I was unfit to lead.

So I don’t hammer the door, I don’t shout for salvation.

My salvation is currently stretched on his back on the floor, staring up at the coffered ceiling, wearing black camouflage pants, tattooed and hard and silent.

Ryodan brought me here to give me silence.

I wonder, clever man that he is, if he brought me here also to somehow give this man words.

What could make someone stop speaking a thousand years ago? I can barely grasp, much less accept that anyone has lived so long.

How would it feel, if you cared for such a person, to watch his complete retreat? To see him day in and out, yet never converse again? To know that he could speak to you if he chose to, but won’t? Day in, day out, your brother in arms, in your reach yet completely unreachable.

Ryodan has ordered this mute, dark man to be my teacher.

Will he obey?

I need instruction to cement my newfound center. I need training, discipline, and strength. I’m not leaving without it.

I lean back against the wall and study him, as I have for nearly a week now. He’s not catatonically withdrawn. He simply doesn’t interact with anyone around him at all.

“Kasteo,” I say. “I’ve stopped feeling the pain of the world. Help me learn to control my environment. Teach me to fight.” To one who stopped living a millennium ago, I say, “Show me how to live.”

The man who has stared at little but the ceiling for nearly a week, who has not so much as once acknowledged my presence, slowly turns his head to the side and looks across the floor at me.

Then stares back at the ceiling.

23

“The nights go on waiting for a light that never comes”

CHRISTIAN

I’m fourteen, finally old enough to enter the circle of standing stones for the first time. Ban Drochaid—the White Bridge, as these stones are called—was once a bridge through time, for the right Keltar for the right reasons. But my clan abused the gift, and the Fae queen who’d granted it took it away.

Still, the stones hold ancient power. Only one avenue was closed to us.

I stand with my da and uncles between the dual bonfires of our great May celebration, and prepare with solemn pride to help them usher in the season of rebirth with ritual and chant.

Our women, no less strong than our men, gather round, clad in the old ways, with brightly colored skirts, laced blouses, and bare feet, in honor of the coming feast, which will be attended by the entire village that thrives in the valley below our mountain.

The night sky is black and crystal clear, with thousands of glittering stars scattered like diamonds on a cloak of mink. Diamonds.

I want a girl with a mind like a diamond …

“Dani,” I whisper through lips that are cracked from dehydration. I taste blood, it bubbles in my throat, choking me. Pain lances my ribs, my gut, my groin.

Focus.

The heather has not yet begun to bloom, and although the grass is still recovering from April’s unexpectedly frosty kiss, yellow May flowers have blossomed and are strewn everywhere, on doors and windows, on the livestock, around the necks and in the hair of our women, scattered around the stones.

My da and uncles awe me, tease me, push me, teach me. I want to be like them when I am a man: wide-shouldered, with a ready laugh, a spine of steel, and courage beyond compare.

Was she worth this? Dying over and over? You gave yourself up so she could fight for those sheep. Fuck sheep. You’re not a sheepdog anymore. You’re a rabid wolf.

I gave myself up to watch her shine. Because I knew what the massacre of so many people that she loved would do to her. Steal the light from her eyes. I wanted to watch her save the world, and feel on top of it.

I inhale sharply. I just stumbled as I passed between my uncles, took an inadvertent elbow in my stomach, nothing more.

There’s Tara, our housekeeper’s daughter and Colleen’s best friend. Later tonight a group of us will go for a midnight swim in the loch and shriek from the icy slap as we plunge deep. I’ll try hard not to stare at Tara’s wet blouse when she gets out, but och, the lass is growing in all the right places and I stare in spite of myself. She always spots me, tosses her head of fiery curls, catches the tip of her pretty pink tongue between her lips and smiles, eyes shining.

Near her stand Jamie, Quinn, and Jonah, the elderly, impoverished MacBean’s grandsons, orphaned when their parents died last year in a car crash. This is their first Beltane without them. They join us nearly every evening for supper, lonely but not alone, as food is more plentiful in our household than theirs. Old MacBean was injured a decade ago, walks with a cane and has only the food he can harvest from the land.