Chapter 59
Ash
Time remains suspended until I enter the Sidhe mounds beside Orion.
I braced for annihilation. For the forgetting. For whatever unmade gods, swallowed names, and let the most powerful go on like this, beings in existence staring at their own reflections like strangers.
Peace settles over me instead.
Which is worse, honestly. I know what to do with a fight. I have no training for surrender that doesn’t hurt.
When I traveled the world with my team, that was one of my favorite memories. Ending up in places I never would have thought to travel to. And some of them held this peace to them. Like coming home after a long vacation. Or visiting a loved one after years away.
There was just this sense of home that bled into the way the trees shifted and the way the wind blew.
That’s what it feels like right now.
Orion grunts beside me. “Peaceful.”
“For now.” I step onto a valley between the mounds and walk toward the one I fell through in the dream.
“Wait a gods darn minute.” Orion grabs my shoulders, spinning me around. His jaw falls open. He blinks rapidly. Moving and twitching as he takes me in. “What happened between the moment we walked through that door and just now?” He pokes a thorn on my crown.
“Aengus.” I laugh, shaking my head. “Come on, we have a job to do, and I’ll explain as we go.”
“I sure hope you do.” He huffs. “My queen.” His feet pause and I look back. It’s just hit him. That I’m now officially the Wild Queen.
“Don’t make it a thing.” I turn back around.
“Are you out of your mind?” He tosses his hands in the air.
“Queen! Queen. Queen! I felt it happen. It happened, it’s happening!” Whispen zips through the space, coming at me so fast he zips through Orion and then me.
Orion and I turn around. “Whispen, you silly creature, where—”
“Oh.” Orion gasps.
“Whispen?” I don’t know what to do. Where to look. What to say.
It’s Whispen. In his child form, but not quite as young, maybe thirteen. But he isn’t blue anymore.
He’s corporeal.
He’s kneeling, facing away from us. He’s staring at his hands. Turning them over and over like he’s never seen anything so strange and wonderful and terrifying in his entire existence. Like hands are the most remarkable thing that’s ever happened to him. Maybe they are.
He’s wearing linen-colored trousers and a cream shirt. His hair, his hair makes me pause.
“Whispen.” I breathe his name as the earth under me shakes.
“Ash.” He turns around, and for the first time I’m seeing Whispen.
Not the will-o’-wisp.
Just Whispen.
“You have green hair.” Tears build in my chest.
The thorns under my skin bloom. Not defensively. Not the way they do when magic threatens or the courts push. They bloom the way they did in the forest when the Wild Court soil recognized my blood. Reaching. Seeking. Finding something that matches.
Because I know.
I know before I ask. I’ve always known. In the way you know a song from the first three notes, the way you know home before you see it. I just need to hear him say it. I need to know the bond I feel between us is real.
Real in the way that the one freckle behind his ear matches my own. That moon-shaped crescent. Real in the way that both our noses button at the tip. Real in the way I love him deeper than anyone else in this world.
Love I haven’t felt since I lazed in a hammock with Morrigan and…him.
Orion goes still beside me.
“I do.” His green eyes widen, not blue. Not gold.
Green.
Pure green.
He tugs a strand of hair out and stands, rushing to me too fast. Far too fast.
He trips over his feet and I catch him. We both tumble to the ground. He’s laughing, happiness pours from him as he sits up to stare down at me.
“Whispen.” I know the answer. It burns inside me, a truth yet to be spoken.
I just need to find the courage to speak it.
“I have green hair,” he says, blinking rapidly.
“You have green eyes.” I swallow thickly. “What’s your true name, Whispen?”
His needle-point teeth are all I see as he smiles. “Now that is the right question.” Blooms surface under his skin as he answers. “Whispen Moonshadow.”
This time I launch myself at him, hugging him so tightly to me as tears of silver fall from my eyes. He laughs. I cry. Family. I have blood family.
“No way.” I pull him back, staring at him. “Whispen. What… How…what?”
“Oh, little sister, I have much to say.” He looks at his body. “Look at me. I’m alive.” He smiles. “A real boy.”
Letting that one slide, “How?”
“It’s a sad story,” Whispen says.
“I don’t know which story I need to hear right now.” Orion falls to his knees beside us, the ground quaking underneath. “This or how she got that crown.”
“The Trial of Survival, Orion,” Whispen, my fucking brother, snarks. “Your mates tried to kill me. Multiple times.” He instantly tells on all three of them.
“I believe that.” I sniffle. Because I have a brother.
“I, ah.” Orion rubs the back of his neck and glances at me. “Won’t do that now.”
