What Sleeps Within the Cove, page 39
When I pulled back from Badb, she surprised me by touching a gentle hand to the side of my neck, cupping me there in a move that felt like it was meant to bolster my resolve. I knew that they knew enough about what was going to happen to know I needed it, to know that the contact would be welcome as I fought to suppress all thoughts Caldris might overhear. Whatever the Fates had done to protect this, I couldn’t know.
I only knew that if he’d heard the words the statue had spoken in my ear the night before, if he’d heard even the echo of them in my memory, he’d be doing everything he could to drag me from this place kicking and screaming. He’d never allow me to make it to the temple doors, and yet here I stood, with him a quiet sentry at my side, fully prepared to step into the temple alongside me.
“It has been a pleasure to know you in this life, Estrella Barlowe,” Badb said, her voice choked with emotion that felt strange in her ethereal tone. She was always tinged with a bit of darkness, a deep and smoky voice that conveyed absolute strength.
“It has truly been our honor to know this version of you before the Cradle changes you,” Macha reiterated, stepping back and taking Badb along with her. The three of them moved to stand beside Nemain, pausing briefly before they looked toward the sky and blended into their singular raven. They took off in flight, their form quickly disappearing into the light in the distance as they curved through the air above the temple.
Medusa stood at the doorway when I turned to face the temple finally, the gleaming white marble taking my breath away. It was the same as the temple that had been dedicated to me somehow, but the sheer size of it was so enormous I thought I might lose my ability to breathe standing before it. Never had anything else made me feel so insignificant and small in the face of it.
She was the first to make her way through the entry, waiting for me on the other side. I saw it for the deception it was, for the manipulation to convince my mate and Brann where they followed at my back. The simple act would make them think that they too could pass through the entry, when I knew it would be the opposite. I didn’t know how, but I knew that this was the moment when we separated. I felt it in my bones and in my blood. I couldn’t afford to turn to look at Caldris, knowing that he would see the devastation on my face even if he couldn’t hear it in my thoughts. I pressed forward, the fabric of my golden dress skimming the dirt beneath me as I crossed between the two statues on either side. Their swords were crossed peacefully, guarding the place that didn’t belong to the people who wanted entry. The cruelty of having sanctuary exist right in front of you and being unable to reach it was not lost on me, and I hated that for the people in the encampment.
I stepped forward, crossing through the entryway. My skin tingled as the barrier felt me, the air heavy at the point where the temple met Tartarus. I forced myself through, not giving it any hesitation so that Caldris’s ever-watchful stare could fixate on my reaction. When I made it through, I turned to stare at him on the other side. He was faded from view, clouded by mist as he stepped up. While I could still make out his features, the separation between the interior and the exterior of the temple was plain to see from this side.
He took a step, attempting to enter the temple only to spring back from the soft surface he met. He bounced back with a look of shock on his handsome face. “Estrella,” he whispered, a question in the name. His brow furrowed with agony as he searched my face, and I felt the wall the Fates had placed within me fall away.
It crumbled like stone, allowing him to finally see the truth of what I’d known. It let him feel the fate pressing down on me, the truth of what would become of me here.
That I’d known he wouldn’t be able to come and gone anyway.
“Estrella!” he shouted, raising a fist and pounding at the boundary. His hand bounced back, the gelatinous surface repelling him with as much force as he gave. “No,” he pleaded in my head, flinching away as Brann attempted to pull him back from the temple.
A woman from the encampment stepped up, her face shrouded in a white cloak. She waited behind my mate, silent and peaceful as he stared at me with those begging eyes.
I held a hand up to the boundary, pressing against the surface that was hardening with every moment that passed. Stone spread from the bottom, climbing up to seal the doorway off.
“I love you,” I whispered, hoping he could hear the words on the other side. I could say it in our bond, but I wanted him to hear it in my voice. I wanted him to know in case I never saw him again.
His hand touched the boundary, pressing against mine through the barrier between us. “Don’t you dare,” he said, shaking his head as he looked down at the stone. The panic that filled his face would haunt me for the rest of my days, haunt me in whatever afterlife I found.
“I need you to say the words. I need to hear them one last time.”
His face twisted with pain, with rage so full that I couldn’t imagine ever being leveled with that hatred. Even in this, his anger was not with me. “I love you, my star,” he said, holding my stare as the stone came up and cut the connection of our hands, one step closer to taking him from me.
“I’ll see that he gets back to the land of the living, Tempest,” the Priestess said, her words a reassurance in the background.
“Do not let Mab see you,” Medusa said, her words an order as she spoke them behind me. Caldris never took his eyes from me but I knew he heard the order, watched his cheek twitch. “Gather forces quietly and be ready for Estrella to return. She will have need of them when she’s completed her final trial.”
