“They were a wee couple, were they no’?” Jem squints at his mother.
“Sort of.” She tilts her head. “No, but yes. Ban and I come from a very old line of magic. Old lines”—she looks at me—“they’re dangerous, like money in your world. Magic is power in ours. Ban was, since we were small, obsessed with power. And Vee…” She tosses me another look. “All those stories on your planet about Aphrodite and Venus, Inanna, Minerva, they’re all based on Vee. She’s not quite a god; she’s just…beautiful and persuasive and magically charming.” Itheelia shrugs hopelessly but still smiles as she thinks about her friend. “People just adored her. Ban adored her. Obsessed with her, he was.”
They were a complicated couple, apparently. Itheelia says they were on and off and on and off, and then one day, they were on and they found out she was pregnant. And everything was good. They were good. And then rumours started swirling around Ban and his motives. He’d been trying to gain power and favor with the fairies with relationships and bribes and blackmail, and when he couldn’t get it those ways, he turned violent.
“And that’s when we found out about the prophecy.” Itheelia sighs.
Jamison makes an “achk” sound with his throat. “It’s just a story.”
I look between them, wondering if it’s the same one Rye mentioned.
“What prophecy?”
Itheelia gives her son a long-suffering look. “When two founders meet under an oxblood moon, the true heir will rise and sit on the throne once again, and the island will be restored.”
Jamison stares at his hands, looking bored, but I frown at her.
“Restored?” I look at her like she’s crazy. “Is the island in disrepair?”
Itheelia tilts her head. “You mightn’t think so from looking at it, but then neither does your Earth look unwell, but trust me”—she gives me a solemn look—“it is dying.”
“Of what?” I frown.
She frowns over at me a little before she says it. “Hope.”
“Or lack thereof,” Jamison adds.
“Hope?” I repeat.
“Our world daesnae operate by the same rules and laws yours does,” Jamison tells me like I hadn’t noticed.
“Hopes are currency here; they’re a weighted substance. They fuel it.”
“And hope is…dying?” I ask, not quite sure I believe it.
“Not dying.” She shakes her head. “But disappearing.”
“What would that mean?”
“For us?” Itheelia squints. “Our world will rot and crumble away, and for yours—”
“For mine?” I stare over at her, a bit alarmed for my family.
Itheelia gives me a strange look.
“Hope is our biggest export,” Jamison tells me. “It’s made here but used universally.”
“Really?” I blink.
“We’re all connected.” Itheelia shrugs. “If we run out of hope here, for your world, it’s probably just another Great Depression, but forever.”
“Oh.” I scrunch my face up. “Is that all?”
Itheelia breathes out her nose, looking flummoxed. “We can’t tell why the wells are so low.”
“There are wells?” I look between them.
Jamison’s mother gives him a long-suffering look. “How do you stomach her incessant questioning?”
Jamison looks down at me for a few seconds, then he says, “Her face,” before he crosses his arms over his chest.
The way we’re sitting now, we’re sort of pressed up against each other, and I’m shamefully aware of my breathing and how benignly his arm is touching mine. Some sort of wonderful, splintering pain rolls through me that I don’t understand. My face!
“So Ban was trying to make the prophecy come true?” he asks.
His mother nods. “Vee had the baby. She tried to smuggle it away, and we tried to help her get it off planet, somewhere away from him, you know, once we knew what his motives were, but he got to her. He tried to stop her. They had a fight, and she injured him badly. So he did a spell to save himself, killed both of them in the process.”
Her face looks strained, and I make a note to myself to remember that time doesn’t heal all things.
“What spell?” Jem asks with a curious frown.
“Soul tether,” she says with a solemn nod.
Jamison tilts his head. “I’ve never heard of—”
Itheelia shakes her head. “It’s old magic,” she tells him. “Finicky. Dangerous.” She breathes out her nose and looks between us. “It only works if you’re soulmates.”
“What only works if you’re soulmates?” I ask, trying to glean as much from this woman as I can.
“The spell,” she says, as though I’m an idiot.
I lift my eyebrows. “Which does what?”
Itheelia gives me another impatient look. “It’s a complicated one. It can give you life when you’re losing it and powers when you had none before even, but it’s costly. You become one. It can kill you if you’re not fated.”
“How do you know if you’re fated?” I ask her quietly, not looking anywhere remotely near her son’s eyes.
“You don’t die when you do the spell,” she tells me unceremoniously.
Jem rolls his eyes. “There are other ways.”
I lift my brows. “And they are…?”
Jem opens his mouth to say something, but his mother cuts him off. “A shortcut to something you should just figure out in due time,” she says sagely, and though I can’t be entirely sure because I was still avoiding his gaze, I suspect that his eyes and mine both rolled. “Souls aren’t to be trifled with.” She gives us warning eyes. “They’re too delicate and impossible to untangle.”
“How do they get tangled?” I frown and then pause. “Do you mean literally tangled as though they’re a literal thing?”
She eyes me like I’m some sort of terrible dope. “They are of course, a literal thing.”
“Inside us!” I stare at her. “Like an organ we don’t know about on Earth yet?”
And then she erupts in laughter.
Jamison tosses her a look. “Mum—”
“Sorry.” She shakes her head and gets a hold of herself, trying to make her face look actually sorry and not just amused. “No, darling, not like an organ inside you.”
I give her a tiny glare for laughing at me but only a tiny one because she’s magic and I don’t want her to hex me, and also I think I love her.
“Where then?”
“The Cave of Souls,” she says like it’s the most obvious thing on the planet. “It’s remarkable down there, but”—she pauses thoughtfully—“souls themselves are remarkable. Delicate but amenable. I’ve never had the chance to see one be tied, but my mother did long ago, and she said it kind of smells of strawberries when it does.”
“And that’s what Ban did?” Jem asks. “Tried to tie their souls together?”
Itheelia nods.
“And they weren’t fated?” I ask.
“Evidently not.” She shrugs. “See, Ban needed to be linked to Vee, needed the tether to control her, but soul magic is a different kind of magic. It’s pure, doesn’t like to be manipulated. It just won’t be.”
Jem blinks a few times, shaking his head. “Fuck.”
“And the baby?” I ask quietly. “You said they had a baby.”
“The baby.” Itheelia looks from her son and over to me, where her eyes settle. “Well, he grew up. Handsome little thing, charming, just like his mother. I think he’s a friend of yours.”