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I frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“I am going home, Cassia,” she said. “To the Verdant Courts.”
“The fae realm?” I shook my head. “The fae are broken, and the courts are sealed. No one goes in or out.”
“The Seelie Court is sealed,” she said. “But the unseelie… The unseelie are starving.” She stepped back, her expression grim. “The tribunal locked them out of the soul stream centuries ago. Cut off the food supply. The Court of Shadow is desperate. Dying. They need energy. They need essences.”
“So, why would I go there?” I asked. “To be eaten?”
“To be of help.”
The words hung in the air, absurd and terrifying.
“They need you, Cassia. They need a provider. Someone who can walk between worlds. Someone who can slip through the cracks the fae cannot pass. Someone who can hunt.” She pointed at the blade on the floor. “You are a void now. A hole in the world. You have no light the tribunal can track. You can cross barriers, hunt the souls they need, and bring them back.”
“You want me to be a…butcher,” I said, the horror rising.
“I want you to be a survivor,” Leta snapped. “The Verdant Courts, especially the unseelie lands, are chaos. Their magic is wild and untamed. It scrambles the celestial frequencies. If you go there…if you hide in their shadows…the tribunal will never find you. You will be a ghost in a kingdom of ghosts.”
She reached into her pack and pulled out a stone. It was rough, gray, and unpolished. But when she turned it, it shimmered with a wet green light.
“Oweynagat,” she whispered. “The Cave of the Cats. In Ireland. It is an old forgotten gate, watched only by Morrigan’s crows. It leads to the court’s underbelly.”
She pressed the stone into my hand. It was cold and heavy.
“I am going there. Tonight. I am going back to my people, even if they are starving. And I can take you with me.”
I looked around my room and then at the blade.
Death was easy. A moment of pain and then silence. But this…this was a different oblivion. To disappear into a realm of chaos and hunger. To become a hunter of souls to feed a starving court. It was a monstrous existence.
But it was an existence.
“Why?” I asked, looking at Leta. “Why save me?”
Her face softened. She reached out and touched my hand, the one holding the stone. “Because you are the only one who ever saved me,” she whispered. “You didn’t treat me like a servant or a sprite or a nuisance. You treated me as if I belonged. And because…” She hesitated, looking at the blade. “Because I know what it is to want to end it. And I know that sometimes you need a reason to stay for one more day.” She squeezed my hand. “Come with me, Cassia. Don’t let them turn you into a tragedy. Be the nightmare instead.”
I looked at the blade one last time. It was beautiful. Clean.
But Leta was right. If I died here, they won. If I died here, I would be just another broken thing swept under the rug of history.
But if I lived… If I vanished…
I reached out and picked up the blade. But I didn’t point it at my heart this time. I put it back into its wrapping. “Ireland.” The word tasted of rain and moss.
She nodded, a fierce grin breaking through her sorrow. “Ireland.”
I stood and looked around the room, the tomb of my past life. I looked at the bed where I had slept alone, the window where I had watched the snow fall. “I am not coming back.”
“Good. There is nothing here but ghosts.”
We walked out of the room, leaving the door open. We walked down the stairs, past the place where Aldric had faded, and out into the night.
37. Cassia
Ireland did not greet me and Leta with the gentleness of a long-lost mother but with the weeping gray indifference of a widow who had buried too many sons.
The last time I had touched this soil, it had been a graveyard. 1845. The year the sky broke, and my sister and I fell. I remembered the smell of the rot, the cloying stench of the potato blight that had turned the fields into slime. I remembered the silence of the villages, where hunger had hollowed out the voices until only the wind remained.
