“Those parts of you do not come from Mab, Little One,” I said, my eyes going soft as I studied her. She was so determined to hate herself, and to bear the weight of her need to be liked by everyone around her. “They come from me. They are all the worst parts of me that you provide balance to.”
“How do you bear it?” she asked, her voice nothing but a low murmur.
“Bear what?” I asked, knowing she could be speaking of a great many things. Knowing Estrella for her own self-hatred, I suspected she would say something along the lines of a question of how I could stand to look at her.
But that was not what came out of her mouth.
“The thirst for power. The knowledge that you could be so much more than they believe you to be, if you only let that monster within you loose. How do you control your strength with such finesse, when we both know you could kill a man with a snap of your fingers?” she asked.
Estrella might not have been comfortable with her title in formal settings, but she was born with the need to rise. If Lord Byron had been a halfway decent man, she’d probably have embraced her position as his wife and been the Lady of Mistfell.
But that kind of power would never be enough for my mate. She would be submissive to no man in the end, and would settle for nothing less than an equal at her side.
“First, you must learn to channel your power before you can worry about controlling it. Come,” I said, pushing to my feet and holding out a hand for her. The Wild Hunt had long since finished assembling our tent, but I knew Estrella well enough to know she would not fall asleep anytime soon.
She wore her restlessness on her sleeve for all to see, and she confirmed as much when she took my hand and allowed me to pull her to her feet.
Exhaustion waited for her on the other side of training with me. All she had to do was walk willingly into it.
27
ESTRELLA
The trees taunted me, swaying in the cool breeze. They seemed to whisper in my ear, reminding me that they could dance in the winter breeze far easier than I could channel it into my own damn hands.
“This is a waste of fucking time,” I growled, throwing my arms down in frustration. No matter what I did, no matter how I twisted my body and tried to force my will to focus on the cold air I tried to craft within my hands, nothing came from it. I couldn’t grasp anything but the darkness pulsing in my fingertips, and couldn’t see past it to summon the Viniculum to channel Caldris’s power.
“You can do it. You just need to be patient,” Caldris said, as gentle as he was every sleepless night that he dragged me from our tent to practice.
“Is it because I’m not human?” I asked, staring at him. If I was Mab’s daughter, then I was Fae. I didn’t have the ears, and had never channeled the magic of nature until the moment he’d marked me when the Veil fell, but there was something decidedly inhuman within me, pacing under my skin.
“We don’t know anything yet,” he said, his face shutting down as it had for the remainder of the day when I’d tried to ask any questions about what it would mean for me.
For us.
“How many humans do you know who can turn a dead fucking bird into a living snake?” I asked, tossing a hand onto my hip and glaring at him. He seemed determined to live in denial, never admitting to the glaring similarity to Mab. Nausea swirled in my gut, my body reacting to the knowledge Caldris refused to share.
“Not many,” he said, pinching his nose between his fingers. “But you won’t be not human until you touch the land of Faerie—at least that’s what we suspect.” The new information shocked me, silencing me as I processed that confession. I’d change when I got to Alfheimr?
“And what of the other child? Were there any rumors of another girl who went missing?” I asked, focusing on the things that would matter. If I were to change when we arrived in Alfheimr, I would have little control over that. The instinct to cling to what remained of my humanity crashed over me. I’d lived my entire life, lives, believing myself to be a human girl. Simply letting go of that was not so easily achieved.
“It was centuries ago, min asteren. I haven’t got a damn clue. I can ask around when we get back to Alfheimr, but by then I suspect we’ll have more answers. Your magic is more and more determined to make itself known. There will come a time when it gives us the information we need to decide what you are,” he explained, stepping forward and taking my hands in his.
“I understand that you want me to be able to channel your magic to protect myself, but maybe what we need to focus on is the fact that I have magic of my own. Maybe mine is repressed and wants to be let out, but it's blocking everything else from escaping because it's been lying dormant for so long. Maybe in the past when your Viniculum answered, it was because this part of me hadn’t awakened.”
“I don’t think it is wise to encourage your magic to surface,” Caldris said, turning to give me his back. “If you aren’t trying to control it, there is no telling what it might do.”
“Do you believe I’m Mab’s daughter?” I asked, noting the hesitance he’d shown with being near me since the discovery. He hadn’t tried to get me into the tent to seduce me before we fell asleep, as if he couldn’t quite grasp the idea of bedding me anymore.
“I don’t know what to believe. Your magic has some similarities to hers, but it also manifests in different ways. I’ve never known Mab to reincarnate a creature immediately,” he said, but the end of the statement hung unspoken between us.
“She seems far more concerned with killing things than bringing them back to life,” I said, flinching away from the reality of who she was.
“That is also true,” he said, sighing as he relented. “I can’t say that you aren’t her daughter, but I’m also not confident in saying you are. Either way, we should proceed like we haven’t got a clue where your magic comes from or what it is capable of, which means erring on the side of caution.” I nodded, letting him raise my hands and encourage me to start all over again.
Even though I knew it wouldn’t work, even though I felt it inside of me that I was meant to release some of my own magic before it would let me touch his. Sometimes, love meant humoring someone, even when they were wrong.
I raised my hands in front of me, fixating on that pulsing, twisted darkness that rose up immediately. Taking a deep breath of it into my lungs, I closed my eyes to shut out the blackness surrounding me. Only the light of Caelum’s hair and blue eyes stood out in stark contradiction, but somehow the darkness wasn’t enough anymore.
It wasn’t dark enough to hide the shadows cast by the light of the moon. It wasn’t dark enough to hide the very essence of the trees surrounding me, filling the land as if it were overflowing, as if it needed to be taken back to the place where the world was quiet.
My hands thrummed with that dark magic, the urge to bring the shadows to the forefront of my vision overwhelming, but I swallowed against it, holding that part within me and shoving it down into that pit that rested inside my belly, into the hollow that craved oblivion.
Opening my eyes, I looked at the snow-covered branches over Caldris’s head, raising my arm and considering what it would feel like if it fell on my head. How the cold would sink into my skin, tickling the back of my neck where my cloak gathered and trapping it there until it sent a shiver through me.