34. Chapter 34
Chapter 34
T he two of us curled up in blankets next to the open hearth. We spoke long and deep into the hours. We laughed. We cried. I raged, and she held me.
She stitched the hole in my shoulder with molten gold from one of her coins. She stitched my heart together with her easy acceptance of all of me. She pulled me back from the ether piece by piece and set me into my own skin, even though this body had been divorced from the Sóna Mac Raith I knew so completely. Ever since I stood before that mirror in the Market and saw what I had become, I didn’t recognize myself, and the more I floated away from the recognition of my flesh, the more I floated from the person I had crafted wound by wound. I felt more myself now, in this strange body with these strange features, than I had felt in a long time. I felt reborn.
I had never trusted anyone to tell them the whole of me, to have the unbridled and unabridged access to the truth of who I was, but the more she told me of herself, the more I opened my pages for her. She told me of the House of Magic and her time there as its Lady. She told me of árus Contráth and the Court of Dusk’s great halls built of glittering gold and shimmering glass.
I told her of every foster parent I could remember. She wept and raged at the injustices I had lived and survived through. I wept for the life that I could have had as a child with two parents who loved me dearly.
I did not weep for the loss of my childhood as a Fae.
“You don’t adorn your ears?” she asked as we sipped tea.
It was our eighth pot, and I was starting to become curious about how she survived down here.
“Should I?”
She set her small earthen teacup down and watched me over dark-golden lashes. The cerulean of her eyes bore into me, and I imagined what it would have felt like as a teenager, lying to this woman, who was so keenly aware of even the slightest bit of avoidance. Only when it was clear that I was not going to give did she finally bend.
“It is a time-honored tradition, dear one. On the day you first touch magic and feel it pulse and respond to you, you would be gifted with your first cuff. Your father and I had already commissioned yours. We knew you would be an early bloomer. Oh, they were stunning. Woven silver and gold threads adorned with chips of night sky amethysts. Dark as midnight but flashed deepest purple in the sun. Tell me, Sóna, what color was your hair before Rictus altered you?”
I squirmed with the happy imagining. A mental image of the beautiful Fae next to a man who had black hair and flashing purple eyes gifting me with a sapphire box containing the cuffs specially crafted for me to place on the tips of my ears. It was uncomfortable to think of all the maybes. Of all the small potential ways my life would have been wholly different. What would it have been like to have a home? A family? A culture?
“It was dark red,” I grumbled. “And it’s all the same, really. I haven’t used a single bit of magic anyway. So, it’s not like I’ve earned them yet.”
She watched me stare into my tea as if the answers to cosmic questions that I dared not ask lay at the bottom of the murky drink.
“None at all?” She tilted her head and watched me as I shook my head. “Have you tried?”
“It’s not exactly like they have classes on how to cast fireballs in Human. So, no, I haven’t tried.”
A gentle finger tipped my chin up, and her eyes darted between mine. I felt her regard slip past my gaze. I felt it like silk moving through a river stream, gentle and graceful. It swam through my mind and past some barrier that existed between me and some other part of myself I didn’t quite understand. It encircled something deep within me that existed only in the ethereal and conceptual understanding of myself. It was not an uncomfortable feeling but one so wholly intimate and personal that I didn’t quite know how to react to it.
“You have within you a vast ocean of potential, my daughter.” The sheet of silk slid and glided within me. “An ocean that could drown you or bear you into legend. It is your choice. Accept yourself for who you are or don’t.”
“And who am I?”
The bitterness of that question twisted on my tongue.
It was a question I was so familiar with. It was a question I had been asking myself since I was old enough to think it. I had thought that the moment I met my family, found them and learned about them, I would understand the answer to it. But I was no closer here in this dank, open-air dungeon, sitting across from the woman who had given me life, than I was in the reception of the social services office, waiting for the next in a long line of disappointments.
I had never known who I was. I had never known where I belonged in the world. And I still didn’t.
The silk slid from within me and her thumb began lovingly stroking my cheek. “You are my daughter. You are the daughter of the great Túathal, God of Magic, balance, and weaving. You are Fae.”
“I am not Fae.”
“Deny it all you wish, beloved girl, but there is no denying what stirs in your blood. Even as I plumb the depths of your essence, I see clearer than you ever could. I know you, daughter, even if you do not yet have the courage to look yourself in the mirror.”
I hadn’t either. Not since the tent at the Night Market. It had been months since I had seen myself. The idea of looking into the mirror and seeing a stranger staring back at me made everything within me crawl from my bones to my skin. I couldn’t do it. I avoided all reflective surfaces as a rule of thumb, and when I could not avoid them entirely, I looked away. Anywhere except at the eyes that I knew were waiting for me, waiting to confront me with the truth I refused to accept.
