Chapter XXV
CHAPTER XXV
An hour before dawn, Aisling sat on a cliff’s edge. Lir, Galad, and Rian were already dozing beside the fire Aisling had lit earlier, dreaming deeply. But sleep, ever since Aisling’s union, had eluded the mortal queen. Dreams came at a steep cost: hours of thinking, of worrying, of anxiously waiting for the sun to set so she could trail onwards. Nightmares that embellished her most wicked memories with greater horrors. The Cú Scáth devouring her belly as she watched, the fomorians forcing her to dance upon the fae knights’ bones. Losing control of her violet flames till they devoured her in licks of an all-consuming wildfire. At times, she even found herself running through Tilren, banging on Castle Neimedh only for her tuath to have forgotten her. To her clannsmen, her name, her face, her voice was but a foreign word in their ears. Meaningless. A series of vowels strung together. To her family, she’d vanished like a ghost come morning light.
So, Aisling sat on the cliff’s ledge, dangling her legs over the steep drop. A wall of bark-like stone descended into a mess of clouds beneath her. And further beyond, on the horizon, were the endless feywilds preparing for the coronation of the rising sun. But even from this vantage point, Aisling could see blotches of black. Areas where Nemed’s fires had burned through the wilderness. A thief of fire and ash—fire that Aisling recklessly toyed with on her fingertips, jewels of deepest plum fluttering from the tips of her nails.
“You should be resting, or are you unable to resist certain peril?” a familiar voice purred from behind. Aisling turned to find Lir approaching, brushing sleep disheveled hair from his eyes.
“You’ve said that to me before,” the mortal queen replied, doing her best to steady the rapid pace of her heart the fae king’s presence inspired.
“You need to be reminded of your more destructive tendencies,” he said, sitting beside her on the cliff’s edge. His legs were much, much longer than her own. His boots dangling farther down the wall than Aisling’s. The mortal queen swallowed as his thigh brushed her own.
“Perhaps you should focus on your own destructive tendencies instead of mine,” Aisling quipped, forcing herself to concentrate on the flames at her fingertips.
“I have many.”
“Tell me one,” she said, daring a glance in his direction. Lir’s sage eyes shimmered with lilac, reflecting the light of Aisling’s fire. He sat transfixed by her fingers toying with the flames. Aisling had never seen him look at anything like that, with such fascination. An expression that softened his features. Made him nearly real and not the otherworldly king that the mortal queen knew he was. But moments like these, looks like those, made her forget. Just for a moment.
“You,” he said, eyes flitting towards Aisling. Catching her eyes before she had a chance to look away. Aisling blinked at the fae lord, her breath hitching in her chest.
“Do you fear me?” she asked against her own volition. But the words didn’t feel like her own. As though she were listening to another woman speak to the mythic warrior beside her .
The corners of Lir’s lips curled slightly. A mischievous smile, steeped in the promise of something forbidden. Something dangerous. Something she shouldn’t explore, yet wanted to all the more.
“Aye, I do,” he said, returning his attention back to Aisling’s hand. Emerald vines grew from nothing, twirling around her arm, tickling the bare skin of her wrist. Aisling shivered at the touch. A caress as light, as gentle as the kiss of a taunting breeze.
The vines curved towards her fingertips, bedizened by her flames. And once the lianas touched her fires, they sizzled, blackened, then wilted until they were nothing more than ash, floating off the cliff and into the sea of clouds below. All the life he breathed, she destroyed.
“You once told me you live in fear,” Aisling said, remembering his words. “What else do you fear?” As soon as the words left her lips, she regretted them. It wasn’t her place to ask such intimate questions of the fae king. One whose armor ran deeper than the steel plating he sported. One who bore his fangs and snarled at the slightest provocation or threat. He wasn’t simply the stag, the winged Aos Sí in her moonlit dreams, she needed to remind herself. He was also the wolf—insatiable, predatory, lethal. Gloriously fierce. A fact that had been all-encompassing at one point.
Lir averted his gaze, turning instead towards the forested expanse before them.
“I fear my people’s suffering,” he confessed, his voice deeper than it had been before. “I fear making an unforgivable mistake, a lapse of judgement that would put my people in jeopardy”—he paused—“like my mother did.” His eyes flicked back to Aisling.
