Chapter 43
Ash
The clearing stinks of ozone and copper with a tinge of the flowery sweetness of death that lingers at the back of your mouth.
My guys are close. I can feel them in a visceral way that pulses just under my flesh.
The goddesses are still cleaning up. Badb’s laughter carries through the trees. Macha’s silence is louder than that.
I can’t look at any of them.
The man on the ground isn’t a man anymore. The thorns did their work with the patience I asked of them.
It’s the lack of feeling that has me frozen. I feel nothing.
I keep waiting for it. Some crack. Some flood. Fucking something that would allow me to grieve this man.
Except all I feel is disdain. All I feel when I see him lying on the ground is all the thousands of little cuts he enforced of me over the years.
The moments he made me feel small while looking at me in the face and telling me how well I did. The paradox nearly fucking mentally destroyed me.
Until now.
The wind catches the edges of him. Dry skin flaking away from bone the way dead leaves let go of branches. The thorns accelerate what the poison started, breaking him down into something the earth can use.
“Ashes to ashes.” The words leave me before I mean them to. Quiet enough that only the dead man hears them, and he’s past hearing. “Dust to dust.”
The soil beneath my bare feet hums and groans. Almost wanting to reject the offering. It could if it wanted to but see, the soil is hungry, starved even.
So, it accepts his remains the way a furnace accepts fuel.
It doesn’t forgive. It just consumes.
The last of him scatters. Nothing left. No grave marker. No dog tags. No folded flag.
Just a patch of soil that’s slightly darker than the rest.
I stare at it.
Behind me, Orion sits down.
He’s just there. Silent and unmoving in only the way he can be. Well, not completely silent. He doesn’t say a word. But I hear his breath, I feel his presence.
Except, I don’t look at him. And I really want to pretend that’s fine. Even if it isn’t.
“Ashlynne.”
The voice doesn’t come from a direction. It comes from the ground. Up through my bare feet, through the bones of my legs, only to vibrate through the rest of my body like a tuning fork.
I blink. The world reassembles itself in pieces. Purple twilight still streaking the sky. Smoke threading through barren trees. The wet iron smell of a battlefield that’s gone quiet in the specific way battlefields do when the killing is done and the dying hasn’t started yet.
And Dagda. Standing on the other side of what used to be Colonel Marcus Graves.
He’s enormous. I keep forgetting that until he’s close enough to block out the twilight.
Built on the same scale as Orion, same broad shoulders, same barely-contained energy rolling off him in waves, but where Orion burns, Dagda hums. A low resonance that makes the fillings in my teeth ache.
The kind of power that doesn’t need to announce itself because the ground already did it for him.
He’s looking at me the way no man has ever looked at me.
Not hunger. Not assessment. Not the clinical cataloguing of a handler measuring an asset’s performance against projected outcomes.
Just seeing. The way you look at someone and find them enough.
He steps over the ashes. Doesn’t go around. Doesn’t avoid them. Just walks through what’s left of the man who stole me, and the dust swirls around his boots and settles.
“A father,” he says, “would look at you and see strength worth honoring.”
Three steps. He closes the distance in three steps and he’s right there, close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to hold his gaze. The heat radiating off him smells like woodsmoke and gold and something green underneath.
His existence is the embodiment of lore. Of the gods and the power they hold.
“Not strength worth using.” His hands settle on my shoulders. I’m not going to pretend that the touch doesn’t unfurl something dormant inside me. It does. “Not strength worth deploying.”
I’m going to cry again. I can feel it coming on.
“Strength worth honoring. As I do.”
The sound Graves made when he was proud of me was satisfaction. A hum in the back of his throat that I chased like a dog chasing a hand that sometimes feeds and sometimes strikes.
This, Dagda’s voice, gravel-deep and steady as bedrock, I don’t have a name for yet. But my body recognizes it the way my feet recognized Wild Court soil.
And fuck me, I didn’t know.
I didn’t know this was the wound under the wound. I thought the rage would be enough. That killing the man who weaponized me would cauterize whatever was bleeding underneath.
I break.
The tears come and I don’t stop them. Don’t swallow them. Don’t press my palms against my eyes until I see stars and the pressure forces it all back down.
I just stand here with a god’s hands on my shoulders and let the years of counterfeit fatherhood leak down my face in dirty streaks.
