Chapter Thirty-Eight
Wayland
The dark waters below Murias rippled red under a dim dawn. A once sandy and pebbled strand was littered with debris—broken glass and rusted metal jutting from the sand like broken spines. Deeper, the carcasses of ships lay half sunk along shattered jetties, their masts broken and their hulls gaping. The air was heavy with a foul, chemical tang.
Wayland glanced reflexively at Murias, its shattered white towers slicked with red sunlight like a mouth full of broken, bloody teeth. Beyond, he sensed the awful, undeniable ripple of the corrupted wild magic—it sang to him, with a soundless kind of wailing. Like the aching, unknowable calls of the whales who’d swum in the seas around Emain Ablach—exceptwrong.
He tore his eyes away, looking back at the bluff where he’d camped with Idris the night before. He could not see the other man, nor the draigling he’d scolded until she’d agreed to stay with Idris, but he knew they were there.
Wayland did not want either Idris or Hog here with him. But nor did he want them too far away.
Ugly, gloomy waves slapped greasy foam on his boots as Fia’s words echoed in his mind:The nemeta are key. The groves are like homes to them.Them—the Solasóirí. The Bright One connected to the Treasure Wayland wished to reforge. He somehow knew—whether it was his own innate connection to the seas or Fáilsceim humming faint directions in his mind—where that nemeton would be.
It would be underwater.
Gingerly, he toed off his boots, pulled his tunic over his head, and waded out into the turbid surf with Fáilsceim strapped to his back.
The cold water was a shock against his skin, but he forced himself deeper, the oily surf sucking at his waist, then his chest. The tide was turning—a subtle pull he knew had the potential to turn treacherous. The waters around Emain Ablach had been rife with riptides and whirlpools, and Wayland had spent years learning them—avoiding them or seeking them out as the mood demanded. But these seas were unfamiliar to him. With the warped wild magic extending its blight into the bay, many dangers might lurk below the rippled, dawn-lit surface.
Wayland shifted into his anam cló, reveling as his senses and perception changed from his Gentry form’s. The frigid ocean was but a pleasant nothing temperature against his blubber-coated body. His sensitive whiskers vibrated, feeding him information about his surroundings: the direction of the tide, the force of the wind, the path of a three-eyed kelp bass sliding somewhere beneath his flippers. And something else—a corrosive hum climbing through the dark water and glossing unpleasantly over his flesh. It had a magnetic pull, as if the soundless, quivering tune might become audible if he drew closer. Yet beneath its staccato hid a warning—the dangerous thrill of magic Wayland had spent the bulk of his adult life estranged from.
Magic meant power. Magic meant freedom. Magic meant creation.
But magic also meant pain, swift and soul crushing. Magic meant misery. Magic meant loss.
He forced himself to stare through the slippery currents to where the ocean rotted and roiled. Whatever waited for him on the seafloor needed him. He knew that. He was the only heir alive with a natural affinity for the dúil of water. No one else was coming to right this wrong; no one else knew how or even why. Without him, this blight would continue unchecked. Another decade… another century. Another millennium.
Forever.
Wayland cursed, and kicked himself to the slick sighing surface of the bay, shifting back into his Gentry form. The cold waves lapped at him, shocking after the protection of his anam cló. He thought suddenly of the warm imprint of Idris’s mouth on his and gazed once more toward the bluffs above the beach. He swore he could make out Idris’s lean figure, silhouetted in black against the pink-and-gold morning.
I want to give you something of myself. Something I do not even know if I have in me to give, Wayland had said, and he had meant it. He wanted to be someone Idris deserved, someone who deserved Idris. He wanted to be the kind of man who dived bravely to the bottom of the ocean without reservation to barter with an ancient tortured god. That was who Idris wanted. Who Fia wanted. Whoeveryonewanted.
Wayland had worn many masks in his life. Most of his own making. Some created by others. All far easier to wear than his own imperfect self. He had never,neversimply been himself. And he wasn’t sure what he feared most—that his true, authentic self was just as callous as his persona… or that it simply didn’t exist at all.
“This better be fucking worth it.” A faint breeze smelling of carrion gathered his curse and gusted it over the swallowing sea.
He inhaled deeply, shifted back into his anam cló, then plunged beneath the water. A metallic taste filled his mouth, the brine clinging to his tongue. His nostrils instinctively closed against the rancid scents wafting with each cresting swell. His fins brushed slimy,wilted strands of seaweed. Filmy sludge stuck to his pelt. Shadows shifted below—fish with cloudy, glowing eyes, their scales dull and pitted; slow-moving turtles crusted with bloated barnacles. Only wavering shafts of sickly green light pierced the heavy, polluted depths.
He pushed deeper. That magnetic hum wavered in and out, eerily dissonant, like a lullaby sung by something that had forgotten what it was to sleep. The sound filled his chest with the uneasy echo of things lost or not yet found.
There—a flicker of movement, serpentine and disjointed in the opaque water. Scales? Tentacles. Wayland dredged the gloom for what had swum by. But not even his seal eyes could plumb these depths.
Then filaments of bioluminescence bloomed along the seafloor. A reef twisted below Wayland, its spires and arches aglow with ghastly radiance, gnarled towers of diatoms and algae twining in spirals veined with violet and blue. The light pulsed like a heartbeat, throbbing in time to that bilious, maudlinsongthat kept digging deeper into Wayland’s being. Phantom fish darted between tendrils of sea flora blooming in sickly tones of pastel pink and pallid yellow. The water whorled thick and gummy, heavy with the weight of a thousand unforgiven wrongs.
At the center of the reef was the nemeton, a grove of branching corals unfurling like twisted trees. Dark crimson stalks spiraled upward, their tips crowned with jade-green clusters pulsing with more of that eerie bioluminescent glow. A deep purple mist hung between them, clinging to the puckered candle-wax trunks. Filaments of uncanny radiance laced between the gnarled branches, flickering with ghostly veins of light and casting spectral shadows across the blooms of algae trembling in the ebb tide.
“Gods alive,” Wayland blurted in horror, his words gargled bubbles in the dim.
From the shadows beyond the grove,theyemerged—silent and impossibly vast, their body an undulating mass of rotting sinewand jagged spines. Luminous, unblinking eyes the size of boulders locked onto Wayland’s with predatory hunger. Thick tentacles—slick with oily slime—coiled and uncoiled through the water. The leviathan’s maw opened, revealing rows of needle-sharp teeth, each as long as a man’s arm, gleaming in the dark. The water rippled and distorted around it, as if even the ocean recoiled from this ancient, ravenous thing.
Hello, tánaiste.Hearing the Bright One’s psychic voice was like drinking spoiled wine—a clinging, sour sensation that Wayland longed to scrape away. The leviathan roiled closer, shifting as they did—tentacles becoming limbs becoming fins; scales becoming floating dark hair becoming thick pelt. They drifted toward the center of the grove until they, too, were a seal—sloe-eyed and sleek, nearly the same size as Wayland.
The song slithered through the water, unmistakable now.Rest now, rónán beag, where the black waters creep. The sea knows your name, and she calls you to sleep.
All Wayland’s forced bravery seeped away in an instant as nausea curdled in his gut. That was the lullaby his mother had sung him when he was in his cradle. The heartless tune his father had ground out in his graveled voice, trying to comfort a son who had lost that which was undeniably most precious to him.
“Don’t,” Wayland gurgled, his voice irritatingly useless beneath the sea. He reached for the warped, wild presence rifling through his thoughts with sucker-studded tentacles and spoke to it directly in his mind.That is not yours for the taking. For the touching. Leave it be.
