15. Chapter 15
Chapter 15
Ard Tiarna Emrys of Breacadh an Lae, The Raven of the Dawn
“ A gain,” I barked, spitting blood from a tooth knocked loose by the new guard’s pommel strike.
My pride said it was a lucky strike, while my ego said I had let him have it. I knew, deep down, under my unwillingness to present anything less than what was expected of me, that both were wrong. It had been carelessness. My mind was smothered by wafting grey tendrils of incense smoke, my heart wrapped beaten and bloody in a cheap wool blanket beneath stones. It should be laying languidly naked but for the caressing rays of a breaking dawn.
The punishment of training was not enough. The bands of my shield were biting into weeks of layered bruises. The vicious quake of the blunted practice swords ran up an arm, savaged by tightened muscles and a shoulder that had seen far too many lances. Every strike was agony, but it was nothing compared to what I wanted to be feeling.
I wanted to throw myself from the tower and fall into the brutal arms of the wild magic storm that was shredding three acres of the bastard’s favorite hunting grounds. I wanted to switch out the soldiers practice swords with real blades, rip off my gambeson, and let them come for me.
It was what I deserved.
“Snap the fuck out of it, Raven,” the guard hissed as he threw his sword and shield back into the pile.
He was tired of beating my ass.
Unfortunately, for him, I wasn’t tired of the punishment. I had watched her take strike after strike for three whole minutes before I could stop him. A single human man can do enough damage in three minutes but an Ard Rí of the Fae? When he is drunk on the power of his god? That she even survived it long enough for me to get her to the temple was shocking.
She was a primordial contradiction in my arms as I bolted through the palace. She felt like a home I had lost over two hundred years ago, like a knife to my throat. She had felt like the accumulation of my misdeeds yet lighter than a feather, too light. She had felt like all the best decisions I had or would ever make.
I had longed to touch her. Oh gods, had I longed to feel her skin on mine again. I ached for it like I had never for anything before. When I felt the pooling of my magic on my skin begin to drip into her at the Market, I had panicked. I hadn’t savored it. I hadn’t even thought about what it could mean or would mean until I had seated myself next to Ever Bright. It was only when she and her little crony had been so vocal about what they would do to her when they got her back to Deep Fire that I had determined to ensure that would not happen.
Watching her up on that block had been agony twisted into a corrupted braid with pleasure. The world had narrowed as the wisps danced around her, lighting her curvy figure from every angle. I imagined she was on stage to dance for me, that this was a private moment shared between lovers. Imagining it as a game between us, rolling in the others that were insistent upon including themselves, made it survivable. It made the possessive beast within me stop shifting and eased the urge to rip out everyone who dared to look at her throat. Even the silent war I had waged over her with Ever Bright had been rolled into my fantasy .
Anything to prevent me from remembering that the first creature in my entire life that had made my magic stir was, in fact, a human daoire.
It’s not that it was not done. In the old days, when the Fae were more present in Human, it was almost commonplace to take a human lover. There were whole coteries of Fae who found their human pets fashionable. In the end, though, they were never accepted as mates, as spouses.
The few times, a Fae had dared to try to elevate their status to be equal enough to mate with one, let alone marry one. Both the Fae and the human had been cut down by magic itself. The imbalance between a human spirit, inherently banal and incapable of harboring even a spark of magic and the spirit of a Fae, by its very nature, inherently a manifestation of magic itself made flesh, was too much. If magic itself didn’t dispose of them and their offspring, then Mabh would have been oath-bound to do so. Or her House of Magic.
Cricket might have been safe from the slaughtered House of Magic and their dead god, but that had only unshackled magic from its moors, and it ran rampant, unchecked and uncontrolled, across the land now. If it would have cut such a pairing down when it was bridled and tamed, what would it do when its primordial wild spirit had been left unattended to do as it pleased? Magic was mercurial on the best days, and it had become a savage tempest.
Sceach Gheal an Bith, the Sacred Hawthorn of the World, this very palace, had been built to withstand the direst of magical barrages, and its placidity was a boon most of us didn’t deserve. But even this sacred place turned den of debauchery under the rule of that bastard had its cracks. Magic within the palace walls was more stable than out in the countryside, but it was harder to touch, more distant in our veins than it was anywhere else.
If I were bold enough to give into my urges to lie with her, to feel the length of her body pressed naked against my own, would that distance from magic be enough to keep her safe from its ire?
The idea of it ravaging her because I allowed myself to give into the temptation of her flesh and break my oath to magic kept me dancing on the razor’s edge between madness and determination. I wanted her beneath me, whispering my true name with the passion of an anam cara more than I wanted air most days, but she was as far outside of my reach now as she had been when the concept of her existing was all I could cling to in the cold night.
