Page 35 of The Shadowbound and the False God

“No, it is not. That magic comes courtesy of the late Seelie Queen, Laure Sinturel. Weak, just as she was. Far too weak for this realm.” Yalde ground another winding stalk under his bootheel.

“She’s here, too?” Aisling’s stomach knotted as she was reminded harshly of the other death she was complicit in. The sight of Laure’s mouth agape in a silent scream and her wide, wide amethyst eyes had frequented her nightmares almost just as often as Kael’s bleeding throat.

“Her aneiydh, yes. But her body was interred in a sky burial. She lies in a coffin on the cliffside below Solanthis.”

Aisling looked at the flecks of vine still stuck to her palm. “She’ll never rest.”

“Indeed, she will not. She was terribly devout, though. Her aneiydh tasted as sweet as her prayers.” Yalde paused, then asked, “Amidst all that he and I have created here, how are you so quick to tell the weeds are not his?”

Aisling didn’t answer. She could feel it—she could feel Kael in everything around her, as distinctly as she might tell his touch on her skin from another’s. She couldn’t feel him in the vines.

The affinity.

She kept this knowledge to herself, too, and prayed the deity couldn’t read her thoughts.

“I want to see him,” she said, finally looking back up at where Yalde’s eyes might have been. “Please.”

His smile grew once more, and he nodded. “Come.”

Aisling half-expected it to hurt when she followed Yalde into the swirling cloud of shadows at the far end of the cathedral. But it didn’t, nor was she struck blind by darkness when she emerged on the other side.

She wished she had been.

It wasn’t shadows, but an avalanche of madness and chaos and heartache that churned around her, over her, sucking her down into its violent depths before she was even able to take in a breath of air to hold.

Kael.

He sat before her, straight-backed on a wicked throne of thorny, sickly brambles. Motionless. Emotionless. He could have been a statue, carved from unyielding marble, but it washim.Not his ghost, not a vision.Kael.

Aisling was glad then for her nightmares—they hadn’t ever allowed her to dream of a reunion. Her mind had never been given the chance to imagine how it might feel to see him again, to hold him again. To picture that moment when their gaze wouldmeet and he would run to her and tell her that he missed her, and maybe, for the first time, that he loved her.Even still, the sight of him this way brought time to a shuddering halt.

She felt the blood drain from her face and was only vaguely aware that she’d stopped breathing. She’d heard it once that when the body experiences enough physical pain, shock sets in to numb it away. And as her vision dimmed around the periphery and her head spun, Aisling was sure that’s what this was: shock. It had set in so fast she hadn’t even had time to register the pain.

If Kael saw her, he didn’t recognize her. And if he did recognize her, he hid it well behind an impassive mask. His eyes, twin black pools, didn’t reflect the light, but seemed to absorb it. To devour it. His glamour had been stripped away, leaving exposed the ravaged flesh and winding scars he kept so steadfastly concealed. Shadows dripped like ink from the tips of his fingers where they rested on the arms of the throne, and thin black veins twisted and zigzagged like lightning over every inch of his uncovered skin, only fading just above his jawline. She had only seen those marks appear the day he’d lost control of his magic during the battle at the Nyctara front.

He seemed but a vessel; a puppet, commanded and consumed by his shadows. Aisling wondered whether there was anything but blackness left inside of him, or if that vicious, murderous version of Kael was all that was left. All those soft, beautiful parts of his aneiydh that he’d quietly shown to her in their time together had been stripped away by the savagery of Elowas and the brutality of the Low One—of Yalde. Maybe the Luna moth was just another figment pulled from her own mind, her own memories. Maybe it meant nothing at all.

More so than anything else she’d experienced up to that point, that thought alone would be what finally broke her. Hopelessness settled over her shoulders, a heavy mantle, unlikeany she’d carried before. It was Aisling that had doomed him to this nightmarish end. It didn’t matter what the prophecy promised. She could bring him back—whatever he was now, whatever was left of him—but he wasn’t Kael. Not anymore. She’d lost him.

“He’s lovely this way, isn’t he?” Yalde’s dulcet voice interrupted her spiraling thoughts. She’d almost forgotten about him lurking there, watching her reaction. The way he spoke about Kael so adoringly made her skin itch, but that new sensation pulled her back into her body. The space came into focus again, and the numbing shock gave way to a spark of anger that flared to life inside of her. This time, for the first time, she let it.

Kael still wore the simple set of robes she and Methild had changed him into after bathing his body. His earring—that strand of silver gems—still hung from the lobe of one pointed ear. Whether he knew it or not, he was still Kael.

“I think his imperfections make him that much more beautiful.” Yalde had stepped up onto the dais and circled around the back side of the throne. He reached out and caressed Kael’s ruined skin. He didn’t flinch. “The evidence of his devotion to me is striking.”

Aisling thought of the look on Kael’s face when he’d told her about the injury. She could still hear the bitterness in his voice when he’d described his misjudgment of the Low One’s whispers, how he’d wrongly conducted the blood rite that stripped away what little control he had. Sangelas had exacted its pound of flesh and Kael was left in an even worse state for it.

“He begged you for help and instead all you gave was a cryptic answer that he misinterpreted.” She winced sympathetically as Yalde’s talon pressed into an exposed muscle on the side of Kael’s neck.

“You are innocent, aren’t you?” He continued his slow circle around Kael, wading through the shadows that pooled on the ground. “I am not a merciful god, nor am I kind. But I am not unjust, and I do not inflict cruelty for cruelty’s sake. I answer to those who utter my name in any form with only the response they deserve—whether or not it is the response they sought. He interpreted my counsel just as I intended him to. He is worth so much more to me like this.”

That spark in Aisling’s chest burned hotter. “Why?”

“When he cannot control our magic, it is far easier for me to hold it under my own command.”

Kael had given everything to his god, and Yalde had taken it all without sparing a thought for his disciple. Aisling’s nails bit into her palm and the space was whitewashed for a split second by a flash of lightning overhead. Yalde sensed it and grinned.

“Calm yourself, dear. You’re giving away your little secret,” he taunted.

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