6. Keira
Chapter 6
Keira
I can’t stop staring at my arms. Each freckle has turned crimson and gold, glowing like a fire rages beneath them.
It isn’t me. These markings aren’t mine, and I want them off. A deep, maddening urge to scratch them out of my flesh consumes me.
My hair drapes over my shoulders, those same burning whipcords as my father’s that move and rage and change from yellow to red to orange.
I am too afraid to move, in case I am burned by the fire.
This isn’t me . It is some other ethereal woman, and I want my body back. My breaths catch in my chest and my throat feels like it is closing up. I struggle to drag in air, despite how my chest heaves.
I reach a hand up to my ears as bile rises in my stomach, but I don’t have the courage to touch them.
“Is it—are they—” The words die on my lips.
“They are peaked like mine,” Aldrin murmurs back, regret simmering in his eyes. He scared me as well as my father.
“Make it stop! Put it back!” I cry.
His eyebrows pinch. “Is it so horrible to be fae?”
“I want to be myself again.”
Aldrin shakes his head. “I’m sorry it was revealed to you in this way.”
I feel as if a bucket of ice-cold water has drenched me. When I look down at my hands, my flesh is back to normal. I let out a shaky breath.
I force myself to glance up at my father. He stares and stares into his reflection in a silver platter my mother holds before him, her other hand on his arm and her body held close to his side.
“How can you look at me like this?” he says to her.
“I promised I would be at your side, no matter what came our way,” she whispers back. “Have you forgotten?”
I don’t know how she touches him when he looks like a demon from the Otherworld, but there is only grim determination on her face. She was trained in a household of such extreme internal politics that she has an incredible ability to mentally pivot.
“Will you stop listening to your mother’s poison now, Edmund?” My mother’s soft words carry.
“Mother. Who exactly was my birth father?” he growls, turning fiery eyes on my grandmother. “Is he this fae monster you have mentioned so many times but won’t tell me about?”
My grandmother holds her face in her hands, then sweeps her fingers across her temples. She looks so small and bony, curled up in that huge armchair.
“You look almost exactly like him. I never expected to see his face again.” Her voice cracks and my heart breaks hearing it. “Edmund—can you return to the face I have always known and loved? It will take time for me to get used to seeing him when I look at you. Is that a horribly selfish thing for me to ask?”
“I don’t know how,” my father says softly.
“Aldrin, please,” I whisper. “I know they haven’t treated you right, but please do this one thing for me.”
Aldrin nods. The air distorts around my father, his skin slowly returning to its usual creamy color, scattered with freckles. The tendrils of his hair still, no longer a raging inferno, and each flame ebbs out until they are back to their familiar array of red, orange and blond strands.
My mother lets out a long sigh of relief and throws herself into Father’s arms. His eyes are unfocused with shock, but after a few moments, he wraps her in a tight embrace.
Aldrin sits heavily in his chair. His skin has paled and the shadows beneath his eyes have deepened.
“Are you okay?” I peer into his face.
“You know they have been poisoning me to inhibit my magic,” he says. “I have developed a tolerance to it, and my magic has returned bit by bit, but I just used a lot and I am nowhere near my full strength.”
I summon a volley of air to push my seat next to Aldrin’s, then collapse into it, now facing my father across his desk. His eyes narrow and his jaw clenches as his gaze flicks from Aldrin to me and back, but he doesn’t argue.
“Mother, I think it is time you told me the story of your pilgrimage.” My father turns that piercing gaze that many warriors have cowered under on my grandmother.
“It is forbidden for a priestess to speak of her pilgrimage,” she snaps.
“Forbidden by whom?” he roars. “You are the High Priestess, are you not? Change the rules.”
My mother pats his arm and speaks soothing words in his ear, as though calming a beast, but he shoots her a murderous look as well.
“He deserves to know.” I lean forward and squeeze my grandmother’s leg, able to reach her where she sits to the side of the desk.
She flicks her long fingers toward Aldrin. “Not in front of the fae.”
“Which one?” my father grinds out. “Because apparently there are three fae in this room.”
My body turns rigid at the accusation. I am not fae. I have dedicated my whole life to this realm. To humans. To identify as anything else would realign my entire existence, and I am not prepared for that.
But all humans have at least a little fae in them, and all fae have a lot of human. Where does a person draw the line when we are so interbred?