Like his mother did ? Lir had only ever mentioned his mother once before. Before they’d come across the fomorians. But what crime could his mother have committed to harm the people of Annwyn? The kingdom of greenwood? Aisling stilled, afraid to move lest the fae king build up those walls of ice, stone by stone, once more.
“I fear losing what’s mine.”
“Like you lost Narisea and Peitho,” Aisling surmised, deigning to mention the child he’d lost alongside his first caera . It was too great a risk but she couldn’t help herself. Despite her better judgement, she needed to know. Wanted to know.
Lir bristled. But whatever he found in her amethyst eyes dispelled the tension her query aroused, his shoulders softening.
“Like I lost Narisea,” he confirmed, seemingly surprised Aisling knew of her at all. But of course, she did. Not only had Peitho mentioned his first caera , but others had spoken her name as well. Balor. Sakaala. And his neglect of Peitho didn’t escape Aisling’s notice.
“What was she like?” Aisling asked, torn between wanting to know the answer and running before she heard a genuine response.
Lir’s expression fell as he studied his hands in his lap.
“She was born with a spear in her hand and the forest in her heart. A wicked temper.” The fae king smiled, fangs flashing in the firelight. “She was wild,” he said, considering for a moment, “like you.”
Aisling’s heart skipped a beat. But Aisling was no warrior. She was a princess, hardly capable of throwing a dagger, much less a spear.
“And you?” the fae king asked. “Have you ever given your heart to another?”
As if the question had summoned his face, Dagfin appeared in the mortal queen’s mind. Aisling shuffled away the image, her heart twisting at the thought of him. The way he smelled of smoke and Roktish incense. His voice, a song of home. A place that now felt more like a dream than reality. “ I’ve missed you . ”
“Don’t tell me it’s the princeling,” Lir said, as if reading her thoughts.
“No, I’ve never given my heart to another,” Aisling bit quickly, wrinkling her nose.
“But the princeling gave you his?” Lir watched her closely.
“No, never. We grew up together. We were friends?—”
“To you perhaps.” The fae king smirked, unable to mask his amusement. But there was something dark behind his thick lashes. Violent. Something sharp he was hiding.
Aisling opened her mouth to speak but knew not what to say. Dagfin was her friend. Her companion when she was loneliest. The only one who had ever paid her mind or valued her thoughts. Encouraged her to pursue the adventures she craved. Was complicit in her mischief as a child. Just a friend. Nothing more.
“ I’ve missed you .”
“Galad told me what he wrote in his letter to you,” Lir continued. “Are you truly so blind to his affections?” Lir shook his head. “That must drive him mad.”
Aisling flushed, clenching her hand into a fist and wrapping it in fire.
“It doesn’t concern you,” she snarled even though she knew of its inherent hypocrisy. Lir had no obligation to have told her anything of what he’d already confessed. Yet he’d done so regardless. Done so at her request.
“You’re my caera . Of course, it’s my business,” he said, his voice ragged with recent sleep.
Aisling stiffened, aware that the fae king had never mentioned that word to her before. Had never explained it to her. Had never called her so. The only reason she knew it at all was because of Gilrel. Aisling didn’t believe in its meaning the way the fair folk did and she didn’t think the fae king took it seriously either. They were enemies. Their hatred for one another swam in their blood.
“Do you know what that means?” he asked, his eyes flicking towards the mortal queen’s mouth. A gaze that burned her lips.
“Gilrel explained it to me in passing.”
“Did she tell you of its origins? The Lore’s telling?”
Aisling shook her head. There was very little she knew of the Forbidden Lore. The history and conception of the world according to the fair folk. She’d never minded not knowing. Before her union, Nemed had ensured it was nothing more than deceit. Now, Aisling could no longer ignore how much her father had gotten wrong. Possibly lied about. But Aisling couldn’t dwell on that possibility for long. Still, what else did the Forbidden Lore contain that would ring true for Aisling?
“Once the gods were satisfied with the barren realms they’d created, this plane and the plane of the Other, they returned to the Great Forge of Creation to cast its inhabitants: the Sidhe came first and the Unseelie second.”
“ Man was born of nothing, but nevertheless born first .”
Aisling bit her tongue. There was no point in contesting Lir’s version against her father’s own. Their disagreements were clear and her mind ached when she thought of their contradictions.
