Chapter Nine Irian
Chapter Nine
Irian
Irian had never been the most patient of men. Laoise forcing him to wait for Wayland and her brother before explaining the supernatural grove of flaming trees licking and crackling above his head was making him livid.
“Why is it dying?” Irian asked for the third time.
“I’ll explain all I know,” Laoise said, also for the third time. “When Idris arrives with Wayland.”
Ten paces away, Sinéad—who had been nearly wordless for the past three weeks—was drilling through the forms and variations she’d learned from Fia, taking her aggression out on the air as she kicked and punched and stabbed with her twin daggers.
Irian exhaled a frustrated breath, turning in a tight circle as his hand skated toward the Sky-Sword, which hummed a querulous melody beneath his palm.
Fia’s ghostly weight haunted his arms. Perhaps he should not have left her in the main caverns with Balor, who was too large to easily navigate the smaller caves.
“Leave her with me, lord,” the Fomorian had offered. “I will keep her safe. Safer than safe: I will keep her Balor!”
Irian had not known what that meant. But it was daytime—his wife was quiescent after the rigors of the night.
Though claw marks scored his chest and the imprint of scales pebbled her limbs, he knew she would not transform fully until night fell.
So—pushing away his worst misgivings—Irian had conveyed her limp form to Balor, who had handled her with the tender care of a parent holding a newborn.
But as Irian followed Laoise into the bowels of the mountain, the image of the Fomorian cradling Fia’s slack body brought him no comfort. He wanted to get this meager council over with.
“Brother.” Wayland approached across the curved belly of the sinkhole, trailed by roly-poly Nidhoggur blundering through the cut-glass sunshine.
A few paces behind, Idris followed, his face half hidden behind a fall of dark red hair.
Irian had met the slender young man briefly before Laoise dispatched him to seek out Wayland, characteristically sleeping in while the rest of the world went to war.
Even now, Irian’s erstwhile foster brother seemed unconcerned by the conventions of clothing, sauntering boldly bare-chested through the ice-chased morning.
“Wayland.” Irian greeted him with a tone he hoped was rough enough to convey his growing annoyance. “Were you having sweet dreams?”
“The sweetest,” Wayland said. “For I was dreaming of you.”
Irian growled, deep in his chest, but that only made Wayland smile.
Irian forced himself not to react further.
Wayland had done nothing truly wrong to earn Irian’s recent short temper.
Yes, Irian’s oldest friend and foster brother had kissed his bride—but the geas binding them together had been forged long before Irian had wed her.
Yes, Wayland sometimes looked at Fia too long when he thought Irian wasn’t watching—but they were all concerned for her well-being.
Yes, Wayland had been the one able to remove Fia’s collar when Irian could not—but it had needed to be done.
Fia had chosen Irian. He was not jealous of Wayland.
He did not know what he was.
“Shall we?” he said, tightly, to Laoise. “Provided the conditions are at last favorable?”
She stalked between the harmonic circle of flaming trees. “We shall.”
Irian followed, trailed by Sinéad, then Wayland, then Idris and Hog.
At their feet, the dark volcanic rock was pocked with divots approximately the size of Irian’s fists.
He could only assume this was where they’d found the clutch of draig eggs.
Above, a few of Laoise’s draigs swooped and swirled, their red-gold scales shifting and flaring in counterpoint to the guttering trees.
“Here is all I have discovered.” Laoise’s voice held the same resonant gravity with which she’d relayed the tale of her dragain and their upbringing.
“Sacred groves are scattered throughout the realms of the Fair Folk. Tír na nóg. Emain Ablach. Annwyn. They are usually assembled of trees—though not always—but beyond that I can find no pattern. Some groves contain many trees; others only a few.” She glanced at Irian.
“If Sinéad’s stories of your Heartwood are true, some contain only one. ”
Irian remembered a ribbon of green vines and a ribbon of black feathers, and a much smaller hand clasped in his own. He remembered all that tree had taken from him. And all it had given back.
