Chapter 47
Ash
I don’t dream of them, my cousins, that night. I’m not sure I dream at all. I’m asleep in that weird place where dreaming belongs.
I blink. Rolling hills stretch into existence as far as the eye can see. Endless twilight leaves Faerie in its permanent state of transition. The world settles around me, soft and gentle at the edges.
I’m not alone.
Tiana stands to my left, just as confused as me. Kestra stands to my right, smiling.
“I’m guessing you know what this is?” I ask her.
The smile never leaves as she glances at us. “You don’t know where we are?”
“Does my face look like I know where I am?” Tiana juts out a hip, her brows nearly into her hairline.
“I have no idea where we are,” I admit, turning to Kestra.
“The Sidhe,” she whispers like the word holds a kind of weight I’m not privy to yet. “Long ago, when the Tuatha were defeated in Ireland, they went underground. Back to Faerie. To the Sidhe.”
I look at the vast rolling hills that don’t seem to end.
“I am not following.” Tiana crosses her arms. “If I don’t get my eight hours of beauty sleep I might just kill you when we wake up.”
Kestra rolls her eyes. “You can’t.” Smugness threads through every syllable she utters. “You don’t want my court.”
Tiana shudders. “No, that I do not.”
“At least you have a court,” I cross my arms and grumble.
Kestra laughs. Full bodied. “That’s the point, Ash.” She grips my face and turns it to the rolling hills. “Those aren’t just sleeping gods, they’re Fae. Your court is still alive.”
Something flutters in my throat. Not hope. Not yet. I don’t dare to hope.
“Graves said they killed them all.” I feel the blood drain from my face, even dreaming, even here.
“Yeah.” Kestra drops my hands and steps back. “Come on. Walk and talk. I have a theory.”
“You know one of those theories burned my eyebrows off.” Tiana rubs her brows that are still very much on her face.
Kestra slices her palm through the air, dismissing her immediately. “I told you to back away.” She gives me one of those looks, the one that clearly says it was multiple times.
“She did,” Tiana admits. “Still blew off my brows.”
“You have a theory?” I press Kestra, because while the banter is amusing, I am going to need her to get to the damn point.
“I always have theories.” She tosses the words over her shoulder. Finally she pauses at a mound and presses her hand to it.
Tiana and I glance at each other, not really sure what she’s doing or trying to prove.
“Fae shouldn’t be able to use magic in dreams,” Kestra explains. “That’s reserved for dream walkers. But Ash, I want you to touch this mound. Tell me what you feel.”
“Okay.” This might be the weirdest thing anyone has ever asked me to do, but it isn’t like I’m waking up any time soon.
I kneel and press my hand to the Sidhe mound.
It’s instantaneous.
I gasp a breath because that’s all the time I have before I’m in the fucking Faerie mound.
Like walking into a womb. Not gonna lie. I hate it.
The sound is wrong first. Not silence. The opposite. Like every sound that ever existed is happening at once, very far away. Like pressing your ear to the earth and hearing the whole history of it.
Then I see them.
All of them. Suspended, sleeping peacefully. There’s maybe a dozen or so in this one mound alone. And some are hurt, as though they saw a battlefield recently. Pink floats from sealing wounds. Some have heads floating above their torso. Some are still healing.
I spin in a circle, my hands hovering just close enough to touch them but never truly touching. I don’t want to disturb their slumber. Is this what Morrigan meant when she said she’s asleep? In a Sidhe mound. With others.
I step out of the mound and fall flat on my ass.
“Confirmed.” Kestra sounds pleased with herself.
The valley reassembles around me.
For a second the world is just breathing. Mine. Theirs. The hills.
Goo covers me, dripping off of me like slime. I wipe it from my eyes and crawl away from the mound, careful not to touch it again. Though I want to. It’s almost a feeling like their my babies. And I must be willing to do anything in my power to keep them safe.
“What did you see?” Tiana is standing on the mound.
“Get off of them!” I scream, panic and fear welling inside me.
Her eyes widen as she hops off, nearly stumbling. “Them?”
“A dozen in this one. All women. Looks like the same maternal line.” The words come rushing out as I turn to Kestra. “The Wild Court?”
“Not all.” She smiles. “See, the wildlings are different.” She looks from me to Tiana.
Tiana goes very still.
Her face loses any impression I can read, and her eyes move across the rolling hills, mound to mound to mound. I can’t tell If she knew or knows now.
“How many mounds?” Her voice is quiet.
“In this valley alone?” Kestra spreads her hands. “Hundreds.”
Tiana doesn’t answer. She nods before looking back at us.
“How?” I still don’t know how they are here. There is just so much of this world that I still have yet to uncover.
“Wild Court, if they die on soil, before the moment of death they can return,” Kestra whispers like she’s telling sacred secrets.
Because she is.
“This is what Mab taught you.” I turn to Tiana. “Tatiana taught you?”
“And your mother should have taught you.”
Chills dance across my body. “My parents?” I look out across the vast expanse of the rolling hill. Are they out there somewhere? Sleeping beneath a Sidhe mound?
But Kestra shakes her head, slow and sad, already reading my thoughts. Hopeless as they are.
There’s no box to put these emotions in.
I don’t know what to do with that.
The ground under my knees feels very solid. I focus on that.
Kestra sits down beside me in the grass. Tiana doesn’t sit, but she stops moving. Which, for Tiana, is the same thing.
Nobody speaks as the hills breathe around us.
The moment is too loaded, too heavy for words. All I can do is stare at that mound and feel every little injustice brought to my people.
My people.
That’s who they are. Mine. My people. My babies. And some waited a long fucking time for me to show the fuck up.
“Okay,” I say finally. Not to them. Just to the air.
Kestra’s hand finds mine in the grass. I don’t look at her. She doesn’t let go.
“The fallen?” I swallow. “Where even are we?”
“That, Ashlynne Moonshadow, is only in your knowledge. Even if no mother told you, you will know how to get here. How to wake them.” Kestra taps the mound. “But not before they’re ready.”
“What do we do now?” I look at the two other queens of Faerie. Fear pulses through me. There is so much at stake the fear of fucking it up is real. My people have a second chance and by my gods, I’m going to do everything in my power to make that happen.
“We take back the Academy.” Kestra blows out a nervous breath. “We must move by nightfall tomorrow.”
“Why?” Tiana questions.
“I don’t know why.” Kestra’s eyes take on a faraway look. “My intuition is telling me time is up. My people see me as treasonous.”
“Mine as well.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Take them by force,” Kestra says. “One king. One queen at a time.”
I don’t ask how. She clearly has something and she’s clearly not sharing it yet.
But the soldier part of me that never fully sleeps is already running numbers.
Two queens without armies. One wild card who can dissolve a man into the earth with her bare hands.
A nightfall deadline with no stated extraction plan.
Kestra always knows more than she says.
I file it. Trust it. And keep my mouth shut.
“You’re going to kill your father?”
She looks at the mound and pointedly doesn’t answer me.
“Tiana?”
“I know what I need to do.”
“And me?”
“You?” Kestra smiles. “You’re our wild card.”
I open my mouth to answer.
And wake up.