Chapter X
CHAPTER X
A hand wrapped around Aisling’s wrist. It pulled her back, spinning her towards her captor.
“Aren’t there mortal tales of wolves that warn maidens not to wander alone?” a familiar voice said from nearby. Aisling leapt at the sight of him, clutching her chest.
Lir stood before her, his sleeves rolled to his elbows and his pants cuffed above his ankles. Even from where she stood Aisling could smell his cologne of pine, wet leaves, and woodland memories. Sacred, age-old oaks and ashes.
Haloed in firelight, he approached in smoke and the sensual rhythm of the music.
“This maiden wishes to join the wolves’ dance,” Aisling said, her stupor dampening her anger. Washing away the bitter taste of the day with tea sugars and winter spices. A dense, sparkling cloud muffling every sober thought.
“The choice is yours,” he said, stepping nearer still, “but you should know the risks of entering a Sidhe ring.”
Aisling glanced over her shoulder at the dance, the feverish haze a muse to their every movement.
“Once a gathering of Sidhe forms a circle, they bond their ‘magic,’ forming a cradle of mass enchantment. For a human to step foot in one…let’s say it’s unwise. ”
“Have you seen it before?” Aisling slurred, blinking to readjust her focus.
“A mortal step into a Sidhe circle?”
Aisling nodded in response, doing her best to shake away the haze.
“I’ve seen mortals dance themselves into their graves, infants stolen by the hands of the Other. For even after the Sidhe have left, the power remains.”
Aisling looked down at the fair folk’s feet. Mushrooms grew beneath their toes, bubbling from the earth till Aisling believed she heard them giggling. Was this how the dancing Aos Sí had created that labyrinth of hedge and rose at the center of the arena?
“Then why form one if they are indeed so dangerous?” Aisling asked, watching them over her shoulder.
“Dangerous to mortals,” Lir clarified. “To the Sidhe, such power and unity are euphoric.” The fae king fixed his eyes upon her. Eyes that cut into her soul, explored her till she felt bare before him. At times, Aisling believed him a figment of her imagination. The muse of grisly fireside tales breathed to life in the flesh. To the mortals, he was a wicked sovereign who sat on a throne of mortal blood and bones. Her betrothed, measuring her as he’d measured so many humans prior to shredding their flesh with fangs now sheathed in wine.
“You’re charmed, aren’t you?” Lir settled his feline eyes on her own unfocused ones.
“What?”
“The music, the dancing, the circle. Even when you’re near to such spells it affects you, doesn’t it?”
Aisling’s body responded for her, swaying to and fro, her violet orbs pooling with black. For the music rippled through her, every note promised bliss. The night gripped her jaw and poured its tonic past her parted lips as the stars cackled.
Aisling’s feet picked up once more, the rage still burning a hole at her core. But the music, the lights, the smells. It was all too enticing, too easy to lose herself.
Lir was nothing more than a blur when he spun her towards him, danced with her inside the fae ring. His wicked grin was a mess of pearls and diamonds whirling in the opposite direction the world rotated. The Snaidhm a kaleidoscope of glittering dust and laughter till she began to fly. No not fly. Glide through the revelry in the arms of another. Her eyes rolled as she struggled to reply to the oaks hanging their heavy heads to ask her for her name.
Aisling wasn’t certain how much time had passed when the debauchery faded into a distant, collective murmur. Only that every step further from the Snaidhm made her more aware of how truly alone she was with the fae king. His heart beating against her right temple. Aisling hadn’t believed he bore a heart. Perhaps he’d stolen it.
The mortal queen blinked rapidly. Her internal, lucid self, fighting to regain control. To claw its way out of this slippery stupor and towards sobriety once more. For her feverish, muddy mind was already tearing like gossamer.
Aisling counted Lir’s steps as he neared the trees. The great shadows of the forest cloaked them both at its lip. She was one, perhaps two steps away from foregoing one world and entering another. A realm of trees that eyed her warily, arguing back and forth as they leaned forward for a closer look.
Lir set Aisling down on a bed of moss, placing her as far from the Snaidhm as possible without entering the shadowed keep of the greenwood. From this distance, the music and uproar of the Snaidhm were but a drawl, vibrating through the earth.
These were his feywilds, Aisling repeated in her mind. A concept she struggled to wrap her mind around. For Aisling had always been taught the forest was wild, untamable, insatiable, ruthless, but not more so than its monarch. The sovereign who knelt beside her now, watching as she inhaled her sanity once more. The way his eyes perused her unsettled her more than she could describe.