“Like I said, whatever fathered Edmund, he was not fae,” Aldrin retorts. “And I am the only one in this realm who could tell you what he was. I will know for certain with a description.”
“And what would I have met in the Otherworld, if not a fae?” my grandmother spits.
“Tuatha Dé Danann.”
The entire room freezes.
“Sometimes the gods wander in my realm to experience their creations, often masking their identities,” Aldrin continues. “We haven’t had an official visit in centuries, but I recall the last one. It would explain why Edmund is so powerful, more so than me, if he is half god. My ancestry isn’t that strong, nor is that of any fae living today that I know of.”
Aldrin reclines in his seat, arms behind his head, while he forms an air wield that unstoppers the crystal decanter on my father’s desk. It pours a glass of whiskey and floats it over to him, where his hand plucks it out of the air.
I want to shake him for the smug expression that fills his face, especially when my father glares at him.
“I’m sure you know our joint history,” Aldrin says. “The Tuatha Dé Danann bred with humans thousands of years ago to create the high fae. They combined their essence with the spirits of the trees, of the water, of fire, or fused with animals to create the low fae.”
A powerful shiver runs down my spine at his implications. Aldrin gives me a measured glance before he continues.
“The magic of the gods is too strong and pure within Edmund for the man you bred with to be anything other than Tuatha Dé Danann.”
My heart hammers against my ribs. It is a lot to digest. Every muscle in my father’s body is taut, his shoulders high, tendons sticking out of his wide neck and his fists clenched.
“Tell us how you met my father,” he demands of his mother. “I won’t tolerate any more excuses.”
“Your father, your true father, was the man who raised you. The man who was Lord Protector of these lands before you.” There is steel in my grandmother’s voice.
“Mother—”
“But the man I conceived you with? If I am to tell you of him, I need you to understand why I went on the pilgrimage in the first place.” She takes a deep, shaky breath. She looks so old and vulnerable. Sometimes I forget she has already lived far longer than many humans would expect, approaching ninety years, because magic leaked from my father into her during pregnancy.
“It is difficult for a priestess to talk of their pilgrimage,” I quickly cut in. “You can’t truly understand what it is like to walk through the utter void of a portal and take that leap of faith unless you have experienced it. We step into a completely foreign world, where we are told everything, absolutely everything, will want to kill or harm us. Every single Mother of Magic makes great sacrifices there to save our people. Her soul is never the same. Please, try not to judge too harshly.”
Aldrin gives me a scathing look. “Is the sacrifice yours or ours?” The corners of his lips are turned down and the swirling amber of his eyes reveals the depths of festering anger and bitterness in his heart.
I never thought he would give me a look like that. I never thought I would deserve it.
My grandmother’s hands shake as she begins, and she sits on them to hide it. “I was born poor, desperately so. We often battled with starvation twisting our guts and had no idea when our next meal would be. I tried to forage in the woods for berries and herbs and would retch until I passed out when I made a mistake.
“Foraging turned into setting snares for rabbits. One day I stumbled across a wild Cú Sídhe that had killed a hunter. Many of the fae beasts had slipped through the rips in the veils around that time and plagued us for years after.” She pauses for a long moment, staring into the air. “I watched the entire thing from the top branches of a tree. The creature ripped out the man’s innards and crunched his bones, leaving him a bloody mess. I will never get that sight out of my mind, or stop hearing the sounds of his screams, or forget the horror of what I did next. I was only thirteen at the time.”
Hot waves of horror ripple through me. Aldrin shoots me an unreadable glance, but I can’t drag my eyes away from my grandmother. Her shoulders hunch inward.
When it looks like she won’t continue, my father pours wine into a chalice and wraps her fingers around the stem, coaxing her into taking a sip.
“I crept up to the ruined corpse,” she whispers, “and I took his bow, arrows and throwing daggers. He didn’t need them anymore. The man had been short and slight, probably only a teenager himself, but it took a full year before I had the strength to pull his bow and the ability to aim the arrows.
“I had less magic back then, a bit of air and a zap of lightning, but all the determination of a girl with a painfully empty stomach. The desperation of one who didn’t want to end up like my mother. She had four other children, all younger than me, with not a single one of our fathers sticking around. The shame we received from the rest of the town for the fact…well, you don’t need to know about that.”