“Sir.” The Grey Hound of Summer said with a stiff sniff and a tilt of his head toward something over my shoulder.
I spit the last of the pooling blood in my mouth into the dust of the bailey and turned my attention to the tiny animated doll that stood, dwarfed among the pikes that rested in their stands. She cut an out-of-place figure, dressed in a pale purple dress adorned in ruffles. Delicate icy blue lace and silver snowflake buttons lined the front of her crisp white pinafore, her dainty unnaturally white pointed ears capped in silver filagree. Among the dun, black and grassy livery of the guards gathered in exercise around her. She was a rose among weeds.
“Can I help you, little miss?” I asked, crouching to her level so that my gaze was even to her soft violet glass-like eyes.
Small fissures spidered across the porcelain of her features as she watched me do so.
“You can, indeed, Sir Raven.”
Her voice was like chipped porcelain broken by a careless child being swept up into a bin, yet it held an authoritative edge that seemed at odds with her tiny child’s body.
“Raven is fine—or Captain if you insist on formalities.” I chuckled. “Does your mistress wish to have a sword to play with? I could probably spare a woo—”
“My mistress doesn’t give a fuck about your toothpicks, Captain Raven. And I’ve not come on her bidding any ways. I’ve come on my own.” Her rounded arms crossed over a flat chest, and she glared at me with the judgment of a wizened old crone.
“I was unaware they even had the ability to think for themselves,” jabbed one of the guards behind me .
He was given a reproachful scowl for his troubles before I turned back to the doll. There was no reason for him to poke at the daoire, and his elitism was just as unnecessary.
Cricket had accused me of being uncaring toward the plight of the warrens, but I wasn’t. Dawn had kept daora like any other court, but our methods of acquiring them were different and considered soft.
They earned a wage. They had agency in most things. They could marry. Have lives if they so wished. Even the method by which we selected our daora differed from the other courts, as we only selected those who had only misery in their lives beyond Magh Meall. We abhorred the extinguishing of hope and joy as a sacrilege and did not allow it to be callously done within our walls. That extended to those who served us.
I could no longer afford to be so kind in the Ard Rí’s palace.
“If you please, madame, your purpose for distracting my guards?” I lofted my brows and pressed.
Her baleful violet gaze moved from the guard to my face and then to the splatter of my blood in the dirt.
“Beautiful, isn’t it, Captain? Does it remind you perhaps of an errand you have left unattended?”
I tilted my head, narrowing my eyes on her, as she toed the dusty globs with a black slipper.
Who was this daoire? I hadn’t seen her about the palace, and she seemed to have appeared to remind me of something I had forgotten.
“It does not. Have I forgotten to skin someone alive for your mistress, little doll?”
“Oh, no. Not my mistress. But perhaps some roses might be nice.”
Her words were weighted and heavy as she glared at me.
“Apologies, young lady, but I will not be giving roses to a little girl. I’m sure your mistress is lovely. I lament that I am vowed to another. Do tell your mistress that I shall send her a bouquet, but they will not be roses. Striped carnations, white heather, iris, and white poppies wrapped in fern will be her bouquet from me.” I rose, dismissing the little doll coming to interrupt my brooding with the crush of a young courtier .
Waves of heat blasted me as the fissures in her face cracked wide and throbbed with a volcanic heart beneath. I could see all the way down into the cavity of her porcelain exterior to a swirling black and red molten liquid that quivered with her rage.
“Do not dismiss me as some child, Raven of the Dawn. I said to you once I do not come for my mistress. You are as dense as the twigs you fling about. Think again on your arrogance and what it has already cost another and what you vowed to that other. Your debt has been noted.”
Before I could reel in my own shock at the shift in demeanor, the plates of her face had snapped together, and her cherubic countenance had split into an innocent doe’s smile. She curtsied deep with all the reverence due to the Ard Rí himself, executed with grace and poise, she turned and skipped away into the arched corridor from where she’d come.
“The old ones creep me the fuck out,” whispered the Grey Hound. “His Majesty did us all a great service when he put the old master craftsmen to the sword. Their creations are just . . . creepy.”
“Never known you to be limp tailed.” I cast him a wry grin as we both watched the ruffles disappear into the shadows that would lead her up to the inner courtyard of the residential quarters.
“Limp tailed? Come, dear Raven, show me to your quarters. I’ll show you how limp my tail truly is,” he barked with laughter and pushed my shoulder.
“Your sword hangs at your side already, Grey Hound. I’d hate to deprive your Lady of it’s substitute,” I volleyed back, snatching up the practice sword I had abandoned, waving at him to prepare for our next round together.
The small doll’s words kept flying around my head, though. What had I forgotten to do? Who had I forgotten to visit? What debt did I owe that I had not paid?
