Page 63 of The Shadowbound and the False God

“You wouldn’t bring her here.” Aisling frowned, imagining the apothecarist crossing into the god realm. She was good, and gentle, and compassionate—everything this place was not.

Raif shook his head sharply, dismissing the idea. “When we return, I will find the white oak. Orist’s mirror, the part of her that exists in Wyldraíocht.”

When, notif.Raif sounded so sure they’d make it back. Aisling longed for even a fraction of that confidence. As it was, she could scarcely imagine leaving the bounds of the Enclave, much less traversing the forest and the black sand plain to find the door again. And if they could somehow manage to make it there, if they could avoid Yalde’s Sight and the centaurs and the gwyllion and all the rest—what if they were too late? What if they couldn’t open the door? What if—

Aisling pressed her hand tighter against the bark as her thoughts continued to race, allowing the bite of the rougher bits to draw her focus and slow her spiral.

“Come down from there, both of you,” Sudryl chided from below. Aisling stood stiffly and with Raif’s help, climbed backwards down the cairn. It wasn’t a challenging descent, but the noise in her head left her feeling unsteady and her hands trembled slightly as she grasped for purchase beneath the moss.

Sudryl led the pair back inside and down a narrow, sloped passage. The cairn reminded Aisling of the Undercastle: a tangled web of chambers and shafts and passageways that she struggled to mentally map. This one found both Aisling and Raif stooping low until the corridor came to an end in a cold hollow. Its walls were lined with baskets and from the ceiling hung bundles of herbs.

“It’s like a root cellar,” Aisling observed quietly, nearly knocking over a bushel of potatoes as she shuffled to one side to make space for Raif.

Sudryl hummed, already digging through a shallow hole in the chamber floor filled with thin strips of curled bark. The faerie withdrew a handful, holding each to her nose and turning them this way and that before selecting several of the largest strips and laying them in her basket.

“Three of those,” she ordered, nodding to the potatoes. Aisling chose three off the top.

“Do you forage for all this yourself?” Raif asked. He nudged one of the hanging bundles so it swung back and forth.

“Some, but not often. I only leave the Enclave when necessary. I have others that gather supplies for me who are better equipped to survive outside. Well,” she paused, correcting herself with a subtle half-smile, “other.”

“Fenian?” Raif guessed. The faerie didn’t respond, but the affectionate twinkle in her eye spoke volumes. “The beast is not so heartless as he purports himself to be.”

“Another spot of kindness in this forsaken realm, that one. He has been here a long while.” Sudryl took the potatoes from Aisling and added them to her basket then said, “Let’s go. You all could use a proper meal.”

The empty silence in Kael’s mind was haunting. As much as he now feared the Low One’s—Yalde’s—cruel whispers, he longed for them, too. Without that voice, Kael was alone in his head. There was no one to look to for guidance, for blessings. If he were to pray now, there would be no place for those prayers to go.

No one was listening.

A worn track was eroding beneath his feet, a physical manifestation of his tormented thoughts—one that the alseid would almost surely scold him for. So Kael stopped and, without glancing again at the impenetrable, tempting darkness of the forest, retreated into the golden glow of the cairn.

He might have smiled at the scene before him if the expression came more naturally. Raif was crouched over a large brass pot that hung from a crooked root above the fire, stirring its contents. Aisling and Sudryl knelt nearby, kneading balls of tough brown dough atop flat rocks. Aisling’s hair was twisted back out of her face and tucked into the collar of the púca’soverlarge sweater. Its sleeves were pushed up above her elbows and a fine dusting of flour coated her forearms. A smudge of it was streaked across her cheek, flushed from the heat of the flames that warmed the chamber.

“This hardly feels like bread dough,” she remarked under her breath.

Sudryl gave her a harsh look. “This is hardly your mother’s bread, girl. You watched me grind the flour from bark; what did you expect?”

Kael eased himself to the ground and rested his elbows on bent knees. The warmth was stifling, but he could no longer face the trees or the dark or the silence alone. Those things all seemed a little less threatening with Aisling close by, even if she was doing her best to avoid meeting his eyes.

“What is it?” Rodney emerged from a chamber at the back of the cairn and stopped to peer over Raif’s shoulder into the bubbling pot. His nose wrinkled at its contents.

“Stew. Potatoes and mushrooms,” Raif replied, lifting a spoonful to show the rough-cut vegetables.

“And that?” Rodney gestured to a fibrous strip that hung limp from the edge of the ladle.

“Cambium, the meat of a tree,” Sudryl said, still kneading vigorously. “The bit between the outer bark and the sapwood. It will fill your stomachs well and keep them that way.”

From the corner of his eye, Kael thought he saw Aisling grimace briefly. He wished she would join in the conversation with the others. He wanted her to speak again, to say anything at all so that he could drink in her voice and let it soothe the hurt inside him. But he couldn’t ask for anything more from her now. So he didn’t address her, and she remained silent.

It wasn’t until they had each taken a roughhewn bowl of the thin stew and a portion of flatbread that Aisling finally spoke. Her eyes were downcast as she balanced the bowl in her lap andthe bread on top and said, “I don’t know if this is breakfast, lunch, or dinner.”

Without any celestial movement—no sun or moon, scarcely any darkening or lightening of the sky—it was impossible to tell what time it was, if time existed there at all. Elowas seemed outside of time, at once unaffected by it and enmeshed in it. Kael would have believed that he’d been there for a century as easily as he would have a day.

“It is a meal, and you would do well to eat it,” Sudryl admonished, not at all gently. Kael wished to say something encouraging, perhaps to lie and say the bread was light and sweet or that the stew had no bitter aftertaste at all, but Rodney cut in before he was able.

“All you’ve had since we got here is half a chocolate bar. Less—you didn’t even finish it. You’ll make yourself sick, Ash.”

She nodded and brought a spoonful of broth to her lips, then another. Kael’s eyes narrowed, catching the way she winced as she swallowed it down. The dry bread, she left untouched.

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