She falls into a long, drawn-out silence. I hold my breath, waiting, too afraid to say anything, in case it startles her.
“Mother. The rest of the story,” my father cuts in, downing an entire shot of whiskey in a single gulp.
“I was an accomplished huntress by the time the realms aligned again,” she continues. “I would aim straight for a beast’s heart and load my arrows with my lightning. It takes only the smallest zap to the heart to make it stop, which is lucky, because that was all I had.
“When the rifts between worlds were torn open, a whole horde of redcap goblins streamed through into these lands. Their attacks on defenseless villages were horrendous. There were so many deaths. People were slaughtered for no reason other than their savage bloodlust.”
Aldrin stiffens. “They were probably terrified out of their minds, lost in a new world with a massive target on their backs. The creatures have the intelligence and impulse control of a human toddler.”
My grandmother’s eyes snap to Aldrin. “Well, a murderous rampage is still a murderous rampage, despite the reason.”
“And what is it called when humans slaughter an entire band of goblins? Justice?” he fires back.“Could you not herd them back through the rift?”
I put a hand on Aldrin’s shoulder and he whips his head around, staring at it with a scowl. He doesn’t shrug me off, he doesn’t move at all, but he might as well have. I pull my hand away sharply as the realization dawns on me that my family would have told him about my involvement in the hunts. They would have threaded lies in with the truths to sow division between us, just like they did to me.
Gods, Aldrin probably thinks I tortured low fae for kicks in my spare time.
I drag my eyes away from Aldrin so he won’t see the unshed tears glazing them. I glare at my grandmother instead.
My entire life, she has been a foundation of warmth and overprotective strength. I have cried in her lap countless times. Right now, I loathe her. The bitter resentment is like a wild animal thrashing within my chest, growing until I fear I will not be able to contain it.
Her lips twist at what she sees on my face. The flash of pain in her eyes swiftly shifts to anger, as it always does with her.
She leans forward in her seat, pointing a finger at Aldrin. “Don’t think for one moment, fae , that because you have met my granddaughters, you know all humans. The majority cannot fight or defend themselves. Most have practically no magic. We’ve never had massive armies lying around to escort rabid fae back home. Especially back then.”
“Did you humans even try, Naomi?” Aldrin bites out the words, though much of the heat is gone from them.
“We were fighting for our survival.” My grandmother dismisses him with a flick of her hand. “There must have been a hundred redcap goblins obliterating villages near my hometown. I saw the aftermath of their work. There was not a single creature left alive or in one piece. Blood was everywhere, pooling across the pavers and painted on the walls. Have you ever had the displeasure of fighting redcaps, Aldrin?”
Aldrin shrugs. “I fought a war against the Winter Court, so of course I have.”
“Then you know of their frenzied bloodlust. That they coat the entire surface of their skin in their victims’ blood, and that there is no stopping them during a slaughter without extreme force. Explain to me how we should have herded such numbers.”
A heated silence drags out between them. My heart hammers hard and my blood races in my ears until it is the only thing I can hear.
“Mother,” my father grinds out. “I know you are stalling.”
“Yes. Well.” My grandmother finally remembers the wine in her hands and takes a long drink, while my mother runs an absent-minded hand up and down her arm in a soothing gesture. “We decided to fight. My home was a large township at the edge of the wilderness, and we had a lot of hunters in our number. We built a fortification of sharpened stakes around the town, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Then the heir to the Lord Protector rode into our town with a band of elite warriors, looking like a savior angel of death, ready to wreak havoc on our enemy in our defense.”
A slow smile forms on my grandmother’s lips as her eyes become distant.
“Ronan was breathtakingly beautiful and nothing like I expected a lord to be. Caring and compassionate. Ready to risk himself for us lowly peasants. When the goblins arrived, we fought together, peasants alongside nobility and guards.” She suddenly lets out a laugh that makes me jolt with shock. “Ronan became captivated by me. I was a slip of a girl with a ferocious temper who held her own next to his trained soldiers. I was the lowest of peasants, and he , the Lord Protector’s heir, was mesmerized by me . He gave me a job hunting the fae causing havoc in our realm, and kept me close to his side.”
She hesitates for a long time.
