by Beth Ball
“You are right,” she called, her voice drowning out the true trajectory of her thoughts. “I would be foolish to throw in my lot with these two when I might join your side instead.”
Lefre chuckled, straightening slightly as he shifted away from Emryc. His blade still rested on the warrior’s neck.
“Allow me, fair king, the offering of a story, one dear to my people in such times as these.”
The king’s gaze narrowed slightly.
“Ignore his posturing, my Chosen.” Cassandra’s lulling voice drowned out the torrent of her thoughts. “Your path is right. Go on.”
The evergreen blaze of Emryc’s eyes protested. Daugath’s blue-white fear . . . she could see it now. Desperation drove him. He had seized the one chance he believed he would find.
Circe stilled the sounds of her deep-set thoughts and allowed her voice to rise above their rushing waters. “The tale is an offering to you, my king. A sign of loyalty.” She conjured false memories of bowing before other sovereigns, weaving tales of splendor for the delight of their surface-dwelling courts.
Lefre nodded once. “Very well. Let us see this magic my ex-general spoke so highly of.”
The saudad smiled and dipped into a bow as best she could around the fomorian guard’s grasp. His arm loosened slightly, just as she had hoped. “As you wish, my lord.”
Circe willed an added brightness to her eyes and enhanced the shimmer of her skin. Around the chamber, the lanterns stilled their drifting. “An ancient magic ties my people to the woven fate of the world,” she began, “the threads deeper embedded than those that hold any other.”
Her mother had been the first to tell her of Cassandra’s binding spells over their people, a sign of the goddess’s mercy after their home city of Orison fell. “Travelers by nature, we could not return home after our beloved city vanished from the face of Eldura.”
With each retelling, the story embedded itself deeper into her bones. Cassandra had chosen her people, yes, but they had each chosen her as well. We carry her stories.
The guard’s hold loosened further. Her tale’s ropes were beginning to take hold.
“This special fate started with a single storyteller, trapped alone in the dark, whom the goddess rescued. ‘If you accept my help,’ the goddess said, ‘you and your people will become bearers of my magic through the ages. The stories of fate will bind themselves to you and you to them.’ The power and promise of what she offered glimmered in Cassandra’s eyes. ‘Their deep-set magic shall be yours alone to wield.’”
A half-smile tugged at the corner of Lefre’s mouth. He pictured himself in possession of this power, exactly as she had wished.
“The goddess told the lost saudad the parameters of her binding. ‘I cannot restore what you have lost, but I can weave your destiny anew.’ The lost saudad assented, joining our destiny to fate’s very thread. She swore herself and her people to serve the goddess.
“Tears gathered in Cassandra’s eyes. This binding was not without cost. ‘If you accept this, you will never return home.’” Circe’s voice grew thick.
“The lost saudad shook her head. ‘We will forge a new home, woven from your stories.’ At this, the goddess smiled. The saudad would soon know the weight of their binding, for fortune’s wheel ever turns.” Circe steadied her breath, clutching the ropes of her story-bindings. Soon, she would unleash the magic she had coiled. “Through ages we wander, our home in our hearts. We, and we alone, know the sorrow and power of what Cassandra’s binding wrought.”
Emerald light crackled in Circe’s gaze as she turned her eyes upon the king. Her voice grew loud, resounding across the hall. “This power I now call.” Circe threw her shoulder back into the guard who held her. He grunted as he stumbled back, granting her the sliver of freedom she needed.
“By darkness and vine,” she chanted, “by depths be undone.” Waves of energy lapped up from her depths, rising swiftly through the chasm she’d crafted.
The king grimaced, his fire-hued face flaring scarlet. “Stop her,” he ordered his guards.
In unison, the fomorian soldiers surrounded her.
She slid away from the one holding her to the center of the circle.
Metal screeched as they withdrew their curved blades.
“Circe!” Emryc shouted. The warrior flung himself from the axe blade, offsetting the king’s stance. Blood sprayed in his wake. In a fluid motion, he thrust himself over the line of lanterns, his wings unfurled.
