'A hundred years times three, this isle of the sisters is safe from thee.'įrom her reaching fingers, light whipped, spun, a circle in a circle. Power was still in her, and the strength and wit to wield it. And so she would, but she would not forsake her children, or the children who came from them. This island, that she and her sisters had conjured for safety from the ravages of those who would hunt and kill them, she thought, would be lost. She teetered on the edge, will straining against will as the storm within her, and the storm she'd conjured, raged. Their nurse would tend them, teach them, and the gift, the brightness, would be passed down. Her children would be safe, she had seen to that. This last time they were hers to command again. Air and Earth and Fire - and the Water that had given her great love, then had stolen it away again. And the sea howled in response, the ground beneath her shuddered.

She lifted her arms so the flame of her hair snapped in the wind that she called up with a breath. Her death would feed it, and still she could not face life. She felt it, creeping closer now, sliding along the ground in a filthy fog. Her circle was broken, and she could not, would not, withstand alone.

Even knowing them for what they were, she was tempted by them. The dark whispered to her in the night, its sly voice full of lies. She could fight it no longer, could find no purpose for her own life. Now the dark closed in, and she who was Fire was alone with her pain. She had used her power for vengeance, forsaken her Craft, and embraced the dark. He had murdered her for what she was, and she had not used her power to stop him.Īnd so the one who was Earth had raged and grieved and built her hatred stone by stone until it had become a wall that no one could breach. The one who was Air had loved a handsome face and kind words that had disguised a beast. They, too, had been fated to love and to lose. Such was her fate.Īnd her sisters', she thought as she stood on the cliffs she loved, above a sea that boiled and bucked. He would not remember her, or their sons, their daughters, the life they'd made on the island.

Even now he would not remember the years they'd had together, the joy of them. Her husband, her lover, her heart, had returned to the sea, and the parts of her that were hope and love and magic had died that day.

She had left them, even as their father had left them. Nor was she, to her great shame, any comfort to them. Even her children - those she had carried in her body, those she carried for her lost sisters - were no comfort. The jagged shards of it stabbed at her soul until each hour, each moment, of what her life had become was a misery.

Face the Fire by Nora Roberts