I swallowed, choosing to remain silent in the face of his venom. There was nothing to be said when he was so angry with me. Saving the world wasn’t meant to be my responsibility, and it shouldn’t come at the expense of my dignity.
And yet, how could I choose between myself and the freedom of so many imprisoned by the Queen who held all of Faerie in her hands?
11
ESTRELLA
I sat on a blanket thrown on top of the snow, the fire at the center of our campsite keeping me warm. Holt draped an additional blanket around my shoulders as the rest of the Wild Hunt set to work putting up the tents. “I’ll put a man on you tonight, but he’ll stay outside the tent. Try not to get into too much trouble without Cal here to physically hold you down. I don’t relish what he’ll do to my riders if he finds out they had to put their hands on you.”
I lifted my shackled hands toward the fire, nodding wordlessly. An entire day and Caldris hadn’t returned, leaving me to the unease of being with creatures I didn’t know. I didn’t want to contemplate how I would feel waking up to another shade in my tent without him here to protect me. Fenrir lay beside me, earning a glare from Holt as he settled his upper body atop the blanket and lay his head on my lap like a pampered beast.
“Caelum wasn’t always this way,” I said, huffing out a breath. It might be ridiculous, but I needed him to know that the man I’d slowly fallen for hadn’t behaved as if I were his property. He’d been protective, but as much as his teasing had made me want to stab him, he’d been charming, in a sense. “He was sweet in the beginning. Not so concerned with the fact that other men might look at me wrong.”
Holt paused, turning back to face me with a sigh. “Have the two of you discussed the mate bond at all? Aside from just skating over the fact that you have one?”
I shook my head, knowing there had been time for Caldris to explain the ins and outs of how it would work. We’d had the entire day before, sharing a horse, when he could have taken the time to explain it all.
Holt groaned, dropping to a sitting position on the blanket beside me. He kicked his legs out in front of him, keeping his slushy boots off the fabric and lying back to stare at the night sky above us. “If you were to accept the bond, the instinct that drives him to be so possessive would ease,” he explained, turning to pin me with a sharp look. “It would not disappear entirely, but it wouldn’t feel as if—”
“He’s going to suffocate me with it?”
“Yes, that,” he agreed with a chuckle. “If you accepted the bond, he would know your mind. He would know exactly what is in your heart, and other men wouldn’t matter because he’d know without a doubt they didn’t have a chance of stealing you away from him. It is practically unheard of for a person to have an affair outside a mate bond once they’ve been formally bound to another.”
“He has always claimed that it isn’t me he doesn’t trust, but the people around me. If that’s the case, what good would it do for him to know how I feel about him?” I asked, dropping back to lie beside him. I kept my distance from him physically, but allowed myself to enjoy the sight of the moon and stars glowing in the sky above.
My biggest complaint about sleeping within the tent was the lack of night sky above me.
“It isn’t only your feelings that are revealed. Your minds are open to one another. That means there will be no secrets between the two of you, no moments when a male tries to make a pass at you that he is not aware of. He can tailor his actions around what has already happened rather than trying to guess at what he might not know,” Holt explained, rising to his feet. He moved to the skeletal horse waiting nearby, opening the pack slung over the horse’s rump to pull an old book from it.
He held it out for me as he returned, allowing me to stare at the leather binding as I reached out with tentative hands. I ran my fingers over the surface, unknotting the tied laces keeping it closed. Opening to the first page, I ran my fingers over the words staring back at me.
Kateadh yn Psychid.
“Fracture of the Soul,” I said, earning a quirked brow from Holt.
He studied me intently, waiting for me to flip through the pages. “I wasn’t certain I believed Cal when he said you were able to read the Old Tongue fairly well. That book details everything that occurs during the splitting of the soul for the mate bond. Every consequence and every benefit to accepting it. It’s all in there.”
“Why would you give me this, if it will tell me the negative effects of agreeing to a bond with Caldris?” I asked, turning a shocked stare up to him.
“Because it will also show you the positives greatly outweigh the negatives. I have been Mab’s errand boy for centuries; even before the Veil was formed she often sent me here to collect the Fae Marked. It wasn’t often that I encountered a human who was willing to listen, to learn what might exist beyond his or her own prejudice. I keep that for the ones who will see.”
He started to walk away, but I quickly turned and asked one more question. It burned inside of me and urgently needed an answer, because I didn’t have it in me to read the book out of order, needing to absorb the information in proper form.
“When you say the benefits of the bond, do you mean to Caldris or to me? Is there something more than increasing his power to act as an incentive for him to complete the bond?” I asked, needing to know if there was a nefarious purpose that I didn’t yet know.
I wanted the truth. I just had to hope that the Faerie rules of lying applied to the dead Fae of the Wild Hunt.
“Increasing his power?” Holt asked, furrowing his brow as he hung his head in his hands. “I guess that’s one way to refer to it.” He returned to the blanket, kicking off his boots and bending his legs to sit on it beside me. I pushed to sit up as well, the book cradled in my arm, as he extended a single finger. Fenrir grumbled beneath his breath, rolling to his back and giving me his belly for rubs.
A gleaming black claw protruded from Holt’s finger, shimmering in a way that made my throat tighten nervously. But he only extended it to the snow in front of us, drawing a stick figure male in front of me and a stick figure female beside him.
He drew a curved line connecting the two figures, hanging below them, but left two patches of snow to disrupt the path. “Say this is you and Caldris, and the line is your bond. The bond is incomplete, and the connection between you is severed in places. His power has to flow to you to offer you protection, but you were also gifted a part of his power when your souls were cleaved in two. He has half and you possess the other half, but with only this one pathway for that power to travel between you, broken as it is, all that happens is a collision in the bond. You cannot share power in the way you are meant to, and it weakens you both.”
He dragged his sharp nail through the snow, curving it over the line he’d already drawn. “When Caldris accepts you formally, the line between the two of you solidifies. Because you will have accepted him, too, and we both know that day will come soon enough—” He drew another line curving above the two figures, solid and uninterrupted as the one beneath them. “You will have unhindered access to him as well. It forms a circle, a fluid path for exchange of power. He can give to you and take from you all at once, as the power does not belong to one person alone. It is shared between you.”