Chapter Eleven Laoise
Chapter Eleven
Laoise
Gathering and eating with the half dozen strangers she’d brought into her home brought Laoise curious comfort.
Idris was a good cook. He’d had to learn, one of those first long winters at the Cnoc, when Blodwen was a rambunctious juvenile and Barfog an incessantly noisy hatchling.
The supplies Laoise had brought from Dún Scaith and scavenged from Findias had long since been used; she could hunt in the form of her anam cló, but the Barrens were not plentiful with game.
When her lanky teenaged brother—as relentlessly hungry as the newborn draigling licking sweat from her neck—complained about the lack of food, Laoise had snapped at him, perhaps unkindly.
Lick the walls like Blodwen, Brother, she’d shouted. If you wish for something with more sustenance, then shift yourself to find it or make it for once in your bloody life!
Idris had gone terribly quiet for two days, then seemingly taken her words as a challenge.
A week later, he’d served a truly horrendous dish of clumsily filleted blind salamanders burned to an utter crisp.
Probably by Blodwen. Laoise had choked down the blackened hunks of tough lizard, devouring her own guilt with it.
Was this not exactly what she had demanded?
The least she could do was accept the effort at face value and pray Idris took the failure as a sign his talents lay elsewhere.
He did not. That, too, he took as a challenge.
The caverns were not rife with life, but nor were they absent of it.
Florid yellow lichen climbed the damp walls beside the underground rivers; green geckos and scarlet salamanders and speckled venomous frogs gamboled in the shallows.
Tenacious birds with gemstone wings nested high on the walls of the sinkholes; furry burrowing creatures whose calls sounded like wind chimes dotted its floor.
If it could be foraged, Idris learned to forage it. If it could be snared, Idris learned to snare it. If it could be cooked, Idris learned to cook it.
Now—many years after those initial growing pains, which had included a number of accidental poisonings—Idris’s culinary talents bordered on the rapturous. Despite Laoise giving him zero warning about the crowd she was bringing to the Cnoc, he’d conjured a veritable feast.
Braised lichen tossed with moonworm honey. Crystal-cap mushrooms steaming on toasted rounds of root bread. Salamander and wild garlic tart. Wine made from twilight berries and deepwood sap.
Each dish was delicious and everyone ate like they were starving.
Which perhaps they were. Balor chuckled at the spread before excusing himself, claiming he’d seen a delectable vein of obsidian quartz he’d prefer to sample.
Sinéad ate heartily for the first time in nearly a month, and Laoise was pleased to see pink bloom on her wan cheeks.
Wayland gamely sampled everything before returning for his favorites.
Irian—Fia lying supine beside him, with her head resting in his lap—ate with tense, precise bites.
His strict inscrutability refused to hint at whether he was enjoying himself.
Laoise sometimes wished she could tell Irian to take entertainment where he could find it. But she supposed one did not demand the sun shine at night, nor the cliffs bow to the sea.
Before long, the food had been demolished and the conversation began to ebb.
The draiglings were all lazily curled between the Folk—or, in Hog’s case, stretched languorously over Wayland’s lap.
Balor had stomped cheerfully back into the cavern and settled himself against a smooth wall, his enormous teeth looking particularly sharp and gleaming.
Even the aughiskies seemed sated, having been shown the most plentiful underground rivers by the draiglings.
Laoise cleared her throat, planting her elbows on the stone table before her.
“The magic of the Barrens—and this nemeton at its heart—kept Eala from following us.” Laoise jumped straight to the heart of the matter—no point in wasting everyone’s time with unnecessary dithering.
“But I have received word from my network of… informants. Her withdrawal does not appear to have been a retreat. Quite the opposite—although it has been but a few days since Mag Tuired, she has marched through several Folk settlements, chaos and death upon her heels. The rumors spreading in her wake are concerning. Some call her the Rotten Princess. Others say she has dubbed herself Grave Mother.”
“How do you know this?” Irian’s hand twitched toward his belt, but he must have left the Sky-Sword in his chambers. He rested his palm on Fia’s dark head instead. “Who are these informants?”
Laoise did not particularly care to explain her past to the Gentry heir—the long years training in swords and shadow magic at Dún Scaith, the friendships she’d forged and the enemies she’d earned.
Nor did she wish to reveal how she and her Twilight Sisters—scattered now across Tír na nóg, Annwyn, and beyond—stayed in near-constant contact, their messages appearing neatly folded in shadows only Laoise knew how to unfold, sharing joy or warning of danger.
