Page 35 of Up from the Earth

This horrible hardened iron, what it was used for by mortals, it was a weapon, a destruction, a disease. I looked to the baba ega, my jaw tight with fury and agony.

“Are you satisfied?” She nodded with a mangy grin. “Good.”

I reached into the pot, gathering up the sticky, unwieldy metal into a ball. When I pulled it free from the pot, this place where both it and I had changed, it quickly hardened, becoming a solid ball similar to the iron ore. It was larger and smoother, but at its core, it was still a metal of the earth.

“Cerberus?”

He stuffed his nose through the door at my call, and I smiled at him, walking over to run my singed hand along his muzzle.

“Open up.”

Cocking his head at me, it took a moment before he understood. When he made the connection, a light glow suffusing his skin from the inside and creating an orange backdrop behind his ribs, Cerberus silently nodded, opening his mouth for me.

I stuffed the steel inside, trusting him to swallow it down. He did, and I watched the lump travel down into the pit of his stomach, a furnace the likes of the earth’s core residing there.

Turning to The Crone, I met her gaze hard. “I will not havethatin my realm.”

Sixteen

As The Wheel Of The Year Turns, Spring Always Follows Winter.

Myskinitchedasit formed new layers, healing the damage from the fire. I followed The Crone behind her hut, past the chicken legs, to a darker part of the swamp, quietly hidden in the shadowy trees.

The thick mosses and grasses matted down in a path muffled our steps. She’d walked this way before enough times to wear down the flora, convincing them not to grow here. I’d seen enough paths like this, so many, it seemed, in the short whirlwind that was my life. Paths and darkness and pain. Was that the end of things?

“Look down into the still waters, Cerridwen Adaire Locke. You have a decision to make.”

Shaking myself from my thoughts, I looked up at the baba ega, that gnawing pit still present in my belly.

“Is that what you ask of me?” I tried to keep the bitter tone from my voice, but it was no use. “This is your third task? Look and make a decision?”

She chuckled, and the sound was not better for having left the hut. It still scratched against the walls of my mind, coiling a snake of unease in and around my guts.

“Come now,Queen. You must know now that a decision can be the hardest thing you do in your life.”

I wanted to deny her, spite churning through me like none I’d felt before. The easy joy of my youth felt absent, my youth itself long gone and too buried beneath layers of agony and proving myself for me to hear it any longer.

Still, I knew she was right.

“Fine.”

Stepping to the edge, my toes precariously hanging over the bank of the pond—or perhaps a lake, considering its size—I gazed down into the reflection that waited for me.

I had changed.

It was challenging to put into words what was different. I could see it more in the haunting beneath my irises—still one green and one blue—in the way I met my own reflection’s eyes, a new sort of expression. There were lines there that hadn’t been before all this, subtle and only noticeable to me. There was also a lack of that sunny glow beneath my skin. It wasn’t gone entirely, but damn, it was hard to spot now.

I’d heard my mother once speaking to herself in the bathroom, and her words then rushed to me in the present.

I don’t even recognize myself. Who is this woman looking back at me from the glass? What happened to the exuberant girl of all those years ago?

This had been shortly after I finally understood what had happened to my father. I had been a baby when he was killed. I thought it was some simple accident—a nasty twist of luck. And in a way, I supposed it was. Though now, it was impossible not to harbor a deep scowl for the way his journey had ended.

Hunters. They’d shot him when he was out in the woods. Their irresponsible behavior stole my father from me. They’d been hunting on land they shouldn’t, but it was a cold comfort to know that the King of Summer’s End had found them and snatched them up.

“And what do you see, child?”

The Crone’s voice was dim in the background, coming from miles away or beneath the water. I shook my head, sighing as a vehement edge sliced through my chest.

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