Page 52

F IFTY

ESTRELLA

I crawled my way out of the sands at the river’s edge, feeling the moment Caldris’s stare locked onto me. There was no recognition in his face as he moved around Medusa and made to lend me a hand, not a hint of the man who recognized the bond pulsing between us.

I pushed to my feet, accepting his helping hand as his mouth parted on a startled gasp. It did something to me to know that even with my hair plastered to my face where it fell free from the braid, even without the emotional connection of our bond driving him or his memories of me, his attraction to me was sudden and immediate.

I’d felt the same with him, even with his human glamour in place when he’d deceived me. Caldris in all his glory was another story. He pulled me to my feet, keeping my hand in his as I dug into the pocket of my armor. I tossed the Morrigan the piece of the antler that I’d brought back as part of my gift for the Fates, grasping the vial they’d given me from the leaf in the Lethe. Yanking the cork free, I poured the powder into my hand as my mate watched me with curious eyes.

I held it out before him, letting him study the golden shimmer of it in the dim light. When he moved even closer to study it, I blew out a hard and fast breath, watching as the powder flew into his face and covered his lightly bronzed skin. He gasped, breathing it in and coughing as a single hand went to his throat. He released me immediately, taking a step back as some of the fog in his blue stare faded away.

My sigh of relief was immediate, knowing the moment that his memory returned in full. He moved to me, wrapping me in his arms and pressing a single hand to the back of my head to hold me to his chest with steady pressure.

“What the fuck happened?” he asked, pulling back just enough to look down at me.

“You’re vulnerable to the Lethe even without touching the river. You’re just a soul here in the end, so—”

“I’m more vulnerable to the punishments of the afterlife,” he said, shaking his head as we walked away from the river.

“Where did you get that powder?” Macha asked, reaching out to take the vial from me. She smelled it, scenting the powder around the rim before handing it to Nemain who did the same.

“It was a gift from the Fates,” I said, holding her stare as her brow rose.

“They came to you? In the Lethe?” Medusa asked, taking the vial from Nemain and studying it intently. Shoving it into her pocket, she started walking away from the river, leaving us to follow. I did so without hesitation, sliding my hand into Caldris’s and needing the feel of him even as we moved.

Night would fall soon enough, and we would need to find a place to take shelter for the night. While we certainly had enough of us that we would be likely to survive the night, it didn’t seem wise to tempt it when we could be resting more easily.

The memory of what had happened the night I hadn’t been safely tucked away when night fell was too potent in my head for me to ignore the warning it gave.

Medusa and the Morrigan exchanged a look as they walked, leaving me to hate the feeling of being out of the loop.

“Is it a bad thing that the Fates came to me? I should think their gift would be a blessing,” I said, following after them. Medusa sighed, stopping and turning to me slowly.

“It is not bad, as you said their gift was welcome,” she said, exchanging another look with Nemain. The wolves prowled up ahead, searching the landscape for any signs of threat. They moved through the dim light like white flashes against a dark landscape, frolicking and having fun as they hunted. “It merely means that they were curious about something, and for the very beings who know all, curiosity is a challenge.”

“What makes you think they were curious at all?” I asked, shrugging as I walked past Medusa. I spun to face her, walking backward with Caldris to guide me so I didn’t trip. “Maybe they were just bored.”

“They wanted to see you, Estrella. That means something has shifted, and they are trying to anticipate your new path. Seeing you in the flesh allowed them to play with your threads more intimately,” Badb answered, her words sinking inside of me.

I considered her words, trying to find that place within me that cared. I couldn’t find it, and for a moment I had to wonder if that was a consequence of embracing Aella. If the things that had once felt like they mattered so much to me would no longer make a difference in my life or cause me stress, instead embracing a careless attitude that was so different from the woman I’d come to know through my life.

I shrugged, a bitter laugh escaping me at the concern on Medusa’s face. “They’ve been pulling the strings of my fate for longer than I’ll ever remember,” I said, continuing along the path Medusa had already set for us. “What difference does one more shift make in the grand scheme of things?”

Macha laughed, her head tipping back as she pressed a hand to her stomach. “Oh, Little Tempest. You will find that the moments when the Fates intervene and reknit things to suit their purpose have often led to great pain and destruction. All should fear their interest and curiosity—even those of us who are not the subject of it.”

“What good will worrying do her?” Caldris asked, his deep voice calming the frayed edges that their words of warning left me with. Maybe my calm had nothing to do with Aella at all, but with completing the bond with the other half of my soul. Maybe he somehow grounded me, making those other concerns feel secondary and so much less terrifying.

Because we would face them together as one when they came. For the first time in my life, I had someone that I knew would always be by my side. Someone who would stand beside me no matter what I did. Even when the Fates forced us to separate as they’d warned the time would come, he would still support me from a distance and be the part of me I could not deny.