Blinding rays exploded out of the lanterns, streaking toward Emryc. They embedded themselves as radiant fire into his wings.
Circe screamed. She dodged the first guard who lunged at her and took aim through the gap in the circle he left.
Emryc cried out as he plummeted toward the ground. His brilliant black feathers that shone emerald in the sun withered, sizzling as he shouted in pain.
The saudad thrust her hands forward, the fury of fate at her fingertips as she aimed for the lanterns. She would break through their protective barrier around the king.
“Good.” Daugath’s voice murmured into the roar of her mind. “You remembered.” The ghost of his bright smile flared across her vision.
Daugath tugged the gem free from his chest. He slammed its tip into the temple of the guard nearest him. The fomorian soldier crumpled immediately beneath the blow, the garnet light of his gemstone extinguished.
“Kill them all!” the king bellowed.
The circle of soldiers around Circe closed tight. A cruel laugh broke free from one soldier’s lips.
Beyond the deadly ring of their blades, Emryc struggled to rise.
He fought for her still. Circe blinked back the tears that rose. If only she could speak directly into his mind. For you I weave my final tale. Ancient magic thrummed deep within. She knew not what unleashing it would mean.
Another blade swung for her waist. She spun away in time. Her movement sent her crashing into one of the bare-chested soldiers behind. His ruby stone grazed the top of her shoulder. Her skin heated as blood pooled.
But the lunges of blade-wielding soldiers provided her the angle she needed.
Circe narrowed her gaze to the king.
“By darkness and vine,” she growled this time, “by depths be undone.” Circe flung her arm from hip to shoulder, directing the line of ancient magic she’d conjured where it should strike the king.
The air beside her trembled. A cold tongue of iron sang closer.
Sparks of black flame glowed from her fingertips.
Across the room, ebony ropes wrapped around the torso of the king, binding him from hip to shoulder.
Circe screamed as one of the guard’s blades tore into her outstretched arm. Pain as she had never known it hurtled through her veins.
King Lefre’s eyes widened. He released a single gasp.
The vines cinched tight, slicing his body in half. They vanished into nothing. With a sickening thump, the king’s head and severed shoulder struck the ground.
Circe’s forearm—cut free by the guard’s blade—thunked onto the stone beside her. The black vines slithered toward her from behind her eyes, obscuring her vision. The story’s magic, it had claimed her soul as well.
Instead of chaos, a pale purple light pierced the room.
Daugath’s voice echoed from the rafters. “You are bound now to me, my brethren. The dark of the old has turned over. A new time arrives with me as your king . . .”
Strong arms caught her around the waist and held her close. “Hold on, Circe.” A voice she knew. “Don’t leave me here.” Emryc. His fingers brushed the side of her face. A blurred teardrop fell from his dark eyelashes onto her cheek. “I promised that I would return you to the light.”
Chapter 23
“THE HOLE IN THE VINES”
As Cassandra taught us, there once was a girl with vines for arms who lived in the ivy-covered hole of her heart. When she first arrived, there weren’t many vines. The space between the sides of the hole seemed im
possibly far. But little by little, the girl grew her vines, reaching and wending their way across the expanse between the two sides.
It was not soon, but one day, as the vines continued to grow, the girl found they were thick enough for her to walk from one side to the other. She wasn’t sure what she would find on the other side of the hole.
But the girl was brave and curious, driven by a desire to explore.
She wrapped her vine arms around the ropes of ivy nearest her. Fear gripped her throat. What would happen if she fell deeper into the pit? She had tried not to think about that first day when she arrived, the long fall she’d had before she landed here.
The girl shook her doubts free. There was time to think on this later. She extended the vines of her arms once again. With enough patience and practice—she steadied herself—she could walk across the thread from one side to the next.
Her first journey was frightening. The chasm below stretched deep. Sound only came from herself and the song of her vines. “Help me to cross,” she whispered out into the darkness. “I need to see the other side.”
