Page 26 of The Shadowbound and the False God

“And where is our dear Red Woman?” Lyre glanced around as though Aisling might have been hiding nearby.

“I lost her,” Rodney admitted reluctantly. “I thought she was right behind me.”

“That’s a shame. I had grown rather fond of her.” Rodney ignored his implication that she was lost for good. She wasn’t.They’d find her.Filling the silence Rodney let settle between them, Lyre added, “And to think, I might not have known her at all had fate not intervened.”

“Had you not owed me a favor,” Rodney corrected. “Had I not procured that rather expensive bit of minotaur horn for you.” He’d nearly gone to hell and back to find it in a shady backwater market, and bargaining the price down had taken almost just as long. If he hadn’t also found a purveyor of some of the finest honeysuckle cider he’d ever tasted, it may not have been worththe effort at all. As it was, even then Rodney knew that being owed a favor by Lyre was no small thing.

Lyre chuckled darkly. “And a fine specimen it was. Remind me who you were then? I can’t seem to recall.”

Rodney thought for a moment before he said, “Olin, I think it was. A wood elf.”

“Ah, yes.” Lyre fell back behind Rodney as the trail narrowed. “The winemaker.”

Rodney frowned. Not all of his lives had been particularly memorable, but he was almost certain he’d never claimed to be a winemaker. “Wine drinker, perhaps. Certainly no winemaker.”

“My mistake,” Lyre acquiesced.

The pair pressed on in silence for a time, unable to stray far from the route Elowas had laid out for them. When they’d first come upon it after crossing the black sand plain, the copse of trees hadn’t looked nearly as big as it seemed once they were inside. Now, it was endless. An uneasy feeling coiled in Rodney’s gut, not unlike what had twisted there as he’d approached the crying Sítheach. Everything about the god realm felt off—not always noticeably; just a few degrees from normal.

Lyre picked up on his discomfort before he could hide it. “You saw something too, didn’t you?”

“This realm is toying with us,” Rodney said, briefly sweeping his eyes up through the branches overhead. It was as much confirmation as he was willing to give.

“Indeed it is. And your vision—it was unpleasant?” Lyre’s footfall was nearly silent compared to Rodney’s, save for the errant twig snapping beneath his bootheel. But while Rodney trudged heavily, Lyre seemed to glide.

Rodney snorted in an attempt to mask the look of pain he felt flash across his face. “That’s one word for it.”

“Memories, I believe,” Lyre mused pensively. “Or, rather, what began as memories. Then twisted into—”

“Nightmares,” Rodney said at the same time as Lyre said, “Fantasies.”

Rodney shot the Prelate a bewildered look over his shoulder. “Fantasies?”

“Grim fantasies, perhaps, but fantasies, nonetheless. I do not believe we could have been shown anything we’d never imagined for ourselves.”

Rodney couldn’t conjure up a witty retort to hurl back this time. The Prelate was right, as he so often was. He was thoughtful; an analytic, reflective thinker. And though his conclusions tended to be uncomfortable ones to confront, Rodney couldn’t deny that Lyre was just as intelligent as he let on—a fact which annoyed Rodney to no end. He reached a hand up to scratch the back of his neck, fingers sinking into the tufts that trailed down his spine.

“And here I had just begun to grow accustomed to your human skin.” Lyre’s tone was singsong, lilting as he taunted. He could sense Rodney’s self-consciousness and pounced on that weakness straight away.

Rodney rolled his eyes and shoved his hand back into his jacket pocket. “Sorry to disappoint.”

The Prelate hummed in response. “I suppose at least this way the shade of your hair is slightly less…abrasive. Or—is it fur, now?” Rodney huffed in response, drawing a chuckle from Lyre, who added mockingly, “Come now, what’s a bit of teasing between old friends?”

“We’re hardly friends.” Acquaintances, at best. Companions now, only by sheer necessity.

“That is true; friends know each other’s names. If this is your true form, surely you must prefer to use your true name. What is it?”

Another cold chill, another twist in his stomach. Lyre made him just as uncomfortable as the endless maze of trees. “We’ll stick with Rodney.”

Silence again. As the pair walked, Rodney tried subtly to tug at the magic around them. It was calling to him, stronger now that his glamour had been stripped away. The tips of his fingers itched; his palms burned subtly as the air seemed to beg him to weave it into something new. To Create something. But what he found when he reached into the web was overwhelming, too concentrated and tightly wound to parse apart. It scared him off from trying further.

“Sítheach’s blame—that was your own, was it not? She was but an echo of things you’ve told yourself time and again since that day.” Lyre’s voice rang out sharp and clear and cold. There was an edge of malevolence that hadn’t been there before, barely concealed beneath his silk-smooth timbre.

Rodney stopped, one foot lifted mid-step over a fallen log. Slowly, he lowered it and turned back to face the Prelate.

“I never mentioned Sítheach,” he said carefully. He thought back, quickly recalling their conversation. He hadn’t—heknewhe hadn’t.

“No?” Lyre cocked his head to one side, a wicked sneer carved into his features. Something about him wasn’t right. Off, just slightly. His face had an uncanny nature to it. When he tilted his head to the other side, observing Rodney study him, the púca finally realized what it was.

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