‘Then die, you faithless traitor.’ She spat the words at him, summoning powers that commanded the wind and the wave, magic taught to her by Ankou himself.
‘Your magic has no power over me, princess,’ said her latest lover disdainfully. ‘I am protected.’
The princess threw on her robe and rushed after him. Though she ran and he walked, she couldn’t catch him. Invisible weights dragged at her, as if she was running through deep water. Nor could she seem to raise the alarm. Her voice didn’t carry. The dancers danced on, her father spoke only with the priest, the servants tried in vain to hold back the storm and the guards stood like statues, oblivious.
Her lover strode onwards and she followed him out to the sea wall, to the great gates, which strained under the press of the wild waves. From across the courtyard, he smiled back at her, triumphant, as he slid the key into the lock on the sea gate and opened it to the raging ocean.
‘Are you mad?’ she screamed over the roar of the storm. ‘You’ll kill us all. The city will drown.’
‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘The sea will have you. This is my intent.’
‘But why?’
‘Why? For every death, for every life exploited, for every family destroyed by you and your kind. I am the Mac’htiern of my people, their protector.’
The water was rising now and he stood above it on the wall leading back to the promontory, to safety. The water rushed towards her.
She saw her people begin to panic and flee, saw her father on his magical horse, riding across the waves, and for a moment she thought he would rescue her. But the priest behind him damned her with his words and her father left her to drown.
With her last breath, she cursed the Mac’htiern, her faithless lover, cursed his line, cursed everything and everyone he would touch. Cursed herself for ever trusting him.
‘I would have loved you,’ she cried as the sea rushed in around her. ‘I would have been yours. And one day I will have vengeance, even if it takes forever. I’ll wait in the land beneath the waves. The sea will take you too. It will take all your menfolk, and all who stand with you, and leave your women weeping. Until the day you save my city, until you give your all to protect Ys, I curse you and yours to drown.’
The cold hand of death took her, even as she raged, even as she cursed, even as she poured every last ounce of power into her words. She looked into the face of Ankou, the Servant of Death, who had loved her and left her, who would do anything for her. She cried for her lost city, her lost love, her shattered dreams, and he took pity on her, releasing her.
The water took her and made her its bride.
CHAPTERONE
Ari had never intended to come back here. In fact, she had told Jason as much the day she refused to return for the funeral.
Nothing on earth will ever drag me back to that godforsaken place.
The ends of the earth, Finistère, Brittany, this promontory of bare rock and raging waves, wild and angry at the rest of the world, stubborn to the last.
‘Just like you,’ her brother told her. He always was a smart-arse.
The wind tore at her hair and she tasted the salt carried on it like old tears, all the way across the Atlantic with nothing to stop it. The cliffs fell away beneath her feet and the sky— She had forgotten about the sky here. It just seemed so much bigger than anywhere else, a vast dome of shifting greys and myriad blues which could change like a transient mood. Sea and sky, and the rocks between, the white of foam and clouds, all the colours of the Atlantic. Bright overhead, darkening as it swept towards the far western horizon, where it deepened to indigo and blended with the endless sea.
Beautiful, she would have said once. Long ago, she hadn’t conceived of anywhere more beautiful. When she’d been in love with the region, and the peninsula of Cap Sizun in particular. And Simon.
But losing him had stolen everything.
It still felt like he was here, as if he lingered at her shoulder, or failing that, at any moment he would clamber back over the rocky outcrop to the left, scrambling through bracken and wild honeysuckle, and join her once again. He’d grin. That reckless, devil-may-care grin.
And she’d feel it all through her body, the joy. Love.
Had it really been two years? Two years since the letter from him which had changed everything. Since the phone call that had made it all even worse.
She let the wind whisk her tears away from her face and fixed her gaze on the distant place where the sea and the sky melded together, seamless and dark, threatening oblivion. Seagulls wheeled overhead, crying out in those long, drawn-out screams.
To her left, the Pointe du Raz cut like the bow of a ship through the treacherous passage of sea. Beyond it stood the lighthouse, La Vieille, the Old Lady, named for the sea witch, orgroac’h, who lived beneath the rock on which it stood. After that, the Île de Sein, called Enez-Sun in Breton, hung like a mirage, a flat stretch of isolated land, five miles away. After Sein, barely visible, even on so clear a day, the final lighthouse, the shadowy form of Ar Men, the Rock, clung to last scrap of land. Then there was only the ocean, the vast Atlantic.
Qui voit Sein, voit sa fin.
Who sees Sein, sees their end, or so the saying went, before the sea took them, the rocks tore them apart and the ocean swallowed them up.
Like Simon. She shied away from that thought.
