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“What had she done to him?” I cut in, my voice rough.
“She had cut out his heart and eaten it.” Sloga’s voice grew choked. “She delighted in telling me. But when I saw him, I saw a new moment being woven—the moment you are here to carry out. The moment you kill her. But I also saw something else. Do you know much about deathcraft, Lonan?”
I blinked at the sudden unexpected question. “Not really.”
Sloga nodded. “Your mother practises it, but has never mastered it, no matter how much she wishes for it. She is obsessed with the idea of consuming another being to gain more power.”
My jaw clenched. “Like what she tried to do to Ash.”
“Yes. And she believed that… cutting out the heart of a living creature and consuming it would give her the powers of a belsmith. A practitioner of deathcraft. I’m sorry,” he added softly, “for telling you such gruesome things.”
“It’s alright,” I said tightly, trying not to picture it.
“It didn’t work, of course. Some skills and crafts come naturally to the Folk, others can be learned. One cannot teach themselves to be a belsmith, much like one cannot learn to become a spiritsmith. It is something you’re born with, but she refused to believe it. She was, and is still, so sure that it is something she can master.” Sloga paused. He turned his head to look at me. “You were born with that skill, Lonan. You are a belsmith.”
I froze, unsure that I had heard him correctly. “What?”
He nodded. “The Carlin assumed that her choices would have no consequences, that as a queen, she was free to do as she liked. But what she really did was forge the sword that has been dangling over her own neck ever since. Her actions that night created a… contract of sorts. One between all three of you. And much as I am compelled to tell you this now, I was compelled to tell her that night.”
“Tell her… tell her what?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.
“That if you died by her hand, by her bloodline, or even by her order, it would kill her too.”
Speechless, I turned to stare at him. When he simply gazed back, I stammered, “H-how?”
“Fate.” Sloga held out one hand, then the other. “And free will. She made the choice to force your father into her life. She made the choice to kill him. She chose when, and how. But by then, you were a part of it too. And your fate had already been decided. She chose to attempt deathcraft that night by consuming the heart of her unborn belsmith son’s father, just as you were ready to enter the world. Those choices had consequences.”
“So that’s why… Is that why she has never just killed me herself? After she realised I had been helping Ash when he left unseelie, I never understood why she didn’t just kill me. She despises me.”
“She fears you,” Sloga countered. “She knows that her life is linked to yours. She despises the fact that you possess the skill she so desperately wants, that she has never been able to achieve. So she twisted you into something that would still benefit her by making you her killer. She believed that blood being spilled in her name by a true belsmith might still give her those powers.”
“But… I don’t have death magic.” I spread out my hands. “Wouldn’t killing all those Folk, even if it was by her order, have made some kind of… power manifest in me?”
“No. That’s not how deathcraft works. She just refuses to believe it.” Sloga laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. “It is not an evil skill to possess, Lonan. It’s not… parasitic, in the way the Carlin believes, where it lets you sacrifice others to absorb their lifeforce and their powers. Being a belsmith allows you to… restore balance in life and death. If you see a hunter shoot down a deer for sport and simply leave it to die, making its death meaningless, you have the choice to bring that deer back.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “I can… resurrect?”
“Yes.” He looked back at me, his beastly face grave. “It won’t always work, but you have the ability to try.”
“But why hasn’t it ever manifested in me? I’ve been around enough death for it to surely have…”
“It has manifested.”
I frowned at him. “When?”
He gave me a sad smile. “The night your Ash became full fae. You helped him shed his mortal skin,. He was dying, and you played a part in bringing him back. It all comes back to fate and free will. The choices you both made up until then were ones of many, but you were always going to be in the throne room with him that night, at that exact moment.”
I scrubbed both hands over my face, pressing my fingers hard into my closed eyes until spots appeared in the blackness.
“So you’re saying that… me knowing all of this now will help me.” I dropped my hands and blinked hard, staring into the darkness. “It will help me kill her.”
“Yes.”
I turned to look at him. “Can you tell me how I do it? If you can see it?”
“I can’t see what happens, I can only see that it will. It’s like… every fae is a single thread on the tapestry. I see your thread and her thread coming together. And then her thread ends, and yours continues on.”
“But that tells me nothing.” I gritted my teeth. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to do it. I have her true name, but if I can’t think of the exact right order to give her, she will find a way around it.”
