My knees gave way. One of the men uttered an oath. I fell into someone’s arms as the world turned black.

CHAPTER 2

~Felix~

The fog lies heavy on me. It weighs me to the very bone. My eyelids struggle against it. Ebb, flow. Ebb, flow. Tides. Faces above me, coming and going.

I thought I saw a woman. Between the shadowy curtains she turned strange eyes on me. The veil came down again, and I lost her.

My eyes hurt. My head hurts. I try to turn it and my neck shrieks protest. Iron bands around my chest, tighter, tighter. Each breath a mountain to climb. If I were dead, would I feel this?

I am cold. The chill is in my bone and in my blood. Blankets piled on me. A heated stone at my feet, some kind of creature beside me in the bed. I am so cold.

There are three women. One comes more often, neat-featured as a marten, dark-haired, green-eyed, a line between her brows as she leans over me. The others are like her, but not quite like. The second woman has locks the color of sun on autumn leaves, and a scattering of freckles across creamy skin. The third . . . the third has eyes that startle and compel, eyes like still pools under early morning sky. They fix on me and I feel the power of them in an untouched place, deep inside. I seem to know her.

I am in the afterworld, perhaps, or on my journey there, and these are three guardians. Three goddesses? Three Fates? Which cut the thread that was my life? What do they want of me? And what . . . What . . .

Are these three sisters? There is a dark-skinned man as well, who comes to look at me, a calm-eyed man in a white robe. A physician? Sometimes he seems old, sometimes young. What place is this?

Night outside. A lamp’s glow brings a landscape of moving shadows: monsters, demons, serpents. Another man sits by my bedside awhile. His face is tattooed with a raven’s mask. His gaze is somber. I am at the gate of death; this is a threshold spirit, a guardian warrior. He speaks of trust, of choices and chances. He tells me I am safe here. He names the place: Inis Eala. Swan Island? I do not remember such a name. I do not remember . . .

I wake with heart hammering, my skin clammy with sweat, my mind reeling in terror, from what, I do not know. Under all these covers I am naked. Where . . . What . . . There is no question I can ask. I know nothing. Nothing. Save that, after all, perhaps I am not dead.