“This is not your grand pageant, old man,” Wayland spat,forcefully. He was horrified to realize both his voice and his hands were shaking. He clenched the hilt of his ceremonial blade until the carven metal was imprinted onto his palm. “This is your heir, finally in a position to demand what ought to have been given to him years ago.”
Gavida barked a brusque laugh. “What’s that?”
“My freedom. My destiny.”
“The damnedpattern.” Gavida shook his grizzled head, then flung himself back toward the walls, continuing his dismantlement of the space that had once been his sanctum. “Marban said this would happen. He said the balancing would find me, in the end. He warned me that the cost would be high—too high to pay. But that blasted fool never knew—well, I never told him—”
Wayland watched as his father careened from one wall to the next, his ramblings becoming more and more disjointed. A treacherous finger of pity stroked the rigid spikes of Wayland’s vengeance until it began, horribly, to wane. The tip of his sword came to rest on the shaking floor.
Gavida had lived over a thousand years. Wayland had never once, until today, thought of his father as old.
“This is all her fault!” Gavida’s huge, meaty fists splintered a graceful credenza with the force of his destructive rage. “I never should have allowed her to come.”
“She manipulated us all, Father.” Abruptly, the ground beneath them lurched several inches to the right. Both men stumbled, fought for their footing. “Butyounever should have forged her a Treasure.”
“Not the human princess, you fool!” Gavida staggered to face him, his face like a rictus of death. “That changeling bitch ruined everything! I tried to control her, but she just had to shove her starry little fingers into the warp and weft of the pattern andpull. And now everything is ruined—ruined!”
Just as abruptly as he had raged, Gavida groaned and sank to his knees on the rocking flagstones. Mortar fell like rain around hishead, coating his hair in white dust. Another section of the ceiling sheared away, swirling the seething vapor. When the king looked at Wayland again, he appeared composed, his deep blue eyes serene as a summer sea.
“I have always known I would not die an old man in my bed, my dear Way.”
For a moment, Wayland saw him only as the beloved father who had dandled him upon his knee as a little boy, delighted by his son’s cleverness and wit. The beloved father who had sung him endless lullabies in his awkward baritone after Wayland’s mother had abandoned them both.Rest now, my Way, where the black waters creep. The sea knows your name, and she calls you to sleep.
“There are but two honorable ways for a man to die: in battle, or by his own hand. I fear, even amid all this destruction, that I have not the fortitude for the latter.” Gavida gestured toward his ruined throne. “So give me my hammer and my steel, Son. Then send me on my final journey. I know you want to.”
For a brief, ungenerous moment, Wayland wanted to do nothing of the sort. If his father wanted a clean death, then let him do it himself. Better yet, let him go down with his precious island—let all the terrible architecture of his power be the thing to destroy him. Let this crumbling white stone crack his skull, let this sharp-edged palace grind his bones to dust, let this devouring magic drown him forever.
“I will grant your last wish, Father,” he ground out. “In return for mine. Remove my collar, and you shall have your death.”
“But why, my son?” Something sharpened in Gavida’s eyes. “We both die here today. Or did you think you had time to enact vengeance on your fatherandescape this island before it falls into the sea?”
The words sent an icy wave of realization crashing over Wayland. An hour, Irian had said. How long had it been? The time seemed to yawn behind him, a curse not yet fulfilled. He would never make it. He had doomed himself. And for what?
“Set me free,” he said, more forcefully. “Let me go as myself. Then you may die a penitent father, and I may die a free man.”
Gavida hesitated, then lifted his hands to Wayland’s face, cupping his son’s cheeks with surprising gentleness. His calloused palms were rough on Wayland’s skin. He stared deep into his eyes, searching for something. What, Wayland did not know—as much a mystery as what he had been ransacking his throne room for.
“I know you hate me for what I have done,” Gavida murmured. “But perhaps someday, when you have a son of your own, you will come to understand. Destiny is a bastard who longs to kick you in the balls. But if you really want that pain, then you shall have it.”
His huge hands dropped to Wayland’s throat, clasping around the heavy, carven metal stretching from his collarbones to his jaw. Veins of silver light flared around the metal before twining Wayland’s face and tangling in his hair. Pain screamed down his back and up into his skull, whiting his vision and rattling his teeth. He was flayed alive—every inch of Wayland’s skin sliced away, torn bodily from tendon and bone, exposing all the blemished meat of him. The charming, choking revulsion of him. The laughing, lacking wretchedness of him.
The collar crumbled away in his father’s hands, silver as sand in the moonlight. Father and son stared at each other. High above, another piece of ceiling screeched and slid. Far below, the island bellowed a warning. Gavida reached for his tools, hefted them in his beefy arms.
Wayland grasped the Holly King’s ceremonial blade, flipped his grip on the hilt, and drove the steel between his father’s ribs.
The old man collapsed against him, and Wayland caught him in his arms. Hot, dark blood jetted out over his hands and his tunic as he lowered them both to the pale tiles. He smoothed his father’s wild hair from his face as his eyes went wide, then far away, then gray, gray, gray. Below the tumultuous anguish of the Silver Isle tearing itself apart, Wayland sang, brokenly, “Rest now, old man,where the black waters creep. The sea knows your name, and she calls you to sleep.”
A moment or a lifetime later, Wayland remembered Irian’s last request:Fia needs her Heart. It wouldn’t matter now, he supposed. But perhaps, with his collar removed, he was no longer immune to miracles. He reached below the collar of Gavida’s tunic and slid the chain over his head. A spark of heat passed between his fingers—sharp, stinging silver. Wayland drew the chain over his head, and when the cool blue-green stone settled over his breastbone, he experienced a burst of solace, green as a Midsummer forest. He glimpsed a path cloistered with long-boughed ash trees. And in the distance, a glade crowned with sunlight—
He jerked his head, even as a touch, like pollen-dusted fingers, ghosted over his cheek. And he knew, with distant horror and creeping hope, that it wasmagic.
For the first time since he was a boy, he could sense magic again.
Wayland left Gavida in a pool of his own blood, sprawled with his tools and a sword splitting him in half. He climbed onto the remnant of the throne of Emain Ablach—he was king now, after all. He sat. And he waited. The wind howled and the sea churned and the Grove of Gold ignited in a great roaring sheet of ardent flames.
When Laoise’s anam cló came soaring over the crest of the island, shimmering red-gold like coins or autumn leaves or burning coals, Wayland did not think to be afraid. He had simply known—he was truly free.
But destiny could be its own kind of collar.
