Page 9 of What Sleeps Within the Cove

My thoughts immediately flashed to Mab, to how unworthy she’d proven to be of the magic she’d been given. The magic that was stolen by the dwarves centuries before I was born.

“How am I to survive the trials without my magic?” I asked, watching as she drew her finger away from my chest and held out her hand for me to take.

“The same way you always have. As a human,” she answered, her fingers wiggling as she pushed me to accept the only choice I had.

“It hardly seems fair to have to prove myself worthy of entering a prison,” I snapped, gritting my teeth. “Torture is hardly a gift.”

“No place is truly good or evil, Tempest. Places as much as people exist on a continuum. For the right person, Tartarus can provide just as much as it can take.”

“If I can prove myself worthy. If I’m not, it takes the ultimate price,” I said, grabbing her hand despite the harsh reality of my words.

“Perhaps that, too, is a gift. If you are unsuccessful, your mate will die. This way, you may join him in the Void and find peace with The Mother in Folkvangr. The peace of oblivion is not a gift to take lightly when so many would do nearly anything for it. You would never have to know why the threads have led you here, why they’ve woven you through countless lives to bring you to this very place and this very decision,” she said, guiding me right up to the hazy gateway. She stepped to the other side, crossing through the mist that flowed like water and reappearing on the other side to look back at me with features that felt far too familiar. “Sometimes death is a mercy, but if you live, not even you can outrun the Fates forever.”

I touched shaking fingers to the mist in the entryway, wincing back from the deep cold that suffused my hand at the touch. Fenrir appeared beyond the Morrigan, his stoic face still and his eyes holding mine. His head seemed to nod, as if he understood my hesitation and wanted to tell me it would be alright.

But it wouldn’t. I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that nothing would ever be alright again.

“What will the trials require of me?” I asked, hesitating at that gateway. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to pass into the inner sanctum of Tartarus, not without first asking the questions that once, not so long ago, I’d have been too afraid to voice.

“That will depend on how the magic of Tartarus judges you. The trials are created around what it wishes to see of you, what it needs to test,” Badb said, the cryptic answer the only one I knew I would receive.

Nemain raised a hand, lining her fingers up with mine on the opposite side of the mist. I swallowed as I pressed my hand farther, pushing it through the misty waters that spread around it, thick and viscous and so cold it burned. I gasped as my hand emerged on the other side, my arm and then my body following. Nemain moved with me, guiding me through the cold until it surrounded my face, filling my ears and my nose and my eyes with the burn of it. I couldn’t escape it, couldn’t breathe as it made my lungs still in my chest. I barely managed to push my legs forward before they felt like they froze solid, emerging on the other side as Nemain took a step back, her hand still raised to mirror mine.

The liquid leaked out of my nose, dripping down the sides of my neck and running over my skin in droplets. It gathered on the back of my left hand, pooling in the center of the black circle as I fought for the ability to move. It sank into my pores, eating away at my Fae Mark there.

I wheezed, dropping to my knees as it robbed me of air. As it painfully stripped my power away from me, gathering it all within itself and holding it there. The center of the circle turned the color of flesh once more, the reddish brown of my skin showing where there had been only darkness before.

My knees throbbed with the pain of hitting the stone, forcing me to acknowledge what had been lost. It wasn’t just my magic, but the ability to heal from the injuries I sustained. The ability to not be fazed by such mundane trivialities.

Where I’d been semi-numbed to the pain of having the skin peeled from my bones, now I felt every stone in my knees.

I pushed myself to my feet, trying not to allow my knees to buckle. I wondered if Caldris felt the shift in our bond, felt the fact that I couldn’t access any of the power that arched between us. Maybe it would mean he would have greater access to it.

Maybe it would mean he could fight.

I didn’t pretend to understand the equilibrium of a bond andthe magic that pulsed between two halves of a soul. Because the one thing I knew was that I didn’t stand a chance when I felt like my body was too heavy to carry.

“It feels worse than you ever remember before, doesn’t it?” Badb asked, nodding her head for me to walk forward. She was right, but even worse than the physical heaviness was the emptiness within me. Where my bond had once pulsed brightly in my mind, a distant light, I could no longer feel the warmth of Caldris’s mind pressing against my own.

I suddenly remembered what it was to be completely and entirely alone in my head. To have him silenced.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said with a scowl, making my way down the steps on the other side. My knees threatened to cave with every step.

But I took them anyway. Just as I always had.

SIX

CALDRIS

I carried yet another of the fallen forms down the stairs toward the dungeons where I’d only just gotten free from hours prior. The pile of remains in front of the river exit grew with each trip as the Lliadhe and I worked tirelessly to get them out of the throne room. The remaining Fae carried their own mates, lingering beside the grouping of bodies far longer than they should have.

The sight would only torment them, would only remind them of all the moments they’d been deprived of. There would be no escaping the grief that was coming for them, or the madness that would eventually set in without the other half of them present to ground them against it, but that didn’t mean they needed to stare at their mate’s pain and suffering.

Mab had not been kind in her destruction.

I lowered the newest body beside the rest, a Lliadhe woman whose only crime had been to be in the wrong place when Mab snapped. She’d been the first to die, the messenger sent to deliverthe humans to Mab’s throne room. She’d allegedly taken too long to make the journey earning Mab’s impatience as her punishment.

I stared at them, my gaze flashing between the boat waiting for me to make the journey with their souls while the Lliadhe handled their physical forms once I’d offered their spirits the true separation of the Void. I knew my place, understood my duty like a calling in my blood. It drew me toward that boat, my steps hesitant as the other part of me called from the other direction.

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