Subsequent journeys grew easier, and the girl learned to feel more at home in the dark. From her first path she made others, and soon a complex web of vines spanned the distances that stretched over the black expanse.
But no matter how thoroughly she wove her ivy strands, a hole in the middle remained. She tried many techniques, thin braided lines and overgrown branches. Still, they shriveled away. They left only black space behind. “Why will this not work?” the girl said to herself and her vines. Was she not meant to span the hole into which she had fallen?
She stomped across her winding vine path to the side of the hole and peered in.
The girl leapt back as a pair of eyes blinked up at her out of the dark.
“Gods!” the girl cried. “Who are you?”
Her heart caught in her throat as the figure emerged. Iridescent emerald wings fluttered free.
An onyx-clad faery with midnight-blue skin and eyes gray as the sea turned to stare at the girl, a serene smile upon her face. “One day, when you’re ready, you will see.”
Time continued to pass in the hole in the dark, buried deep inside the lost girl’s heart.
Her new faery friend wove stories to cheer the girl. For the first time, flowers blossomed along the vines that spanned the darkness.
“I still don’t understand,” the girl said with a frown, gazing again into the dark of the faery’s domain. “Why can my vines not cross this spot? It makes even the flowers wither away.”
“Are you sure you are ready?” The faery raised a dark eyebrow.
“Please, I think it is time.” The girl settled at the edge of the hole. She wrapped one ankle over the other and clutched her knees tight to her chest.
“As you wish.” The faery nodded. “I am memories of what you have lost,” the faery explained.
Around them, the plant-song rose. The flowers danced on their stems.
“Your vines cannot bridge me, for to my gaps they lead.” The memory faery smiled and shook her head. “I will remain here as long as you will, until you’re ready to return once more to the light. But this hole, it will linger after us, where what you yearn for used to be.”
The faery reached out, her hand petal-soft upon the girl’s face. “What you have lost is not gone,” the faery added with a tinge of concern crinkling her sea-gray eyes. “They’ve just changed their form.”
Dark memories returned to the girl then. Flashes of lightning ravaged the expanse of woven vines. Her white city under siege. Orison, her home, vanished beneath the roar of waves. The girl pitched forward, falling into the darkness before her. She could never go home again.
Out of the darkness, the faery lunged for the girl. She propelled them both back to the spread of vines above. The hidden realization burned in the girl’s eyes. Her faery held her closer still. “Let’s you and I together find a new home.” With the girl clasped tight, her trilling wings carried them both upward through the chasm.
The girl hugged the faery back. Vinesong rose as they flew. High above, a faint shimmer. There, a beckoning sliver of light glowed and grew.
Epilogue
Over the centuries of his imprisonment, Emryc had learned much of what it meant to be swept into the path of the goddess Cassandra. Tales of other Chosen trickled through Apollo’s dungeons and confirmed what he had seen while he served at Circe’s side.
Cassandra often gifted her representatives with prophetic visions, tellings of what is, was, and could yet be. Each Chosen had to chart their own course through these tales, slowly coming to understand the narrative behind their Sight. They would need to discern which of the visions was for them to interpret and which was merely for them to See.
Despite this gift, the goddess of fate kept her own counsel. She alone could tell why some, by their innate nature, changed the weave of fate, while others simply followed the course of their own thread.
Circe had begged Emryc to let her go, to allow her freedom. Had she known, by her request, that she condemned both him and his line to an eternity of misfortune? He had confessed his promise to Apollo shortly after they emerged from the Underland, once Circe’s fever from her half-severed arm had finally abated. He hadn’t known then that the wound’s pain would never fully leave her. When he finally revealed the other oath he had made, she had raged against the guardian’s directive. Emryc would never forget the way her emerald eyes burned as she internalized his betrayal. Her pledge, she swore, was to serve Cassandra and no other. And so he let her go.