“The only constant is the magic flowing through and around the nemeta,” Laoise continued. “Even then, the magic is variable. I had never encountered anything like the wishing apples of Wayland’s Grove of Gold. But nor have I encountered other trees like these. They certainly grant no wishes.”
They all gazed at the shadow-flame boughs.
“This is what I have come to believe: The groves are the nodes where magic gathers and flows. Anchors, in a sense, rooting magic into the land even as their branches radiate it through the ether. They are all connected—by lines carrying power and life across our world.”
“Like hearts pumping blood through veins,” Wayland murmured.
“Where did they come from?” Irian’s jaw tilted as he considered this. “Have they always been here? Will they always be here?”
“So impatient, tánaiste.” Laoise clucked her tongue.
“The theory I find most plausible is that the groves are where Solasóirí—Bright Ones—landed when they fell from the stars. Which means they have not always been here, but are unknowably ancient. The magic they create, consume, and connect is bound by the same laws as nature—it may even be the law of nature. They can consume too much or too little. They can be warped or corrupted or even destroyed. And… they can simply die.”
Laoise had alluded to this dying before.
Irian saw what she meant—though the brightly colored foliage burned like a bonfire, veins of darkness ascended the glittering trunks from the black rocks beneath their roots.
The shadows pulsed spasmodically; the sword belted at Irian’s waist hummed in protest with every sick syncopation.
The minerals gleaming from the walls seemed to darken.
Irian did not know by what rules magic governed this grove, nor this mountain. But he believed Laoise when she said the nemeton was dying.
“Why?” Wayland sounded both bemused and intrigued.
Irian was astonished he had not yet made some quip or double entendre—his foster brother had never enjoyed a philosophical puzzle so much as a dirty joke.
“You said the grove began to die when Hog—when the last draig—was hatched. Why would that have… triggered… this slow decay? It has been years, has it not?”
“Several.” Irian had not yet heard Idris speak, and he was surprised by how deep the quiet young man’s voice was.
“There are legends among our mother’s people—the Ellyllon—that these mountain ranges were once home to Y Ddraig Goch.
The Red Dragan. Huge beyond imagining. Powerful and ancient as the stars.
Laoise and I have come to believe that this legendary draig existed in truth and was a Bright One.
This nemeton was its home—its landing place, its node, its source of cosmic power. ”
“Where is she—it—now?” Wayland demanded, and Irian knew without having to ask that his foster brother was thinking of the Year. Talah. Fia had told him what they had discovered, deep in that tomb where Gavida kept his captive Bright One.
“The Red Dragan has passed beyond these realms. Whether that means death, or some other ending, I cannot begin to say. But they no longer exist in a sense that we understand. They passed the last of their life force into that clutch of eggs.” Laoise gestured at the divots hollowed into the dark rock.
“We have no earthly idea how long those eggs were here. Millennia, most likely—the ruby passed down through my mother’s family was ancient beyond memory.
But we believe their existence put the grove into a kind of stasis.
Without the Bright One feeding and regenerating its magic, the grove relied on the eggs—which contained some essence of the entity—even as the eggs relied upon the nemeton. A self-sustaining system.”
“But when Nidhoggur hatched,” Idris finished, “the system terminated. Without the source of its magic—the Bright One or their offspring—the grove is now dying. And all the magic contained in this mountain with it.”
Irian glanced at the dying trees, then toward the juvenile draigs shrieking and tumbling through the air near the top of the sinkhole. Their glowing scales chimed like glass bells. “Why are the living draigs not performing the same role? Does the magic not flow from and through them?”
“Apparently not.” Laoise gave a complicated shrug. “We know not why.”
“Then this tells us nothing.” The anger and desperation simmering in the pit of Irian’s stomach gnawed at his self-control. His voice rasped ragged between his teeth. “We are exactly where we began. Knowing nothing. Having no path to save Fia’s life.”
“There is another aspect we have not considered.” Wayland spoke up, unexpectedly.
“My father did not speak of the Treasures often. When he did, I rarely cared to listen. But I do remember this—he forged the Treasures as conduits between sources and vessels. We now know the sources are Bright Ones. The vessels, Gentry heirs with affinities toward elemental magic. And the conduits, resonant objects that must be regularly renewed lest the cycle of regeneration end and the magic become corrupted.”