And once the lucidity crawled back into her mind, the night air sobering, Aisling clumsily stood, staggering and lengthening the distance between herself and Lir. Closer and closer to the edge of the forest. Away from he whose breath trailed around her still, prickling her skin.
Lir smiled, unfurling himself from his crouch.
“If you knew what lies in those woods, you’d prefer my company to theirs.”
Aisling snapped a branch beneath her heel, a reminder of how close she stood from entering the surrounding woodland.
“More trows and dryads?” Aisling quipped, rummaging through her mind for the right words. After all, a thick cloud still blanketed her thoughts, lifting at a glacial pace, the Snaidhm ’s residual enchantment that’d transformed her bones to glass and her limbs to jelly.
“Aye, and other fiends of the feywild.”
Aisling considered the forest over her shoulder. The instinct to avoid the woodland tugging at her conscience lest she be punished, for the wilderness had always been forbidden. Until now. There was no Clodagh to reprimand her, no Nemed to raise his hand to her, no brothers to ridicule her. She could do what she liked here. Even stand with the enemy at the woodland’s edge, the forest himself.
And perhaps it was still the Snaidhm ’s charms that made it appear as though the trees spoke amongst one another like a great counsel. The groaning of their trunks in the evening gale, the rustling leaves, the murmuring insects, the hoots of an owl, all were sentient. All alive and eager to see her. Touch her. Know her. Ancient and feral and unpredictable. Inhospitable to all they rejected.
Lir held out his hand to her. “You’re not in your right mind. I brought you here only to diminish the effects of the Snaidhm before continuing on. Return with me to Annwyn. From that distance, the sorcery of the Snaidhm should entirely?—”
“I’m fine,” Aisling interrupted, holding his gaze.
“You lie easily and quickly, is this a mortal trait?” he asked.
“A dreadful habit of my kind,” Aisling quipped, “although, perhaps more characteristic of your blood than mine.” Nemed had indeed always said the mouths of the Aos Sí were designed to spew lies and speak deception, incapable of being honest lest their tongues burn.
“You believe we lie?” Lir scoffed. “To tell a mistruth requires great concentration and even then, it is poorly told,” he said, the ghost of a smile tugging at his lips. “Believe me, I tried when I was a child.” How long ago that must’ve been. What was it like to carry centuries of memories? For one’s childhood to be lost in some distant, ancient past?
Aisling stifled her surprise. If what he said was true, how could her father have been so wrong? Perhaps the fae king was deceiving her even now but there’d already been a great deal Nemed had chronicled poorly. The way the fair folk looked, for example. Aisling had never known her father to be wrong about anything. Although, she realized, pent up in Castle Neimedh, there’d never been another to disprove his claims.
“So would say a liar.”
He laughed, eyes glinting like a rogue. “I don’t need to lie to you.”
Aisling clenched her fists at her sides, her fear of the fair folk only rivalled by her rage. Her resentment. The bitter taste of an upbringing stoked by her race’s rivalry with these brutes.
“Do you know how to wield that dagger?” Lir’s attention shifted between her corset and her face, devilry widening his smile.
Aisling slid the knife from her bodice, careful not to reveal herself in the process. She bore no intention of using it on the fae king but was rather comforted by the sensation of it in her hands.
“You’ll have to draw it more quickly if you wish to take me off guard,” the king continued, moving closer. So close, Aisling needed to tilt her head up to meet his lowered gaze.
“Who says I have any intention of using it?” Aisling growled. For the mortal queen would be foolish to consider jeopardizing all her clann had sacrificed. And attempting a strike on the fae king was among the fruitless errors that would find her executed by either the Aos Sí or the mortals themselves.
“It’s written in all that you do: your strange, violet eyes perpetually glancing over your shoulder, how you recklessly clutch your dagger even while you dream, the flickering of the muscles in your hands each time I near you, the tension in your jaw each time I look at you.” Lir’s eyes flicked to Aisling’s mouth, quickly returning to her eyes. “I know you want to use it. But I also know you won’t. You and I both know the risks of presenting this union as anything other than a joyous pairing.”
Horror ambushed Aisling, her throat running dry. Lir had noticed more of the mortal queen than Aisling had anticipated. His sage eyes were more watchful than she thought possible, capable of dissecting her behavior with an accuracy that chilled Aisling’s spine.
“Regardless,” Lir began again, “a queen—especially one of the feywilds—should be familiar with her dagger.”
“I’m aware how a blade works,” Aisling spat, taking a step back, standing on the lip between the forest and the glade. “I use the pointy end and stick it in your heart.”
“Show me.”
