“If you’d been alive back then, you would have understood.”
“Paint a picture for me, Aine.”
She plucked at her gown. “Fee’s magic failed, allowing abominations into the world. The kings used the queens to push them back below the earth, but the queens liked the power too much. They were greedy creatures, selfish, ruining everything. Forests were disappearing. Rivers fouled. They threatened the kings, who naturally wanted to control the queens, put them in their place. The kings came to me for aid. I asked a powerful sorceress for a solution and she obliged me.”
“How did she do it?” More importantly, was it something Amal was likely to stumble across, then duplicate?
“The sorceress was a seidr witch, a seer. The kings went to her. She told them what fate had planned. How the queens, if left alone, would become forces of chaos. A battle would ensue that the kings would lose. Everyone would die. Their world would be lost. And the kings responded with a request to neuter the queens, but not destroy them.”
“What went wrong?”
“Nothing.” Aine’s wintry smile reminded me she wasn’t human. “Seidr magic requires a ritual, and to be successful, both parties must have the same desire.”
“The kings desired the ritual to control the queens?” I guessed.
“And the sorceress convinced the queens that they, too, wanted the ritual.”
“How—by showing them their future?”
“By revealing the desire of the kings, and how the ritual would actually grant the queens power.”
“Pitting them against each other, while wanting the same goal,” I guessed. What both parties wanted, to enhance their own power. Create the future they desired at the other’s expense.
“Seidr magic allows deceit, although there is a risk.” The nymph queen studied her long fingers. “It’s easy to convince one person to want what the other desires. The kings were already on board because it would nullify the queens. The nudge to the queens wasn’t worth the effort. They stumbled over each other to get the gift first.”
“What kind of ritual, Aine?”
“One presided over by a seidr practitioner,” she said. “A sorceress who knows the chants and how to create the right runes. The kings carved the marking into small stones—the same rune Amal drew—and the queens painted the runes with their blood. The blood ignited the magic, and the magic claimed the price.”
I shuddered. Grayson paid a price when he inked the moonstone runes on my skin. He’d said magic wasn’t free. Was it the same magic?
“What happened to the wolves?”
“They followed the blood into the runes and remained locked in the stones—or their essence remained. Their spirits,” Aine clarified. “The overjoyed queens wreaked havoc until they realized they’d been de-fanged. Their human forms were no match for the kings. All hell broke loose.”
“I can imagine,” Metis sneered with distaste.
Aine nodded, for once agreeing with her sister. “The sorceress disappeared with the rune stones. Over time, the queens went crazy. The kings banished them, claimed it was punishment, then sent out hunters to find the sorceress. They wanted to destroy her. Destroy the stones. They wanted no way for the imprisoned wolves to be reclaimed. The sorceress turned to me for protection. By then, she called herself the Wolf Woman. Over time, people called her the Bone Woman, or the Gatherer, because that was the price she had to pay for misusing the magic. To roam for eternity, gathering wolf bones, trying to resurrect what she’d destroyed.”
Ice crept into my spine. “Didn’t the kings curse the queens and all their daughters to never have a wolf? Isn’t that why we’re failles?”
“Well, that’s the problem with seidr magic,” whispered Metis. “It spreads like a nightmare, with a mind of its own. Especially if deceit is involved.”
“I offered the sorceress a wrinkle,” Aine said while staring at the mist from the waterfall. “A prison, since the rune stones became too disruptive to leave alone.”
“She kept them with her?” I asked.
“Insurance. In case the queens found her. An exchange for her life.”
I rubbed my stiff arms. “Where is this prison?”
“Where else?” Metis said with a sharp laugh. “In the Carmag. That’s why Fee’s magic screws up.”
Aine brushed at her gown.
Her sister warned, “She’ll find a way out.”
“She won’t.”
