Chapter Twenty-One Wayland
Chapter Twenty-One
Wayland
The mood in the Cnoc was like someone had accidentally kicked a hornet’s nest and now waited for the inevitable sting. Tense, heavy anticipation haunted the halls with unspoken fears. Wayland had barely been here for five minutes and already he was tired of it.
News of Fia’s awakening had buzzed swiftly through the caverns.
Mere moments after Fia and Laoise had begun their race toward the nemeton, Sinéad had slammed into the library where Wayland and Idris were working, wild-eyed and spouting gibberish.
Once Wayland had worked out what she was trying to say, he’d left the library at a dead run, leaving Idris to stare open-mouthed after him.
In the end, he had missed all the excitement.
He had met Laoise, Irian, and Fia returning from the sinkhole, preceded by a pungent waft of burnt skin and molten metal, both odors unpleasantly familiar to him after a lifetime as the son of a smith-king.
Laoise led the way, her half dozen draiglings scampering boisterously ahead.
Hog bobbled off her shoulder and made a beeline for Wayland, slamming into his chest before sagging into his waiting arms. Her scales seemed to gleam a touch brighter in the dim, but he didn’t think twice about it.
He peered over Laoise’s shoulder, trying to catch sight of Fia.
He saw Irian first, towering at her side, his arms bare and his face barren.
Worry spiked through Wayland when he noticed the careful distance his foster brother was keeping from his bride.
He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.
Then Wayland saw Fia.
“Thorn Girl?” The nickname spilled from him before he thought better of it, hammering Irian’s expression hard with menace.
But Wayland only had eyes for Fia—he wasn’t sure he could have looked away from her if he’d tried.
Although she was mostly swathed in Irian’s overlarge dark mantle, and her pale skin wore half-moons of purple beneath her eyes, and she had grown thinner, she was… radiant.
He did not mean it as hyperbole. Fia had always been beautiful.
Now she was terrifying—luminous as the moon and just as untouchable.
Her skin literally glowed, rays coruscating between the tangles of her uncombed, half-burnt hair.
The gleams at her hairline that had once been Talah’s metal were now the silver-gold of starlight.
He remembered the words Fia had repeated when they’d first encountered the Year trapped far beneath Aduantas.
Star touched, she had said, frustrated but wondering. What does that mean?
Wayland had not known then. He did now. It made him afraid. Just as the power of a Treasure had seemed too overwhelming for Eala’s fragile human form, so too did the volatile ancient magic radiating from Fia’s skin.
It was one thing to be held hostage to the pattern in the stars.
It was another thing to be a fucking star.
He had been staring too long. He forced his eyes away from Fia, landing on Irian. He saw now why he was holding his hands awkwardly crossed, palms up. They were injured—nearly blackened. Horror flashed through Wayland as he realized what must have happened.
Irian had tried to touch her, to hold her, to comfort her. And Fia had hurt him. Gravely.
“Gods alive,” he said out loud. “What happened?”
Laoise held out her hands for Hog. The little draigling reluctantly vacated Wayland’s arms. Again, Wayland noticed some alteration in her. Not nearly as grievous as Fia’s transformation. But her scales seemed brighter. The flames of her eyes sharper.
“Let’s get everyone together,” Laoise said tiredly. “And tell it once for all.”
They gathered in the Cnoc’s dining hall. Idris busied himself with laying out food and drink, clearly discomfited by the whole ordeal but nevertheless wishing to be helpful. He pressed a steaming cup of something medicinal into Fia’s shining palms, ignoring her curious glance of unfamiliarity.
Wayland thought she needed a stiff dram of whiskey, not tea. He thought they all did. But he wasn’t going to be the one to say it.
Then everyone sat in stilted, awkward silence. And he realized he absolutely was going to be the one to say it.
“How about something stronger, Idris?” Idris gave him a startled kind of look before diving toward the sideboard and uncorking a jug of his deepwood sap wine.
Glasses were passed; alcohol was poured.
Still, everyone simply sat there, trying not to stare at Fia radiating like a fallen star. Idris shot Wayland a dolorous look.
“Gods alive.” Wayland lofted his glass. “Are we not celebrating? For months, this is all we have talked of. All we have hoped for.” Perhaps not exactly like this.
But Wayland knew, perhaps better than anyone else, that wishes granted rarely came true in the way you expected.
Stories always changed in the telling. And most people wouldn’t recognize a happy ending if it spat in their open mouth.
“Fia, the fierce. Fia, the fortunate. Fia, triumphant.”
Everyone echoed his sentiments, albeit wanly.
Fia sat a little straighter, shrugging out of Irian’s cloak and reaching for her own glass.
She hesitated in the moment before picking it up, as if afraid the black cup would shatter.
It did not, only seemed to take on a pale aura as she lifted it to her shining lips.
“Good,” Wayland said. “Now, what exactly happened?”
Irian opened his mouth. “She—”
“Please, Brother.” Wayland held up his palm. “I would hear it from her.”
Irian glowered but fell silent. Fia looked into her wine, her fingers playing over the ragged edges of her hair where Laoise’s fire had scorched her two months ago. When she spoke, her voice was faintly hoarse.
“When Talah overtook my body on the Longest Night, she and I were cast into struggle in a place I’ve come to know as the Deep-Dream.