“We fell in love, but our class difference meant we could never be together. Not unless I took the pilgrimage to the fae realm. There is only one way for a peasant girl to break the chains of her birth and marry a lord: a magical pregnancy. I would have done anything to be Ronan’s bride, and I sacrificed part of my soul to make it happen.”
I don’t realize I am crying until a tear drops from my cheek onto my hand. I always knew there was a lot of pain and struggle in my grandmother’s youth, but I never knew the extent of it.
How can she blame Aldrin for traveling across realms to be with me when she did the same?
My grandmother suddenly turns on my parents, leaning forward in her seat and scowling at them. “Now, don’t you judge me for what comes next. Everything I did was for Ronan. All. Of. It.”
I can’t help letting out a laugh. My mother already looks scandalized, but my father is trying to hide his amusement. “Nothing shocks me with you, Mother,” he says.
Aldrin shifts uncomfortably in his seat, eyebrows pinched. “I already know I am going to hate this.”
“I took the pilgrimage with one goal in mind,” my grandmother says. “I planned to attend every forest party and nymph grove in the Autumn Court until I fell pregnant, but at the first one, I found him . Nissien. He gravitated toward me like a predator to prey. With hair of raging fire and eyes to match, red skin that glowed like embers and chains of golden oak leaves adorning his clothes. I was immediately in awe of him, and terrified of the imposing figure he cut. Power like I have never felt since radiatedfrom his being. Even the other fae feared him, but somehow, I came to forget that first impression.”
Aldrin nods to himself at her description, but I cannot drag my eyes away from my grandmother to question him. The knuckles of my fingers are white where they grip my skirts into bunches.
She lets out a long breath. “Nissien changed into high fae form when he became intent on pursuing me. He had such a gravity of personality that nothing else existed when he was around. It was thrilling, and I fell in love with him. I can’t explain it, but the love of two men burned bright in my heart. Then I fell pregnant.
“When a pilgrim is with child, she must run for her life. For her freedom. I knew this. They had drilled it into me, but I came to trust Nissien. He loved me, protected me—then he became my greatest villain.”
She pauses, and for a horrible moment, her lip wobbles.
“Nissien lost control when he scented the hormonal change within me. It drove him insane. He became crazed and locked me within a prison of his creation. I couldn’t go outside and feel the sun on my skin. He wouldn’t allow me to speak to another living soul. For any eyes to be cast on me. Nissien broke my heart. He shattered it into a million pieces, and it has never been right since. It is my fault. I shouldn’t have given it to a creature of that realm to begin with.
“I was imprisoned for days and days, but my magic increased tenfold as his baby grew within me.” She stops to give a weak smile to my father. “And it was because of you, Edmund, that I could break out of my prison. I ran and ran, following the pull of my moonstone bracelet and timing my escape for when Nissien was away. I thought it was leading me toward a portal, but I was wrong. Ronan had come to the Otherworld with his best warriors. He had gone against our king’s law and committed the greatest sacrilege against the temple of the Mothers of Magic in a mad search to rescue me before the portals closed, as no man can make the crossing. I hated myself so much in the moment we found each other, because I had lain with another man before him.”
A shiver runs through me. I sit on the edge of my chair, staring at her tightly coiled form and picturing the young, willful woman she once was. I think of my grandfather and the way he always looked at her with adoration and love brimming in his eyes.
Their passion never dimmed, not even when they grew old and gray.
I want to know that love that spans a lifetime. I want it with the man sitting beside me, but I don’t know if he still wants me. He couldn’t possibly. Not now.
“Ronan risked everything for me,” my grandmother says wistfully. “Nissien found us—I don’t know how, but he would have followed me to the ends of both realms to recapture me. I was his property. His slave. His consort . And he became savage when he found me sharing a horse with another man.”
I half expect her gaze to shoot daggers at Aldrin, but she is too caught up in her story.
“Nissien reverted to his primal form of fire and fury. He whipped up a firestorm, shattering the trees to splinters and burning a wall of flames around us as tall as this castle. Nissien’s only weakness was that he didn’t want to harm a single hair on my body. He loved me, and in his own toxic way, he thought he was protecting me from the world.
“Ronan and his warriors were humans fighting this monstrosity. I had to make a choice. To decide which man would live and which would die, when I desperately loved them both. When Nissien pulled me away from Ronan and thought he was shielding me with his body, I stabbed him in the chest. I pulled as much power out of the baby as I could and used it to rip a bolt of lightning out of that storm, thrusting it into Nissien’s heart, stopping it forever.”