The rhythmic clash of wood against wood soothed the warsome spirit within me enough to allow my mind to drift back to Cricket and the way she had felt pressed against me .
I was obsessed with her. Obsessed with the way she sparkled in the light. Obsessed with the way her eyes followed me. Obsessed with the way she bit back whenever she had a moment.
I had been a soldier, even before the War of Thorns. That battle had only hardened me more. Martial combat was deep in my bones, and I had always longed for a partner who would wage war on me both with word and flesh. I suspected that Cricket would meet me dritto for reverso and push me back at every stage, and I’d let her. Seeing the flash of ire in her eyes had become my newest addiction.
“Fuck! The landlord!” I exclaimed as the Grey Hound performed a perfect posta di bicornio on me and forced me into the dirt on my ass.
“Whose landlord are we fucking?” he asked, bending to help me back up on my feet. “Been a while since I saw you at any brothel long enough to bed a landlord.”
“No, you cockheaded twat. Not fucking a landlord. The fucking landlord,” I grumbled.
“Captain, I think I might have hit you too hard. You’re not making any sense at all. Perhaps a little lie down in the temple? I’ll get the Bandrui to see if she can glue that brain of yours back together?”
“Oh, shut the fuck up, Grey Hound. I have elsewhere to be. Take command.”
It should have been harder to step through the mirror of her bedroom. I snorted my disdain for the shoddy workmanship of whomever had set the frail boundary on her mirror. Was it strange that a human with no connection to the Fae had even some means of protection on her portals? Not entirely. There were all manner of faiths in the human world that could mask energies and weave wards. Most humans, even the most benign of them, had some means of security in their homes from us. But my Cricket? She had what amounted to a wall made of tissue paper .
I gritted my teeth against the feel of the human realm across my skin. I hated this place. Even the air itself felt wrong, empty, lifeless, and void of magic. To a creature like me, this world was as inhospitable as the surface of the sun was to humans. I could only stand it for a short while, but I needed to ensure that whatever ties she had held here were seen to. She would not be returning to it. No matter what would transpire, I would not let her return here.
My last visit was cursory. But a few moments to peek in through the lens of her life and ensure that no threads of her previous life would be left dangling and bringing unwanted attention. Though Cricket believed us indiscriminate in our laws around slavery, there were still laws to be observed. Never take from the humans that which they will miss. It was a simple law that had over the eons been stretched around all manner of things from buttons to dresses to people to coinage.
I moved through the single room, with its simple bed on the floor and uncomfortable-looking bedding wadded up in the corner. Only a single pillow. If she had had a lover in this room, there would have been two. There were no decorations on the walls. No curtains on the window. No furniture aside from the bed, cords coming from the plug, and a pile of clothing in another corner.
I peeked into the open closet and found nothing but a discarded sack that looked like it might have contained groceries at one time.
Satisfied there was no evidence of a paramour, I moved from the lone room into the main living area. The desolation of this place crept into my body and twisted. The kitchen was dimly lit, the light over the sink flickering with age. The yellowing squat refrigerator whirred angrily. There were no pictures on it, like the few human homes that I had encountered before. No evidence of humanity at all. Just disrepair.
The only thing that seemed tended to was a lit-up tank that took up almost the entire back wall of one room. It looked like a habitat for some sort of creature, but whatever had once lived in it had long since fled, as the lid to the enclosure had been left off.
The television was pointed at the shambles of a couch, but there was no other evidence of humanity beyond that .
I spun on my heel as I took in the two and a half rooms of the home. This was where my Cricket had lived before she came to me. This was where she had slept at night. This was where she had eaten her meals.
It was awful.
There was no joy here. There was no love. There was nothing. Every piece of her life left in this room felt as if it had been holding its breath, waiting for the next stop on a journey.
The front door to the apartment had seven locks and a bar buried into the floor to keep it shut. If she had been welcoming anyone at all, it would have been a cold welcome.
There was nothing here but decay. It was hard to imagine the firebrand that I knew living here. I could not place her in any of the spaces she must have inhabited. I could not see her making a meal in the dusty kitchen. I could not imagine her coming through the door after a day at work. I could not see her showering in the cold, nearly empty bathroom. I couldn’t imagine anyone living in this place at all, except whatever had lived in the warm tank. That was the only thing in the entire apartment that looked like it had had any thought or investment of time put into it.
As I moved to stand before the tank, I wished whatever had been inside was still there. It would have been a nice gift to bring her back the creature she had shown so much love, but there was nothing. No trace of whatever animal had resided there.
My little bug was living up to being exactly what I said she was, a beautiful little liar.
A wry smirk pulled at my lips as I made my way back to the long mirror hanging on the back of the bathroom door and crawled through it.