Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish here,” Graves said to Lorcan.
“Accomplish?” Lorcan asked. “I think I have already accomplished everything I’ve set out for. I have my throne back and my people and my lands. And my queen will be at my side.”
“Saoirse is dead,” Graves snapped bluntly.
Lorcan flinched. “I fucking know she’s dead. I can’t bring her back. I can’t bring my kids back. And the world gave me another chance after a century, and you want to destroy even my hope at happiness.”
Graves laughed. “I can’t do anything to you. This you are doing to yourself.”
“You threw her away!” Lorcan roared. “You threw her away, and I was the one there to take care of her.”
“I didn’t throw her away,” Graves said with calm determination. “I made her leave to protect her, from me.”
“Graves,” she hissed.
Lorcan’s eyes widened. “You were going to use your magic on her?”
“I sent her to you, my enemy, rather than hurt her. A selfless love.”
“Selfless?” Lorcan asked with a dawning horror. “You’re a fucking monster, and you dare to call yourself selfless for not destroying her mind in exactly the method I told her you would.”
“He didn’t do it,” Kierse argued. “And he wouldn’t.”
“I’m so reassured,” Lorcan deadpanned. “He continues to show you exactly who he is and you refuse to believe him.”
“I believe that he would hand me over to you before hurting me,” Kierse argued. “Whereas you would mangle my own free will on a whim.”
“A whim,” Lorcan said with a head shake. “When he is proving the reason for it was necessary.”
“We wouldn’t be here at all if you hadn’t forced the bond!”
“We can’t escape it,” he said tenderly. “He would have done it whether I forced it or not. It just added protection to you, from him. And he’s the first to admit that you need it.”
“No,” Kierse said.
But instead, Graves said, “Yes, she needed it.”
Lorcan gestured to the man behind her. “At least one of you is coherent.”
Kierse closed her eyes against the pain of that statement. She didn’t want to think that she needed protection from the man that she loved. She didn’t need protection from anyone. She held the power. She was the force. She could do this without either of them.
“But she made her choice,” Graves said. “And it’s not you.”
That’s right. Her choice. And she’d make one now.
“I need more,” she insisted to Nuala.
The tree hesitated. “More will overwhelm you.”
“It isn’t enough to break the bond.”
“Then perhaps the bond is not meant to be broken.”
“It is. The stone said to regain my power.”
“There are more ways to gain power.”
“Please,” Kierse begged.
Nuala went silent, as if unable to process such human emotions all at once, then finally said, “Open the door.”
Kierse’s gaze shifted past Lorcan to the Ash Door. She’d been told many stories of what the door could accomplish. Lorcan suggested that it could only work when they were linked. Maya had made it seem like the door could open to places that Kierse had never been before. Jason had said that he was going to use it to find other sacred trees. But did any of them really know what the door did? Did she?
She trusted Nuala, though. Trusted that if Nuala was telling her to open the door for power, power was what she would get.
She jerked free of Graves. Lorcan lurched toward her, but she was already running past him and out of reach. The tree was only a few feet away, and with the amount of power she had, freezing time was as easy as breathing. She didn’t even need Lorcan’s magic to do it.
The tree loomed overhead as she walked to the base of the magnificent trunk. Nuala in all its glory. The power radiated outward like an explosion set to devastate the world if she let it. Still, she held on. The Ash Door was a physical manifestation of the portaling, and with her connection to Nuala she knew that it was something more than that. Something much older.
A door to anywhere.
Kierse’s fingers closed over the handle set into the tree, and this time, it turned. She pushed the door forward, opening the Ash Door to beautiful summerlands.
Tears came to her eyes as she gazed upon the rolling hills, bubbling creeks, mountains in the distance. The chirping of birds and bright summer sun and the whisper of music on the breeze.
“Faerie,” she gasped.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Faerie was everything Kierse had ever imagined it would be. And it had unimaginable magic that flowed into her like a rush to flood the world.
The magic was everywhere, in everything. It shimmered at the edges of the eternal summer sunshine that glazed the countryside in warmth. Hung on the tiny wings of the hummingbirds that buzzed nearby, dipping their heads into a kaleidoscope of magenta, periwinkle, marigold, and honey blooms that cascaded down the hill. Moved through the willowy wisps of clouds scattered across the clear blue sky. A creek flowed with glittering magic down from the mountains with little bubbling waterfalls. A copse of gnarly woods gleamed ominously with heady magic to the left of the creek with birds and beasts moving in the shadow.