Chapter Six Within
Chapter Six
Within
I had been here before.
Rath na Mara swallowed me whole, a patchwork of half-remembered hallways and half-imagined occupants.
Depleted of happy memories, I had begun hiding from Talah in the places I thought she would not know to look.
In the memories I despised; the remembrances I repressed.
But forcing myself into my own bitter recollections was its own kind of torture. For I was helpless to change anything.
All I could do was observe as a quartet of trainees in Mother’s fiann tormented my adolescent self with garlands of rowanberries and chains made of iron.
“You’re just the disposable trash the Fair Folk left behind when they stole the princess,” one goaded.
A defiant tilt to my younger self’s delicate chin. “And you’re a motherless bastard with a slag heap for a face and a stinking privy for a brain.”
The trainee backhanded her—me—across the face.
When red-hot rock began to drip from the ceiling, I dragged my eyes from the tableau of four overgrown boys beating an underfed changeling bloody for the great crime of being different.
The windows above my younger self cracked, then abruptly shattered.
Steam unfurled like white wings, barely hiding a pair of livid metal eyes.
Let me in!
I took off at a dead sprint, leaving the memory behind.
I dashed past a fourteen-year-old Rogan, golden torc askew and face contorted with worry as he rushed to rescue me from my attackers. He had indeed chased them off, that day so long ago, but I had barely seen him—my eyes had been swollen shut for a week from the beating I’d endured.
I glimpsed Mother—the queen—half hidden behind doorframes and lurking around corners, but when I looked more closely, she was nothing more than faded tapestries or cobwebs. Her voice echoed through the castle: Only I know how to love something like you. And no one will ever love you more than I do.
Cathair, slyly watching as I dashed past. He toasted me over the rim of his wineglass, and his mocking laughter chased me. You must learn to be strong, little witch.
And always, Talah drifting closer, her regretful but rigid refrain snapping at my heels. You cannot hide from me here. Let me in!
Furious tears fell from my eyes, and where they landed, flowers sprouted—white as fallen stars, black as the night sky that birthed them.
I slammed full tilt into a hard frame. I cried out, nearly stumbled. Strong arms sinewed with lean muscle and fletched with severe tattoos caught me, curving possessively around my shoulders. I looked up into the face of the towering man who’d seized me.
Irian’s beauty was, as always, a knife to my heart. I inhaled his scent of dawn air and cold metal, fighting the urge to surrender to his embrace.
He, like everything else in this accursed place, was nothing more than memory. Much as I longed for him to be real, he was not. He was nothing but an aspect of myself made manifest.
“You have been here before, mo chroí,” he said, rough but gentle. My heart, my heart. “Do you hear me? You have been here before.”
“I don’t know where else to go!” I cried out.
“The pleasure of the losing is in the finding.” Sympathy and worry made a battlefield of his perfect features. “Or so I have been told.”
“I don’t know where to hide so she cannot find me,” I bit out. “How can I lose myself in my own head?”
Irian stepped away from me. He stood suddenly at the edge of a cliff, wind snapping his long dark cape.
He tilted his head, sending raven strands of hair gliding around his ears.
“Your power is part of you, whether you like it or not. And it is vast. You are not strong enough to control it. You must find a way to work with it. You must seek the truth of your anam cló—the shape your soul wants to take.”
I turned away in frustration, only to halt when I saw who watched me from the moor.
A rack of silver-tipped antlers brushed the sky.
Below, their face was inchoate: the shadow-dappled path leading deeper into the forest. Heavy muscle corded over a powerful torso; russet fur glided over legs thick as tree trunks.
Behind them, the deep green forest whispered and beckoned, endless and inviting.
“You.” My helpless fury pushed me toward them. “Can’t you do anything? Aren’t you going to help?”
What would you have us do? The ancient being spoke like the groaning of oaks in a storm, the sighing of dead leaves settling on cold earth.
“Something. Anything.” I had been trapped inside myself for weeks.
Perhaps months. Maybe even years, as Talah circled ever closer, following me to my darkest corners.