Dagda doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t soften. Doesn’t do the thing people do when a woman cries in front of them. That slight lean back, that flicker of discomfort, that silent calculation of how long before they can change the subject. Nor does he do the grey rock thing men love to manipulate.
He just holds the gravity of my grief.
And I can feel my guys. There, quiet as a sentinel. Ever present.
“I trained them.” The words scrape out of me sideways, aimed at Dagda’s chest because I can’t look at his face and confess at the same time.
“The siege formation they used tonight. I designed it. Four teams. Surround, suppress, eliminate. Always attack from above. I signed off on the final assessment myself.”
His hands don’t move.
“I was so goddamn proud of that work. Graves told me I was the best tactical mind he’d ever trained and I believed him. Didn’t ask questions. Signed the assessments. Went home and slept fine.”
I finally look up.
Dagda’s expression hasn’t changed. No horror. No pity. Just that steady witnessing that makes me want to crawl out of my own skin because I don’t know what to do with someone who won’t look away.
“My fingerprints are on my own people’s graves.”
“Yes.” His voice is simple. No softening. “They are.”
The honesty of it hits harder than any reassurance could. No it wasn’t your fault. No you didn’t know. Just the clean blade of truth from a god old enough to know that comfort and honesty rarely share the same sentence.
“You cannot control the hearts of men.” His thumbs press into my shoulders, grounding pressure that keeps my knees from buckling. “You can only do your best to survive them.” His lips twitch. “Then murder them.”
The laugh that breaks out of me is wet and ugly and undignified.
Behind me, Orion exhales. One long, slow breath. Like he’d been holding it since I started talking.
“We woke others.” Dagda’s voice shifts register now. “Not all is lost.”
“How many?”
“Enough.” He evades with the particular skill of someone who’s been dodging direct questions for millennia.
Damn Fae god.
“Go.” He lifts his hands from my shoulders and the absence of that weight almost drops me.
My body sways forward half an inch before I catch it.
“Be with your mates. Our time here grows short, and healing,” he exhales through his nose, the sound of a man who’s seen too many wars end and too many wounds fester, “healing is a long and torturous road.”
“Preaching to the choir.”
“What is a choir?”
“Ask Finnian. He’ll give you a twelve-page answer with footnotes.”
Dagda’s laugh rumbles through the ground beneath my feet. I feel it in my heels.
I turn.
The battlefield registers in pieces. Scorch marks where Orion’s fire ate the earth black. Ice and piles of snow lays on soil where Kieran’s shadows crystallized mid-strike, already melting at the edges. A boot sitting upright near the tree line with the jagged edges of a foot still in there.
I don’t look at that one again.
The goddesses have sorted themselves. Morrigan cleans her blade between licks.
Yes, licks. She’s licking the blood off the metal.
Macha is already gone, no, there, a shadow between shadows at the perimeter, ensuring no runners circle back.
Badb is sitting on a body and eating something suspicious that she keep digging through his chest cavity for.
I’m not going to ask.
My mates are clustered near a fire that Orion must have started because it burns too clean and too controlled to be battle residue.
Orion is still on the ground where he sat himself down.
He doesn’t look up when I turn, like he wasn’t watching, like he’s been fascinated by this particular patch of scorched earth the entire time.
Kieran is standing a few feet from him, back straight, shadows still. Small piles of snow gather around him that Orion melts.
Neither of them planned that. I don’t think either of them noticed.
And Finnian. I don’t know when he showed up. When he found his way back to us. But he did. Never mind that he is covered in blood that isn’t his.
He stands slightly apart from the other two, speaking with Tiana. Dark hair cropped short, violet eyes, rigid posture.
Theres a confidence in him that never existed before and it’s honestly hot as fuck. He always had this intelligence to him. This air of awareness. But now? It’s like the nerd who grew a backbone.
Then a streak of blue slams into my cheek.
“Whispen—”
He hits me like a small warm sun. I’m not going to say I missed the whisp. But I did and all his poetry antics.
Whispen nuzzles into the hollow beneath my ear, his glow cycling through gold to violet to something between that I’ve never seen. A color that doesn’t have a name in any language I speak. Then to blue.
“Little queen.” His voice is barely a whisper. No riddles. No rhymes. Just two words.
