20. Chapter 20
Chapter 20
Ard Tiarna Emrys of Breacadh an Lae, The Raven of the Dawn
“ Y ou need to get your shit together,” growled one of my chief co-conspirators, Prince Sorrow.
He was pacing the delicately carved and inlaid wooden floorboards of the infirmary of the temple. His smart, crisp, rigid riding doublet and breeches were speckled with blood, casting crimson across the otherwise starkly well put together Fae.
Sorrow had once been a messy boy like Daróg and I. Our shared childhood was a gilded manuscript filled with pages of us running through dense old forests, wallowing in mud, muck, and moss like we were no better than the beasts we hunted. The war had changed him, too, like it had changed me. It was not The Raven of the Dawn and The Prince of Sorrow that had run those game trails but The Wings of Hope and The Morning Star’s Glory that had fallen through thickets after a four eared hare. He had lost his left eye, and I had lost all hope.
We never spoke of the war. Neither of us were willing to return to the harrowing halls of memory we shared. Haunted by the choices we made and those forced upon us. Neither of us would ever be the same. Those game trails would be silent as the lips of the loved ones we had watched die, impotent to stop the charging horses of the war we had unleashed.
“Don’ t tell me what the fuck I need to do, Sorrow,” I snapped back, churlish and ill-humored with the weakness coursing through me.
“You spent yourself on a fucking daoire , Raven. Furthermore, you are costing me more fucking stores to heal you!” He slammed his fist into the solid wood of the table I was sat upon. “I entertained this foolishness when you brought her to the Bandrui the first time. I listened to your fucking drivel about potentially using the daoire to our advantage, but this”—he gestured to the state of me—“is ludicrous! You degrade our standing with the fucking guard for a daoire !”
“Call her a daoire once more, Sorrow.”
I kept my voice steady, measured. Every muscle coiled taut, wrapping around bones ready to leap to the fray despite the loss of blood and magic to fuel them.
He paused, staring at me as the change from simple friend and compatriot washed away to the true danger that lived under my skin. The truth that Sorrow and Daróg forgot in their mad quest to top one another was that there was a reason I had been called on as the General to the armies of Dawn and the vanguard of Daróg’s army.
There was a reason that, despite being younger than both Sorrow and Daróg, despite being from a court that even then had been less richly invested in magic, it was me who shook the knees of our opposition. I was a brute. At my deepest core, I loved the taste of blood and the feeling of gristle between my teeth.
Unlike them, I didn’t have to learn to be a war machine. I had to learn to be a citizen of polite society. I embraced every violent urge and let it fuel me. I held my passions for the blade and battle under control by splintering nails.
The costume was not the warrior, the costume was the courtier. Forgetting that was the peril of every enemy that had ever come against me. No one had questioned the accusation that I had slaughtered every living soul, man, woman, child and daora of the House of Magic. They had questioned why I had stopped.
Sorrow’s pale face blanched, taking on the blue reflection of his doublet .
“Gentlemen, I politely ask you that if you wish to tear each other to pieces that you do so outside of my temple. It was hard enough to scrub the blood from my storeroom when that boar was finished. I do not relish the idea of revisiting that pleasant treat.”
The mild voice of the Bandrui, a gentle autumn breeze whistling between us, reminded me to reign myself in before I ripped the dagger from my shoulder and carved my sigil across Sorrow’s soul.
“Apologies, Bandrui,” we both murmured, two recalcitrant boys reprimanded by their matron.
Sorrow returned to his pacing, rolling a lock of hair I was all too familiar with between his finger and thumb as he let his mind swallow him. This was Sorrow’s way, bouts of rage quickly snuffed by pensive obsessive thoughts. When those gave way to the madness, that was when Sorrow became something other than the tightly leashed and controlled creature the war had forged him into. I wished I could say that it was a glimpse at my old friend, but madness had never been a friend to me.
“Has the human at least started to work on the other humans in the warrens?” The Bandrui asked as she applied a faintly glowing poultice to my face. Sparking magic pulsed and throbbed against the wound Cricket had inflicted in her feral fury.
“I don’t honestly know. Every time she returns to the warrens, some fresh hell is visited upon her,” I answered honestly.
