Chapter Fifteen Laoise #2
Laoise bit her lip and tried to decide whether to recount the whole awful tragedy.
It had been a long day and she wished to rest, not exhume ancient memories that would surely bury her in grief and regret.
Perhaps someday, when all this conflict had ended, she would tell her friend the sordid tale.
She thought she might even like it—she could picture how Sinéad would listen to her words without judgment, quietly absorbing the gravity of what had passed.
After, she would not try to hug her—no, neither Sinéad nor Laoise were women of easy embraces.
But she would say something compassionate and unvarnished, and Laoise would be glad to be seen. To be heard. To be understood.
“I did” was all Laoise said, in the end. “Relationships are fraught and tangled. But it’s normal to miss the pieces of our past that felt like home. Especially when they’re gone forever.”
On the third day they saw the smoke.
Laoise’s intelligence must have been outdated—they had flown nearly to the ever-flowering fields of Ildathach before she realized they ought to have crossed Eala’s path by now.
They traveled south along the coastline, then crossed back inland, scouring the valleys for signs of the princess. Where was she?
Sinéad smelled it first, rearing back on Laoise’s neck to shield her face with her sleeve.
“What is that?” she called, above the shrieking of the wind across Laoise’s back.
A suffocating reek of filth, decay, and dense, oily smoke struck Laoise’s nostrils. And she knew: It was death.
She had experienced her fair share of destruction.
She recognized—all too well—the stench of skin crisped by fire and bodies laid to waste, the carrion call of blood and guts spilled over heaving earth.
But the horrors of the battlefield never grew easier to bear.
Trepidation cleaved her sense from her body, and she saw herself as if from a distance.
Laoise, all of thirteen, as flames engulfed the warehouse, devouring flesh and hair like brittle kindling.
Laoise, seventeen, vomiting bile after a skirmish with renegade gruagaigh in the Altaír stole three of her Sisters’ lives.
Laoise, twenty, rolling her mother’s heavy, fetid body off the trapdoor that had protected her brother from slaughter.
She snapped back to her senses. Slanted her wings, banking hard. Wind rippled over her back, nearly unseating Sinéad, who yelped and clung harder to her spikes. Beside her, Blodwen and Barfog barrel-rolled, easy in the air without the terrible weight of knowledge Laoise carried.
She had to protect them from that.
“What are you doing?” Sinéad howled over the wind whipping past them. “Eala’s that way—just beyond the ridge!”
No—no. Laoise could already envision what lay beyond that last range of hills, as if prescient—the blight and ruin, the waste and havoc. She did not want to see; she did not want them to see.
“Please, Laoise!” Panic touched Sinéad’s voice, and it was not for what lay beyond the ridge. “We’ve come all this way. Please.”
Inwardly, Laoise cursed. Sinéad’s words from two weeks ago threaded through her hesitation. I need to see that I am on the right side of this—that they are worse than me. Or rather, that I can be better than them.
Sometimes, the best way to protect someone was to give them what they needed. Even if it caused you pain.
Abruptly, Laoise banked again and pointed her nose toward battle.
The scene beyond the ridge was worse than she had imagined.
The fianna of the dead were vast—Laoise struggled to understand how Eala had amassed such an army in the time since the Longest Night.
As they swooped lower, she began to. Some of the soldiers were waterlogged and bloated, still clad in Gavida’s pale blues and lambent silvers.
Still more were ancient and bog parched—desiccated corpses strung with rotting flesh and armed with weapons from a forgotten age.
But the bulk of them were fresh—blood still oozing from slit throats, hollow eyes gazing from lopsided heads upon recently broken necks.
They advanced in eerie silence, heavy steps trudging over early-blooming snowdrops.
The air should have been crisp with the gossamer scents of frosted pine and waking earth; instead the putrid reek was like a grave split open—rotten flesh and mold and damp carrion, underlaid by the acrid tang of burnt hair, scorched marrow, old blood turning to rust. Where they marched, the land withered—green grass blackening, yellow daffodils curling into ash, crystal streams turning to inky sludge.
The last rows of dead warriors carried torches; eager flames devoured whatever life remained.
Behind them stretched the wasteland of their passing, a stark wound slashed through the serene beauty of late winter’s landscape.
“Your fire!” Sinéad’s shouted in Laoise’s ear. “We have to destroy them!”
