Lia cleared her throat, taking a linen square to mop her brow. “The underworld can hollow a child. That’s what the ‘Dark Hollow’ refers to. It can take parts of their soul. I feared it could be true, but I would not voice it until I was certain. That explains it.”
Edan bolted up from his tree stump. “What?”
The news of the Dark Hollow’s true meaning hung heavy. Tora let out a strangled cry, reaching for Ailith and her mother. The three fell to the ground, clutching each other, just as Ailith’s head tipped back again, another vision racking her mind. “The moon,” Ailith gasped, her eyes unfocused. “That’s what controls it. The cycles of the moon.”
Tora’s head rested on her mother’s shoulder, but it was Ailith who continued, her voice distant, still caught in the vision’s afterglow. “The bairns are held until the full moon. Then, each fortnight, a part of their soul is hollowed out. First their memory, then their will, their voice… and finally, they become empty.”
She saw the flash of a child, not Heilyn, with eyes like polished stones, empty of light or recognition.
The group took in her words, the shock echoing in silence where only the movement of the leaves above could be heard.
Ailith sat up. “But I can help them.”
Lia said, “Go on. Do not interrupt her. She’s coming out of a vision.”
“They unravel like threads,” Ailith explained, her breath hitching. “If I can hold the frayed edge, I could prevent the total loss. But it doesn’t happen just once a moon. It’s twice, on a half-moon and a full moon. Each time, the Dark Hollow claims a piece of their soul.”
Dyna whispered, “The full moon is in two days.”
Edan cried out, “Heilyn is going tolosepart of her soul in two days? We have to go back. Now!”
No one argued with the man this time.
She didn’t share what else she saw, that holding a frayed thread would cost her. In what way, she wasn’t certain.
It could be sheer pain.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Dyna
The day had proven to be more than she could handle. She wondered how Alasdair was faring. If anyone had said Sylvi, Tora, Halli, or Sandor were going to the Dark Hollow, Dyna would have drawn her bow and declared they’d have to get through her first.
An unknown world and a man with iron blood were enough, but the thought of what Edan’s father had been forced to do—run from the Unseelie with a bairn in his arms—was incomprehensible to her.
She had no words.
And stealing a bairn’s soul? Their will, voice, memory? How cruel could the Unseelie be?
Her mind reeled with all they’d discovered. Unable to stop tossing and turning, she decided to let Derric sleep. Donning her night rail, she crept down the stairs and stepped outside into the chill night air. The cottage had gone quiet an hour ago.
Dyna sat on the low stone wall at the edge of Magni’s yard, her back to the front door, watching the dark water lap against the shore. The loch held the moonlight in scattered pieces. She hoped the peaceful setting would help her sort things out in her mind. If not, she’d be no help to Ailith or anyone else on the next trip to the faery hill.
But something, or someone, was out there.
She sensed the change in the air before she noticed anything else. A particular stillness, the kind that did not belong to wind or water, that pressed against her ears and made the small hairs on her arms stand.
Then Erena was simply there, beside her on the wall.
Dyna did not startle. She was old enough that most things startled her only internally.
“You’ve been waiting for me to be alone,” Dyna said.
“Aye.”
The queen did not offer an apology, and Dyna did not expect one. Erena’s presence beside her was different from her usual appearances, no light, no cold authority, no sense that the air was being arranged around her. She was simply a woman on a stone wall, and that alone told Dyna whatever she was about to hear was not meant for anyone else.
“Tell me.”
