Erena looked at the loch for a moment. “I need you to understand what I am about to say before you respond to it. It is not only a confession. It is a weight I am placing on you, and I will not do it without asking first.”
Dyna considered that. She was too old and too tired for the pretense of uncertainty. “Then place it.”
Erena turned to face her. Her eyes in the moonlight were the color of winter grass, holding no warmth at all. “I fear the evil overlord in the Dark Hollow was to be my husband. His name is Morvran.”
The name didn’t mean anything to her until Erena continued.
“Morvran is Taranis’s brother.”
Dyna had heard Lia speak of Taranis, but never Morvran. She realized that if he were dead, it would explain Lia’s silence. She sat with that for a moment, not long, but long enough to feel the full weight of what it meant before she let herself respond.
“Lia has only mentioned Taranis, not Morvran. But they are brothers?”
“Aye.”
“Does she know the overlord of the Hollow is Morvran?”
“Nay.” Erena’s voice did not waver. It had the quality of something rehearsed, something practiced. “I bound him. Andthen I told Lia he was gone, because I could not tell her the truth of what I had done and why.”
“Why are you telling me now?”
“Because you are going into the Dark Hollow tomorrow.” Erena paused, and in that pause, Dyna heard the unspoken, held back not by cruelty but by a restraint built over years. “You may see something down there that does not belong to the hill. If you do not know what it is, you will react, and your reaction will reach him. He has been watching. He has been patient. The grief Lia carries for Taranis, her certainty that Morvran is gone, her solitary mourning, the true overlord of the Hollow has been feeding on it. Three centuries of that particular sorrow, and he has grown stronger on it than on anything else. And Morvran might now be his assistant, I fear.”
Dyna said nothing. How could she? Erena’s words were more confusing than ever. How does an overlord feed on grief? “There’s more you aren’t telling me.”
“Allow me to start from the beginning. Lia and I were to marry the brothers. She was madly in love with Taranis, and I with Morvran. He and I were to become King and Queen of the Seelie, Taranis and Lia the Sworn. Before our wedding day, bairns were stolen. Taranis, knowing Lia was the protector of bairns and took any failure too hard, attempted to stop it. He almost freed their bindings and was nearly killed for it. Morvran put him in the crystal cage to keep him alive.”
Erena paused. The loch made its small night sounds.
“What I am about to say, I did not understand at the time. I have understood it in pieces, over three hundred years.”
Dyna waited.
“After Morvran caged his brother, he was alone. Grieving. He did not know how to explain to Lia what he had done, or why. The evil overlord of the Hollow found him in that hour, and he is the one that feeds on grief, the grief of parents and more.That is how he survives. If the bairns were freed, then he could not survive. To stop the bairns from being freed, he had to stop Taranis. His own existence depended on it. But then his evil soul did something even more despicable. He whispered to Morvran that he was the one who had taken Taranis. He offered a bargain. Serve me, and I will tell you how to free your brother.”
“Morvran took it?”
Erena arched a brow. “Before he understood what it was. He believed he was bargaining for Taranis’s freedom. Instead, he was bargaining for his own corruption. The thing that whispered to him did not only take his service. It turned his sight. By the time the bargain was done, Morvran believed Lia had caused Taranis’s imprisonment. That her failure to protect the bairns had brought all of it down. His love for his brother curdled into rage at her.”
Dyna had to set her hands flat against the cold stone of the wall to keep them still.
“I saw him moving on her. I did not know about the bargain. I did not know what he had become. I knew only that my sister was in danger and that the man I loved was the danger, yet I could not kill him. I bound him.”
She let that sit.
“What I did not know, until much later, was that I had also bound the thing inside him. The overlord was already in him by then, lodged in the corruption, and my binding closed around them both. They have been trapped together for three centuries. Neither strong enough to break free. Neither dead. Both patient.”
“Then he is not the overlord’s assistant,” Dyna said slowly. “He is the overlord’s prisoner.”
“Aye. And the overlord is his.”
Lia’s rage alone would split stone.
“She cannot know,” Dyna said.
“Not yet. Not here.”
“You’ll tell her yourself. Eventually.”
