She was dreaming. Her lips would move as if she were speaking with someone, pausing to hear their reply, before wordlessly speaking again. Her skin was still bleeding where she lacerated the runes, soaking through the dress and seeping through the thin material of his shirt. He would heal them with his magic just for the laceration to spill open again.
He had never seen anything like this, but his mother had lived for hundreds of years. Surely, she would know what was torturing Ailsa and how to fix it. If not, she would bleed out all over him, across the very shirt she expressed her affections with. He would loseeverything, both the Tether and Ailsa, what was and what could be. Their number of potentials dwindled by the second.
Vali felt home as soon as he crossed the border, inhaling the magic in the air like a perfume and let it scourge his body with power and life. The Palace of Light was sparkling in starlight. Alfheim was so close to the sky in the Highest Branch that the cosmos appeared within reach, as if he could reach above his head and gather the constellations in his palm. The stars were tenfold brighter here and illuminated the landscape now shaded with night.
They neared the gilded gates carved into the shape of the bending bows of ash trees, and the cavalry around him encouraged the gatekeepers to swiftly open the doors and give them passage, allowing Vali to charge right through without question or pause. He spurred his horse to quicken her strides, speeding the mare through the line and galloping past the army to lead the way toward the castle.
Even at night, the Palace of Light manipulated each beam of starlight. The castle’s countless spires were crafted entirely from stained glass, painting the land in a thousand broken colors. As the sun and moon moved across the sky, their light would hit the towers at different angles, and the glass would catch the rays making colors change, darken, lighten, forever moving across the world and coloring a new picture into the realm’s rolling canvas.
The view was enough to distract him from the wetness spreading across his chest, but not enough to slow him down.
Vali had not seen the inside of his own castle for half a century, yet everything appeared the same. The furniture, the gold-plated wallpaper, the skylights lining the rooftop, leaving only the need for a few scattered wall sconces to light the foyer—it was all the same as he remembered it. The night staff startled as he burst through the front door, Ailsa limp in his arms and covered in her blood.
“Send Lady Rind to the hospital wing immediately!” he shouted at one of them—all of them—successively as he charged up the foyer steps and toward the eastern side of the castle where the healers resided.
The wing was empty when they entered. He picked a bed and threw her on top of the ivory linens and began gathering any supplies he could find. The bedside table held a sink and a drawer full of freshly cleaned cloths and tinctures he could not name or place their use.
He tried to clean the excess blood from her skin but more pooled and replaced what he wiped away. She had four large gash marks, one above her left breast, one across her stomach, a slice down her forearm and a short tear across her thigh. But Vali didn’t know how to close any of them, and her skin had already paled several shades beyond its normal honey shade.
“Vali!” his mother’s voice was a solace. He looked up to find the feminine version of himself trailing a group of healers, her chamber robes sweeping behind her. She rounded the four-poster bed to hug him, but he held out his arm to keep her at a distance. He was covered in Ailsa’s blood, and he had no interest in grand reunions just yet.
“Mother it’s wonderful to see you but this cannot wait. Ailsa is the Tether and for some reason I cannot heal her. She tried to cut the runes before they formed, and now she won’t stop bleeding. She’s going to die if we don’t find a way to close her wounds!” The words fell out of his mouth, and he hoped she could find their meaning somewhere in the mess.
“Let me see,” she said. Her raven hair was pulled into a long braid down her back as she leaned over Ailsa, her nimble fingers pressed the edges of the laceration together and assessed them with a power he could not see with his eyes. “God’s below,” she muttered under her breath after a time. “Her blood is not willing. It’s rejecting the Tether—she is rejecting the Tether.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means the power is trying to bind to her, but she isn’t accepting it. I’m sorry, Vali. I don’t understand how, but she is in a fight for her life beyond our control. With a force of nature I cannot manipulate.”
“No,” he whispered stubbornly. He sank to his knees next to her bed, barely feeling the sharp sting in his bones as they struck the floor. “This is not what the Norn told me. This cannot be it. I will find another way, another potential.”
Three healers stood on the other side of the bed, quickly soaking cloths with a clear liquid before pressing them to her wounds. Their efforts were futile. The pale pavers beneath the bed were now speckled with crimson stains. The sheets already soiled. His mother placed a soft hand over his shoulder. “I’m sorry, my son. We will cleanse her with the waters and hope it helps. But she is the only one controlling her fate now. You must let her fight this battle alone.”
Ivor and Seela trickled into the wing, the frosty blue of the wolven’s eyes now diluted with despair as her eyes found Ailsa lying on top of the sheets. The runes on her skin were now black and dormant. Quiet. But her blood still oozed from the wounds across her body, made by the blade he had given her.
“Why are you all just standing there?” she demanded as she approached the foot of the bed. “Help her!”
“There is nothing we can do but wait,” one of the healers spoke for him.
“Yougargan! Snake! I’ve seen you heal your own wounds, Vali. Heal her now!”
“Ivor, he cannot. Don’t you think he’s tried?” Seela spoke softly behind her.
“She is dying, and he is doing nothing!” Ivor spat at him, her hatred on full display. “She’s just another failed attempt to you, isn’t she? You’re probably already manning another crew in your head to search for the next Tether. Her life meantnothingto you!”
“You need to leave,” Seela tamed the fire in her voice with a forceful shove. Vali heard her struggle as she managed her out of the room, encouraging the guards from their post to assist in subduing the wolven.
Vali was lost for words, void of fight. Everything he had ever wanted, the things he thought he could never have, were there right in front of him. In a single moment they had been ripped away, along with the one woman who offered him the potential for a thread of happiness—cut just as it was starting to weave into his life.
The healers covered her with heavy blankets after binding her wounds and left the group. His mother mumbled something about returning in the morning,
He reached into the bed and cradled her limp hand in his own. Her icy fingers made their own runes upon his palm, forever claiming their place with the invisible markings made by the slip of her lifeless fingertips.
“Even this close to the heavens, the night is dull without you,Stiarna. Do what you must. Do what you must tolive.”
Her pulse beat a slowing rhythm against his thumb.
If he had a heart, it would have shattered.