Chapter Three Irian
Chapter Three
Irian
Irian’s already jarred shoulder struck packed dirt a moment before his skull cracked down. He instinctively struggled beneath his attacker’s weight, jerking his arms as he fought to free his sword.
“Gods alive, man!” Wayland’s voice, ragged with alarm, carved through Irian’s aggression like a serrated knife. “Stay down.”
A surge of flame blasted mere inches from where both men grappled.
Blistering heat raked Irian’s face; he heaved himself away, and Wayland rolled with him, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the blaze carving a path through the army of Eala’s dead.
The conflagration ignited ossified corpses and liquefied time-pitted metal.
Irian elbowed Wayland away from him and glanced up.
The red-gold silhouette of Laoise’s anam cló was an ardent pennant against the flaming dusk.
Sunset kindled scarlet along her sleek scales and silhouetted her wings in ocher and plum.
Her sinuous neck curved, molten fury burning from the depths of her gorge to incinerate the wall of shambling skeletons threatening Fia’s prone figure. Grudging awe rose in Irian.
From the moment Irian had intuited Laoise’s true nature, he had guessed she was formidable. She had proved herself indomitable.
“Up.” Wayland’s hands propelled Irian to standing. The wall of fire guttered as Laoise moved onward, leaving a trail of smoking skeletons and flaking ash in her wake. Beyond, Fia sprawled, insensate to the chaos. “Laoise is buying us time. Let us not waste it.”
Irian kicked through cinders to scoop his wife into his arms. She was whole and breathing, albeit slightly scorched—the right side of her body blackened with ash and a few of her long tresses singed away to nothing.
The scent of hot skin and burnt hair withered Irian’s nostrils.
He fought automatic fury, even as he sheathed his still-humming sword and cradled Fia’s head against his shoulder.
“Laoise couldn’t have given her a wider berth?” he growled at Wayland. “At this rate, my wife will be bald.”
“Scold Laoise later.” Wayland’s glance was barbed with agitation. “Much as it pains me, we must now heed your advice. Run.”
The other man set a brisk pace, following the path of Laoise’s incendiary carnage.
Half-burnt bones caught at Irian’s boots; red embers flared up to die on his clothes.
Black smoke scrawled over the darkening sky and seared his eyes.
It was slow going. And beyond the blackened path, the dead shambled, drawing ever closer.
Irian set his jaw, nestled Fia closer, and drove forward.
At last Wayland burst through the wall of smoke, Irian a half step behind.
Beyond, figures writhed. He tensed. But they coalesced into a handful of wheeling aughiskies, Abyss among them—limping but alive.
A tall, lithe girl wielding twin daggers.
A vast Fomorian blotting out the burn of new stars against the charcoal of dusk.
Irian strode toward Abyss, but Linn moved brusquely in front of him, sliding her slender head beneath Fia’s mass of scorched hair and snapping her shark’s teeth at him.
The picture she burned into his mind was unmistakable: Abyss faltering once more beneath Irian and Fia’s joined weight, before being parceled up and dined upon by the ravening dead.
“But I swore—” The promise Irian had made Fia felt as ancient as this battlefield in his mind, as scorched and desiccated as the corpses marching mindlessly toward their point of dwindling escape. He had relinquished her before. Why did it never get any easier?
Linn shoved her muzzle into his solar plexus.
He took the hint. Lifted Fia in front of Sinéad, who anchored the other woman’s frame with her cloak. Grasped Linn’s black-oil mane, levered himself onto her back. A conflagration of red flame exploded behind the group, startling them all into a gallop.
They rode for the hills.
Night swallowed them in its toothless mouth. Eventually, Laoise’s anam cló swooped in a glittering arc to collapse upon the dirt. She staggered upward in her Gentry form, her limbs trembling and her face gaunt, as if she had aged a century in the span of hours.
Irian had spent a great deal of time in his anam cló, both warped by wild magic and not. Even the simplest shapeshifting took its toll. He could not fathom what it must have cost Laoise to fight off the undead horde, to summon those incredible swaths of fire from her deepest self.
He dismounted. Supported Laoise by her scalding forearms. Interrupted her before she could protest.
“I will walk,” he said. “You will rest.”
Not even Linn protested the arrangement. Laoise mounted with difficulty, then laid herself over the water horse’s withers, twined fingers in her mane, and promptly fell unconscious.
They struggled upward over uneven shale and jagged foothills. At last, the moon rose, bright enough to ease their path.
As it laddered above them, Fia began to change.
She transformed without warning into a wildcat.
Pale skin sprouted dense layers of striped fur; vicious claws sharpened on batting paws; her face exploded into a hissing whiskered maw studded with sharp white teeth.
Sinéad cried out—Irian thought she must have begun to doze.
