Ínne caught me with a hand upon my shoulder. Drew me gently away. Embraced me when I struggled.
Not yet, my child, they murmured softly in my ear.Your part in the story is not yet finished. There is more you must do before your saga can be etched upon these boughs. Battles you must win before your ending is whispered between these leaves.
It broke my heart to turn away from the godhead at the center of everything. Yet the moment I faced away, the tree of life slid gently from my mind’s eye, until it was little more than a distant, perfect promise. I knew I would return here, in time.
We all would.
I turned my tearstained face to the tree that bore my likeness, some small part of me trapped even now in this necropolis of trees.
“Would we go free?” I asked Ínne, haltingly. “Would all the heirs be freed to their true rest if the Treasures were unmade?”
Yes.
A thread of light stitched over her breastbone, sliced the center of her stomach, and split her down the middle. The tree—my tree—yawned open. Beyond, in dense, dusky shadows, a doe stood in the undergrowth, so motionless she might have been a statue. Her dark, depthless eyes seemed to swallow me.
All my strange dreams from the past few months rippled hazily through my mind, mingling with everything I knew or suspected about my mother. Dread and hope beat twin pulses between my temples.
The deer flicked her tail, white in the dim. Then turned on her delicate limbs and bounded away into the evening shadows.
Go, said the Bright One when I hesitated.There is one place stillfor you to visit. Your future will wait for your past. Unless you do not wish to know it fully.
For as long as I could remember, I had wanted nothing more. Yet now, confronted with the deep forest of my mind, I was afraid. I had already seen so much.Feltso much. Could I bear to do this?
Could I bear not to?
Chapter Fourteen
Wayland
The Cnoc’s library—and Wayland felt exceptionally generous dubbing it that—was not huge. It covered one wall of the medium-sized cavern Idris led him to. But a mere glance told Wayland all he needed to know about how precious these books, scrolls, parchments, and tablets were to Laoise and Idris.
He had heard it said dragain hoarded treasure. Treasure, he supposed, was not always gold and jewels. It could as easily be knowledge. Stories.Books.
He could not relate. Wayland hated reading. He could hardly remember a time in his life when he didn’t loathe the sight of a book. In his admittedly limited experience—since he had avoided the damned things since childhood—books were designed to convey one of two things: truth or escape. But he had long since found truth was best discovered at the bottom of a wine bottle, andescapewas just another word forfalsehood. Wayland was too accustomed to living a lie to relish in the prospect of reading one.
His mother had adored reading. In one of his few distinct memories of her, she was clad in her coziest nightgown, practicallyhidden beneath mounds of blankets, curled around a book, utterly absorbed by its contents. He had climbed beside her and snuggled in close, reveling in the warmth of her frame, the heavy sweep of her long brown hair, the press of her lips on his forehead.
But when he looked at the book in her hands, it had been… words. He had not taken to his letters yet, much to his tutors’ constant scolding, and this book had no pictures.
“What are you reading, Mama?” he had asked her.
“A story, rónán beag.”Littlest seal, she had always called him. Her voice had been like sea silk.
“Will you tell it to me?”
She had laughed, a secret kind of chuckle. “No, rónán beag. This story is only for grown-ups. But when I’m done with this chapter, I promise to read you one of your picture books.”
He supposed, if he was being brutally honest with himself, that was where the trouble began.
The Cnoc’s collection, although not plentiful, seemed exquisitely curated—sorted and ordered using a system Wayland could not fathom. Fat jewel-spined tomes sat beside crumbling stone tablets; carven blocks etched with foreign symbols propped up shredded volumes of vellum and tar. It was not the grandiose splendor of the archives at Aduantas; it was not even the uncontrolled chaos of Master Blink’s bookstore, where Wayland had ventured once in his youth, in pursuit of a rare collection of enchanted pornography.
“This looks… complicated.” Wayland folded his arms over his chest as Idris moved around the room lighting torches and candles to supplement the faint glow from the minerals. The light turned the young man’s red hair molten and made his brown skin soft as gold. Hog wobbled up to flop onto the mantel above the hearth, stretching her frame along the warmed stone. “Am I to be favored with a tour?”
“I’m afraid it won’t be much of a tour.” Idris laughed low. “And I don’t see it as much of a favor.”
Wayland quirked an eyebrow. “Why do you say that?”
“Because I can already tell you see research as punishment.”