The words were a shock to me, having thought that the final river was my last trial. It was a secret I knew had been kept from me intentionally, the one I wasn’t likely to walk away from.
I couldn’t stop to process, couldn’t look at anything but him as the stone came up between Caldris and I, stealing his face from my view completely.
The bond went silent as the stone filled the doorway, trapping me in the Temple of the Fates.
There would be no escape now that I had entered.
The only way out was through.
SIXTY-THREE
ESTRELLA
The inside of the Temple of the Fates was similar to the outside, the lowest level a sprawling entryway filled with marble columns and detailed carvings. I stepped into the marble, feeling out of place in my shocking golden dress that was so vibrant compared to the white that surrounded me. But as we walked farther toward the opposite end of the room, a splash of color appeared on the backdrop.
The tapestries that hung from ceiling to the floor were larger than any I’d ever seen, larger than anything that was practical to create or even use. The colors were a myriad, splashes of every color of the rainbow mingling with the delicate golden thread that I recognized intimately.
I stepped away from Medusa where she lingered in the center of the room, drawn to the colors and the way the gold was woven into them. A part of the fabric of life but not the entirety of it, the thread was a statement of absolutes in a world of color. It was life or death in a sea of possibilities.
The bottom right of the most recent tapestry was of a woman who looked too similar to the statue in the temple, the back of my head all I could see as she studied the tapestries before her. I spun to look at Medusa, shock written into the lines of my face. All around me more tapestries descended, falling from the ceiling to line the columns and the walls.
My face peered back at me in each and every one, something I recognized even in my differences. “Is this me?” I asked, stepping away from the tapestry that had first called to me. To the right of it was the woman I’d recognized so immediately, the me of my first life.
Aella stood with Brann at her side, his figure never changing in his time that we’d spent with the rebellion. He hadn’t needed to hide who he was or what I was, instead focusing on teaching me the ways of touching magic even when it did not exist in Nothrek, purely for the sake of readying me for the day the Veil fell.
“They all are. These are your story, Estrella. All the threads and the lives that led you to this moment,” Medusa answered, but I studied the gathering of tapestries that seemed to expand with each passing moment. They hung in layers that I felt like I could spend an eternity walking through, learning the ways of my lives and the past that I could not grasp in my mind on my own.
These versions of me were strangers, and yet I recognized them all the same. I felt the pull of them on my soul, though I could not touch them. They stirred within me, the phantom of a memory that was no longer mine at all.
There were tapestries that didn’t even have me in them, aspects of fate that had been woven before my time. The lines of destiny that had guided me here twisted and knitted the world to suit my creation, and I hated every fucking second of it.
This was wrong. This level of interference and manipulation should not have been.
“I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head. I both did and I didn’t, because none of this effort made sense with anything I could reconcile in my head. What purpose could be so great to go to this? To spend centuries manipulating the lives of thousands …
“The answers are just ahead, through the temple pass,” Medusa said, guiding me to a narrow passage that ascended the stairs. From the way the temple had been carved into the mountainside, I knew that there were three main vestibules to the temple.
“You’re not coming with me?” I asked, almost ashamed of the way my voice cracked. I’d known as much, or should have anyway. They’d told me this was a journey I had to make alone.
“I will see you very soon, daughter. I will be waiting for you within the Cradle, but the words of the Fates are for you and you alone to hear,” Medusa said, stepping up to the wall of the temple beside us. It opened for her, letting her step into the sunshine in a beautiful valley, filled with a waterfall and still pond, an Eden within Tartarus.
I took to the stairs the way I’d entered this Hel.
Alone.
SIXTY-FOUR
CALDRIS
There was no trace of the thing that had once been Estrella’s father remaining in the ferryman while he rowed us up the tangle of rivers to the secret entrance to Tartarus. It was the impossibility of the situation that kept me quiet, kept me from prying and trying to find the man who would have been horrified to know that his daughter was prepared to die in the Cradle of Creation.
That whatever her purpose was and whatever destiny had drawn her to this place and this time, she accepted that her life was the price the Fates demanded. I knew now the words that had made her believe that was true, and my fingers danced along my thigh as I stood on the boat. Even Brann, who seemed incapable of shutting his mouth, didn’t dare to speak to me for fear of the consequences, his own face twisted into a sorrowful expression that reminded me of the hole where my heart had once been.
My heart beat outside my chest, because it thudded within hers. Without the ability to feel her, with the bond silenced by this strange barrier between us, I felt as if I were alone all over again. As if the Veil still existed and I could only feel the faintest of whispers of her existence. My heart was still, my life feeling pointless.