My grandmother doubles over in her seat and holds her face in her hands, struggling to breathe as sobs escape her. I have never seen her so overcome by emotion.
The overwhelming urge fills me to say something, do something, to take away her pain, but I am frozen to the spot, horror running cold through me.
I didn’t know she loved the man who sired my father. I never guessed that she killed him with her own hand. Even Aldrin looks devastated.
“I didn’t kill Nissien for selfish reasons alone.” Her voice is muffled by her hands. “Not just because I loved Ronan more. I didn’t want you to grow up in that world, Edmund, to be raised by a man who thought it would be okay to lock up his woman.”
My mother embraces my grandmother from behind and offers her a cloth to wipe her eyes. My grandmother saved her from her own family when she was young. I don’t know the full story, but there has always been a strong bond between them.
“In a way, Edmund, it was you who saved my life that day.” Her eyes slide to her son. “But without Ronan, I would never have had the courage to do what was needed. We returned to our realm and married as soon as we could.”
My mind whirls around and around, trying to comprehend the gravity of all that trauma. It doesn’t justify my grandmother’s actions, but it does explain them.
She thought a fae had come here to do the exact same thing to me.
“Why have I spent my entire life up until this morning looking human?” My father runs a hand through his hair, pausing mid-gesture and quickly tearing it away as though he has just remembered the flaming whipcords that were there minutes ago.
“How did I not even know I had another form?” My voice is shrill.
My grandmother’s usual strength locks back into place, making her back ramrod straight. “Edmund, you were born with peaked ears, red skin and flaming hair. That’s why all magical pregnancies are birthed at a priestesses’ sanctuary. Within the first year, a half-fae child comes to realize that they don’t look like everyone around them, and they instinctively glamour themselves bit by bit to look human. That is when the mother and babe return to their lives.” My grandmother looks at me with regret. “The disguise becomes so deeply ingrained that their offspring are born glamoured. It works its way through the generations. The babies who drop their glamour are accused of being changelings by their parents, swapped by the fae. Some Mothers of Magic dedicate their lives to finding and raising those babies, but too many slip through the cracks and are abandoned to the elements and die.”
Aldrin cuts through the tension of the room. “Naomi, the man you have described is no fae.”
“Then what was he?” she snaps.
Aldrin scowls. “Nissien was Tuatha Dé Danann. One of the gods of Autumn. If I remember my ancient history correctly, he has a brother called Efnissien. The god you met was the level-headed one, while his brother is known for viciousness. All gods are possessive and at least a little crazy. His blood would explain why autumn magic of decay, destruction and fire runs so strongly in your family.”
The entire world spins around me. There is a ringing in my ears that drowns out the heated words between Aldrin and my grandmother.
We descend directly from one of the fae’s gods?
It cannot be true. There is nothing so special about me.
My father shakes his head. He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. When his wide, emerald gaze meets mine, there is pure panic within it.
A panic we share.
My grandmother gets up and grips his face in both her hands in a fluid motion. “Listen to me, son. I know this story is difficult for you to hear, but you are nothing like Nissien. You took on the traits of your true father, Ronan, and he would be incredibly proud of you.”
My father stares into her eyes. “If I am as fae as Aldrin claims, I will far outlive Maeve. I might outlive my children. Neither is a thing I have planned for. Already I waited to marry because I knew I would have a longer lifespan than a regular human, but this …I do not want it. I can’t live without her!” He throws out an arm to indicate my mother.
The implications slam into me. I think I am going to vomit.
Tears roll down my father’s face and my mother wipes them away with the sleeve of her dress. “Do not borrow tomorrow’s problems, my dear.”
A loud pounding rings out on the closed doors of the study, shaking them in their frame. I jolt. Everyone in the room turns toward them in synchrony.
“Enter,” my father calls, composure and authority snapping back into place.
A flustered guard enters the room. “My Lord Protector, there is a messenger here for you from the palace. It is…er…His Highness Prince Niall himself.”
Anxiety ripples through me as my heart nearly stops. My father’s eyes dart to mine, burning with determination.
We are about to learn the repercussions of my actions in the palace.