“We call ourselves Twilight Sisters. Women who, like me, trained with Lady Scáthach. Women I trust with my life,” Laoise said tightly. “The intelligence is good. Even now Eala approaches the outskirts of the Summerlands—she will likely reach their main city in one, maybe two weeks.”
“Perhaps she has given up on us,” Wayland said, his tone too light. “On Fia. Perhaps we need worry about her no longer.”
Irian barked a harsh laugh. “Eala is mad with power and obsessed with the notion of Fia as her other half. The person who will make her whole, who will somehow cement her position as rightful ruler of both realms. She will stop at nothing until she has her sister by her side, no matter the cost.”
Wayland’s smile slipped, his broad shoulders tensing. Idris reached out to lay a gentling palm on Wayland’s forearm, even as he murmured something below his breath.
Laoise’s curious gaze lingered on the men before she addressed the group once more.
“We cannot expect Eala to act logically. In becoming a Treasure, she has undergone a transformation even Folk Gentry struggle with; as a human woman she has been indelibly changed. She no longer is who she once was.”
“Or perhaps she is,” Sinéad added, in a vicious undertone. “Which makes her all the more terrifying.”
Laoise glanced sideways at her friend, who kept her eyes downcast. Laoise knew without having to ask that the human girl was thinking of her actions on the Longest Night—how she had dropped onto Eala from halfway up the cliff without an ounce of hesitation, then brutally stabbed the other woman until she believed her dead.
Laoise did not blame Sinéad for her violence—she had witnessed enough thoughtless death to recognize a righteous kill.
She only regretted—for Sinéad’s sake, if not her own—that the human maiden had not stayed dead.
“We don’t know what Eala wants or what she is planning,” Laoise said. “But we must find out. And soon, for the specter of destruction haunts her steps. I plan to scout her location in the form of my anam cló—I wish to see with my own eyes where she is going, what allies and armies she gathers.”
Sinéad looked up, blue eyes blazing. “I’m coming with you.”
“Absolutely not,” Laoise said shortly. “When I return, it will hopefully be with enough intelligence to inform our plans for what comes next.”
Her words were met with a tense silence. Sinéad rose to her feet and stalked from the cavern. Laoise swallowed the sudden knife in her throat as she watched her go.
Images and memories lapped over her: Blodwen, small enough to carry in her arms, her forked tongue laving sweat from Laoise’s collarbones; Sinéad and Chandi, singing off-key with their arms twined through Laoise’s, smelling of spiced wine and fresh snow; Nidhoggur—sweet, dear Hog—desperately trying to speak her first word between puffs of acrid, sulfuric smoke.
Mmm. Mmm. Mum!
She still remembered the sunlight slicing through the fog on the morning she approached Fia and Irian on the cliffs by the sea. Irian’s words, tense and dismissive: If chaperone befits your skills, then our camp waits atop the hill.
Laoise barely understood how she had become a mother to seven unruly draiglings. She understood even less how she had become chaperone, friend, then family for two human girls.
Chandi and Sinéad were both nearly women grown—seventeen and nineteen, respectively.
She was not their mother or even their sister.
Yet she had come to care for them both. Chandi’s betrayal still twisted like a knife in her gut—for Sinéad, the anguish was far worse.
Laoise did not wish to cause her any more pain.
“I beg your pardon.” Laoise stood, cutting her eyes around the room. “I will attend to Sinéad. Perhaps in the meantime, the rest of you can decide how you will contribute to this stirring war effort.”
“I’ll plan the valiant retreat,” Wayland said glibly.
“I think we’ve just lived that, Prionsa,” Laoise called over her shoulder. “And I’m afraid I’m running out of hidey-holes.”
Sinéad sat on the plush carpet in her chambers, toying with her daggers as she stared at nothing.
“Sinéad?” Laoise’s voice broke the other woman’s reverie—the rhythmic motion of her hands faltered.
One of her spinning daggers fell to clatter on the floor.
The other dashed against her wrist, blooming red upon her skin.
Sinéad hissed in pain, folding her palm over the injury as Laoise cursed and rounded the bed toward her.
“Shite! I’m sorry.” She drew Sinéad’s hand from her wrist and inspected the cut. It wasn’t deep, but the blades were sharp—it was bleeding profusely, the scarlet blood a shocking shade against Sinéad’s pallor. “Let me help.”