My hand comes up to cup him before I think about it. He’s warm and buzzing and here and something in my chest that’s been listing sideways for days rights itself with a click I swear I can hear. It reminds me of when I climbed out of a tree hollow to see him nuzzling Morrigan.
“Hey, trouble.”
Then Whispen pulls back, needle-teeth flashing, and the moment shatters into Whispen-shaped chaos.
“Much changed! Much grown! Much—” He zooms a full circle around my head, trailing sparks. “The hair, root-born. Pink? Pink and green? You look like a garden that sneezed.”
“Thanks.”
“The eyes, though.” He settles before my face, hovering, head tilted. His glow goes warm gold. “No more hiding. Good. Good, good, good.” He taps my nose with one translucent finger. “I hated the hiding.”
He zips away before I can respond, materializing beside Dagda in his adult form. The shift is instantaneous. One second a fist-sized orb of chaos light, the next a full-grown male leaning against a god’s shoulder.
The adult form is still deeply unsettling. He’s chosen to look like, I swear on every thorn I’ve ever grown…
“Is that—”
“I have no idea what you’re referencing.” He examines his fingernails with studied disinterest. “I simply selected a pleasing arrangement of features. Any resemblance to earthside entertainment figures is purely coincidental.”
“That’s Jason Momoa’s face,” I tell him.
“Sounds made up.” Dagda doesn’t even blink. Clearly I know where his loyalty lays.
“Oh.” I turn back to the god, grabbing onto the shift in energy with both hands because the alternative is sinking back into the darker thing waiting at my feet. “The BBQ sauce. Did you—”
“Put the pot on before the glamour work.” He crosses his arms. “Do you have any idea what goes into feeding a dragon? Do you?”
“I genuinely do not.”
“I pulled out the dragon pot. The dragon pot, Ashlynne. Hasn’t been used in centuries. I welded it shut after the incident with the lindworm and I had to pry it open with a crowbar and prayer.”
“A crowbar.”
“And prayer.” He’s fully ranting now, divine composure abandoned for the particular fury of a cook who hasn’t even met the guest yet and is already exhausted by them.
“Three goats. A whole elk. Seventeen pounds of root vegetables that I grew myself, in enchanted soil, with my own divine hands.” He holds up said hands like they’re evidence in a trial.
“For a dragon I haven’t met. Because you asked. ”
In my defense I was pretty sure BBQ sauce was nothing more than ketchup and some spices.
“She’ll appreciate it.”
“I don’t need her to appreciate it.” He points at me. “I need her to deserve it. There’s a difference.”
From somewhere behind me, Kieran says, very quietly, “He’s not wrong.”
I turn.
Kieran’s expression is perfectly neutral in the specific way that means he’s working very hard not to agree with a god out loud.
“Don’t encourage him.”
“I said nothing.”
“You said something.”
“I expressed mild philosophical alignment with a culinary position.” The faintest pull at the corner of his mouth. “That’s not encouragement.”
Dagda points at Kieran. “I like this one.”
Kieran looks like he genuinely cannot decide if that’s an honor or a threat.
Orion, still on the ground, tips his face up toward the purple sky. “He grows on you,” he says, to no one in particular. “Like a very cold fungus.”
“I’m standing right here.”
“I know.”
Dagda stares at them both for one long moment. Then something shifts in his expression. For the slightest of moments it almost feels like a father approving of his daughter’s suitors.
I just don’t know if he finds them lacking or not.
“Fucking dragons,” Dagda mutters.
The laugh that slips out of me is small and raw and unexpected.
Because somewhere out there, past the sentries and the Dark Forest and whatever else Faerie throws at them tonight, three women are walking toward me. Not for duty. Not because fate or prophecy or political necessity requires it.
Because I’m theirs and they are mine and Vanessa is definitely complaining about the cardio.
Dagda watches me carefully. He’s never met them. He’s prepping a dragon pot on faith because I asked, because that’s apparently what father gods do: they cook for people they haven’t met because their daughter said please.
Daughter. A crack opens in the quiet place where Graves used to live.
I always wanted a father. Someone who stuck around. Who didn’t run or die or manipulate. Dagda is the all father. Except when he looks at me it feels more paternal.
I crave it.
But I also need a shower more and a few days to process my life.