“I don’t want to die again.”
“You said that before,” Orion says.
“I did.” Whispen nods. “Mother and Father knew Amarantha was hunting them. And the courts. I was just rounding my thirteenth birthday.”
He looks far off.
“You don’t have to…” I tell him. “I swear you don’t have to relive anything that makes you feel pain.”
“I want to tell you.” He grabs my hand, his thorns and blooms burst from his skin to match mine. “Mother thought I was safe, I mean she really couldn’t have known that Amarantha seduced Moros and in return he had Unseelie warriors in the forest.”
Something burns inside of me. I don’t like where this is going.
I look at Orion then back to Whispen, my sixth sense pulsing. “Go on.”
“Anyway. There I was. Sitting by the campfire at the tavern with my babysitters. A few dryads and a nymph.” He tilts his head. “I remember now.” He picks at a thorn, piercing himself then watching it heal again and again. “The nymph used me as a shield when the assassins came.”
People who should have guarded him, keep him safe, failed him and it cost him his life.
Graves’ face flashes behind my eyes. Different century. Different weapon. Same math. The people who are supposed to protect you are the ones who know exactly where to aim.
I don’t say anything because there isn’t anything. Some things don’t get words. They just get witnessed.
Orion gets up and walks away. His anger pulses through the bond. At how charges failed a child.
A child. I was a child, too, once. Before Graves turned that into a liability.
“Dagda found me too late.” He blinks away his tears. “Caught my spirit and created a wisp. When Mother and Father died, I swore I’d protect you.”
“You did, Whispen.” I hug him again. He’s so small. So frail. So mortal. “I swear to all the old gods, you will live to feel immortality.”
“That’s a big promise, sister.”
“Who would I be if I didn’t keep it?”
I wait for it. The whisper. The one that always comes when I reach for something good.
You don’t deserve this. You’ll break it. You’ll lose him the way you lose everything.
Nothing.
Just my brother’s green eyes and thorns that match mine and a heart that feels two sizes too big in a chest that’s finally stopped bracing for the hit.
“You must wake the others,” he says, pulling back.
“How?” I swipe at my tears.
“Well, I flew through Orion and then you soooo…” He shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine!”
“When I dreamt of this place I fell into the mound, not everyone was healed enough to wake.” I turn to Orion. “The Cauldron.”
He’s already pulling it out of his chest, offering it to me.
“Time to wake a few gods.” For the first time I look into the small wooden bowl. Its full of blood and I try not to over think it. Why did I not once think about what it would be full of?
Orion’s blood.
I walk toward the closest mound and set my palm on it. Just like before, I fall through the soil and into the mound itself.
This time I know what to expect. And I have my brother with me. My little older brother, and in front of us are a few males suspended in that amniotic-like fluid.
“Wake him,” Whispen says. “Thornback.”
I spin around, seeing the Fae male I beat what feels like years ago, though I know it’s only been weeks.
I look him over. By the looks of his clothing, he was sheared clean in half. I lift the edge of his shirt. The wound looks healed.
“They heal from the inside out here.” Whispen gets close. “He looks okay.”
“I’m taking your word for it.”
“Don’t do that,” Whispen almost shouts. “What if I’m wrong?”
Rolling my eyes, I pour the blood from the Cauldron into his mouth.
“He’s drinking,” Whispen says in awe.
I step back and wait. And wait. Anticipation hums inside of me. It takes forever for his eyes to flicker open and when they do it’s on me.
He falls from his suspension to the dirt floor on one knee, the other bent.
“My queen.” He coughs.
“Thornback, get up. You just woke up.”
“Ash,” Whispen says. “Don’t steal this from him.”
I look at my brother trying to understand. I’ve always felt odd when anyone in my team worked to be on that team. Worked hard to even work with me.
That feels similar. But when I turn to Thornback his eyes are pleading.
This is important to him. Not because of ceremony.
Not because of protocol. Because he’s been sleeping in the dark for gods know how long waiting for someone to wake up and tell him it meant something.
That his sacrifice meant something. I know that feeling. I know it in my bones.
I give him a nod. “Rise, warrior,” I say instead, and step toward him. “We must wake the others. I need to know who is healed enough to wake.”
“My queen.” He nods and stands, taking off to another Fae.
“They’ve waited a long time for direction. For a queen,” Whispen says quietly. He looks into my eyes. “We all have.”
I swallow again and again, and nod because he’s right. It’s just hard to fathom that all of these incredible creatures have been waiting for…me.
My court.
“Let’s wake our court.”