Page 3 of Soulgazer

I’ll just ask for a name. Someone who might want my title or Father’s resources—who’d be content to forget me as soon as we wed. Someone who could balance the scales of what I’ve cost.

Someone I could survive.

Perhaps then I’d earn Da’s ambivalence in the place of his outright contempt.

I reach the circle’s edge. “Blessed seanchaí?” My voice falters, catching on the wind. “I beg you to h—”

“All the magic in this world is meaningless, so long as we cannot pass on to the next.” The oldest seanchaí’s veins stretch in purple streaks from one knuckle to the next as he sweeps his hand through the air, narrowly missing my head. I flinch back. “For two hundred years, the dead have choked our lands—thousands upon thousands of souls left to rot. And for what? For those six eejits to preen each other’s feathers and polish their pretty crowns?”

“Be fair,” another seanchaí says, her hair more copper than silver like the rest. She looks not at the first speaker but beyond, where a cluster of men gather around a single point. Their voices tumble over one another, competing with the music and the elderly storytellers both.

The younger seanchaí raises her voice, a scowl lining her lips. “Ríona Kiara’s half-decent at least. I heard she’s called for another quest, onlythistime her cousin is joining.”

A scoff. “What, the pup who calls himself a wolf?”

“Aye.” The copper-haired seanchaí’s words take on an edge. “They say he’s never once failed to find what he seeks. And if rumors are true, he’s looking for a girl here who can lead him to the lost isle. A girl with—”

“Ocean eyes!”

I whirl away from the seanchaí as though someone’s caught hold of my wrist, tugged along by the solitary, fierce thread of that voice. It emerges from the thicket of bodies clustered around the fire nearby, the lines of it blurring the more people join, until suddenly, one figure breaks free from the rest—a man.

No.

Awolf.

He stands half a head taller than me, bare above the waist andpainted with streaks of mahogany, umber, and ash. Wayward curls sweep his shoulders, as ruddy brown as an evergreen’s bark stripped at the height of spring. When he raises his arms, the air grows thick around him—tinged violet with the essence of twilight and smoke.

And he’s wearing a tail.

None of those gathered see the absurdity, their eyes transfixed by the legend walking the earth. But I cannot look away from that ridiculous length of fur-lined cloth, sewn by a shoddy hand into the back of his trousers so it sways with every quicksilver step.

“She’ll be something special, this girl. Excellent with her stitching, or a damned good fighter. Blue-eyed, green? Hell, sometimes the sea is pure silver as it was three winters past!”

A roar of laughter breaks out over a story of the Wolf’s exploits I’ve yet to hear—the sort that used to set my heart to flying.

It sours my stomach instead. Aidan hasn’t shared a tale with me in seven years.

I start to turn toward the seanchaí again, but I cannot stop watching that pitiful tail. The Wolf of the Wild is a creature belonging to my brothers’ stories and my own dreams—ones where sirens can be seduced and shipwrecks survived by cunning and skill. He’s a pirate. A myth.

And yet somehow, impossibly…just a man.

“The point being, lads, she’shere. I feel it in my gut.” The Wolf drops his fist, and I swear I feel an echoing tap against my ribs. “And with my cousin’s blessing, I’ll take her to sea, where that damned island can’t play coy any longer.”

I stumble back a step. Another. When did I draw so close?

Gooseflesh erupts across my arms as the Wolf twists slightly, until firelight blazes across his profile. Beautiful lips tugged back into a dangerous smile. I retreat as close into the shadows as Ican—but I’m not fast enough to avoid them, the legends I once collected like plump berries off a vine.

“Together, we’ll find the Isle of Lost Souls!”

I close my eyes. Breathe in the crowd’s violent swell of hope. Breathe out the beautiful lie.

It does not exist.

Still, my body remembers praying for the island, lungs burning with the need to push forth a song. I would plead daily for the god-forged utopia to return, begging until my knees bled for the chance to touch its healing waters, said to cure soul wounds, break curses, and even release the dead.

But if the Wolf of the Wild is only a man wearing a poorly sewn costume, then the Isle of Lost Souls is nothing but an empty promise.

I sweep a thumb over the amulet’s rough surface, tracing the bone-white swirls carved within. A shiver racks my spine when the raised center again pierces my skin, and for a moment there is something still and sharp in the air between us—the Wolf of the Wild and me. Roped lines of muscle go rigid in his shoulders. Wind catches my feathers, unfurling my wings from where they lie.