Aisling inhaled, trapping the breath inside her chest. If he wanted to provoke her, then provoke her he would. For he inspired something reckless within her, the sensation of swimming in an abyss, holding her palm beside a flame, wrestling with a wolf.
So, the mortal queen lunged for the fae king, waving the dagger the way she remembered Dagfin practicing in the gardens while she read. And in response, the fae king laughed, a cruel cackle that bred fury all over again in Aisling’s veins.
“Had I wished you harm, you’d be dead before the tip of your blade decided upon its direction.” Lir smiled broadly. A brief flicker of mirth before he propelled forward. Had Aisling blinked, she would’ve missed it. The flash of movement as he snatched the dagger from her hand and held her in place by the wrist.
“To draw your weapon, you’ll need to be quick. You may be weaker, smaller than most opponents you’ll encounter, but you can be fast. Drawing your advantage first is half the battle. And if given the opportunity, you should always be the first to strike”—Lir considered her bodice, flushing Aisling’s cheeks—“and you’ll need something more practical to stow away your dagger than a corset.”
“My brother advised to wield only in the name of self-defense,” Aisling said, as breathlessly as she felt. Internally, she cursed herself for it.
“Your brother is wrong,” Lir said, releasing the queen from both his grip and regard, instead, studying the dagger. “I’m surprised you were allowed such a trinket. My advisors tell me you lacked proficiency with all weaponry.”
“It was a gift,” Aisling said, regaining the sharpness in her tone.
“From the princeling besotted with you?” Lir’s eyes flitted back to Aisling.
The mortal queen blinked, the backs of her lids burning with the memory of Dagfin’s face, his voice the song of her childhood: stealing destriers to spend a day at Hannelore’s Linn, inventing songs to torment poor Fergus, tickling the sleeping guards with pigeon feathers.
“No,” Aisling replied distantly. A word that caught Lir’s attention and held it for the briefest of moments.
“An expensive gift, nevertheless,” the fae king resigned, his thumb stroking the ruby enclosed in the pommel’s ebony fist. A ruby that dulled in the presence of its dagger’s most loathsome enemy.
He tested the dagger’s weight, flipping it effortlessly between his fingers. It looked odd in his hands, long fae fingers toying with a mortal blade. So much smaller than it’d appeared in Aisling’s own grip.
His fingertips traced the haft, the cross-guard, until they found the iron blade. But once his skin touched the iron, he recoiled, hissing like a wounded animal.
“Don’t look so surprised. I’m sure your father made certain the effects of iron on our kind were common creed.”
“What does it feel like?” Aisling asked, eyeing the red and purple blister forming on his injured flesh. Skin that didn’t, couldn’t, recover the way the rest of their body did when exposed to non-iron harm: quickly. Miraculously.
“Like it looks, flame to flesh.” So, even fae lords were slaves to iron. Aisling had often wondered if these foreign monarchs were susceptible to the same weaknesses as their subjects. Vulnerabilities Nemed and all the mortal kings before him used to their advantage in the name of the Isles of Rinn Dúin. Of mankind.
“We should return to Annwyn, you shouldn’t be this near to the feywilds for so long,” he said, tossing Aisling the dagger. “I should’ve returned you to Annwyn once you woke.”
The mortal queen caught the knife. And as she sheathed her dagger in her corset once more, she glanced longingly at the forest.
“But isn’t this your kingdom? ”
“You’d be a fool to believe sovereigns capable of controlling every subject.”
“You refer to the Unseelie?” Aisling pushed, her feet planted in place even as he gestured for her to follow.
A muscle flashed across Lir’s jaw. “How much do you?—”
“Gilrel informed me there were other races, monsters, creatures who roam these forests, the mountains, the waters. I know no details. Only that your kind refers to them as Unseelie. As you yourself have intimated before.”
Lir exhaled, the muscles in his shoulders slackening in the slightest. “You shouldn’t pry into what will only endanger you—a risk to both the Aos Sí and mortals should you die and the treaty be for naught.”
“You believe me afraid?” Aisling challenged, moving nearer to the woods.
“No, and that’s what concerns me,” he replied.
Aisling peered into the forest, a shadowed realm of tree and branch and endless ferality studying the mortal queen in return. It was lovely the way a whetted blade was lovely. The way a storm ravaged the land it danced across.
Lir exhaled. And based off his expression, Aisling realized the same outcome the moment the fae king did: Lir would have to relinquish information if he wished to purchase her compliance. Lest he carry her away himself. And Aisling believed he wanted to touch her as much as she did him. Which was not at all.
“When we passed through the forest, on our way to Annwyn, I veiled you with a glamour. A shield against the dryads,” he said, his voice as cool as the mist building around her ankles.