Laoise did not relish adding more destruction to the desolation already scarring Tír na nóg. But Sinéad was right. This was war—Eala’s army could not be allowed to march onward. And if Mag Tuired had taught them anything, it was that draig fire destroyed dead warriors better than anything else.
Laoise dived, folding her massive wings as she plummeted toward the cavalcade.
Fire erupted from her maw—a searing torrent of molten gold that bathed the undead horde in cleansing flame.
Bone and rusted steel melted like wax; soundless mouths parted in Os of distress as empty lungs incinerated.
Laoise soared lower, her talons lashing out to cleave through brittle skulls and snap spines like dry twigs.
In her wake, a scorched trench marred the earth, the smoldering remains of Eala’s army little more than ash swirling in her furious updraft as she climbed back into the sky.
She descended again and again, screaming fire out of the blue to decimate the horde.
To her right and left, Blodwen and Barfog followed suit, their draig fire less powerful but no less destructive.
Within minutes, the cool morning sun was hidden by stinging smoke and sifting ash, accompanied by the searing stench of burnt bodies.
“There!” Sinéad was laid low along Laoise’s neck—her voice raw from shouting. “Up ahead! I see her!”
Laoise did not know how the girl could see anything through the smolder.
Still, she swooped toward where Sinéad indicated, her wings slicing the smog into wafting specters like the souls of the dead warriors below.
There—through the shifting smoke, she spied the tangled sprawl of a hazel wood, buds still curled tight in the chilly grasp of late winter.
Figures wove through the wreckage with swift steps, their silhouettes flickering between the twisting branches.
A golden-haired human man led the group, hacking with his sword at the grasping boughs hemming them in.
Behind him, a slight blond-haired woman moved with silent urgency, her shredded cloak billowing amid the death-scented wind.
A tall, slender girl with long black hair followed, her spine hunched as she glanced repeatedly over her shoulders.
A score or more heavily armed warriors brought up the rear, though Laoise could not determine whether they were living or dead.
Her stomach contracted, not with belching fire but with curdled relief. Chandi lived.
So, too, did Eala.
Upon her back, Sinéad’s legs tightened. She leaned precipitously along the length of Laoise’s neck, forcing her to rear back and bank her wings to keep the human girl from sliding off.
“I know this place!” Sinéad shouted. Between the hazel trees, past the haze and ruin, a glade beckoned—a patch of untouched green bathed in distant sunlight. The human prince was cutting a path directly toward it, Eala and Chandi at his heels. “Geata Coll—the Hazel Gate!”
The Hazel Gate. The Gates had never been of much concern to Laoise—she had little interest in the human realms and even less in the stolen domains of the bardaí. But she knew enough. Only a Treasure could open a Gate. Eala was now a Treasure.
Perhaps this had always been Eala’s route—the human realms her deadly target.
Perhaps this was the promise of escape within reach, with a fire-breathing assailant at her heels.
It mattered not—the princess knew these territories as well as Sinéad did.
There could be no doubt about where Eala was heading.
“Lower!” Sinéad screamed, her fingers digging into the tender spaces between Laoise’s spikes. “You have to fly lower!”
Laoise hesitated. Despite Chandi’s betrayal, she did not wish to harm the girl. She could not kill Eala—not unless she wished to unleash wild magic over these lands. Nevertheless she obeyed, descending from the heavy bank of smoke.
“Lower!” Sinéad urged.
Hazel branches scratched Laoise’s belly and grasped at her scales. Sinéad tilted sideways. Panic threw Laoise in the same direction. But the girl’s legs were unlatching from her shoulders, her hands unhinging from her spikes.
Sinéad threw herself down into the hazel grove.
Shite. Laoise banked, rolled, and tucked her wings tight.
She flung herself after Sinéad, transforming from her anam cló as she plummeted.
Hazel branches bent and snapped, scratching Laoise’s fragile Gentry skin and showering her with pale catkin pollen.
She hit the ground hard, her knees thunking on cold, muddy ground.
Her eyes swam over a confusion of tangled branches and lurching figures and skeining smoke.
Where was Sinéad?
Laoise shoved forward, careless of the thrashing branches catching at her hair and clothes.
A heavy, reeking warrior wildly swung a sword in her direction; she neatly sidestepped and rolled beyond his reach before flinging herself back to her feet.
Panic made her dizzy—her heart beating too fast as she dragged smoke-stained air into her gasping lungs.