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Tears scorched the edges of my lashes.

“I made a deal with magic on the night of your birth. I knew what was coming. I knew that the House of Magic would fall. I have told you this. I sent you away. I kept your true name and bound it to the stones of the House of Magic, and I took the blood of my womb and the blood of your birth cord and bound my pact with magic in it. I would accept whatever came next for me, whatever horror would be visited upon me, without struggle. And in exchange for my submission, magic would bring you back to me when the time was right. And when you are ready, magic will allow you to claim your birthright. Only the dead can free me, and no ghosts walk these halls. Magic accepted this oath of sacrifice from me. It will not allow me to break my oath to it. It must be by your hand, sweet girl. You must free me.”

Her voice was soft, a tear on the wind between us.

“I . . . But I just met you.”

All my childhood dreams of a loving family, of my mother’s arms, what it would feel like to be loved and cherished by someone were crumbling like dry sandcastles in my hands.

“I know, beloved girl. The cruelty of this is not lost on me.”

“I . . . I can’t kill you.”

The weakness in my voice would have, at one time, been an anathema to me, but I couldn’t hold it back. I felt like Icarus, wax burning my skin as I plummeted to the rocks below.

“You must, Sóna. Claim your birthright from me. So that you may claim your father’s legacy. Let me go to him. Release me to my beloved, please, daughter.”

A fat river of tears streamed down my filthy face, cutting pale gouges into the dirt and grime that must have coated my skin. I couldn’t do this. The thought of it shattered every emotion within me and broke me in half against the weight of it.

She gathered me into her arms and held me, whispering soft assurances as I sobbed into her shoulder.

I broke apart at the seams. I wept into the arms of the mother I had longed for my entire life. I wept into the arms of the one thing I had ached for my entire existence who was about to be ripped away from me. I wept for the broken dreams of the little girl who simply wanted to be loved and cared for. I wept for the woman who had grown up without a mother to guide her and had watched her friends as they struggled through their own relationships with their mothers and asked herself, “What would it be like to be able to fight with my mom?” I wept for the woman who would walk out of this dungeon with the blood of her mother on her hands and would never be the same. I wept for the woman who would walk back into the cold world with not a single creature who cared about her and not even the faint hope that, one day, she would find the family that she had always longed for.

Every hope and dream I had ever had, all of them culminated into the body of the woman I was clinging to who had asked me to do the one thing for her, a goddess, that she could not. And I would walk away from this without her. I would walk away with less than I had walked in here with. Not even the scar over the wound in my heart would be left to me. She had torn it open wide and wriggled herself into the hole in my heart, and now, I would bleed out all over the walls as I did my funerary march back to The Raven’s cell.

I cried for hours in her arms. I tried to bargain with her. I tried to convince her of the madness of this. I tried to talk my way out of it, tried to find some other solution. I tried everything, and each time, she would patiently listen and stroke my hair, reminding me of the finality of magic. I cried until there were no tears left within me, and all I felt was a cold numbness in the place where I had dared to hope for something new.

“I’m sorry, sweetling.” She pressed into my scalp with a kiss. “Fae never die, truly. Our essence is cast back into the Well of Magic, and we are in all things that draw from it. I will always be with you. As your father is with you.”

I nodded, accepting that I would do this for her. Accepting that I would give her the one thing she could not take. I didn’t want to. I wanted to hold her to me and keep her as my own secret down here in the darkness, visiting her whenever I could. But she was not a pet, and I was not a cruel person at my core. That was something I would have to learn from the Fae around me.

The acceptance of it was a cold, detached acceptance, one that I pushed far away from myself. It needed to be done. I could cry, could scream, could rage, but the only way around it was through it.

I would sharpen myself to be the deadly knife that would slip between their ribs and rob them of everything they had taken from me.

“I’ll do it.”

My voice was weak, hoarse, and as dry as the tears that had fled me.

“There is an iron dagger buried in the stonework of the hallway. I don’t know who put it there or when, but I have known it was there, out of reach for decades. I feel it slicing at the magic that pulses around it. Take it from the stone. Bring it to me and bury it in my heart.”

“Iron bites. Iron kills,” I murmured, devoid of any emotion, too numb, too distant to think or feel anything other than what I was told to do.

If I did as I was told, if I performed as I was meant to, then I could shield myself from the horror of this moment. I could keep myself from the worst of what was to come.

“Yes, dear one, iron cleaves magic in two, and all denizens of Magh Meall are born of the same Well of Magic.”

Her voice floated somewhere above me.

The dagger was easy to find. In truth, had I not been watching the candlelight as I came down the passage, I would have seen it, covered only by a bit of rubble and a thick layer of dust.

Goose watched me, his great head tracking me with concern and confusion playing on his smoky face as I passed him and returned to the circle with Airgetlám.

Tears had begun to form in her eyes, glittering like the coins she pulled from the air as they skirted down her cheeks and spattered against her fine robes. We knelt next to each other as I stared at the dagger, and she untied the outer layer of her robe to reveal her chest.

Her finger tipped my head up, and we watched each other, memorizing our faces. I wished I wore my own so that she could go to my father with the memory of the true face that I had. It wasn’t truly my face, though, was it? My Aunt Cleena had crafted it, just as Rictus had crafted the one I wore now.

Who was I? Who was I really? What did I look like? I realized with a startling clarity that I truly did not know. I didn’t know my own name. I didn’t know what I looked like. I didn’t have an identity of my own. I had only a collection of names and faces that someone else had decided I should have. None of them were truly mine. I could own none of the names. I could own none of the faces. None of them belonged to me.