that if he left for any length of time, Arwin would slip into the great unknown.
Ghisla was as silent as she’d been in the early days, and his fear for her well-being and his longing for her voice was almost unbearable. He comforted himself with the strong heartbeat he’d heard on the hill just before he’d found Arwin; whatever the clansmen from Adyar had been referring to, she was in the temple—alive and well—when he carried Arwin down the hill.
He slept little, and when he finally succumbed to exhaustion and slept for hours at a time, he would wake in horror thinking Arwin had cried out or Ghisla had sung, and he’d been too unconscious to hear either of them. He traced the rune on his palm in blood and tried to will her to answer, but there was never any response, no burning on his palm or tingling in his fingers. And there were no songs. It was as if their link had been completely severed.
He grew so desperate to know how she fared that he drew a seeker rune on his palms that sent him hurtling into the darkness. But the seeker rune did not give him eyes, and the things he heard and felt were muted and distorted by distance and dissonance. What sounded like a voice lifted in song could just as easily have been birds cawing in the bell tower.
One night he fell asleep in the chair beside Arwin’s bed and woke to his master moaning and tugging on his hand.
“I have failed you, Hod,” he whispered, and Hod could hear his tears. He disentangled his fingers and checked his mentor for fever. His head was warm, but not alarmingly so, and Hod pressed a drink to his lips and wiped his mouth. Warm tears dribbled from the corners of Arwin’s eyes, and he wiped those too.
“I have failed you, Hod,” he said again and reached for Hod’s hand. This time Hod let him hold it, sinking back down into the chair beside him. It was clear that Arwin wanted to talk.
“You have not failed me. You have been the only family I have ever had, and you have cared for me all these years.”
“They have failed us.”
“Who, Master?” But he knew who. When Arwin was lucid, he talked of little else.
“The Keepers of Saylok. The mighty Keepers of Saylok. They have failed us all,” Arwin murmured. “They have failed my little boy.” He brought Hod’s hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to his palm, his tears pooling again. The gesture was something he’d done when Hod was small, a way to reinforce pride in his work. It’d been years since he’d kissed Hod’s hand; but these days Arwin was lost in the past far more often than he resided in the present.
But his lips stilled and he pulled his face away, his thumbs smoothing Hod’s palm, over and over, like he worried a rabbit’s foot or summoned wishes from a rock.
“You have a rune on your palm,” he gasped. “It is a soul rune.”
Hod sighed. It revealed the fragile state of his own health that he could summon no excuse for his teacher.
“Yes, Master,” he said. “I do.”
When he tried to withdraw his hand, Arwin clung to it, drawing it back to his face. He pressed his right eye into Hod’s rune, the act a similitude of Odin dropping his eye into the well of Mimir in exchange for the wisdom of the runes.
“Take my tears in lieu of my blood, and show me your other half,” Arwin beseeched the rune. Hod did not stop him or yank his hand from his trembling grasp. He had begged the rune for the same thing, day after day, in hopes to simply hear a heartbeat or sense Ghisla there on the other side.
“There is nothing there,” Arwin said. “I see only frayed tendrils.”
“No . . . there is nothing there,” Hod answered, and his voice broke.
“It is forbidden. Have I not taught you this? It is forbidden. What if the Highest Keeper had seen this?”
Hod rose and washed his hands. He could smell Arwin’s breath on his skin, sickly and sour, and there was nothing more to say.
“She is the king’s witch now,” Arwin hissed. Hod froze, his hands dripping, his hackles raised.
“Who, Arwin?”
“Ghisla the Songr. The girl who sang to you. She sings to the king now. She has addled his brain. He is mad. We have a mad king and the keepers