I had to have faith in her ability to return, in the fact that her mother would not have brought her into that temple knowing that her death would come. Estrella had been warned of her coming death since that night in the woods of Mistfell when Adelphia had warned her that death was coming for her after her candle fell from the stone. There was no other choice but to accept that two types of death existed, that Estrella still clung to the woman she’d been as a human. There was a figurative death in that loss that she failed to anticipate the power of. Letting go of that version of herself would feel like a sacrifice, it would feel like she was being torn from her body if she were to ever give that girl up in truth. I loved that human girl, the innocence of her gaze when it had found me staring at her in that barn. While life may not have been kind to her, there was a certain quality to her that could only exist because of her young life.
Age hardened you. It tore the kindness from your soul and ripped the care from your bones. It had long since made me cynical and forced me to see the worst in people, but Estrella always hoped for the best. She hoped people would prove her right and be as gentle as she would be to any who loved her, but she hadn’t yet felt centuries of disappointment when people acted for their own selfish gain.
Age tore the innocence away. Age took your ability to be hurt and morphed it into a fever dream, a breathing, tangible thing that you could never seem to shake. Age made it so that you anticipated the pain of that betrayal with every step you took.
I didn’t know that I had it in me to believe that the people who had my mate were good. I just had to hope that their own self-interest aligned with mine, that they needed my mate alive far more than they needed her dead. In that, I had to trust.
Otherwise I’d have flung myself into the closest river, gladly joining her in this Hel forever.
Instead, I stood in silence as the ferryman guided us out through the cave we’d entered, returning Brann and I to the land of the living as the Priestess had requested. It was a bittersweet thing to be returning to my home, knowing that my mother was dead and I was the King of Winter. That I’d had to leave my mate behind after all my desire to help her. I didn’t think I’d managed to do anything for her in this place except to be a shoulder for her to lean on, a comfort to her emotionally. These trials weren’t for me, and the helplessness of that fact and my helplessness in what would come didn’t sit right with me.
“Do you think she’ll be okay?” Brann asked as we emerged into the light of day. The sun was far too bright on my face, after the time spent in the dimness of Tartarus, and I turned my head to stare at the floor of the boat as the ferryman continued to row.
“She will be,” I said, letting my resolve power the words. If there was one thing I knew about my mate, it was that her ability to survive anything life threw at her was her true magic. She would adapt and change as she needed, serving whatever purpose was necessary so that she could come back to me. She’d live through sheer determination alone, bending the will of the Fates to hers.
That was who she was. That was her strength.
Holt and the rest of the Wild Hunt waited on the shores when we finally reached the sands of the coast where Brann had once fallen to certain death. I’d been prepared for a great many things when we finally returned to the land of the living, all that was left to reunite my spirit with my body.
What I hadn’t been ready for was the reality that Holt and Brann clearly knew one another, their glares a matching set as they sized one another up. “Brander,” Holt said, his voice stern and unforgiving. It was so unlike the male who was usually full of lightness and humor even in the darkest of times.
“Huntsman,” Brann returned, the bite in his voice matching his lack of desire to use the man’s real name. He reduced him to his title, a disrespect that would have been equivalent to calling Brann a witch.
Reducing him to his magic, or in Holt’s case, his curse.
“I’ve a name,” Holt snapped, turning to his horse. There weren’t enough horses to carry us, so I sighed as I guided Brann up to ride at my back. He shook his head, denying the ride.
“She never referred to you by anything other than Huntsman,” Brann said.
“What I allow Imelda to call me is none of your business, and you are not gifted the same courtesy,” Holt said, staring down at where Brann seemed determined to go his separate way. To escape the coming war, I had no doubt.
The fucking coward.
“Why not?”
“Because I like her,” Holt said, guiding his horse into a trot up the narrow path. I followed after him, leaving Brann behind. There wasn’t time to reason with him, to convince him that Estrella would want to find him with the rest of her loved ones when she emerged from Tartarus. If he didn’t already know that, if he didn’t want to be there when she walked the earth again, then he didn’t fucking deserve her in the first place. I had better things to do than babysit an immortal, stubborn witch. I had an army to gather for my mate.
He could rot, for all I cared.
SIXTY-FIVE
ESTRELLA
The bag clutched in my hand felt impossibly heavy as I ascended the stairs, making my way into the second vestibule of the Temple of the Fates. Filled with the offerings I’d gathered from each of the rivers: the horn from the bull, the hair from the lion, the antler from the hind, the ashes from the hydra, and the apples. This level was far smaller than the one below, cradled atop the cliffside with gaping, open windows that revealed the Cradle of Creation on the other side. The waterfall ran down the opposite cliff on the other side of the valley, the shine of water running through the loose forests of trees that surrounded the gardens at the center. They were teeming with life, all things natural flourishing within the valley in a way that made me think of all the seasons coming together. Of all the places and times in the world condensed into one garden that somehow pleased everyone.
