Page 120 of Soulgazer

This magic is ferocious. It’s eating me alive—pulling viciously as the current dragged Aidan down so Conal was forced to follow. It tugs me to a chamber at the wrong end of the hall, marked by a beam and long strips of graying silk that flutter without provocation.

I don’t want to go inside. I fight with everything I possess, but it drags me through like the tide. As the last kiss of silk fades, my eyes adjust to the dim light of a single window and fall upon an altar in the center of the room.

Conal’s body rests on top.

Gods.

The magic fades like a candle snuffed, until only a whisper of its smoke lingers. His voice is just a memory in my mind. I hesitate and then trace the edge of his burial shroud, mapping the way it sculpts what must be petrified flesh now, if any remains at all. It doesn’t make sense why it’s here—why they haven’t put him in the crypt with the others to seek rest until the Isle of Lost Souls can be found.

My touch lingers on the embroidery at the silk’s edge. I wonder vaguely if Mam stitched the embroidery alone, since I wasn’t allowed to help. Da banished me before the druid could complete the first funeral rites, after all.

His face crosses my lids, and I flinch away.

I shouldn’t be here. I turn to go, but a flicker catches my eye. Rippling like moonlight.

Conal’s soulstone.

Not cracked or porous or blackened at the edges; no sign it’s been corrupted. But it’s faded somehow. The three swirls of a triskele on its top worn so smooth, they’re almost invisible—like the waves tumbled it over pebbles until someone could fetch it back from the sea.

I step closer, and my lips part as magic flutters through my belly and draws my touch back, hand hovering over the soulstone until the very air hums with longing. Because itiscalling me— No. Conal is calling me. Just like Gráinne did, deep in the water. His soul yearns to be seen, held, protected.

Released.

Icould release his spirit to the wild. I could—

“Saoirse!”

My father fills the doorway, the whites of his eyes on full display. He tears his gaze from my outstretched hand to Conal’s body and back again, going white with shock and then purple with fury. “You…you worthless, traitorous—”

“I wasn’t going to do anything. I swear!”

“It wasn’t enough that you took his life. You want to steal his soul now as well?!”

“No, Da, please—”

He crosses the room in two strides and seizes my throat, startling me so violently that I curl my bare, bloodied fingers fast around the soulstone.

Forty-Five

I am five, shaken and bruised from a fall off my very first horse. But Da scoops me up, his laugh as warm as the quilt Mam patches every time I rip a new hole in its edges. “You’ll make a fine king—look at you! Not a bone broken. Clever boy, rolling as you did.” Da’s smiles are my favorite sight in the world.

They vanish one night, after Mam screams for an entire day and a baby is left to show for it—a girl this time. The smiles don’t return for years.

I’m thirteen, and girls take up too much of my mind, Da says. He tells me to either kiss the laundress’s daughter and be done with it, or he’ll dismiss her. I do, and kissing is far less interesting than I thought it might be. It’s easy to stick to training after that, until I’m sixteen and bed the lass. She smells so sweet, with a body as soft as spun wool, but the act is unsettling. Too animal. I leave the rutting and romance to Aidan and his favored stable lad after that.

I am eighteen, a week away from my first Damhsa. But Aidan and I are restless, knowing the grown world is minutes away from swallowing us alive. We want to live before it happens. He wrestles me in the pebbled cove while wee Saoirse searches for flat stones to skip. She never meets my eyes anymore, and I miss the strange colors.But when we go to swim, she clasps our hands—then bursts into tears and begs us to stop. White as bone, her eyes churning like a wave.

The hairs rise along my nape.

She asks if we can go inside, but every inch of me rebels. The walls hold our parents and rules, stuffy tailors keen to dress me like a damned cock for the lasses to pluck during the ritual. I shove Aidan toward the water instead, dragging her between us. Saoirse pleads, but we’re already up to our knees. I’m chilled to the bone by the end of the first dive, tilting my face back to the sun, laughing because we are young and perfectly free.

And then there’s no laughter. No air.

Tentacles of water wrap around my body, pulling me down like a monster of the deep. A current. But I know how to break free of these—Da taught me as soon as I could swim through our isle’s vicious waters. I twist my body, hold my breath, kick out instead of against until a glimpse of pale flesh banishes every feckin’ instinct.

Aidan.

My life becomes forfeit to his. I grab him around the middle and push him high, kicking with everything I have until his head breaks the surface and he can breathe, while my chest is wrapped in burning irons that tighten more with every passing moment.