The Savage Queen (The Aisling Trilogy #2)

Chapter X

CHAPTER X

AISLING

In the mountains of Fjallnorr, death was frostbitten, relentless, and inevitable.

Cloaked by webs of silver frost, this Unseelie tore through the earth and its carpet of leaves.

It stood on two creaking legs, wrapped in ivory roots and thorns. A decaying corpse still clad in forge-welded armor. Its grave possessed by the forest of ice in which it lay.

Aisling stared it down, balling her hands into fists at her sides.

It tilted its skull to the side, curious, before dissolving into frenzied laughter once more. Worms, beetles, and dirt skittered from its eye sockets as it appraised their party.

“ Fear gorta ,” Sigewulf exhaled, staggering back.

Aisling silently repeated its name, but she already knew its kind.

Unseelie. “ Dealing with the Unseelie is complex. They’re not a single race. They’re many with various lords, chiefs, matriarchs, and leaders. Ranging from pure beast to conscious, intelligent creatures. All chaotic, archaic, opposed to order and governed solely by hunger and need .” Lir taught her this what felt like a lifetime ago. And since then, Aisling had become familiar with multiple breeds of Unseelie. Some tales claiming even Aisling herself was Unseelie.

Aisling’s pulse raced but she swallowed her fear and reached for her draiocht .

The fear gorta unlatched an obsidian greataxe from its back. Ice creeping down the weapon as its rotten bones gripped the haft. It spun the blade between its crimson stained fingers, narrowing its eyes on Aisling.

“ Skalla ,” it wheezed. Aisling lost her breath, staggering back. But then its attention shifted to Dagfin and stayed.

An arrow shot across the expanse.

The reed stuck into the fear gorta’s head, juddering still from the impact. But the creature was unfazed, turning to find Annind, poised with a bow in hand.

The Unseelie reeled back his arm before releasing his greataxe. It flew, winding toward Annind. The blade cut across Annind’s chest despite his attempts to dodge the onslaught, dying the snow beneath him red while he rolled in the dirt.

“Annind!” Iarbonel shouted.

The axe continued on, circling their camp like death’s raven. Slicing the Roktan crew members one by one, Fjallnorrians, leaving their bodies dismembered in its wake before returning to its master like a hound on a chain.

Aisling ground her teeth, ignoring her earlier concerns and unleashing wicked wildfire at the fiend. Concentrating all her power on the demon and not their camp nor on one another. Fortunately, the fire found its target, igniting the skeleton like a torch in a dungeon of trees. The Unseelie cringed, bracing itself against the heat, devouring its ancient skeleton spark by spark.

Killian unloaded his quiver of bolts on the fear gorta, he and Aisling watching with horror as the fear gorta ripped them from its body and extinguished Aisling’s flames. Frost splintering from its mouth, its sockets bleeding ice and smothering every lick of fire till it trudged forward in smoke and ice. But it wasn’t the cold that snuffed Aisling’s fire: it was something that tasted like magic. Like plums and shadows and bubbling cauldrons. Some sorcery this Unseelie wielded to dampen Aisling’s might or that of any other for that matter.

It towered over Aisling, glaring down at her with an unholy grin. Aisling hesitated, too afraid to feel the pain of her burnt and blistered palms dripping on the snow below her boots.

Dagfin lunged for her, pushing her out of the fear gorta’s path. It dove for the earth, pinning Sigewulf standing behind Aisling instead.

It crouched atop the chieftain, maw opened wide as it delved into his flesh and tore him apart piece by piece. The sound of tearing skin horrific enough to make Aisling’s ears bleed.

The mighty chieftain of Fjallnorr felled by a single Unseelie.

A second passed and his life was gone.

Aisling’s stomach churned, nausea inspired by sheer horror.

After months in the feywilds with Lir and his knights, she’d not garnered an understanding of what it meant to be mortal in the woods. To be vulnerable. A candle-lit flame snuffed without a passing thought. The wilderness was no place for man. Even the mightiest among them.

But there was no time to dwell on his death lest more be dealt. Aisling called upon the draiocht again, spilling violet across the beast. At last, it turned from its meal, hunched and cackling, fixing its absent gaze on Aisling. Winter’s glass spider-webbed over her flames with ease. Powerful, arcane magic, resisting Aisling’s own.

Aisling hissed; her draiocht snuffed by another.

