Page 115 of Soulgazer

“Stop.” Aidan’s hands land on my shoulders, grip too tight. His jaw locked, fingers shaking. “Saoirse, you—”

He swallows. Lips wobbling from their harsh set. “You shouldn’t have…”

I wait for him to push me back then. To disappear behind Da’s training.

Instead, Aidan’s fingers dig into my collarbone and then he pulls me forward into his chest. Both arms wrap around me as he buries his face in my hair. When his body shudders, I tighten my hold, thinking of Faolan’s arms the night of that first storm. Every nudge from Brona, ruffle to my hair from Lorcan, and rough embrace from Nessa—they’ve all found a home in me.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

Sorry I didn’t fight you both harder to stay onshore with me.

Sorry it wouldn’t have done any good even if I had, because fate is cruel, as Faolan said.

Sorry that I’ve been so lost in my own wounds, I’ve never stopped to wonder what it’s like to be the one who’s alive only because our brother died saving his life.

Aidan’s breath shudders through my hair, something hot and wet dripping down the back of my neck. When I pull away, he wipes a sleeve across his face. “I begged them to let you stay, Saoirse. And when that didn’t work, I tried to go after you, but I never made it far. I should have tried harder—should’ve fought them both.”

I search his face, my chest tight. “We were only children. We had to survive.”

He quiets, brow furrowed and lips apart. I see the passage oftime in his jaw, shadowed and rough-cut along the edge. His beautiful hands shake before he folds them behind his back, calluses marking the wrong spots on his skin. They used to grow at his fingertips where he’d pluck the lyre strings, or halfway down his knuckles where the sling dug in. Now they form a mountain’s ridge where a sword’s hilt must rest.

“Aidan?”

He shakes his head. “How did you survive?”

I fall back against the wardrobe, gripping its wooden side. “I told myself stories. The ones we used to make up, or ones you brought back from court.”

Aidan’s face clears of confusion, a playful glint slipping into his eye. “The Wolf of the Wild?”

My face floods with heat.

“Right. Would you care to tell me, little sister, how thehellyou managed to marry him?”

Forty-Three

The fire becomes a handful of embers, its reddish glow marred by the gray of predawn filtering in through the open window. I watch numbly as one of them flickers out, my mind spiraling over my own stories. Meeting Faolan at the Damhsa, trying to swim to his ship, the Teeth and Maccus’s attack, Scath-Díol and boarding Rian’s vessel. The only parts I omit are those to do with the numbing ink made of caipín baís and the tattoo it created. Both would paint Da in a light I’m not certain Aidan’s ready to see.

Still, at first I wasn’t sure whether Aidan truly believed me. His smile was too amused in parts, his eyes flicking up like they wanted to roll when I told him what it was like to meet Faolan for the first time. But by the end, all Aidan can do is utter a single soft curse.

“It sounds mad, I know.” Another ember goes dark. “But it’s true.”

“I…believe you. I think.” Aidan rubs at his jaw. “Even if it’s strange. But I guess I’d be more annoyed at the fact the magic only chooses lasses if the things it showed you weren’t so fecking awful.”

I laugh and drop my head back against a chair, though I’m curled on the rug below. “I don’t know whether to pray for better visions or none at all.”

“Do you still pray?”

I touch the bare space on my throat where the gods’ charms and tokens used to hang, and feel the drag of Faolan’s wolf ring along my collarbone instead. “Not really. The gods are truly gone.”

I felt one of them die.

“So why do you still have this magic?”

My laugh is empty as I adjust the shackles on my wrists. “Da told at least one truth among the lies. Our grandmotherdidawaken the magic with a soulstone.” And perhaps tried to drown me as well. “But even Faolan agrees she’d gone mad with it by the end of her days.”

Ash lifts on a plume of smoke between us, and Aidan catches it in his fist. Crumbles it between his fingers. The ease between us draws a bit tight. “Are you worried about that happening to you?”

I turn the wolf’s-head ring over once. Twice. “Yes. But for all I know, the magic could leave me once we find the Isle of Lost Souls.”

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