” Fia’s words were stilted, as if she was not sure how to tell her tale.
“We were not the only ones there. Our battlefield was my memories; the fianna, everything and everyone I have ever known. The only reason I survived the struggle was because I was already linked to another Bright One—the elemental source of my Treasure. ínne. They showed me—” Fia trailed off, emotions tangling over her features before sifting away like dried grass.
Fear… ecstasy… sorrow… determination. Wayland could not help but wonder what she had experienced, trapped in the winding halls of her own mind.
“They showed me many things. How I was conceived, and why I survived. Who came before me in the lineages of the Treasures, and how the magic has, over the centuries, slowly begun to degrade. How everything—the Solasóirí, the Treasures, all magic—connects back to the nemeta. The sacred groves.”
“The nemeta?” Laoise did not so much ask as demand. “What of them?”
“They are where the magic of the stars—and the Solasóirí—exist in perfect balance. Where there is neither too much given nor too much taken. Where all magic coincides and collects. The closest things a Bright One might have to a home.”
Laoise and Idris shared a loaded glance, and Wayland remembered that had been one of their pet theories—that the groves were places to which the Solasóirí had descended from the stars.
Wayland had thought it a convenient explanation.
But all of this seemed to be veering rather terrifyingly into bedtime story territory.
“Is that how you knew to bind Talah anew?” Irian asked. “Did your Bright One tell you?”
“Irritatingly, no,” Fia said with a little laugh. “Solasóirí seem upsettingly allergic to speaking in anything but riddles. It was more of an impulsive, if slightly educated, guess. I did not know it would work until it did.”
Silence stretched out as everyone absorbed Fia’s words.
“And what, exactly,” Sinéad asked, “did happen?”
“The Grove of Gold was once Talah’s home.
But in time it became her prison—in the same way the Treasures have become prisons for others of her kind.
She was bound first by twos—by the Oak King and the Holly King.
After, Gavida bound her by threes. Three elements, three shackles, thrice three trees.
Then we bound her by fours.” Fia’s eyes slid far away, and Wayland knew she was remembering that night beneath the glowing apple trees of Emain Ablach.
They had all been so certain something was going to happen…
and then utterly sure nothing had. They had been wrong on both counts.
But Fia had been the one to pay for that foolishness.
“Gavida once told me, Bindings are always easier than unbindings. All the pieces of the cosmos want to be connected, even as they fall apart. Perhaps that means the natural state of balance is… binding.”
The words clattered against the inside of Wayland’s skull. He’d heard those words before. Many times, in fact. Unless he was much mistaken—
“Did my father say who told him that?” Wayland asked sharply.
Fia’s brow creased as she studied him as if for the first time.
Her mismatched gaze widened when she focused on his throat, curious and canny and unflinching.
Wayland experienced the same forced unveiling as he had on the Longest Night, as if Fia had torn off his skin and stared into the unmasked meat of him.
There was no judgment in the recognition—only kinship.
Maybe even solace, green as a well-trodden path through a sunlit wood.
“He mentioned a man named Marban,” Fia said after a beat. Satisfaction chased away Wayland’s less convenient feelings, and he shared a loaded glance with Irian. “And he said he had never met a human who had not changed the course of his life. Do you know of whom he spoke?”
“It can wait. I interrupted your tale—please continue.”
Fia lifted one shoulder in an eloquent shrug. “When I saw the flaming trees of the nemeton, I hoped Talah might find a new home and leave me in peace. But I was forced to bind her anew. Seven trees. Seven… friends.”
“And my dragain,” Laoise said, in a clipped tone that made Wayland think she was trying not to sound as furious as she was.
Fia’s chin came up an inch. “Seven dragain. And a price, levied in counterpoise to the magic performed.”
“What exactly was the magic performed?” Laoise had surely noticed how the minerals embedded in the cavern walls suddenly appeared more silver than gold, like Talah’s metal veined through Aduantas.
How the draiglings’ red-gold scales all seemed glossier than they had before—as if embossed with hammered silver. “And what was the price?”
“The girl is glowing, for gods’ sake,” Wayland scoffed. “And nearly burnt her husband’s hands off, if I’m not much mistaken. Is that a high enough price for you?”
Irian reflexively curled his palms, though his skin had nearly healed over, pink and smooth as a babe’s arse. Wayland almost pitied him—it would be hell to earn his sword calluses back.
No—Wayland did pity him. Swordplay was likely not Irian’s first concern in this unlikely scenario of his wife’s touch burning the very flesh from his bones.
“But why?” asked Sinéad softly.
“I don’t fully understand.” Fia looked at her hands. Her glow had dimmed but not disappeared. “I must think on all I’ve learned. Now—will you tell me what has happened since the Longest Night? What happened to the Silver Isle? Where is Eala? Where are we? Who else is here with us?”
Her gaze fell on Idris with this last question, and Laoise’s brother dipped his head behind the screen of his hair, struck inexplicably shy by Fia’s direct gaze. Everyone was silent as the past few months arose like a monumental mountain in their midst. No one seemed to know how to traverse it.
“Come, mo chroí,” Irian finally said, his voice pitched low. “You will wish to bathe and eat and perhaps sleep. Then I will tell you all that has passed.”