Page 24

He reached over her shoulder to toy with the necklace, turning it over between his fingers. His long nails scraped across her collarbone.

“A pretty charm; they’ve worn these since the beginning.” He laughed, and threads of the sound tightened around Aisling’s bones. “Pointless. Their silly symbols mean nothing to me. These, however…”

They were in The Cut then, and he gestured to the runes carved into the ground. Some were still stained with blood. Aisling’s stomach churned. The taste of iron washed over her tongue, the strongest it had been since that night.

“These, they got right. Or, at the very least, right enough .”

The vision dissipated, and the deity stood in front of Aisling once more. Too close—she backed away from him. He took a step forward as she did, closing the distance again. The weight of his presence was overwhelming.

“Who are you?” The question spilled from her lips unbidden. She knew better than to ask it; though, it seemed by his taunting tone that the god wanted her to do just that. He was baiting her with nebulous visions and cryptic answers.

The corners of his smile disappeared beneath his hair. “I am Yalde, the Endless. The Star-Eater.”

Yalde. Aisling turned the name over on her tongue, but it felt jagged and foreign.

As if to demonstrate his point, he reached up through the tangle of branches. The sky was somehow close enough that his fingers could brush against it; he plucked a flickering star out of the darkness. Languidly, he pulled it down to his lips and swallowed the tiny glowing light.

Yalde’s robe billowed open with his movement, and where it separated Aisling saw the night sky.

Thousands of stars, swirling galaxies, all bright pinpoints of light surrounded by vast, hungry emptiness.

It drew her in—if she’d stared any longer, she might have stepped forward and fallen straight into it.

It could have swallowed her whole. For a fleeting moment, just one, she thought that spending what remained of her life adrift amongst those stars might be as close to peace as she’d ever come. The mere idea took her breath away.

“Your kind thinks that stars die a natural death,” Yalde purred, closing his robe. “Most do not, though I’ve become quite skilled in leaving behind just enough matter for it to appear so. I longed to taste Merak, but it was never quite within reach.”

Aisling stilled. “You know Merak?”

“I am here because of Merak. I wear this because of Merak.” He dragged a talon over the blindfold tied around his head. There was an edge of bitterness there—the barest hint of it—and his aberrant smile wavered.

“So the Low One, and Aethar…” she trailed off, waiting for Yalde to fill in the rest.

“Were never anything more than my own creation, my own whispers. Both the Seelie and Unseelie Courts were so deliciously desperate for something to believe in. Still are, really. Their piety was necessary to foster.”

Aisling’s fear turned into a numb state of shock and finally, her knees gave out.

She sank heavily onto the fallen log just behind her.

Her vision was so tunnel-focused on Yalde that she scarcely cared just how close her shoulder was to one of those statuesque shrouds.

While one hand still clung to the hilt of Kael’s dagger, she dropped the other to dig into the moss beside her.

It was soft, and cool, and alive. It was everything that brought her the comfort she sought whenever she fled to the forest to clear her head. It did the same now—to a degree.

Yalde tipped his chin down, watching her blindly from behind the strip of fabric.

Black-tipped fingers toyed idly with the edge of his cloak as though he was contemplating whether to open it again.

Like he knew how tempted she’d been to fall into the abyss he hid beneath its folds and wanted to give her another chance to act on it. She wouldn’t.

She didn’t think she would.

She swallowed the thought. “Necessary?”

“Now, sweetling, we’ve only just met. I can’t reveal all my secrets yet, can I?” Yalde preened under her fearful stare, reveling in it. “And besides, you’ve not come here just to meet me.”

Something stung Aisling’s arm and she tore her gaze from that too-wide smile. A ribbon of shadow slid away and left a thin, bleeding line across her wrist. She sucked in a sharp breath when another grazed her thigh, slicing through her jeans to the skin beneath.

“Where is he?” she demanded, but her voice wavered. Kael’s shadows—those same shadows she’d once stilled, once tamed—had no regard for her now. They sought out her bare flesh and lapped at her blood, just as they had that very first night in The Cut, before his eyes met hers.

“As I said, he is all around you. The earth, the forest, the darkness. All were here before, but none so defined. He has given Elowas a new life.”

Life where there should be none. The Luna moth had led her to Yalde. Kael could have sent anything to do the same, but he’d chosen a Luna moth. It was gentle and beautiful; if there was anything left of Kael’s heart, that was proof of it.

Yalde cocked his head and mused, “He was so much less powerful when he arrived. I have you to thank for this, dear one. Without you, his flesh would have simply returned to the earth. I have all of him now—his aneiydh, his flesh—and he is stronger for it.”

Bile burned in the back of Aisling’s throat. Had she damned him to this? She’d so blindly trusted the guidance of the Silver Saints. She’d been convinced that laying his body on that pyre and setting it ablaze was the right thing to do—the only thing to do.

Peering closer now at the shapes around her as she tried to steady herself, Aisling noticed that how outlines wavered, just slightly. They were much more solid than the things that had surrounded her in the visions, but still not quite real. Not quite there.

Leaves rustled at her feet as a blackened, withered vine snaked out from beneath the log she sat on, creeping towards her as if grasping for her warmth.

“That’s not Kael,” Aisling said of the trailing plant now twisting its way up her leg. When she reached down to rip it from her calf, it crumbled and disintegrated between her fingers.

“No, it is not. That magic comes courtesy of the late Seelie Queen, Laure Sinturel. Weak, just as she was. Far too weak for this realm.” Yalde ground another winding stalk under his bootheel.

“She’s here, too?” Aisling’s stomach knotted as she was reminded harshly of the other death she was complicit in. The sight of Laure’s mouth agape in a silent scream and her wide, wide amethyst eyes had frequented her nightmares almost just as often as Kael’s bleeding throat.

“Her aneiydh, yes. But her body was interred in a sky burial. She lies in a coffin on the cliffside below Solanthis.”

Aisling looked at the flecks of vine still stuck to her palm. “She’ll never rest.”

“Indeed, she will not. She was terribly devout, though. Her aneiydh tasted as sweet as her prayers.” Yalde paused, then asked, “Amidst all that he and I have created here, how are you so quick to tell the weeds are not his?”

Aisling didn’t answer. She could feel it—she could feel Kael in everything around her, as distinctly as she might tell his touch on her skin from another’s. She couldn’t feel him in the vines.

The affinity.

She kept this knowledge to herself, too, and prayed the deity couldn’t read her thoughts.

“I want to see him,” she said, finally looking back up at where Yalde’s eyes might have been. “Please.”

His smile grew once more, and he nodded. “Come.”