Chapter Two Irian #2
“Let me.” Sinéad had spoken but a handful of words since she had plunged her ready daggers into Eala’s chest. Now she held out her arms. “Together Fia and I weigh less than you and she. My mount is strong. Ride Linn. Let your stallion rest.”
Irian had hesitated one last moment before bundling Fia in his cloak and nestling her in front of Sinéad.
The other girl had sheathed her daggers, then wrapped her arms around Fia’s limp frame.
Irian had tensed, every instinct he possessed screaming at him to haul his wife back into his grasp.
His time on Emain Ablach had taught him that he could not control everything.
Yet if he could not control this, what could he control?
If he could not hold her, was he not letting her go? “If she transforms—”
“For days we have all watched you care for Fia alone.” Sinéad’s tone had held exhaustion and dogged determination. “We have all been kept awake by her screams; we have all wept when you wept. This pain does not belong solely to you. Trust us to bear some of it. Please.”
So he had, though he feared it had not lessened the pain to share it.
His body had found much needed rest. Abyss had regained the strength of his long, elegant limbs.
But every moment Fia did not rest in Irian’s arms was a moment fletched with fear and sharpened with regret.
He might not be able to control the world around him.
But nor could he bear to be away from Fia for long.
“Ho!” Now Wayland cantered up beside Irian, sympathy and regret passing over his features as he glanced down at Fia clutched once more in Irian’s arms. “Laoise wishes to camp here—where the ground is flat.”
Irian’s eyes sharpened toward their surroundings.
Sunset teased a pale blue sky with bloody fingers; night was not far behind.
The broad, flat plain before them stretched toward foothills purpling with dusk.
Beyond, rocky ridges cast looming shadows.
Nothing grew here but ragged brush and pitiful clumps of grass.
With a flare of fear, Irian recognized this place. A premonition of danger ghosted over his skin and whipped his head back the way they had come. His arms tightened around Fia’s motionless form, his fingertips pressing divots into her boiling skin.
Surely Eala could not have followed them all this way.
Then why could he still feel her? The same searing power that had blistered from Eala’s frame when Gavida’s cursed crown touched her golden head rippled toward him across the landscape, raising the hairs on the nape of his neck.
“Laoise.” His voice was harsher than he meant it to be. “Why have you brought us here?”
“What, tánaiste?” Laoise—riding now upon Linn—grinned, showing off her fetching dimples. “Do you not wish at last for a flat place to camp? We are only a day’s ride from Cnoc Féigleann. But we will not reach it tonight.”
“We must not stay here.” Irian wheeled Abyss, even as the Sky-Sword began to hum an eerie, atonal tune at his hip.
His breath rose haphazardly in his lungs as danger winnowed through him.
“Wayland… Laoise—be on your guard. Balor, make ready to run. Sinéad, make ready to ride. We must cross this plain as fast as we can.”
Balor seemed unflappable as ever, stomping indomitably forward. Sinéad looked up at her name, her expression hopeless and haggard. Only Laoise’s expression betrayed surprise.
“Why, Irian?”
“Because these are the old killing grounds of Mag Tuired,” Irian ground out, even as he kicked Abyss into a lurching canter.
“This marks the edge of Tír na nóg, before the Barrens begin. Here the Tuatha Dé Danann defeated the Fomorians in the battle that would decide their sovereignty. And here every man, woman, and giant is buried where they fell. We have just walked onto an army for Eala to use.”
“Surely she could not have followed us this far?” Wayland’s question echoed Irian’s own concerns.
“We have no idea where she is, nor what she is capable of. Do you wish to risk it?”
Perhaps it was his words that spurred them on; perhaps it was night’s sinister promise scraping blood over the slate sky. The aughiskies stretched their sleek legs into a gallop. Balor broke into a thunderous run, his tree-trunk legs propelling him at a surprising clip.
Irian felt the buzzing thrum of magic upon his skin, tasted the sweet-sour sizzle of petrichor on his tongue, heard the mournful discordance of Eala’s Treasure entwine with his sword’s song.
How?
It did not matter. It only mattered that she was close. Too close.
The first bone-flanged hand burst from the cold, damp earth.
“Ride!” Irian roared. Grotesque shapes birthed themselves in the long, dark shadows cast by the mountains. “If you want to live, ride.”