My deepest regrets. Surely the entity to whom I had bound myself beneath the Heartwood could do more than stand there.
“You are a Bright One, are you not? One of the Solasóirí? You contain within you the magic you brought from the stars. You wield the power of the earth itself. Yet you do nothing!”
We long ago bound our magic to the Treasure you hold. We bound our power to you. They were patient as the seasons and enduring as the millennia. We can only do what you wish us to do. We can only be who you wish us to be. We can only go where you wish us to go.
“Go?” I nearly screamed. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re trapped inside my head. With her. No matter where I try to hide inside my memories, she always finds me. I’m running out of places to go.”
As if on cue, Talah’s fire-fretted voice melted along the cliff face and shrieked from the sky.
You cannot hide here, star child. Let me in.
“No.” I jerked my head over my shoulder, but Irian had melted away like a forgotten dawn. I fought a sharp stab of sorrow as I forced myself to remember—he was not here. Had never been here. Somewhere, outside, he lived. He had to live.
As long as I was trapped here, I knew he would not let me go. He had made me a promise. And Irian was a man of his word.
But that meant it was my responsibility to free myself from this prison of my own making. To keep Talah from wresting control of my being.
“I thought I had more time.”
As long as you run, she will chase you, the antlered figure intoned, with a gesture of their gleaming claws. But you belong to us. As we belong to you. It is as it has always been.
Standing preternaturally still with the forest writhing at their back, the Bright One spoke with an air of… invitation. I searched for eyes amid the mottled light and shadow of their face but found only an endless kind of regard that made me feel very small. Very young. Very other.
“We belong to each other. Are you saying…” I licked my lips, grappling with the sudden terrible sensation of teetering upon a precipice. “Can you offer me somewhere else to go, where Talah will not be able to find me?”
The figure nodded, unhurried despite the smoking embers curling along the cliffs, the veins of molten metal splintering the sun-bright moor. A long time ago, you were given to us for safekeeping. Three moons ago, we gave you back to yourself.
The cliffs began to shake; stones rattled toward the seething sea. You cannot hide here. Let me in!
“I don’t understand.” I fought to keep my focus despite Talah drawing ever nearer. “My early childhood is a blank. I have no memories from before I came to Rath na Mara.”
You have all you need. The figure turned on their heel, melting into the forest. Except perhaps the courage to face what you must do.
My breath accelerated in my throat; my heart thumped an uneven tattoo. Before I could change my mind, I flung myself after the Bright One. The moor dissolved.
The deep forest at dusk. Early frost scribed twigs with glass; leaves flamed in shades of ocher and rouge.
A small girl played beside the path—a girl with hair dark as deep water and mismatched eyes sparking green and brown in the low light.
She was not alone, although her playmates were wholly unexpected.
Fair Folk clustered around her, playful yet protective.
A flock of gossamer-winged sheeries shook the branches until golden leaves fell around her dancing form like lucky coins.
Three ruddy-faced leipreacháin hurried the fallen leaves so they chased the laughing girl to and fro.
Beyond, a few moss-haired ghillies bent the late blooms—asters and goldenrod and chrysanthemums—to make a bower for the girl to run through.
“Fia!” The shout burst the pleasant hush like a bubble being popped.
The Fair Folk immediately hid, slinking behind tree trunks or between dimming shadows.
The little girl tried to follow, but in the murky wood her face made a wan moon punctuated by desperate dark eyes.
The strident female voice grew louder. “Where are you, you accursed little horror? I told you not to wander off! But do you listen to me? No, no, you never do. What does it matter if your nursemaid gets whipped for losing you? You’d rather be off cavorting with your own kind.
This ends tonight, do you hear? I’m going to tell the queen where you keep running off to. And then you’ll be sorry!”
A russet-haired woman, pretty face contorted with irritation, careened into the clearing through a stand of ash trees. The little girl with the mismatched eyes froze at the sight of her.
“There you are,” Caitríona hissed, her eyes narrowing to cruel slits as she lunged for the little girl I had once been. “Just wait until I get my hands on you—”
Her grip was savage. The little girl cried out in pain, and the nursemaid immediately slapped her.