She struggled to hold on as claws caught her across the temple, raising livid lines of red upon her skin.
Irian lunged for the women. Balor beat him to it, neatly scooping the yowling, scratching creature Fia had become into his massive fist.
“I can take her,” Irian growled, relief and worry pounding through him. “Please. Let me have my wife.”
“She is perfectly well, lord,” rumbled the giant cheerfully as the wildcat continued to strain and shriek in his implacable grasp. “Besides, I love cats.”
They trundled onward. When the moon passed its zenith, Irian sent a flurry of zephyrs scouting back the way they had come.
They teased over rocky outcroppings, slivered between troughs of still-smoldering flame, brushed over the desiccated notches of scorched spines and blackened bones.
Nothing moved—not for three leagues in any direction.
For the first time in nearly a month, the blistering thrum of Eala’s magic felt faded. Far away.
“We have not been followed,” Irian announced. “Balor—my wife, if you will. It is time we made camp.”
He wished he had said it out of concern for them. He had not.
The secret Irian had kept for the better part of the last month blustered through him, suffusing him with dread.
It had happened not on the first night after the Longest Night, nor even on the second, but on the third night, when they camped cold beneath snow-draped trees that cracked and fell beneath the weight of ice.
In the hour before dawn, after transforming without respite from hawk to hound to serpent, Fia went deathly still in Irian’s arms. Irian’s gaze rode the horizon, where faint pink streaked a leaden sky.
Worry tangled with relief in the exhausted arsenal of his muscles; briefly, he relaxed.
Fingers too hot for the frigid night trailed up his chest to tangle in his hair. A mouth that moments ago had been fanged glided along the column of his throat to breathe sultry against the shell of his ear. Legs smooth as silk slung around his waist.
Hope pummeled him. Gods alive, but he had known not even a Bright One was a match for Fia’s strength. “Mo chroí?”
She arched above him, her hips surging over his.
His response was reflexive—his body hardening as his hands braced at the divot of her waist, barely sparing a thought for their compatriots slumbering nearby.
Reflected moonlight glazed her curves and sharpened her features as Fia leaned down to kiss him.
Her fingernails dragged at the ties of his shirt as her mouth met his, lips eagerly parting.
The wrongness of her taste assailed Irian. She savored not of sun-warmed stone or cool moss, but of bog tar. Scorched metal. Flesh heated to searing.
His eyes slashed open. His horror caught at her shoulders. His dismay pushed her back, even as she ground on him.
“Fia?”
This time, when metal sparked in her eyes, he knew it was no trick of the moonlight. Her irises were silver threaded through with gold; the pupils, black as an untold future. They were ancient, unknowable. Fearsome. And they burned.
With greed. With hatred. With desire.
This was no longer Irian’s wife looking back at him. It was something else. And it longed to be free.
Every night, in the hour before dawn, Irian no longer fought with Fia. He fought with himself, and his own treacherous desires. He fought to hold at arm’s length the form of the woman he wished never to let go… even as the entity inside her taunted him with her mastery.
That was when he felt his strength begin to crack. His endurance begin to ebb. His hope begin to hollow.
He had promised never to let Fia go. But if she was already gone… then so was he.
Without Fia, there was nothing left of Irian.
At least, nothing good.
Morning blushed behind jagged black peaks striped in lavender and rose.
These were not the flowering crags of Ildathach, nor the basalt bastions of Mag Mell—not even the pale silver cliffs of Emain Ablach.
They had passed beyond the bounds of Tír na nóg into the unknown lands Irian had only ever heard called the Barrens.
A hard, uncivilized region not even the Fair Folk had wanted to claim.
It occurred to Irian with a burst of irony that in all his years of searching for heirs, the reason he had never found Laoise was simply because she had hidden herself beyond where he desired to look.
Dim rocks came alive with color beneath the rising sun. Veins of sapphire streaked between layers of garnet; seams of emerald reached between geodes bristling with sparkling quartz. A thrill of magic bronzed Irian’s veins.
A night’s sleep had revived Laoise—dimples quirked in her pert cheeks, and her hair flamed red as the dawn. She grinned infectiously.
“You feel it, don’t you?”
“I was always told these lands were naught but desert and despair,” Irian growled.
The night had been less kind to him than to the Gentry maiden.
He curled Fia close so he would not have to regret all the times he had been forced to push her away.
“Why would the Fair Folk have steered clear of all this magic if it was free for the taking?”
“Because you can’t.” Laoise’s smile grew. “Take it, that is.”
Irian did not enjoy saying I do not understand. So he said nothing.
“Don’t fret, tánaiste,” Laoise said blithely. “You’ll see.”
Irian tamped down a brisk surge of resentment before forcing his steps onward. It did not matter where they went, what they saw, or how they lived. It only mattered that they survived.
That she survived.