And yet now, I was curious. With this new feeling of filling into my skin, would I see the same horror? Would I see mangled golden pearl skin? Would I see the nightmare of missing scars and tattoos? Would I see everything that was stolen from me, or would I see everything that I was now?
I longed to look into eyes I had barely taken notice of.
Just like my mother was doing.
“I’m not Fae. I will never be Fae.”
“And why is that?”
“They are awful. They are the worst kind of creatures. They treat people like pieces on a chess board. They treat humans like animals. None of them tell the truth ever, and they are all looking for the quickest opportunity to stab you in the back. I hate them. I hate all of them.”
My reasoning felt flimsy, but I was grasping at damp tissues in a quenching rainstorm, trying to hold on to it.
“All of them?” she parroted back at me, amusement turning up her soft lips. “Oh, dear one, lie to yourself all you wish, but there are more than a handful of Fae that you most certainly do not hate.”
“You two don’t count. She’s a priestess, and you’re . . . Well, you’re my mother.”
“Just us?” The amusement pulled deeper at the corners of her lips. Was she talking about The Raven? Brittle Spear? I did hate him, both of them. Didn’t I? She didn’t give me time to respond, merely pressed on. “You can hate them all you wish, Sóna, but that will not change who you are. You may not have been raised Fae, but the blood of Fae has always run through you. It has always been Fae, and on the day, you return to magic, you will be Fae.”
“I was raised human.”
“You were,” she agreed, topping off my tea. “And you will always be human as well. You are both.”
“How can I be both? ”
Her eyes flicked up and down me. “Are you not breathing? You sit before me, a Fae raised as human. A human who was born to Fae gods.”
Silken hands reached across the blanket we sat on and gripped mine. “You judge Fae by human standards as Fae judge humans by Fae standards. Fae will never be humans. Humans will never be Fae. You can never and will never be one or the other. You are both. You are neither. You are the sum of all your parts, your parts are not the sum of you. But dear one, know this: the Fae will never be soft. They will never be like humans. There is nothing in their culture that is human. There is nothing in their spirits that is human. They are something else. Stop looking at them as humans and start looking at them as Fae. You are one of them. You should feel that in your soul by now. Embrace both. Embrace the soft empathy and community that is inherent to human and embrace the passion and freedom that is Fae. You have it in you to melt them together and forge a new kind of world around you, my daughter.”
I watched her for a long while as I turned her words over in my mind. She was right.
My mind turned to The Raven. I expected him to act like a human man. I judged him against the men I knew in Human and found him wanting and reviled him for his actions because they would be repulsive in Human.
But here? In Magh Meall? Were they repulsive? Or were they how one survived? Did I love and cherish the Bandrui because she acted as a Fae? Or because she acted as a human? If I judged her as a Fae, would I revile her? Or did I need to judge either of them against any specific litmus? Could I not embrace them for the truth of who they are?
Could I not embrace myself for the truth of who I am?
I nodded to her, and the sunlight that dawned in her face warmed me to my core as she gathered me into her arms and brought me into her lap. Even as a grown woman, even as an unnaturally larger version of myself, Airgetlám was taller and longer than me, and it soothed some deep need within me to feel like a child embraced as the delicate creature it was .
“I have more favors I must ask of you, dear girl,” she whispered as she stroked my hair. “It is unfair of me to ask, but the time grows near, and I can feel it humming in the air how dire it will become soon.”
“Ask me what?”
“You are like your father in more ways than one, dear Sóna mine. He was the balance to magic. He held it in the palm of his hand and kept this realm from tearing itself apart. With him gone, the threads are starting to unweave themselves. The loom has been shattered and must be put to right. Will you do this for me, my daughter? Will you bring balance back to the magic of this place?” Her arms tightened around me.
“I don’t know the first fucking thing about magic! How the fuck would I even begin to know how to balance it?”
“You may not know now, but you will. When the time comes, you will know what to do and how to accomplish it. It is not for me to know how this must be done. Magic keeps many secrets, and though it whispers the answers to me on many things, this is not one of them. This was not and would never be knowledge that was meant for me. It is meant for you, your father’s heir.”
“So, you want me to promise that at some indeterminate time in the future when I manage to figure out how to balance an invisible force that I have no knowledge of at all, that I do it?”
The doubt and incredulity in my voice was apparent.
