerful ways to use them.

Ones that filled our dwindling coffers and made him a wealthy king.

My stomach revolts, and I clutch a handful of those ridiculous feathers I spent so many hours creating—stopping only to bruise my knees over and over again, praying to gods Da promised would listen if I offered enough of myself. It wasDawho built half a dozen altars to the Slaughtered Ones by the time I was six—and Mam who guided my knife across the throat of my first pet in sacrifice. As the earth turned black and putrid beneath those altars, Da swore my offerings guaranteed the gods’ protection. He said they were what truly made the amulets work.