“If my fate has already been determined, then whether I worry or not will make little difference to the outcome of any of this,” I said, continuing forward. Caldris allowed my hand to slip free from his as I approached the wolves, running my hand through Fenrir’s fur as he approached me. He was tall enough that I could lean forward, touching my forehead to the top of his head affectionately. “I would rather not know what’s coming for me. I don’t want to feel the dread of knowing whatever loss or grief will hit me next. I want to just enjoy what I have while I have it, and for now, that’s having all of you with me while I try to navigate my way through these trials.”

Determination settled in my gut, fueling my words like a fire burning deep in my core. It spread through me like wildfire, consuming everything in its path until I didn’t just want to survive the trials, I wanted to thrive and save my people.

Most of all, I wanted to prove it to myself. As harsh as the words of those in Mistfell had been, they would never compare to the ones I’d leveled at myself over the years. They were a tiny echo of the ones that bounced around in my own mind, the abuse I’d suffered at my own words.

I swallowed, raising my chin as I felt the weight of Caldris in my mind, sorting through the thoughts that I didn’t bother to hide from him. His stare softened as he approached slowly, taking my hands in his. The thread of our bond shifted at the contact, wrapping itself around our joined hands and leaving us to both stare at the shimmering gold that bound us together for an eternity.

“You outshine even the brightest of stars, Little One,” my mate said, leaning forward to touch his forehead to mine. His eyes blazed with an icy blue, the magic of winter even more present in him since the loss of Twyla and the transfer of her power. “There is not a trial in this world that you could not defeat if you so much as dared to try. It has been my honor to stand at your side while you discover yourself and your heart after all of this time. I have waited centuries for you, and I would have waited centuries more, because there is no one in this world or the one that we will create who could ever inspire me the way you do. You make me want to be better. You make me want more than I have ever dared to dream of, and you make me believe in light, when all I’ve known is night.”

“Caldris,” I said, the weight of those words lighting something within me. They soothed the flames of my own anger at myself, shifting it into something more comforting like the warmth of a hearth in winter rather than an inferno that felt untamable. “I love you,” I said, swallowing back the burn of tears. The simple statement felt so insignificant compared to his lengthy declaration, but I couldn’t find a way to communicate what they meant. I had to rely on the bond pulsing between us, what had once felt so invasive and like an intrusion of my privacy, becoming my only comfort when words failed me.

He didn’t give me the statement back, his eyes crinkling ever so slightly. I could imagine the way his mouth curved into an arrogant smirk that conveyed every thought I already heard rattling inside his head. It pleased him to know just how much he disoriented me, gave him a twisted sense of male satisfaction to know that he’d rendered me damn near speechless.

It didn’t happen often, and he viewed it as a triumph in and of itself.

He pulled away from me slowly, tearing his forehead from mine as his face came into better view. He still took my breath away, his brutal beauty the kind of face those poets wrote sonnets for, that women sang about around the fire, dreaming for themselves.

He was a song of beauty in the wind, a harmony moving enough to make listeners cry.

But it was me that he watched as he lowered himself to a single knee, raising my hand in his to press his mouth to my knuckles. He held out his hand to Medusa, nodding to her in some wordless communication that she seemed to understand. She smiled as she pulled a dagger from its sheath, pressing the tip into the pad of my mate’s thumb. He turned my hand over as he traced the blood that welled in response into the palm of my hand. “I vow to be the sword at your back, to protect you from those who would stand in your way or make moves behind your back. I vow to support you in all you do, and to believe in the world you see for our future and our children’s future. My sword and my life are yours, min asteren. In this life and the afterlife, in this world and what comes next, you are my guiding light—the answer to the questions I didn’t know to ask.”

I chuckled, the sound coming out hoarse and throaty as emotion swelled within me. The love he spoke of, the love he felt, would have been impossible to comprehend if it was not for the fact that I felt it, too. If it hadn’t been for the incommunicable way that I knew nothing in this world would be worth having if I didn’t have him at my side.

Freedom would not matter. Friends would no longer appeal to me.

Life for me would simply cease to be.

“You are the King of Winter,” I said, attempting to pull him up from his feet. “Should it not be me swearing my loyalty to you as my lord and husband?”

“What kind of King would I be if my first priority was not to serve my Queen in all things?” he asked, allowing me to pull him to his feet as he touched his mouth to mine. The question rebounded in my mind, dancing around with the stark difference between the way he viewed me and the human men who’d thought to own me had seen me.

“You have a Kingdom to run. What is one woman compared to that?” I murmured against his mouth, smiling into him as he reciprocated the gesture, pulling away just far enough for me to see the softness in that icy blue gaze, the glacier melting only for me.

“You are everything, my star. None of this matters if I do not have you.”

He waited for my response, and I felt a flicker of uncertainty from him. A moment where he worried I might reject him as I had done so many times in the past. My stomach cramped with the pain of knowing I had put that there, that I had no one to blame but myself for the way this gentle, loving man doubted himself. I reached up, cupping his cheek in my palm. His blood smeared against his skin with the touch, but he didn’t care as he leaned into the contact. “You have me, Caldris. In this life and the next, I am yours.”

His mouth touched mine, his thoughts swirling and mixing with mine until I couldn’t tell what were mine and what were his. When we parted, we would continue on our journey.

But for now, I needed to feel.