“Yes.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. That sounds like a plan that will go totally fine. Doesn’t sound that complicated at all. I’ll just pop onto Google and search up how to balance magic in the Fae realm. Yeah, I’m sure there are thousands of hits on that one.”
She frowned and moved me to look into my eyes again. “I dislike this sarcasm, Sóna Mac Raith. Tell me true. Will you do it, or no?”
“Sarcasm aside, I have no clue how to do that. I have no clue if I will ever know how to do that.”
“If magic does not tell you how, then you never will, and you cannot break your oath. It is a simple thing, Sóna. I am not seeking to trick you.”
I watched her. The discomfort with making promises or deals to Fae was plain on my face. I knew it was by the reflection in her eyes. I wanted to trust her, though. I needed to trust her. I had longed for a mother all my life, and I would be a good girl and not disappoint the one who was genuinely my mother. Especially with such a nebulous request.
I gave her a curt nod. “Yes. I’ll do it. I don’t know when or how, but if the opportunity presents itself, I swear I will do it.”
A sigh of profound relief exited her and dusted across the tips of my pointed ears as she squeezed me hard enough to break my bones.
“I have two more oaths I would take from you, Sóna. Will you hear me on them?”
I squirmed but nodded. Discomfort rolled through me, prickling my skin.
“You must free the Fae from Daróg and set the realm back to its proper order. He has taken what was never supposed to belong to him. By sitting his backside upon that throne, he has upended the natural order of this realm, and I can feel it writhing and bucking under his yoke. Setting magic to balance is only one piece of it. If you set magic to balance, he will have more power. You must remove him and avenge your house, your family. Swear it.”
“So, his true name is Daróg?” A sly grin pulled at the corners of my mouth. “That will be useful if I ever figure out how to wield magic like a Fae.”
Airgetlám chuckled. “Already thinking like a Fae.”
I smiled up at her. “This one is an easy answer. Yes. I swear it. He deserves it if nothing else but also because he’s a piece of shit.”
“Oh, sweet one, you have barely even scratched a nail along the film of his misdeeds. Look deeper and know him for what a vile, twisted creature he truly is.”
“And the one who put you here? Who did this to you? I’ll kill them, too.”
“I do not know, dear heart. I only know that the room went dark, and I smelled roses. I was already delirious from the birthing bed. It could have been roses or iris or jasmine. I smelled flowers, and when I woke again, I was here. This place had been built ages ago to hold a mad god. I thought it forgotten and rotted away, but here we are.”
I frowned and added that to my mental list of things to figure out. “I’ll find them, too, and they will pay for what they did.”
Her embrace tightened again, longer this time, as if she didn’t want to let go, and the air turned morose and still as the grave.
“The last thing I must ask of you, my dear daughter, is not so easy.” She was whispering, sadness the depths of which I had never heard before crept into the dulcet tones of her voice. “I must ask you to return me to magic.”
“Isn’t that what Fae call dying?” I snapped and turned in her embrace, my eyes frantically darting across her face, trying to figure out some alternative meaning.
“It is.” She pushed my hair from my face as she watched me. “I have languished in this cell for ages. I have mourned your father and been kept from him all this time, and every moment I am parted from him is a thousand daggers piercing me. You will understand when you claim rights to your own anam cara, but a life without them is a half-life. It is lived on borrowed breaths drawn into lungs full of shards of glass. I endured it because I knew, one day, you would find me, and I persevered so that I could once again hold you. But I must return to his arms.”
“You . . . you want me to kill you?”
Hysteria was scratching at the edges of my voice. Denial, hot and vicious, swam within me. No! I just found her. I just got her back. I just had it, what I had wanted my whole life. I had needed and wanted her, and now she wanted to leave me, too? Old wounds, sutured closed with kindness and care, ripped themselves wide open and bled their bitterness all over me.
“Yes. I cannot do it myself. If I tried to stab myself, magic would break my hands. If I tried to fling myself from the edge of the platform, magic would hold me aloft and set me back in my cage. I cannot escape. I cannot leave. Only by someone else’s hand can I flee this place.”
“So, I’ll pull up the iron runes and show you the way out. ”
“If it were that simple, dear heart, I would have asked that of you.”
“I . . . I don’t understand.”
Tears scorched the edges of my lashes.
“I made a deal with magic on the night of your birth. I knew what was coming. I knew that the House of Magic would fall. I have told you this. I sent you away. I kept your true name and bound it to the stones of the House of Magic, and I took the blood of my womb and the blood of your birth cord and bound my pact with magic in it. I would accept whatever came next for me, whatever horror would be visited upon me, without struggle. And in exchange for my submission, magic would bring you back to me when the time was right. And when you are ready, magic will allow you to claim your birthright. Only the dead can free me, and no ghosts walk these halls. Magic accepted this oath of sacrifice from me. It will not allow me to break my oath to it. It must be by your hand, sweet girl. You must free me.”