“I loaned you the fucking dragon’s horde of stable magic for a purpose, Raven. You convinced me that bringing a pretty little thing to distract him would pay off and be a worthy investment.” Sorrow’s pacing finally ceased, and he turned to me, taut with restraint as his milky-white eye and piercing arctic-blue eye scrutinized me. “I will have her value returned in kind.”
“Would you like to crawl up into the palace and keep that fuckwit from being himself? I would be happy to oblige you with a uniform and sword, Sorrow.”
He snorted his derision.
“That’s what I thought. This business is too dirty for your fingers to be sullied with.” I winced as my leather armor was slowly unbuckled by the skilled hands of the Bandrui, revealing the three puncture wounds where Cricket had found the spaces between buckled straps and sank her dagger into me in quick succession. “Have you made any work on getting him married?”
“None. He is determined to stay a bachelor for the rest of time.” Her soft breath felt like razors over the ragged wounds as she spread more sweet honey-smelling mud over the abused flesh. “I’m starting to think he moves pieces on a board I do not see.”
I grunted as I traced in my mind the intricate webs the three of us had woven over the last two hundred years. “Does he suspect you?”
“If he does, he’s not fool enough to reveal it.”
“And his oath to you?”
“As far as I can tell, still solid as stone. Why the gods honor it, knowing full well I was oath-sworn otherwise when I took his, I do not know. But so far, no ill has come from it. With the storm brewing at our doorstep, though, I am not fool enough to test the boundaries of their benevolence.”
“Or your friendship,” Sorrow bit in.
“Or my friendships,” the Bandrui agreed.
“None have returned since Airgetlám’s disappearance?”
We could use the help of our errant gods, if nothing else, but to curb the rampage of the usurper on their throne.
“Sadly, no.” Her nimble fingers were untying the laces at the side of my padded under tunic. “Though messages are sent pretty regularly still. Ailbhe even tempted your little human, Raven. As we all expected.”
A wry smirk pulled at my lips. Of course Ailbhe, god of rage, transformation, and new beginnings from destruction, had been interested in my Cricket. She was a force of nature in and of herself, as he had been before his ascension. I had barely survived the tempest of her emotions. Had it not been for her shit aim and the secret I was still too much of a coward to admit, I’d have bled out amidst the rubble of that damned bed that had kept her from me.
I could not keep living these moments in secret .
Sorrow was looking between the Bandrui and I. “No one else thinks it’s suspect?”
“What is there to suspect? She was in the company of a Bandrui, lighting their sacred offering candles and introducing herself to them. And she had just recovered from a devastating injury. What suspicions do you have, Sorrow? I would have been suspect had that old lech not spoken to her,” the Bandrui snorted.
I watched her handle Sorrow with ease and wondered again why she had never accepted ascension. Surely, she was old enough to have caught the eye of the gods she was so intimate with. Those she had not lain with she had supped with a thousand times over.
Sorrow sucked his teeth with the reproach. “She is a human.”
“She is. She is also a daoire, as you so delightfully wish to keep reminding us. And she is also young, even by human standards. The sky is also blue. What else shall we count among the obvious things?”
“She is a human .”
I watched with growing amusement as the two fenced back and forth, silently enjoying the distraction from the mending of my wounds.
“Do say it again, my Prince. I don’t think I heard your elitist culet trumpet’s proper accent. Do try again, your grace.”
Even when tearing someone to shreds, the Bandrui was a sight to behold. She grew more honeyed the more poison she poured upon another.
Sorrow sucked his teeth again and huffed, defeated by the Bandrui in wordplay. He never won. I don’t know why he kept trying.
“Hold still, Emrys. This will hurt,” she whispered against my ear as her hand wrapped around the dagger still lodged deep within me.
Sorrow and I both stilled. I wasn’t sure if he had heard her use my true name, but it mattered little when we had been oath-sworn as long as we three had.
I drew in a steadying breath, and she pulled with every bit of her significant strength. The dagger had lodged itself in the backside of my scapula, and I felt the bone dislocate with the force needed to release the blade from the prison of my flesh .
The world dissolved in sparks and black fireworks as the pain became too much for my body to tolerate, and I had no more strength left at my fingertips.