With a gesture, three maidens approach from the throne behind this body. Maidens with dark hair, mist-like gowns, and—
Ocean eyes. Every single one of them has eyes like Saoirse’s.
No. Likemine.
My hand cups the tallest girl’s cheek, and for just a moment recognition flares. There is something in the uncertain texture of her hair—the way her body curves in at the waist and sweeps wide above and below—that is achingly familiar.
She bites down on her lip as tears gather in her eyes, and then bows deep. When she walks away, it is to slice her thumb with a slender blade and press it to the amber wall behind my throne. A moment later, she is through, stepping through the very stone with the other two behind her.
A hand seizes my shoulder, whipping me around, but I am not angry. My fate is known—passed before my own eyes.
Wait.
Her eyes. Not mine.
I am Saoirse. I am a fanciful girl. I am—
“You star-gazing bitch. Do you not realize this prophecy damns us all? Including yourself?!” Eamon’s eyes swarm with smoke, an eruption raging within. It is the same reason the people of his isle cry out against him and his constant storms that steal their youngand old, the heaving mountains that destroy livestock and shelter. He thrives on chaos, and it bleeds out onto his land—just as his body soon will.
I nod, infuriating him further. He raises his arm, but my second sister, Eabha, catches hold before he can strike. “No! You know what happens if we spill our blood.”
“Aye.” He rips his arm free and steps back, hands in tight fists, waiting for me to flinch and take it all back.
“We cannot unwrite what fate has written. I am not her master, nor would I ever wish to be. I can only see. Only know.”
“You can’t tell me we’re bound to its whims—not us. We are gods, damn you!”
“Bound to our own power and laws, bound to our possibilities and desires.” I allow my voice to drop until it pours like honeyed wine, as it has to a thousand petitioners across a thousand years.
No, I have only lived twenty-two years.
I am Saoirse. Wolf Tamer. Ocean Eyes.
Saoirse. Saoirse. Saoirse.
Eamon shoves me to the ground, and before I can blink, his fingers wrap around my throat. Their presence is a surprise, a horror—it forces my body to crumple until the cool earth bites at my back. Still, he does not let go, driving a knee into my stomach so that unearthly rattles fall from my lips.
“Take it back. Change it, damn you—do you want to die?!”
In his eyes, the rage recedes and fear takes its place when I do not fight for my life so preciously carved from the ocean itself. He does not want to harm me, truly. He wants to scare me, but I spread my fingers in the dirt instead as I feel his thumbs crush my windpipe, the fragile bones of my neck snapping one by one.
“No.” It is the only word I can manage, and his fingers ease just long enough for me to take one final breath. “But I will be the first.”
His eyes blacken to pitch. My lungs collapse beneath the point of his knee. I hear the screams of my sisters—their pleading—and the clash of a hammer to stone.
I choke on nothing—become nothing.
Am nothing.
Thirty-Two
My throat tears with screams that refuse to stop until a pair of arms crush me against a solid chest smelling of the sea. Pain explodes in my head, and I retch on air—gasping in futile heaves as my body vibrates with magic.
“Saoirse? Saoirse—feckin’ stars, love, talk to me.”
“Th-they—m-my throat—I c-couldn’t—breathe.” Faolan’s arms tense, and I cling fiercely to his neck, my fingers stiff and pulse thrashing. “I couldn’t get out.”
“I couldn’tgetyou out.” His breath scatters hot across my forehead, then converges into one fine point that melts through my whole body where his lips brush my skin. “You were paler than a godsdamned corpse. I thought—and then you started seizing, and I was terrified to move you. Saoirse…”
