Page 123 of Broken Veil
“You will find a way.” Seren walked over and slapped her shoulder. “You’ve proved remarkably hard to kill, but the last thing our mother would want is another daughter trapped here before her time.”
“You act like it’s a punishment,” Carys said. “I thought Annwn was supposed to be a paradise.”
Seren looked at her from the corner of her eye. “No place is a paradise when it takes you away from the ones you love.” She walked to the edge of the loch and snarled. “That fucking traitor Aisling. I’d kill her myself if she was in front of me, then I’d cut her into pieces and feed her to the fish of the sea she loves so much.”
So clearly no love lost there.
The last thing Carys wanted was to get her Shadowkin on the subject of the woman who’d killed her. “Annwn is the place where warriors go when they die, right? So when Lachlan dies, he can join you, can’t he?”
“Doubtful.” Seren’s blue eyes were hollow. “He’s a son of Alba. He has his own gods. His mother serves Frigg, and his father serves himself.”
“So maybe?—”
“I have no interest in speaking of Lachlan’s death,” Seren said. “Lachlan needs to live. For many, many more years.”
Carys thought about telling Seren about Lachlan’s reckless behavior, but what good would it do?
“Treasure your love.” Seren stared over the loch and toward castle hill where the ruins of the old tower still stood, even in Carys’s dream. “I was a fool, you know. I could have loved him for more years, but I fought it because of duty.”
“Lachlan knows that you loved him.”
Seren turned to Carys with tears in her eyes. “Tell him that I love him still. That I might have died but my love never did.”
Carys’s heart ached, looking into eyes that were a grieving mirror of her own. “I will,” she said. “It’ll probably make him sad, but I’ll tell him.”
Seren walked over and stood face-to-face with Carys. “Perhaps it will give him some comfort as well as sorrow.”
“I hope so.” Carys smiled.
“Also tell him” —Seren put a hand on her shoulder— “that I am excusing his transgression with you because you are my Brightkin and the living image of me in the world, but if he takes another lover, I will return from the dead, haunt them both, and see that his lover flees from him in misery.”
Carys froze. “Uh…”
“Joking.” Seren smiled a little bit. “I am joking.”
Well, that was a dark sense of humor.
“Right.”
“Really.” Seren nodded at the forest that had crept closer until the trees surrounded them. “It was a joke. Wake up, Carys.”
“What?”
She turned and was in darkness. The loch was gone, and she was in the forest behind her house. The scent of pine and redwood detritus filled the air. There was a deer ahead of her, its short antlers glowing silver as it walked down a narrow path.
“Wake up, Carys.” The voice was her mother’s. “It is not time yet. Wake up.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Carys?” Duncan was shaking her arm. “I wish I could let you sleep for days, but the dragon is about the break into our room to check your breathing.”
She blinked awake to see Lachlan leaning over her. No, it was Duncan. Obviously it was Duncan and they were in the spy’s house and…
“I just had a very weird dream.”
Duncan frowned. “Was it bad?”
“No, it was with Seren.”