They rode. Irian tallied the distance to the mountains. In the murky dusk, the plain could have stretched half a league. Or seven.
He only knew it was too far.
Another skeletal arm ringed in ancient armor burst from the hard-packed clay and caught Abyss by the foreleg.
A glancing blow—the stallion only stumbled.
A larger arm reached for the water horse’s other leg.
Abyss danced out of reach. Yet another rose in turn, pushing mounds of pebbled dirt to one side as it latched around the aughisky’s foreleg and wrenched it sideways.
Abyss missed a step. The stallion went down.
A precarious tilt, cold winter air streaking sideways. Irian hung weightless above the stallion’s back, Fia’s limp body lolling against his chest.
The water horse struck the dirt sideways, jolting both riders over his withers.
Irian ducked his head and curled himself around Fia, but the impact jarred them apart.
He hit hard-packed earth with juddering force, his breath bursting from his lungs as he landed painfully on one shoulder.
Lines of black and silver striated his vision.
Sharp stones tore his mantle and abraded his cheek as he skidded to a halt on the twisting, heaving earth.
He forced himself sideways, rolling onto all fours.
He reached for Fia. His hands met only air.
No.
Irian staggered to his feet. There—Fia had rolled ten paces beyond him.
She lay with arms and legs tangled between matted clumps of weathered grass, her hair a dark corona around her bruised face.
Irian’s vision tunneled as he lunged for her, the Sky-Sword already singing free of its scabbard.
But the restless earth shifted beneath his feet.
Clods of dirt and gobbets of clay rattled his legs as fists of bone punched upward.
Skeletal fingers latched around his ankles.
He slashed down, his battle metal darkening as sunset kissed rouge along the foothills.
The Treasure made easy work of the ancient, brittle bones, but whenever one hand burst into shards, another was rising to take its place.
And another.
Irian lifted his gaze from Fia’s prone form, alarm beating dark wings against the back of his head.
All across the plain, the dead were rising.
The earth spat them up and belched them out as if it was glad to be rid of them.
These were not fresh corpses; the legendary battle of Mag Tuired had been fought in the time of legends, before humans had banished the Folk from Fódla and before the Treasures had been forged.
The earth should have long ago reclaimed them.
Instead, the boggy plain had mummified the ancient carcasses, rendering them nightmarish in resurrection.
Sword-hacked arms were strung with frayed ligaments and rotted armor. Caved-in skulls sneered with shattered teeth, stared with hollow, empty eyes. Lumbering Fomorians reared to the height of ten men; legless destriers churned in the muck; long-dead warriors reached for maces and axes and swords.
All of them turned toward him.
No. Not him.
Her.
Fia lay so still Irian feared she had died.
As if his unrelenting hold on her had been the only thing keeping her alive, and with his promise broken, her soul had simply fled her body.
But the blue-green stone fastened above her breast—her Treasure, the Heart of the Forest—still hummed a harmonic counterpoint to his wailing sword.
And below that constant murmur, a still-unfamiliar vibration droned in counterpoint too—like molten metal over wet rock, or hot blood kissing iron bones.
The unwelcome melody of the entity to whom Fia had accidentally bound herself on the Longest Night. The deity the islanders of Emain Ablach had called the Year… the Bright One who had named herself Talah.
A circle of space formed between Fia and the rumbling horde of the risen dead.
The ancient warriors slammed against a barrier they did not seem able to cross.
It occurred to Irian that Talah’s terrible power—though he hated what it had taken from Fia—might be the only force keeping the sliding, slithering hiss of Eala’s Treasure at bay.
Talah, like the Heart of the Forest, was not eager to let her host die.
Fia’s life was threatened by two unknowable Solasóirí of near-limitless power. So, too, was her life protected.
The sight of the restless dead’s mindless shambling galvanized Irian. He hacked with renewed vigor at the arms clutching at his legs, scattering petrified bones and long-desiccated flesh to crunch beneath his boots. He thrust through the ungainly horde, reaching for Fia—
“Down!” The word shattered his eardrum.
He did not turn in time to identify the tall, heavy figure barreling toward him. Only felt the impact as someone tackled him around the chest and bore him bodily to the ground.