Page 1

I t began with fire.

Kael’s body would not rest in Talamarís, as he would have wished it to.

Just before dawn broke at the end of his third night lying in that vast, dark cavern in the Undercastle, the late Unseelie King was secreted away.

In a solemn procession led by Merak, their auras softly lighting the way, he was carried on a litter of branches and pine boughs into the forest. Aisling, Rodney, Lyre, and Raif each held a corner; Aisling gripped hers in one hand so that she could keep her other resting on Kael’s unmoving chest.

Raif was the strongest opponent of it all, as committed to Unseelie customs as his king had been.

From where he stood watch outside of the cavern’s entrance, he’d heard everything the Silver Saints said to Aisling during her vigil.

About Elowas, about the capture of Kael’s aneiydh.

When Aisling presented Merak’s promise in secret to Rodney and Lyre, Raif had been just behind her and just as loud in his dissent against opening the god realm.

“It’s sacrilege,” he’d hissed venomously. “To do as they’ve suggested, you’d damn him.”

“He’s damned as it is, it would seem,” Lyre posited. “If he has indeed been taken to the god realm, he is damned regardless of what we do with his body.”

“Where is Elowas? What is it?” Aisling stood beside Kael’s desk.

She could have taken a seat—his seat—as Rodney and Lyre occupied the other chairs in the study.

But as wrong as it felt to see it empty, it would have felt worse to sit in it herself.

Raif paced the perimeter of the room, back straight and eyes dark.

Not bothering to hide the mask of fury and disgust he wore.

“It is a broken realm, unreachable and half-collapsed in on itself since the earliest days of Fae.” Lyre drummed his long fingers on the arm of his chair. “It is where the Low One resides, trapped just as our king. Maybe—”

“Don’t,” Raif cut him off harshly, but Lyre’s cunning smirk only widened.

“Maybe we’ve been offered a chance to free them both.” His yellow, catlike eyes sparkled.

“Your ambition is showing,” Rodney told the Prelate flatly. Then, to Aisling, he said, “Ash, I know you want to bring him back. But no one just comes back from the dead, human or Fae or otherwise.”

Dead. That word hit her like an arrow to the chest each time she heard it spoken out loud. She gripped the edge of the desk harder so that the wood bit into her palm.

“He isn’t dead, not truly. If his aneiydh is in Elowas, there is a part of our king still alive.” Lyre was focused on Aisling now, too. Both parties were attempting to appeal to one side of her or another, as though they thought she had the final say. She realized then that maybe she did.

“He will lie in Talamarís, as it is always done. As he wanted. There is no bringing him back.” Raif’s conviction was unwavering.

“Is it not your sworn oath to follow your king to whatever end, soldier?” the Prelate sneered.

“He has met his end,” Raif shot back. His hand dropped to the hilt of the longsword he still carried strapped to his waist. Its tip nearly grazed the ground, expertly forged to fit his proportions alone.

The last time Aisling had seen the weapon, it had been jutting out of Niamh’s stomach in the center of the battlefield.

“He has made a great enough sacrifice without having to relinquish his beliefs, too.”

“But what if Merak is right?” Her voice was barely above a whisper when she addressed the three males standing before her.

If Aisling was honest, Raif nearly had her convinced.

She knew as well as he did what Kael wished for in death.

But for Kael, to lie in Talamarís was to be at peace, to honor the forest and to return to the earth.

If what Merak promised was true, he would never be at rest there.

His body would rot, a shell, while his soul remained trapped in some distant, liminal space.

To cross into Elowas seemed an impossible task, and stupid.

She was only a human, with no magic, no defensive skills, and no connection to the dark god they hoped to find there.

But then she’d consider Kael, lost and adrift.

Waiting for the day that the broken realm finally collapsed in on itself completely.

And then—Aisling didn’t know what would happen then.

Whether his aneiydh would be set free, or if it would remain imprisoned in the realm’s crumbled ruins.

She thought of what it must be like for him there, day after day the same.

Even if it was but a vast, dark, empty plane; even if he could do nothing but float there endlessly—what an exquisite sort of torture that must be.

It was those thoughts that shored up her resolve to find him, or at least to try. She could bring him back.

In the end, it was the determination in Aisling’s voice—the barest hint of it—that brought Rodney over to her side, too. With the numbers stacked against him then, the three having made it clear that they would proceed with or without him, Raif was left with little choice but to relent.

His anger never diminished, though, and it colored his every move as the group carried Kael’s body toward the tree line.

Even through the haze that had settled over Aisling’s thoughts and the constant, alternating waves of pain and numbness that washed over her, something in her understood where they were going.

Her feet knew the path, though she’d traversed it only once.

As they drew closer, she saw from a distance the turquoise glow of the moss that covered the ground before the ruins of the moon gate.

The forest enclave was just as it had been when Kael had brought her there: quiet, untouched, reverent.

It took her breath away, even now. She closed her eyes when they halted and listened to the wind in the trees, the gentle sounds of the brook tumbling over stones and under roots.

If it hadn’t been for the weight of the litter pulling on her arm and the roughness of the branch scratching against her palm to tether her to reality, she might have imagined Kael standing behind her.

He’d be in the same spot where he stood that night, watching her explore the place he’d never shared with anyone else before her.

It was theirs, then—he’d made it theirs.

Rodney’s hand on Aisling’s shoulder wrenched her out of the memory, and it was only then that she noticed the pyre erected before the cracked stone steps leading up to the moon gate.

It was tall and broad, all trussed bundles of sticks piled up to create a level platform.

Runes were carved into every inch of the wood.

Aisling recoiled, her chest seizing painfully, so Rodney took hold of her corner, too, and nudged her out of the way.

A bed of fern fronds, brown and dry, cushioned the top of the pyre when Raif, Lyre, and Rodney hoisted the litter up onto it.

They each wore the same expression: grim, determined.

Without glancing at the others, Raif withdrew Kael’s dagger from a satchel he carried slung over his shoulder.

He brought the edge of the blade down swiftly against a flintstone before sheathing it, then reached out to place it beneath Kael’s folded hands.

The sparks caught those dry fronds instantly and flared up, flames high and hot within seconds.

They consumed the pyre first, growing and growing until they overtook Kael, too.

And just as she’d watched the light fade from his eyes as he bled out on his knees before her in The Cut, Aisling couldn’t look away from him as his body burned.

His moonbeam hair blackened first, then his skin bubbled and blistered and melted away.

Twice, she had to force back the bile that welled up in her throat at the biting smell of smoke and burning flesh, so thick in the air it felt almost solid as she drew it into her lungs.

It was choking, that scent. Both Rodney and Lyre pulled fabric from their garments up over the lower half of their faces to shield themselves from it.

Raif stood apart from them, stoic, the light of the flames illuminating his stoney glare and the tight muscles in his jaw.

Aisling wanted to cover her nose, too. And her eyes.

And her ears—she hadn’t expected the fire to roar so loudly as it devoured the Unseelie King.

Yet she couldn’t will a single part of her body to move any more than she could will herself to cry.

She should have; she’d wept at her mother’s funeral, and at her father’s after that.

She knew she held a limitless well of tears waiting to be spilled for Kael, but that night, and each night since, the dam that retained them was impenetrable.

That night was not one for mourning, but for solemn resolve.

The pyre cast a bright and blazing image that would stay with all of them and propel them down a new path. That would light her way back to Kael.

The fire would burn for hours yet, but their job was done. Merak took up watch from the stone steps and the tallest of the three nodded to each of them.

“Go now,” they said together. “We will send for you when it is time.”