“A glamour?” She turned to face him.
“A protective spell, a cloak that can shroud an entity entirely or change its image briefly.”
“You wielded magic then?” Aisling’s stomach dropped, realizing she’d been both enchanted and totally unaware. This was unlike the Snaidhm : magic that had been accidental, too potent for a nearby human. No, this…this was different, a crossing of some line she hadn’t realized she’d drawn until now. He’d bewitched her. She was both powerless and at the mercy of his tricks.
“I do not wield magic—I breathe it.”
Aisling recalled the muffled silence, the pressure popping her ears, the voices slamming against those invisible walls as they trailed through the forest and towards Annwyn.
“Were your knights glamoured as well?” Aisling asked.
“No. Fortunately, that day the Sidhe far outnumbered whatever dryads lurked in that part of the woods. They wouldn’t have dared approach our party especially when accompanied by me. But with a human…” Lir hesitated, his eyes meeting Aisling’s. “Unseelie crave mortal flesh. Had they known you were there, they would’ve been unable to resist.”
Aisling paled.
“ The Aos Sí will not hesitate to devour you with their spells. They will toy with your mind, steal your agency, manipulate your reality. All magic is evil and dark and unnatural ,” Nemed had told her, his voice alive only in memory. Achingly distant.
“The glamour, however, served its purpose. They could smell you but not see you—a good enough disguise to help us pass.”
“How do I know you speak the truth? That this is not all some elaborate deception? You’ve now admitted to using magic to manipulate my reality. How do I know these Unseelie, creatures the mortal world has never so much as mentioned, are real?” But even as the words left her lips Aisling knew the answer. The reality of the trow she’d beheaded hours before. Its memory flooding back to her, nearly bringing her to her knees. A sense of guilt, of pleasure she blamed on the fae king.
“You don’t have much of a choice.”
He was right and that made Aisling all the more furious.
“Your kind are considered monsters in mortal eyes, ruthless. Cruel. Savages who hunt humans for sport. ”
“I would’ve imagined a princess to be educated in the Lore enough to?—”
“The Forbidden Lore is outlawed,” Aisling growled. “A library of pure deceit.”
Amusement bent his lips. “I should’ve realized your father’s lies cut deep. What other deceptions did the fire hand of the North steep his mortal kin’s mind with? He who wears the blood of the forest on his hands?”
“You know not what you speak of,” Aisling growled. Nemed had indeed burned the wilds to make room for their overpopulating kingdom. To expand Tilren’s walls so the mortals could live comfortably without fear of the Aos Sí. So it was the Aos Sí who preyed upon mankind, forcing them behind walls to eventually spill from the seams of their iron kingdoms. Not Nemed.
Lir laughed but it held no humor.
“It is not I who has been fed on lies and coaxed to sleep in an iron keep.” Lir prowled nearer still. “And it is not I who has manipulated reality as you claim. That guilt lies with your father.”
“What do you know of my father?” Aisling continued, her heart thrashing against her chest, ears ringing with anger, palms growing hot.
But before Lir could answer, some branch snapped further inside the forest. In an instant, the fae king’s posture changed, his shoulders tightening, eyes gleaming like a wolf’s, hands flexing until no longer did the white stag stand before her but rather a demon of violence. Could he smell something? Sense it? See it even amidst the evening’s veil?
“Step away from the forest,” he commanded, his voice thicker, lower than it had been moments before.
Aisling glanced over her shoulder. Her vision blurred, her temples throbbed, suddenly consumed by a crashing wave of white noise thick like fuzz. The mortal queen shook her head, but it did little to assuage the popping of her ears or the pressure falling as thickly as the fog. Aisling had felt this sensation before. Had been crippled by a similar energy. Force. Bubble. She could see no further than a few paces before her, the rest a mess of shadow and distant noise. But she could sense it. Whatever it was. Angry, hopeful, eager, impatient.
“Take my hand,” Lir reached towards her, his palm facing the star-speckled sky. Aisling appraised it, desperately attempting to orient herself within his magic. Somehow, taking his hand was a betrayal of her own kind. The fact she was afraid, that she perhaps needed to accept his help in order to survive for the second time in one day, worsened that sensation.
“Aisling.”
A growl erupted from behind her.
“Take my hand,” Lir ordered, a brief glimpse of panic seizing his expression. But now he wasn’t looking at Aisling. He was looking over the crown of her head and into the forest. At whatever sighed down her neck and pawed closer. Deep, guttural, laced with hunger. Aisling could feel its hot breath on her ankles.