“From the primordial elements, they cast the first Sidhe, the original twelve Sidhe sovereigns: water, earth, wind, and the draiocht built the Sidhe bones, our blood, our flesh, our breath. But not fire. Fire was the essence of the Forge. Bubbling magma from which the Sidhe were built and could equally be destroyed.” Lir gazed at the lilac fires in Aisling’s hand, his expression hardening as if bewitched by their light.
“The gods continued by forging the twelve Sidhe kingdoms and all of their subjects, granting those belonging to a certain environment more of one element than another.” Lir held out his hand once more until moss flowered from his palm, spreading like a contagion across his arm. “But there were other elements, elements even the Sidhe do not recognize. Minerals. Precious substances that only reside in the pits of the Forge.”
“And you don’t know their names?” Aisling asked.
“There are legends that claim such arcane elements are stardust or lightning or the tears of the gods. Others say it’s a nameless substance we would understand as fate. A substance that takes such an abstraction and makes it a physical entity, a string that binds two souls.”
“Is that what you believe?” Aisling asked.
Lir’s brow knotted, considering.
“I don’t know,” the fae king confessed, watching as the moss around his arm faded away with the first breath of sunlight, peaking over the mountains.
“The gods bound two of their original sovereigns with this invisible, elemental string, curious to know what would occur should they do so.”
“Bres and Ina,” Aisling realized. For, Cathan’s song had described the original Sidhe king and queen as having been forbidden lovers. Besotted but unable to commit to their love lest they forsake their individual kingdoms. A crime the queen of the mountains eventually committed and was cursed eternally for. Alongside every subject in her kingdom. The kingdom of Iod.
Lir’s eyes flickered with grief. A grief so potent, Aisling could feel its shadow darkening the world around him.
“Aye, Bres and Ina were the first caera . Both born of the Forge with a string that bound their heart to the other. Two souls destined to be pulled towards the other no matter how the string tangled, stretched, knotted, no matter the cost.” And Ina had paid such a cost. A cost Aisling wondered about often for none had ever deigned to speak of the queen’s curse. What had become of her people as a result of her love?
“But then, according to the Lore, only the twelve original Sidhe sovereigns and their subjects were cast directly from the Forge. Only they’d be capable of having this elemental string. What of all those who come after?” Aisling asked, searching the fae king’s expression, a shadowed gaze that cut into her chest.
“Like the draiocht , as you now know”—Lir gestured towards Aisling’s fire—“the element is sentient. It grows, spreads, seeks. Wishes to be felt and used and indulged. If such an elemental string is made of fate, fate is a hungry creature. But rare.”
Aisling remembered the night of their union. The three blades staked before her, unaware that her choice was a decision between life and death. No, not a decision. A gamble. One whose loss meant her own severed neck and continued conflict between the fair folk and the mortals.
The mortal queen tore her eyes away from the fae king, ignoring the burning behind her lids.
“And all of this. Your belief in this elemental tether. It’s the only reason you didn’t behead me at our union. A union you entered believing you’d paint the grass with my blood.”
Lir was taken aback, wincing as though he’d been touched by iron.
“Why would I believe that?”
“Because you’d already promised yourself to another caera . And two caera …it’s unheard of, isn’t it?” It was a rhetorical question. Aisling already knew it was a myth amongst the fair folk, a shock to all those who’d attended their wedding and heard of their union after. “That night, you had every intention of ending me.”
Aisling didn’t know why the words, the thought, the memory, made her so furious. Of course, he’d harbored those intentions. But the fury she’d grown over the last several months had burst past her defenses, leaking from between her teeth.
“You know not what you speak of,” he said, a muscle flashing across his jaw. He was angry. And in this moment Aisling didn’t believe the Aos Sí weren’t made of fire. For fire is what brewed behind his lashes in wicked electric storms .
“Don’t condescend,” Aisling snapped. “I know enough. You never believed I’d choose your axe.” Twin axes still crossed at his back as they spoke. Axes Lir never let out of his sight. Axes Aisling often wondered about.
“It’s easier for you this way, isn’t it? So be it; believe me your wicked fae legend, your nightmare come to life,” he growled, the rage in his voice thrumming through Aisling’s core.
The mortal queen stood from where she sat, blowing out her fist of fire as the sun peeked its golden eyes over the summit’s edge.
“If I’d been in your position”—she forced herself to meet his eyes—“I would’ve killed you too.” And she was cursed with knowing that deep down, she would’ve enjoyed doing it.