It lifted its greataxe from the ground, readying it to strike as four more men swung their blades. Iron bouncing off its impenetrable bones. The clinking of its metal a death decree to all who stood before it. For indeed, it swiped at them with ease, harvesting their lives for its forest of ice.

At last, it found Dagfin amidst the chaos, picking up its feet to race toward him.

Why Dagfin ? Aisling thought to herself, starting toward the Roktan prince. But she wasn’t quick enough. The fear gorta moved like a shadow, here one moment and gone the next, whipping through the camp with unmatched speed.

Aisling braced herself for Dagfin and the Unseelie’s collision, but it never came.

Instead, Aisling beheld in horror as Dagfin not only punched through the demon’s chest but pulled out its heart. A rotted, slimy, black coal tangled in maggots, beetles, and thorns.

The fiend exhaled one last breath. Its body shriveling to a pile of ash atop the snow. Bones, age-old, prepared to return to the soil from whence they came.

Dagfin watched as the ashen heart slipped through his fingers like the sands of time. Joining its grave beneath the ice for the final time.

They ripped through the pines, scraping their faces on blade birches, howling aspens, and poison pines, all clawing for Aisling as they fled. Popping roots from the earth to caress their Fjallnorrian mares, stolen from dead men.

“We’ll never survive this,” Fergus said, voice veiled by the frozen waterfall outside the cave. A shallow hollow of refuge from the winter winds, the Unseelie, and the forest. Their mares restlessly snorting just inside the cave’s threshold.

“It’s only the beginning,” Aisling said, and all knew it to be truth. The Unseelie wouldn’t stop for common man, much less for the sons of the fire hand, for Aisling, and for some reason, Dagfin. The Unseelie would stalk their mortal party, hunt them, and in the same breath a beast was vanquished, another would rise.

Aisling’s brothers, even Dagfin and Killian, weren’t accustomed to voyages such as this. And in many ways, neither was Aisling. She bore experience traversing the wilds, yet then, she hadn’t run from the demons, rather hunted them alongside Lir. Her place in the food chain lowered several ranks without him. Made vulnerable to beasts of prey. At least, Aisling thought to herself, for now.

“We’ll find safe haven here for the next several days,” Starn said, glaring out at the forest lying in wait. Anxiously anticipating their return to its embrace. “We’ll regain our energy.”

“There’s no time,” Aisling interjected, binding her burnt hands with strips of her wool dress. Dagfin watching every loop of fabric as she worked. Bringing his flask to his lips as though it offered mortal absolution.

Iarbonel shook his head. “Ash, we can only move so quickly and survive. Annind can scarcely ride a horse in his condition.”

Annind reclined against the cave wall, his fear gorta wounds bound by linen and leather. The bleeding was, at last, trickling to a stop. Still, Annind was pale and soaked in sweat, a wisp of his usual self.

“I’ve done it before,” Aisling said.

“With the Aos Sí,” Killian conjectured, crossing his arms and leaning against the cave wall. “We aren’t like the Aos Sí, faerie. The Unseelie don’t cower at our feet, the wilderness doesn’t mind us, and our wounds don’t heal by the light of tomorrow.”

All eyes drifted to Aisling’s hands, burned again and again by her fires. Already healing as all fae healed.

“Do you believe the Sidhe will slow their pace for us? That the other mortal sovereigns—those still alive and not tending to their destroyed kingdoms—will wait for us?” They each stared at her, mortal features either dancing in shadow or gilded by firelight.

She’d seen how effortlessly the chieftain of Fjallnorr had been slaughtered. How humankind was outmatched in a race against everything Other, a competition where a loss was met with death. Death, who nipped at their human heels. And if the same happened to Dagfin—if Dagfin, as strong as he was with his Faerak Ocras, was snuffed as swiftly and abruptly as Sigewulf…Aisling burned the end of her thought. “We will lose this race if we don’t continue on.”

Starn spoke not a word, seething silently as he kept his eyes pinned on woodland shadows.

“What does it matter to you?” Fergus countered, expression bent with frustration. “You care not for the curse breaker. Your ends are yours alone and us your pawns.”

Aisling closed her eyes, doing her best to quell her most base urges, come awake after months with the fae king now impossible to put back to sleep.

“You speak to me of pawns ?” she said, meeting Fergus’s eyes. Bloodstained fingers twitching.

Iarbonel stood from where he sat.