Her voice was soft, a tear on the wind between us.
“I . . . But I just met you.”
All my childhood dreams of a loving family, of my mother’s arms, what it would feel like to be loved and cherished by someone were crumbling like dry sandcastles in my hands.
“I know, beloved girl. The cruelty of this is not lost on me.”
“I . . . I can’t kill you.”
The weakness in my voice would have, at one time, been an anathema to me, but I couldn’t hold it back. I felt like Icarus, wax burning my skin as I plummeted to the rocks below.
“You must, Sóna. Claim your birthright from me. So that you may claim your father’s legacy. Let me go to him. Release me to my beloved, please, daughter. ”
A fat river of tears streamed down my filthy face, cutting pale gouges into the dirt and grime that must have coated my skin. I couldn’t do this. The thought of it shattered every emotion within me and broke me in half against the weight of it.
She gathered me into her arms and held me, whispering soft assurances as I sobbed into her shoulder.
I broke apart at the seams. I wept into the arms of the mother I had longed for my entire life. I wept into the arms of the one thing I had ached for my entire existence who was about to be ripped away from me. I wept for the broken dreams of the little girl who simply wanted to be loved and cared for. I wept for the woman who had grown up without a mother to guide her and had watched her friends as they struggled through their own relationships with their mothers and asked herself, “What would it be like to be able to fight with my mom?” I wept for the woman who would walk out of this dungeon with the blood of her mother on her hands and would never be the same. I wept for the woman who would walk back into the cold world with not a single creature who cared about her and not even the faint hope that, one day, she would find the family that she had always longed for.
Every hope and dream I had ever had, all of them culminated into the body of the woman I was clinging to who had asked me to do the one thing for her, a goddess, that she could not. And I would walk away from this without her. I would walk away with less than I had walked in here with. Not even the scar over the wound in my heart would be left to me. She had torn it open wide and wriggled herself into the hole in my heart, and now, I would bleed out all over the walls as I did my funerary march back to The Raven’s cell.
I cried for hours in her arms. I tried to bargain with her. I tried to convince her of the madness of this. I tried to talk my way out of it, tried to find some other solution. I tried everything, and each time, she would patiently listen and stroke my hair, reminding me of the finality of magic. I cried until there were no tears left within me, and all I felt was a cold numbness in the place where I had dared to hope for something new.
“I’m sorry, sweetling.” She pressed into my scalp with a kiss. “Fae never die, truly. Our essence is cast back into the Well of Magic, and we are in all things that draw from it. I will always be with you. As your father is with you.”
I nodded, accepting that I would do this for her. Accepting that I would give her the one thing she could not take. I didn’t want to. I wanted to hold her to me and keep her as my own secret down here in the darkness, visiting her whenever I could. But she was not a pet, and I was not a cruel person at my core. That was something I would have to learn from the Fae around me.
The acceptance of it was a cold, detached acceptance, one that I pushed far away from myself. It needed to be done. I could cry, could scream, could rage, but the only way around it was through it.
I would sharpen myself to be the deadly knife that would slip between their ribs and rob them of everything they had taken from me.
“I’ll do it.”
My voice was weak, hoarse, and as dry as the tears that had fled me.
“There is an iron dagger buried in the stonework of the hallway. I don’t know who put it there or when, but I have known it was there, out of reach for decades. I feel it slicing at the magic that pulses around it. Take it from the stone. Bring it to me and bury it in my heart.”
“Iron bites. Iron kills,” I murmured, devoid of any emotion, too numb, too distant to think or feel anything other than what I was told to do.
If I did as I was told, if I performed as I was meant to, then I could shield myself from the horror of this moment. I could keep myself from the worst of what was to come.
“Yes, dear one, iron cleaves magic in two, and all denizens of Magh Meall are born of the same Well of Magic.”
Her voice floated somewhere above me.
The dagger was easy to find. In truth, had I not been watching the candlelight as I came down the passage, I would have seen it, covered only by a bit of rubble and a thick layer of dust.
Goose watched me, his great head tracking me with concern and confusion playing on his smoky face as I passed him and returned to the circle with Airgetlám.
Tears had begun to form in her eyes, glittering like the coins she pulled from the air as they skirted down her cheeks and spattered against her fine robes. We knelt next to each other as I stared at the dagger, and she untied the outer layer of her robe to reveal her chest.