The flat of her palm cracked vicious as a whip in the dimming, silent wood.
The girl’s mouth opened in an O of shock; she began to cry in earnest, gulping in air as huge tears rolled down her reddening cheek.
The nursemaid only scowled, yanking on her wrists with unforgiving force.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Caitríona hissed between her teeth. “I am so weary of your nonsense. Why don’t you ask the Fair Folk to take you back where you came from, willful changeling whelp? No one wants you here. No one wants you!”
Night fell with a leaden hush as the young woman and the girl struggled in earnest—a tangle of flailing arms and screaming faces and kicking feet.
At last, Caitríona caught the little girl around the waist and hauled her bodily off her feet.
But the girl with the mismatched eyes twisted in her arms, her hands forming into claws as she grappled with her nursemaid.
Where those claws struck flesh, Caitríona began to change.
I swallowed hard, my ancient guilt transforming into something closer to vindication. The trees at my back reached reassuring branches to brush my shoulders, as if to say, You were never alone.
In the deepening gloom, the changeling girl transformed her unfeeling nursemaid into a tree. Her legs became birch saplings; her hair turned to flowering vines; her face became a staring sunflower. The little girl fell in a heap, scrabbling backward from the horror she had wrought.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed after a moment, her face mottled with tears. “Caitríona, I’m sorry. Please come back. Please. I don’t care if I get whipped instead of you. Just come back.”
The little girl flailed her hands over the young woman’s transformed limbs, as if she sought to undo the magic she had wrought.
But the nursemaid remained a tree. From their hiding places in the undergrowth, the Fair Folk slowly crept forward on stocky feet or lilted through the air on glowing wings.
But instead of being comforted by their presence, the girl now lurched away from them.
“You.” Her small voice was sour in the dark. “You made me do this. You lured me away from my home. You made me dream of the woods when I should have been learning my letters. You are to blame for this. You are wild and wicked, just as Cathair says.”
The Fair Folk hesitated. The leipreacháin rustled the dried leaves below the child’s feet; the sheeries lifted the ends of her hair with nimble, glowing fingers.
“Go!” Little Fia shouted. She swatted at one of the sheeries; it tumbled to the ground, stunned. “Leave me alone! Stop bothering me!”
The Fair Folk dispersed swiftly among the shadows, leaving the little girl with the mismatched eyes and the night-dark hair alone. She would stay there until dawn chased her home to explain what she had done to a queen who was not yet a mother.
I forced my eyes from her small kneeling form. The now-familiar figure’s antlers glinted silver in the faded starlight.
“Well?” I asked tiredly. “Was this what you wanted me to find?”
They regarded me with the patience of eons. Was it what you wanted to find?
“The moment I learned to hate myself?” My throat worked around the taste of decayed leaves. “The moment I rejected the part of me I had not known I needed to accept? The moment I shut away the half of myself I did not know how to love?”
What does it teach you?
The memory felt raw as rough hide, chafing my softest places. “Caitríona was vicious. Cruel. I was not to blame.”
You were to blame. The figure’s claws lifted toward me. That does not mean you do not deserve forgiveness.
“From whom?”
Who do you think? they returned, with infinite gentleness, unyielding firmness.
Somewhere behind me, the trees began to expand with veins of molten silver. Steam floated like fog between the widely spaced trunks. Let me in.
I stared at the Bright One’s outstretched hand, their palm imprinted with recursive whorls—the striations of untold millennia.
“You have always been with me, haven’t you?” I lifted my eyes to their face, formless as the forest path. “Even when I did not know you. Even when I did not want you.”
Yes. The figure beckoned me through the gold-and-silver-streaked wood. Are you ready now?
I hesitated for one last, aching moment. “I do not know your name.”
ínne, they told me, and it was the sound of trees growing and flowers blooming and stone eroding.
I wrapped my fingers around ínne’s calloused, clawed hand. I followed them deep, deep between the arching trees.