The echo that sounded within Veritas comes to my mind so clearly now, and its meaning is horribly transparent.
“I took her darkness so she could be free. I ripped out the malice so she could be at peace.”
“I died so she could live.”
“She lived while I died.”
“It should have been her. Not me.”
I double over with a groan and now Halle—and each member of my pack—edges toward me.
“Darkness?” Anarchy was already sitting closest to me, but she wraps an arm around my shoulders. She is always my protector, the one who worries about my emotions. “Are you okay?”
I can’t answer her because it doesn’t matter if I’m okay.
I force sound from my lips. “Halle, clarify this for me: Did any Blacksmiths have silver hair?”
“Yes,” she whispers.
“Which House?”
There’s a pause. “Silverspun. The House that created the keepers.” But she hurries on. “That doesn’t mean he was from that House.”
I glare up at her, finding her as pale as she was when the keeper had first brought me to the Underworld, and she took a step back and asked him why he was wearing that face.
That green-eyed, silver-haired face that has always scared the fuck out of me.
“He could have chosen that face for many reasons,” she says. “He could have meant it as a taunt. A rejection of the magic that created him. Hell, he could have even chosen it as a form of acceptance, because without their choices, the world we know would not exist.”
She shudders and wraps her arms around herself. “I may not have witnessed the keepers’ creation, but I saw the decay that stretched east. An entire fae city was wiped out. A Valkyrie village was infected, and all of its women became mortally ill. Animals were malformed… We hadn’t seen a deer for years, let alone a natural wolf…”
Her focus becomes a little distant as she fixates on the wall—outside of which the two wolves may still be playing.
She shakes herself. “There are many reasons why the keeper could have chosen to show you that face.”
Including because he was trying to send me a message about the power I control.
My fingers curl with frustration because onlyhecan give me clarity.
“What about the face he’s wearing now?” I consider his hair, how dark it is, but it isn’t metallic and it never scared me.
To my surprise, it’s Jonah who answers. “The face he wears now does not belong to a Blacksmith,” he says. “Just as this longhouse would never have belonged to a Blacksmith.”
I cast my gaze around the structure. “You said this was an En… En…” My forehead puckers as I stumble over the pronunciation. “How do you pronounce it?”
“Einherjar,” he says, pronouncing it en-hair-yar with emphasis on the second syllable. “He has the same blue eyes as their greatest chieftain.”
The form he takes when his mood is the darkest. He wasn’t wearing it when he first met Jonah, and now I wonder if that was a deliberate choice on the keeper’s part. Jonah would have recognized these eyes.
My hand brushes the keeper’s cold cheek as I try to work through the threads of the weave of my mother’s life and how it connects with the keeper’s.
“Okay, then. Here is what I have: my mother’s life was saved by a powerful Blacksmith whose identity is unknown,” I say. “Whether or not it was given out of love or hate, the heart they gave her kept her alive until I came into existence and absorbed her power.”
A lump forms in my throat. “In prison, her heart finally stopped altogether.”
I breathe out. Then in. Pushing through the pain of those memories so I can continue. “Her heart started beating again when the keeper touched her. A final burst of life.”
A final chance to speak with the keeper who’d taken her place in oblivion.