Her finger tipped my head up, and we watched each other, memorizing our faces. I wished I wore my own so that she could go to my father with the memory of the true face that I had. It wasn’t truly my face, though, was it? My Aunt Cleena had crafted it, just as Rictus had crafted the one I wore now.
Who was I? Who was I really? What did I look like? I realized with a startling clarity that I truly did not know. I didn’t know my own name. I didn’t know what I looked like. I didn’t have an identity of my own. I had only a collection of names and faces that someone else had decided I should have. None of them were truly mine. I could own none of the names. I could own none of the faces. None of them belonged to me.
But I would have my name back. I would have my face back. I would reclaim my identity, and I would know who and what I was and who and what I wanted to make of myself.
I smiled softly to her, finding pieces of her face I would reclaim. Parts of this woman I had just come to know but had healed parts of my heart that I hadn’t even known still existed. I would find a way to reclaim the pieces of her that she had seeded in me and wear them with pride.
“Know that you were loved, Sóna Mac Raith. From the moment your father and I met, we saw you swirling in the well for us, and our hearts were bursting with love and joy at having you as our daughter. We will always be proud of you. Even when you think we would not be. We will be. We will always love you, even when you think that you could not be loveable. And we will always, forever, hold you as the greatest joy that has ever come into our lives. We will watch you from the Well of Magic. We will forever love you. Always, Sóna Mac Raith. Always.” She leaned forward, her hand covering the wrist that held the dagger, as we both let the aching tears spill again.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything. I knew I should say something. I knew I should tell her I loved her, too, but I couldn’t. Any words I would say would make this moment too real. And I wished to be far away from it. Any words I said would make it more real, and if I said nothing, I could convince myself this was all a terrible nightmare, that I had died in the other room with the spider gnawing on my legs.
I set the tip of the dagger over her breast. I was trembling. The tip of the knife scratching at her soft skin. I held it there forever. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t push forward.
“I love you, Cricket,” she whispered.
My heart shattered into shards and dust, and I leaned forward, letting the sharp blade of the knife slip through her body. There was no screaming, no thrashing, no fight in her at all. Only a simple welcoming of it into her body and the slight spatter of her blood across my face. I expected her to fight it like Daróg had fought the knife of his would-be assassin. Yet she merely held me to her as she lay down with the blade sticking perversely from her chest.
“Thank you,” she whispered as her last words.
I sat back on my heels and stared at her. I was, once again, beyond tears.
Goose began howling, long, deep, sorrowful sounds that clawed at the very existence of everything around us. The walls of the prison rumbled with the power of his dirge, and somewhere within the cave some sort of creature or many creatures joined Goose in his keening.
The ghost lights pulsed with him, dancing above his muzzle.
It felt fitting that someone would mourn her passing when I could not.
I buried my face into my hands and screamed. Repeatedly. I could not cry any more, but I could scream. I could howl as loud as Goose. I opened that book she had been the first to thumb through cover to cover and burned it. I tore my voice over the primal agony within myself as dark-green shards began forming around her body. I wailed into the stone as it grew from her feet up and covered her in shimmering broomstick shards.
We were a chorus of misery. And it seemed to never end. I burned the last pieces of me on the bonfire and let the ashes dance on the notes of our collective threnody. I let the void of it left within this gilded skin fill up with all the parts of me that survived the crucible and forged it into steel.
Until the last bit of her beautiful hair was covered by the shards of her crystalline coffin, we lamented in a rising and falling song. The final note of the hollow-shared misery was the sound of me snapping a shard of the dark-green and blue slivered crystal off.
“I don’t know how this works, but listen up, magic.” I was heaving with the rage and anguish pumping through me as I stared down at the way the ghost lights danced over the sarcophagus. I traced a finger over the wavering visage of her in her crystalline coffin. The world seemed to hold still, strain its ears, and pause to listen to me. “Whomever did this. Whomever is responsible for tearing my family apart, I swear to you I will have my vengeance or die trying. No matter where they hide. No matter what power they hold. I will rip them down to the roots and tear their magic from this world, once and for all. Never again will they stain magic with their name.”
Within me, a fire was kindled. Just the smallest of flames, but even as I rose from her side, I knew that small flame would become a mighty inferno. And I intended to feed off it and let it consume me. I intended to burn everything to the fucking ground for what was stolen from me. For what I had endured simply to survive.
Magh Meall would answer for its crimes against me, and I would collect my pound of flesh from every fucking Fae that had done this to me. No matter who they were.