Irian’s thumb skated over the hilt of the Sky-Sword, its metal warm as his own flesh and humming with his own voice.
“We also know,” Irian said slowly, thinking through what Fia had told him of her resurrection beneath the Heartwood, “that the sources—these Bright Ones—may be bargained with. The cycle of magic regenerated. The Treasures restored.”
“The balancing is eternal,” Wayland began.
“But not immutable,” Irian finished, biting the words to pieces.
How many times had Gavida said that phrase?
For perhaps the first time, Irian wished he had paid more attention to his foster father’s booming prattle about bindings and forgings and the patterns of destiny etched in the stars.
But he and Wayland had been boys—they could not have foreseen how complex their own destinies might one day become.
“Then there is no rhyme. No reason. Nothing is written.”
“Yet all may be possible.” A note of excitement thrummed along the contours of Laoise’s accented voice.
“Think, tánaiste. Perhaps the Bright One who inhabited this grove created their own kind of binding—their own form of balance. They passed their vast elemental magic onward and set themselves free of the cycle in the doing.”
“The eggs,” Idris clarified, further unraveling the thread Laoise had picked out. “The draigs. They are vessels for the magic of the Red Dragan, in the same way the heirs of the Treasures are vessels.”
“Yet surely they are not bound by the same rules of balance as the heirs,” Wayland said, sorrow wringing his voice. “Surely they were not born only to die.”
“No. It is the nemeton that is dying.” Laoise’s ember eyes flared with some realization or idea, and she spun suddenly toward the nearest tree in the flaming grove. “Hog, come here.”
Hog, who had been sleeping around Idris’s neck, abruptly sat up. She gave an aggrieved mewl and flapped her stubby wings.
“Please,” Laoise amended.
Hog launched into the air—glazed sharp and gold by the lofting sun—and wobbled precipitously before landing with a thump on the roots at Laoise’s feet. She looked at her mother with adoring curiosity.
Laoise bent to the draigling’s level and held out her hand.
Hog cooed and lifted her taloned paw to gently place it in the maiden’s outstretched hand.
Laoise folded her other palm over Hog’s paw and, without warning, dragged the draig’s claw across her skin.
The razored point drew scarlet blood, welling luminous as smoldering coals.
Hog squeaked in dismay. Laoise gently stroked her snout before stepping toward the closest tree and laying her bloodied palm upon the translucent bark.
Veins of flaming red and smoldering orange and shadowy black seemed to coalesce.
The sun crested its zenith, pouring through the aperture in a wave of blinding, molten gold.
Simultaneously, the nemeton flared, firelight dazzling from every trunk and branch and twig and leaf.
Irian instinctively shielded his eyes with a raised arm. Everyone else mirrored the gesture.
Somewhere high above, all the draigs cried out in unison—an ecstatic cacophony of sound that jarred Irian’s bones and rattled the Sky-Sword in its scabbard.
When Irian at last lowered his hand, the grove had returned to its prior state—blazing but blighted.
The draigs whirled high above, save for Hog, who appeared to have grown six inches in an instant, shedding some of her baby fat as her nose and tail lengthened.
And Laoise—Laoise was uncharacteristically weeping as she held her injured hand to her chest.
“Oh,” she breathed, almost inaudibly. “Oh.”
No one dared speak until Hog chirruped plaintively, breaking the spell. Wayland knelt, scooping the still-small draig into his arms with the faintest oof of effort. Hog curled herself around his neck and buried her face in his long, rumpled hair.
“I don’t understand,” Wayland admitted. Laoise was staring at the tree she’d touched with wonder and horror wreathing her expression. “What does it mean?”
Irian’s heart rattled with foreboding. Then hardened like a diamond compressed by lingering fear, cut by cold realization, and polished by burgeoning dread.
“It is as it has always been.” Irian forced his tone to stay perfectly even. “The first language of the Solasóirí and their sacred groves… is sacrifice.”
Laoise lifted her eyes from the fading glow of the trees. “And blood is not enough.”