Chapter II
CHAPTER II
AISLING
“Aisling!” Dagfin shouted.
Aisling woke swathed in vines of emerald. Dagfin tore them off her body, bloodying his hands on thorns like teeth.
Aisling lurched forward, summoning the draiocht , her magic, without another thought. Her hands flickered with violet fire, withering the lianas to dust as she clawed them away, as well as, unfortunately, her feathered bed and the embroidered canopy now black with her influence.
Dagfin lunged for a nearby tapestry, ripping it from its mantle and pinning Aisling to the ash-ridden bed. Her fire bristled, suffocated by the throw’s threads and the weight of Dagfin atop her.
He held her down, waiting for the last glimmers of the draiocht to vanish from her violet eyes.
“Is it gone?” Dagfin asked, meeting her gaze for the first time. His heart was hammering against her own. The sensation of his body pressed against her was strange. As firm as she’d imagined: the sharpness of his form, the muscles he’d developed in adulthood. The smell of him steeped in ocean air and starry nights.
“It’s gone,” she replied, more breathless than she’d realized.
Indeed, the draiocht had sunk back into its primeval cavern, awaiting its next summons.
Dagfin lingered atop her, eventually straightening and settling his boots on the creaking floors. The abrupt absence of him leaving her cold.
He wore Roktan blue today, the Roktan crest embroidered onto the front of his jacket in bronze thread: a fist holding a gleaming star. A riff off the symbol of mortal man. His shirt beneath was neatly pressed, the laces unwoven and left to dangle down his chest where a belt was strapped horizontally. Knives and sharp things buckled to its front. The only non-obviously destructive element was a flask of worn use.
“He’s found me,” Aisling said. “Even here, Lir’s found me.”
Dagfin cringed at the sound of the fae king’s name on her lips, surveying the destruction. Vines, branches, the forest that slithered through Roktling, into his castle, the port inside Castle Roktling’s monolith, and onto his father’s ship, the Starling . All for her. Finding her private cabin and cradling her in the way only Lir’s power could, even despite distance.
And at the briefest of shudders from a remaining vine, Dagfin flicked his wrist. Like a sparrow, his throwing knife cut across the cabin, stabbing the forest’s thread till its sap bled atop the creaking floorboards.
“It won’t happen again.”
“It will always happen again. It will never stop, Fin. And I won’t run from him for the rest of my life.” Aisling gathered a fistful of ash. “Lir will stop at nothing till he gets what he wants. Running or hiding will do nothing but encourage a beast who enjoys a chase.”
“It’s a good thing then that I hunt such beasts.”
“You cannot win this fight, Fin. A fae king isn’t another Unseelie you can bring back on your shoulders.”
Dagfin scowled. “Give me a reason.”
Because there was an invisible cord knotting, snapping, angrily tearing at her core to return to the fae king. Because she and Lir would spiral into eternity before they never saw one another again. Because the Forge fated them.
But she could never say those words aloud.
Dagfin took her silence as answer enough, shaking his head in disbelief. “So that’s it? We’ve run this far only for you to surrender to him once more?”
“We continue as we have,” Aisling said. “Until I find what it is I want.”
Dagfin fell silent, electricity brewing in his stormy eyes, muddled and shadowed—the ghost of how she once remembered them.
“And what is it you want, Aisling?”
Aisling opened her mouth to reply, but no words left her lips. The answer evaded her, swarmed amid her mind in a hive of everything left unanswered. Who she was. Why she was. What she was.
But before Aisling could make sense of her thoughts, Fergus burst through the door. His expression slackened at the destruction left in Aisling’s wake, and the tension was still thick between his sister and the Roktan prince. But this was far from the first time they’d discovered Aisling lit with feral flame or cloaked in soot.
“By the Forge,” Fergus cursed, appraising the damage. Both fear and the faintest hint of disgust flickered across his expression.
“What is it, Fergus?” Dagfin snapped, tearing his eyes from Aisling. Fergus stammered. Nerves brought about by the shadows creeping at the edges of Dagfin’s posture. Indeed, everyone knew not to provoke the Faerak after there was mention of the fae king. Especially if it came from Aisling’s lips, and such a temper could only mean he’d heard Lir’s name all too recently.
“Starn’s ordered every crew member to gather on deck,” Fergus managed. “We’re set to sail come dawn.”
Dagfin nodded, clenching and unclenching his fists. A tell-tale sign of his efforts to stifle the frustration churning within.
“We’ll just be a moment.”
Fergus made as if to protest, thinking better of it and ushering himself out without another word.
Aisling dusted her skirts—a simple linen gown Gilrel would’ve scoffed at. Rags compared to the beetle-encrusted necklines, the spider-web bodices, the fitted skirts of puckering petals she’d donned in Annwyn.
Her conversation with Dagfin was fortunately interrupted and, if Aisling had a say in it, would be left that way. So, she rose from the destruction to follow Fergus from her cabin, caring little for her garment’s singed edges. After all, only deceit would bring Dagfin solace. And Aisling was more than capable of lying, but not to Dagfin.
“Here,” he said as she brushed past him, handing her a folded bundle of soft wool. Aisling carefully unfurled its fabric. It was a cloak of midnight blue. Thousands of silver stars scattered across its folds, delicately sewn into constellations Roktling’s seafarers sought for guidance when lost amid the sea. Fiacha’s Southern star, the Sunless Throne, the Goblet of Dreams, Odhran and the Weight of the Night. Odhran, forced to glare upon the sands of time until the last grain was spent, and all of evening’s kingdom would crush him flat.
The cloak twinkled in the pillar of soft morning light spilling from her cabin window.
“You needed a new one.”
The fact that she’d burned the last three went unsaid yet acknowledged by the flitting of their eyes to the ashen debris.
Aisling said not a word. “Thank you” felt insufficient, and anything else, any other emotion, seized her by the throat and turned her tongue to stone. So, she wrapped it around herself and lifted the hood instead, watching as it brushed the cabin floors around her boots.
Dagfin studied her closely, forcing Aisling to wonder what he saw. For before him stood what he’d sworn by Faerak law to hunt. His old childhood playmate, now the sort of creature he slaughtered.
“Go on without me,” she told Dagfin, unable to bear the silence any longer. “I’ll meet you on deck in a moment.”
He exhaled, running a hand through his tousle of hair. She knew he wanted to warn her of her brother’s temper, Starn’s loathing for being left waiting. But he said nothing instead. Either because he’d never convinced Aisling to do something she wasn’t already inclined to do, or because he’d grown weary from their travels. Exhaustion riddled the nuances of his appearance. The red around his eyes, the slackening of his shoulders when he and Aisling were alone, the tired dimness of his boyish smile.
At last, he nodded, vanishing out her cabin door without another word.
Aisling wasted not a moment.
If she took too long, one of her brothers would come looking for her, or worse, Starn himself would break down her door. So, she turned her back from the mirror on her vanity, removed her leather gloves, and flipped her palms face up, appraising them for the first time since she’d used her fires. She hoped that perhaps this time, the pain was no more than a figment of her imagination.
Bloodied and blistered, the agony mocked her. Her skin peeled like the skin of a snake, burned by her fires and devoured by the hot teeth of the draiocht .
Aisling allowed herself a brief sob. For the most persistent tears to flee before they forced the rest out. Then she inhaled, wiped her face with the backs of her hands, and slowly slipped the gloves back on. The tender wounds protested as though baiting her to scream from the tops of her lungs. Instead, she ground her jaw and wished for dust.
The draiocht laughed. “ Only monsters prefer to endure the night than concede to morning .”