I bit my lip as heat flooded my cheeks. I could not believe I had tried to beintimatewith him. Riyan was over fifteen feet tall, he would have hurt me, but that damn blood bond must have made me abandon my sense of self-preservation.
Daigen was right, Fraleigh’s blood bondhadmanipulated me.
I moved my eyes to the spot where Riyan had pressed his arms into the cave floor rather than touch me. If the blood bond had pushed me toward him, what stopped him from responding the same way?
My mind pushed me to a memory of Riyan holding me in a shattered bed after our first attempt to be intimate had failed. He said his definition of love was putting someone else’s life and happiness over one’s own.
If the blood bond enchantment had pulsed pure desire through both of us but he never gave in, his legendary strength was not all that held him back…
“…he really loved me,” I whispered.
“Of course he did, he got tochooseyou,” Daigen said, his soft voice reverberating off the crystals around me. “That little bargain he just made with Ganora? A life for a life given in love—that is the most powerful magical bargain in existence. Nothing can stop it, not even Death.”
I slammed my eyes shut to stop bitter tears from falling. Riyan had made an act of selflessness stronger than Death itself, and there I stood, hollow and confused.
Riyan had said I was his sun, but I was the coldest sun the world had ever seen.
“That is how our Man of the Mountain is still alive,” Daigen said, “but do not think he was happy with that sacrifice. He escaped his fate to find his beloved dead next to him. He dug her a grave in the snow, just like the song…”
“My tears did fall, my blood did flow…” I mumbled flatly, keeping my eyes shut and my arms folded.
“…and I became Death’s greatest foe,” Daigen finished. “When the sorceress blood-bonded to him, she gave him all of her power. Every inch of him was filled with magic and he ascended the constraints of his own mortality.”
Daigen let out a long breath. “He could have done anything with his new life and his nearly limitless power. He could have taken over kingdoms or be worshiped as a god, but instead…”
His claws splashed the spring. “He jumped into his beloved’s grave and cried. And he never stopped.”
I opened my eyes. The hundreds of crystals were now luminescent with a soft white light. I had never seen them do that before.
My eyes moved from crystal to crystal, trying to find the cause of their new glow, while Daigen’s low voice filled the cave. “For more than a thousand years, he cried. He grieved his bride so passionately that the grave itself got deeper and deeper, until it became a place between worlds. The laws of our world could not reach him. Time. Morality. Everything but love and fear and truth.”
The place West of the Moon and East of the Sun.
“But all graves have a bottom, don’t they,Litlnadr?”
My eyes wandered up the tiny stream that bisected the cave. It, too, was glowing with the same soft light as the crystals. The stream thinned like a thread into the darkness of the cave until I could not tell if it ended or not.
If that stream fed into the healing spring, where had the magic of the healing spring come from?
If the Man of the Mountain was still at the top of Nordingaard, weeping for hundreds of years, and his body was filled with his sorceress’s magic…
No. It could not be.
Even though I did not want to believe it, I knelt on the cave floor, my fingertips gently dipping into the cold, glowing water.
Little sparkles that I could not see pricked my skin. A melancholic essence traced my fingers in a languid dance, flowing with the gentle pull of the stream.
“Tears,” I said in a breath. The magic of the spring was the Man of the Mountain’stears.
Daigen’s smile brightened his voice. “The grave filled with millions of tears until it spilled over into this world. Bet you hated slurping on them during your marriage ritual! Disgusting, isn’t it?”
My stomach turned, but eyes followed the flow of the tiny glowing stream until my feet caught up, leading me to the mouth of the cave. I leaned against the rough stone at the cave’s opening as Daigen lounged in the spring, which was glowing a bright white.
Daigen swirled his claws in the water. “The tears of the mountain are complex. They are tangible bits of magic created from the most intense emotions a human can experience, but they’re still water, so they act like water does. Flow into rivers, nourish plants, or even…”
He pointed into the mouth of the cave. “…crystallize into solid form.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the gem Riyan had given me. It radiated warmth and soft white light in my hand. If the crystals were made of pure magic, then they must glow because magic is activated.