He had sensed his curse before he met Circe—its presence had driven him to forge a bargain with Apollo—and he had grown more aware of his blighted fate while fighting to help and protect Cassandra’s Chosen. But it was not until Circe’s death that he looked misfortune in the eye. And in a single moment, misfortune condemned him to remain, in perpetuity, by her side. Her sour smile spread its shadow across the entirety of his line.
How often, locked away in the depths of Apollo’s domain, had he questioned the goddess? Did I not serve you loyally? Did I not protect your Chosen until she asked that I do so no more?
But no matter the urgency of his beseeching, Cassandra remained silent.
Emryc had nearly given up hope until the worlds began to stir two decades before. Souls returned, their births foretold. Hope exhaled her spring breeze across the lands. His line, once expansive, had fallen to a single figure, a fae who wandered the Old Bastion Highlands, at times in search of a new future, at others, daring death.
The hope of victory against Alessandra was not Emryc’s to partake in. And yet, when word reached him of a young saudad, born beneath the sign of the Enchantress, he could not squelch the four-petaled iris blossoming within. This, he knew, was the final chance to end his curse, to free his spirit to Astralei—where he hoped Circe waited for him still.
He could not fathom why Cassandra would appoint Jez, his heir, to watch over one of her select. His heir carried the specter of misfortune, the dark side of Cassandra’s gaze—like all of his descendants after his broken vow to Apollo. Why allow Jez to doom the fate of this young saudad, in the earliest years of her adventures?
Circe had believed that Cassandra favored storytellers. “Take the thread of fate into your own hands,” she would have told him. “Weave a new narrative for yourself, one without me.” She had believed in different types of Chosen, ones who selected themselves as well as those appointed by a deity. It was easy to see why Circe, blessed by fate herself, had seen the world in this way.
But each life Emryc had touched ended in death and misfortune.
Apollo was right to punish him, to rend his wings from his back and lock him away, alone in a world of memories. Inside his cage, he endangered no one.
“One day, you and your descendants will break the curse,” Circe had told him. “When you find the Lady of Fortune, she will show you the way.”
The dungeon door banged open, startling
Emryc from his account to Cerdris, his casting of the world of memory.
Apollo’s cold voice echoed down. “It is time for you and your line to prove your worth to me,” he ordered. “Come, and speak to me of this heir of yours.”
Emryc stifled a groan as he pushed himself to standing and stepped free from the candlelight of Cerdris’s small desk in the dungeon. Still trapped inside the cage, his wings whispered. Emryc refused to give Apollo the satisfaction of gazing back at them through the darkness. That part of his story was done.
“We’ll continue this later,” he said to Cerdris, dismissing the story-stealer.
“What am I to do now?” the writer called after him.
Emryc shook his head, neglecting to answer. Do as you see fit. He stalked up the shadow-stairway that wound through the depths of the guardian’s domain. “Have you arranged for them to meet?” Emryc glared up at his captor. Apollo had swelled his size so that he might glower down at the one who had failed him in the ages before.
Apollo smiled, and a burst of cold thrashed through Emryc’s veins. “Yes,” he said. “Their paths will cross at Caisteal Tulach.”
Emryc blanched. The guardian couldn’t be serious. After the siege, their enemy knew—
“Much has changed in your absence.” Apollo crossed his arms, his eyes slits of gold boring into Emryc’s own. “With my help, the castle is once again a fortification of which we can be proud, its shelter secure.”
Emryc shifted on the stair, testing the free movement of his limbs.
“You have Juliet to thank for this opportunity,” Apollo continued. “She thought you and your line deserved the best chance to lend your support.” The guardian inclined his head, indicating that Emryc should follow. “We shall see if the vulpine can convince Persephonie of the same.”
Emryc bit back his retort. He had been right to allow Circe the freedom of death she had sought. Seizing the thread of fate indeed. He could only hope, for Persephonie’s sake, that she was both more pliable and more smiled upon by fortune than even Circe had been. She will need it, to withstand such times, and to perceive the dangers waiting without and within.