“Enough,” Iarbonel said. “Enough arguing. We may not survive this regardless, but we seal our death if we cannot keep from biting at one another’s throats.”

They each fell silent, weighing Iarbonel’s words. So, Aisling used this as her excuse, taking her leave to breathe outside the cave. Away from Killian’s iron, left by the fire to smoke the cave in its putrid stench.

Starn eyed her every step, ensuring she knew she was being surveyed.

Aisling climbed up the mouth of the cave and sat atop it, avoiding the ice and nestling herself amidst the frigid stone. A reprieve from what simmered beneath her flesh and, at times, drove her mad.

She rested her head, quietly listening to the moaning of mating insects, the rustling of trees, the songs of star-filled skies, or the cracking of ice in the wind. A melody Aisling had craved over the last several months, her thirst for it, at last, slaked. Allowing herself a moment to indulge in the feywild’s savage embrace.

“You never did fear anything,” Dagfin said, startling her. “Even when you should’ve. So, I’m not certain why it still surprises me you choose to taunt danger and bait yourself to the wilds. You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

“You speak as though you don’t understand what it means to be imprisoned.” He sat beside her, shoulder to shoulder. “To live a life sheltered and gray, only to taste magic and find anything else suddenly insufficient.”

Aisling didn’t care to glance at Dagfin for fear her heart would splinter at what she found. Every glance they shared pricked her lips and twisted her heart.

“I was never kept in the dark,” he said. “Never lied to, and never traded.”

Aisling smiled bitterly. “Perhaps, but you’ve always been caged by the Roktan crown and the legacy it implies.”

He shifted then, watching her in the pale light of the moon.

“It’s not mine to take.”

“If your brother could’ve chosen one person to take his place, it would’ve been you. Feradach knows this, I know this. You need not feel guilty for taking what is rightfully yours.”

He swallowed, glaring up at the constellations above, “I wish it was as easy for me as it is for you. As children you followed shadows, endured nights put to bed without dinner, and gritted your teeth through the lashings you knew would come. Doing as you liked regardless. And now, you set the world on your heels.”

“You say it as though it’s a virtue. My impulses, my rebellion is more vice. More need,” she corrected. “Lest my soul collapse like a dying fire.”

Dagfin ground his teeth. “You speak of survival at the cost of embracing this wildness inside you, whatever it is that makes you like them , but all I see are hands burned again and again, a body thinning, anger bounding from within. There is power in you, Aisling. As children I saw it in your spirit and now it’s taken a more literal form. But it isn’t wise to let it unravel, lest you find yourself plunging toward your own destruction, falling too fast to stop.”

Aisling crossed her arms, allowing the wind to brush her cheeks. The forest coaxing her calm.

So Dagfin knew her wounds were a product of summoning the draiocht . It was a relief to no longer hide it from him. To no longer endure the pain, endure the fear of whatever was happening to her, but to also no longer bear the burden of hiding it from the Roktan prince.

“Is it self-control you boast in the daylight, when by shadow you relish in your own form of power?”

Dagfin did a double take, staring at Aisling despite the dark.

“What do you?—”

“I know about the Ocras. Killian told me some and I connected the rest.”

Dagfin focused on the distance, still as a hunter.

“You’re addicted to it, aren’t you?” Aisling continued. “That’s how you healed from Killian’s runes so quickly. How you ripped the fear gorta’s heart from his chest. You start and you cannot stop. Why, the flask is perpetually at your lips. Why is that?”

Dagfin turned his head, unable to look her in the eyes.

“Because you crave it as much as I do. Power gives us some semblance of control, Dagfin. And without control we become controlled by another. Someone brave and ruthless enough to take what’s theirs. So, it isn’t virtue, Dagfin. It’s need. As much my own as yours.”

He shut his eyes, leaning his head against the rock. Aisling wasn’t certain if he didn’t know what to say or didn’t care to say anything at all. Only that he never spoke again, taking her hand and lacing his fingers through Aisling’s before kissing her cheek. As soft as a coastal breeze, laced with the roar of crashing waves beyond. Aisling’s cheeks bled crimson. She wasn’t certain what to think of it. But before she could decide, he fell asleep by her side.

Now, Aisling was alone with the wilderness. Hour by hour, waiting, listening, at long last speaking to the forest as it’d longed to speak with her. Finding in herself the voice Lir had coaxed to life.