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“I believe the Higher Spirits intervened to make sure you would be born. The Higher Spirits know what’s going to happen before we do, Ash. They know everything. Even impossible things.”
“Surely not actually everything though, right?” I rasped. “Gadleg—The deal she made with me—”
My voice cut off, throat burning. I realised why a second later. I’d promised Gadleg I wouldn’t tell anyone about our deal. I couldn’t tell Nua that she had made me promise to go back in seven years so she could judge me for my actions, so she could kill me if she deemed I deserved to die. If she already knew what I would be like as king, what my future held, why would she ask that of me?
Before Nua could start asking me anything about it, I quickly said, “But before I killed her, the Brid said she didn’t need the power I’d taken from her. That she was strong enough without it.”
“Strong enough, yes. Strong enough to push back the Carlin’s frost, but not as strong as she had been before. Don’t forget that she was clever with her words, Ash.”
I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t, because we had emerged from the forest and stepped out into the wheat field I had played in so often as a child, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, sometimes with the strange creatures who had visited me.
And right there—so close, looking just as it always had—was my old home.
Chapter Ten
Ash
I’d gone still as I stared at it. Nua came to a stop beside me, but he didn’t say anything. Just waited patiently.
The garden was wildly overgrown, long grass spilling out through the gaps in the fence, bushes spreading further than Mags had ever let them, the ivy she’d always kept at bay now creeping over the back of the house.
The windows looked dirty. The white trim around them was cracked and peeling. I remembered Dad grumbling about having to repaint them last year, but I guessed he hadn’t got round to it before…
I swallowed, tearing my gaze away to look at everything else. The neighbour’s house was just visible behind the willow tree that had stood between us and them since I’d been born. It was quiet, all the curtains still drawn, because it was early.
The small lake behind the cottage garden—the one I’d been pushed into by a fae when I was a child, before Nua rescued me—was murky and covered in thick green algae. Swallowing around the lump in my throat, I jerked my chin towards it.
“Do you remember when you had to drag me out of there?”
“Yes.” Nua’s voice was sombre. “Odran said he tried to help you, but he thought he might have accidentally scared you more.”
“What?” I whipped my head round to stare at him. “Odran?”
Nua nodded. “He used to come to this lake sometimes, to watch you when Gillie and I couldn’t. He said he tried to grab you when the unseelie pushed you in, to get you away from her so she wouldn’t be able to hold your head under the water.”
My mouth opened and closed gormlessly. “I… I thought I felt something grab my ankle. I thought it was… I thought it was something else trying to hurt me.”
“Well, kelpies are known for dragging unsuspecting mortals to their watery ends.”
“Does Odran do that?” I asked, dreading the answer.
Nua huffed in amusement. “He’s not particularly bloodthirsty, but he certainly enjoys the challenge of seducing a mortal.”
I pictured the beautiful kelpie, with his long, lean body—always nude—and gleaming black-green hair. I doubted it was ever much of a challenge for him.
Letting out a shuddering breath, I turned back to the cottage. “Can we… can we go closer?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Neither of us spoke as we crossed the field to the back of the fence. It was only waist height, so I placed an unsteady foot on the bottom rail and hoisted my leg over to get into the garden.
Nua followed me, nimbly jumping over the fence and landing with a light thud. The chair I’d been sitting in when the black cat—Lonan—had appeared and frantically tried to get me to go inside was still in the exact same place, pulled out from the garden table. But it was dirty now, coated in a layer of moss and grime. The blanket I’d had over my shoulders that night was gone. I wondered if it had been taken by the police as evidence. Surely they’d investigated my disappearance when no one had heard from me. Surely they’d come here and looked around, finding the blanket on the ground, the back door still open and lights on inside.
It was deeply unsettling to realise that I was probably presumed dead here. That all my friends and the little remaining family I had—just Mags’ sister and her husband—probably thought I’d been kidnapped from my home and killed.
But then, I had been, in a way. The Carlin had stolen me and kept me chained up until my mortal side died.
I didn’t know how long they kept missing person cases open. I knew some stayed open for years, but those were generally for small children who garnered the attention of the press and therefore the public. Probably not for recently bereaved twenty-one-year-olds. Maybe they thought I hadn’t been able to handle the grief of my parents’ deaths and had just run off. Maybe they thought I’d gone into the forest and done something to myself.
