After
LIR
Aisling and Lir raced on stagback through the feywilds surrounding Annwyn.
They were supposed to be in the throne room, meeting with Filverel, Galad, and the rest of Lir’s knights. Instead, they’d foregone their responsibilities in favor of racing through a woodland storm. The trees bubbling over with plums, peaches, and lemons. Roses wrapping around their trunks and Connemara poppies blooming wherever their stag’s hooves met the ground. Indeed, Aisling and Lir’s draiocht was insurmountable when together once they’d truly bonded. Wherever Lir went, whenever their eyes met, violets would blossom, and the world grew a few degrees hotter.
At last, Lir’s stag caught up with Aisling’s own.
He dove for her, knocking her off the stag and into a glen of brownie moss and cherry-red toadstools. Their stags continued to run into the surrounding woodland with their momentum.
“You cheated,” Aisling said as he pinned her arms above her head.
“So did you.”
He paused, gazing at a bundle of flowers on Aisling’s righthand side.
“ Ellwyn ,” he said. Aisling considered the flowers more closely: violet yet almost translucent, blooming from the earth from glass-like stems and peppered through the thickest patches of grass. “A legendary flower that has no native ground, it once bloomed in Annwyn every spring for several decades until it disappeared. The Sidhe searched for it, longed for it, wondered if it would ever return.”
Lir kissed her palms, tracing over the scars she’d suffered saving him from Danu’s poison. Whisper-light kisses deepening as he pressed his thigh between her legs and released her wrists so she could tangle her fingers through his hair. Lir slid his hands beneath her gown and gripped her hips. The veins in his forearms flexing the harder he held her atop the bed of ellwyn .
“We should return. The others are waiting for us—” Aisling broke off, inhaling sharply as he pressed his thigh more firmly between her legs.
“They can continue to wait,” he growled against her jaw. The forest thickened around them till walls were made of Lir’s thorns, ivy, and blood-red roses. Eyes no longer green but black with wanting.
Lightning splintered across the skies, interrupting them.
Lir straightened, wicking the hair from his eyes when he spotted it: a pool that wasn’t there moments before.
Both he and Aisling stood from the earth, bracing against the cloudburst, nearing the pool with caution. It glittered knowingly, blooming ellwyn and deepening till the center was a black eye glaring back. Lir’s expression narrowed, drawing both halves of Hiraeth from his back. They’d both seen this pool before in Aisling’s dreams.
“The forest is changing,” the trees whispered, every word spoken as though they were peering over their shoulders. “Danu spreads her rot through your land, the Lady sits before her loom in wait, and the mortals are recovering for vengeance. But more so than anyone or anything, the Otherworld is shifting. The veil between here and there hasn’t thickened despite the end of Samhain . Someone is opening gateways. The forest feels it. The forest knows it. The forest screams each time a door is opened to the Other.”
“What is it?” Aisling asked.
Lir tilted his head back. “A gateway.” And at the word, the pool rippled, hundreds of voices whispering incoherently. As though the entire Other peered back from its depths, feeding their thoughts through the water.
“A door to the afterlife,” Aisling conjectured, her expression hardening, growing suddenly distant.
“Aye, the spirit realm where the gods sleep and the Forge rests,” Lir said, sifting through the surrounding woodland with his eyes. “ Tír fo Thuinn : the land beneath the water.”
“Racat celebrates this pool,” Aisling said. “He wishes to tether the two realms: our realm and that of the Other.”
Lir ground his jaw. Racat’s motivations were laced with greed: a common dragon hoarded gold but Racat hoarded power. Wanted it more than even Lir himself and would stop at nothing before he achieved it. And so, it came as no surprise that Racat wanted the entirety of the Other as well. Wanted Aisling to become the guardian of the gateway to the spirit world. Complete sovereignty achievable through Aisling. She, born of both realms. Yet the prospect unnerved Lir. The Otherworld was a land of dreams, of saturated magic, of gods, and monsters.
“What Racat demands is no easy feat.”
“But it’s possible?” Aisling asked, eyes glittering with hope. “We could venture into the Other?”
Lir hesitated before at last speaking. “Aye, but only with an invitation. One you’ve already received.”
Aisling’s expression lit with recognition. “The fountain inside Castle Annwyn with the statue of Ina’s owl.”
Lir nodded his head, impressed she’d made the connection so readily. Lir hadn’t known Aisling for more than a handful of days when he’d discovered her in his mother’s chamber. The fountain was a gateway to the Otherworld where the Sidhe were originally cast before the gods cleaved the world into two realms. Ina made use of its magic, harnessing her draiocht to peer into the future just as Danu used her pools in the Isle of Mirrors and how Fionn travelled through his mirrors. It was dangerous and forbidden witchery to all those unfamiliar with its limits. If wielded incorrectly, one could grow lost in the void between realms, the mind maddened by its reflection, or the heart split by the magic. And when Lir had found the door unlocked and Aisling inside…he half wondered if she weren’t a changeling, another mockery of the gods sent to destroy one of the last semblances of Ina’s legacy. Other than Fionn of course. But the question remained: all this time, was it Ina opening doors for Aisling? Or the gods themselves?
“If we decide to cross into the Other, it’s Ina’s fountain we must enter. To trust this pool or anything else the forest whispers from now on…is unwise.” Indeed, Lir could smell Danu’s influence. Could hear the mushrooms, the disease, the insects growing, swarming, spreading, the longer Danu amassed her legions of traitors. Not even his own woodland was to be trusted until Danu was killed. And this pool would be no different.
“To rule over the Other would be to usurp the gods?” Aisling asked.
“Not quite,” Lir said. “To rule over the Other would be to gain the gods’ favor.”
Aisling swallowed. “And how might we do that?”
Lir hooked Hiraeth onto his back. “We do them a favor.”
Aisling bit her bottom lip. Lir saw the desire stirring around her iris, her mind already sorting through her next steps. An ambition that quickened his heart and forced him to keep his hands to himself lest he never stop touching her, wanting her.
At last, Aisling spun on her heel, breaking the spell she held over Lir as she started for Castle Annwyn. Resolved to enter the Other at any and all costs. And despite the risks, Lir knew this was the only way to ensure a victory against the Lady, Danu, Fionn, and the mortals. With the entirety of the Other, with their true binding, with Racat, no war would be waged without a death wish from their adversaries first.
Yet as Lir made to follow Aisling through the trees, he was stopped short by a single voice breaking through the rest, calling after his caera from the pool. A sound that rippled through his bones and chilled his flesh.
“ Aisling ,” it sang from the sparkling shadows of the afterlife. “ Come find me .”
* * *
Mortal armies are marching toward the realms of the fae. Can Aisling free her magic and defeat them, before they destroy everything she has come to love?