One night Adaira sat with Innes in her quarters, both of them quietly reading by firelight.
“I was thinking about the clan line today,” Innes said suddenly.
Adaira glanced up from her page. “What about it, Mum?”
“How the curse is broken only in a certain place.” Innes shut her book and glanced at Adaira. “Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know. I’ve wondered myself, and discussed it with Torin and Sidra.”
“I think it is because the curse was created by two people,” Innes said. “So it must end with another pair.”
Adaira was silent, weighing her answer. She thought of the origin of the clan line, made by Joan Tamerlaine and Fingal Breccan two centuries ago. Their last words had sparked the curse, even as they had died entwined.
“I don’t know what I can do to help heal it,” Adaira said. She did feel responsible, in a strange, unsettling way. Sometimes it seeped into her dreams, and she would see herself and Jack dying together, swept away by the fire. She always woke from those nightmares in a cold sweat, punctured by guilt.
She hadn’t reached him soon enough.
“I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” Innes said. “It’s just a thought I had.”
Silence came between them. Adaira refused to look at the fire, trying to focus her attention on her book. But her thoughts were suddenly teeming, full of questions about the clan line. When she returned to her room that night, she took Joan’s broken journal in her hands and leafed through the pages.
Adaira had never read the last page of the second half, but she did now. Joan’s final entry surprised her:
I thought I could change the west, but how foolish I was to dream of such a thing. They are coldhearted and vicious, two-faced and arrogant, and I have come to hate the man I’ve bound myself to. Tomorrow, I will go to the boundary in the woods and cut out the scar on my palm, the one that marks me as Fingal’s, and I will return to the house of my mother and sisters, to the land that holds my father’s grave. I will return to the east and prepare for conflict with the west, because there is no other hope for the isle other than strife.
Adaira read the entry twice before setting Joan’s journal aside. She looked at her own scar, the one she had given herself when she took the blood oath with Jack. It was a vow not easily broken, and Adaira envisioned Joan, in the thick of the Aithwood, trying to cut out such a scar. She saw Fingal finding her there in the shadows between the trees. Joan would have been bleeding and angry and keen to leave him.
If blood and words between a Breccan and a Tamerlaine had made the clan line, then surely they could also undo it.
Adaira reached for parchment and her quill. She didn’t know if what she had in mind would work, but she wanted to at least attempt it. She wrote:
Torin,
Meet me at the northernmost point of the clan line tomorrow at dawn.
—A.
A soft snow was falling when Torin met Adaira at the clan line. The morning light was dimly blue, and the air was cold and crisp. Beyond the trees, Adaira could hear the roar of the northern coast as high tide crashed against the rocks.
“You have an idea, I take it?” Torin surmised, remaining on the eastern side. Between their boots, the clan line was a furrow in the ground. Not even the snow would touch it.
“Yes,” Adaira replied. “Thanks to Joan’s journal. The second half that we found at Loch Ivorra.” She unsheathed Jack’s truth blade from her belt. “If two people from each clan made this boundary with blood and curses, then I believe two can undo it with blood and a benediction.”
Torin watched as Adaira held out her hand. She wouldn’t be cutting the palm that held the scar of her blood vow, but the other. Before she did so, she said, “This is Jack’s truth blade. If you use it to score your own palm and walk this path with me, then all the words you utter will be nothing but honest and true. You will speak the benediction for the west, as I will for the east.”
Torin was quiet, but Adaira could read the slant of his thoughts. He had once regarded the Breccans as enemies. All his life, he had been fighting them, sometimes even killing those who strayed across the clan line. But Adaira hoped that Torin could now honestly speak for the good of the west.
“All right,” he said with a solemn nod.
Adaira cut her palm. The pain was sharp, and she winced before she handed the dirk to Torin. She watched as her cousin did the same, choosing to slice the palm that held his enchanted scar. The one that had made him Captain of the East Guard.