Page 99 of What Sleeps Within the Cove

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 likeher,” Holt said, guiding his horse into a trot up the narrow path. I followed after him, leaving Brann behind. Therewasn’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.

In a single corner, winter reigned. The plants were encased in snow and ice, the cold descending to freeze the water of the streamand the lake where it sprawled out between the four corners. Human figures moved within the valley, their bodies tiny pinpricks on the scope of what I watched. But there was no denying the man who stood before the lake, shadows surrounding him like the midnight of a galaxy. His eyes gleamed with gold as he met my stare through the open window, raising a single hand to hold it palm out.

It felt like a mockery of everything I’d left behind, of the mate I’d tried so desperately to touch through that barrier as it slammed closed between us and locked him out. Medusa stepped up beside him, wrapping her arms around his waist and tilting her chin to stare up at him. I couldn’t make out her face from this distance, her features too lowly contrasted to travel through the space between us aside from the writhing serpents in her hair, but something in that posture was familiar.

It was a look of love on her face, I was certain, because that was how I looked up at my mate to tell him I loved him without words.

She too raised her hand into a still wave, her head turning to face me. The noise of footsteps behind me made my heart catch in my throat, the reality of what I’d come here to do pressing down on me. Would they watch, when the Fates killed me? Would my parents bear witness to the end of my life in this temple that promised nothing but pain for me.

Death was my price. It was my salvation and my end, and I could only bring myself to regret what it would do to my mate if and when it came to pass.

I spun slowly, my hands curving in a sweeping motion as the gold of my dress moved with me. It cascaded over the floor, a liquid energy that I could not quite contain. The Fates stood before me, neatly arranged into their group of three in the same positions as I’d seen them in that meadow in the river.

“Aella, we have long awaited this moment,” the woman at the center said. Her half-rotted face moved grotesquely, her fingers constantly fiddling with the spool of thread she held in her hand. Even now, even in these moments, the three of them worked to knit a new tapestry, sewing the threads of life together bit by bit as if they were simply unable to help themselves.

“I am Clotho, and I stitched your name into the tapestry long before the night of your birth,” the woman at the center spoke, that spindle twirling to give her sister more thread. To allow her to take more of the magic of the Fates and spin it into creation and destiny itself.

“I am Lachesis, and I have guided you through all your names and all your lives,” the one to the left said, her fingers working over the new tapestry with a speed the likes of which I’d never seen. She did not need needles to tie the thread into knots, her deft, calloused fingers doing the work alone.

“I am Atropos, and I am the cutter of threads and ender of lives. I am the one that meets the living when their destiny has met its end,” the one to the right spoke. She cut her scissors through the air, as if she could not stop the motion that was endless. There were no threads to be cut in this moment, no lives to bring to the end of their days, but still she cut.

“You’re the one who will kill me when I’ve served my purpose here,” I said, keeping my voice calm. Even as I looked for confirmation of what was to come, I would not show them fear. Fear for the afterlife, fear for any pain that I might feel in my final moments. Fear that I might live and have to go on forever changed.

Silence was my only answer, a refusal to give me the gift of knowledge. I swallowed, nodding in acknowledgment. I should have expected nothing less. I raised the bag I had brought, the gifts I’d worked so hard to gather for these women so that they might grant me passage into the Cradle. So that I might find the answers I sought in the family that waited for me there. Atropos reached out and accepted it, never bothering to open the pack and look at the items I’d gathered. I supposed they didn’t need to, for these women knew every step of my trials. They knew what gifts I’d brought long before I ever brought them.

“Do you think yourself worthy? Of what you will become after you enter the Cradle?” she asked, the words catching me off guard. What did it matter if I thought myself worthy of my fate? Fate did not care for my wishes or wants, my insecurities or faults. It only saw how to use them to its advantage, only saw a being that could be manipulated to suit.

“How am I to say if I am worthy when I do not know what it is I will become? I don’t think there is anyone who is worthy of the kind of power the Primordials and Gods possess. All I can do is endeavor to be fair and just, to give those around me the best life possible and not allow my magic to corrupt me in the same way it has so many others. Does that make me worthy, or does that make me blinded by my own idealism that I might be different than those who came before me?” I asked, sighing as I spoke the words. It felt like blasphemy to insult the Primordials and the Gods, especially in this place, sonear to where the Primordials had chosen to hide away from the world they’d created like cowards.

Clotho moved, breaking free from their triad to take a step closer to me. She touched a hand to my chest, that bundle of threads rising within me as it recognized her touch. Her head tilted to the side, studying the thread intently before her eerie eyes rose to my face once more.

“When we knit the threads, we see only facts. We see actions, but the thoughts behind them are lost to us. We have long since stopped understanding the facets of human emotion, if we ever had the ability to begin with. Do you not wish to have everlasting life and power? It seems so many of your kind would give anything or anyone to have such things, and yet you seem angry that we have presented you with them.”

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