Chapter Twenty-Three Fia
Chapter Twenty-Three
Fia
I could not fall asleep.
Irian and I had spent the rest of the afternoon talking, acquainting ourselves with all that had passed over the past few months.
Acquainting ourselves with our new physical dynamic, achingly different from what we were accustomed to.
Acquainting ourselves with each other—for in some ways, he and I were still strangers.
At what I assumed to be suppertime, Laoise’s brother had stopped by our chambers with an array of strange foods and a pitcher of wine.
Irian conversed with him in low tones; the younger man had avoided looking at me, hiding his eyes behind his sheet of hair.
I’d sampled the food but found I had little appetite.
Just as the wine had tasted sour and flat earlier, so too did the provisions taste bland.
I craved something older. Wilder. I wished not to eat, but to consume.
Or, perhaps, be consumed.
Eventually, Irian’s physical exhaustion could no longer be ignored. I gathered that he had not rested much over the past months, standing sentinel over my nightly transformations. His Treasure glossed over hollow cheeks and bloodshot eyes. But it could not stop him from yawning.
I gaped. I didn’t think I had ever seen Irian yawn.
Now he slumbered deeply beside me, face down on the mattress, limbs outstretched as if in his dreams, he was flying.
I rolled to face him on the pillow and smiled a little.
I could not begrudge him the rest, even if my own felt impossibly distant.
Every time I closed my eyes, shapes clattered against the inside of my eyelids—patterns sharp as silence and vast as eternities, imprinted in living starlight upon my innermost reaches.
In the dark and silence, my sister’s last words to me on the Longest Night reverberated between my ears, mingling with the echoes of prophecies I’d heard in my dreams, spoken by ghosts.
You are my sister. My other half. Only together can we be made whole.
Find your sister. You are her balance. Only you can bring her to the light.
Eventually I sighed and sat up, running a hand through my unfamiliar short tresses.
I padded to the wardrobe, which—fortunately for me—contained more than Irian’s too-large clothes.
Earlier, Laoise had thoughtfully stopped by with some sundries, including clothes for both day and night.
She was close in height to me, if not proportions, and I easily laced myself into a soft, simple kirtle before toeing on worn leather boots.
I opened the door and slipped out into the Cnoc.
Grooves set in the stone walls carried rivulets of flaming oil to supplement the gleaming minerals and gems studding the walls.
I had no idea how anyone told time in these caverns, but I judged it to be late—along the corridor, doors were shut, and no voices or sounds echoed.
I followed the lights to the vast dining chamber we’d met in earlier.
Balor slept in one corner, his bulk like a fallen tree and his snores like the scraping saw that felled him.
The hearths guttered with red flames; a few of the larger draigs were clustered close to the heat, their leathery wings wrapped protectively around their scaled bodies.
I gave them a wide berth as I skirted through the chamber.
Irian said Laoise had raised them as her children…
but even children got hungry. I wasn’t positive either my Treasure or my new radiance could protect me from toothy draigs.
Beyond, a single door stood ajar, spilling honey-gold light across black stone. I glimpsed chairs, a table, stacks of books. A library? That seemed as good a place as any to bore myself to sleep.
I wasn’t the only one with that thought.
Wayland sat at the large table in the center of the room. A few candles illuminated him in gold against the dark rows of books at his back. He looked up when I entered, then stood abruptly, the legs of his chair scraping.
“Sit down, Wayland.” Morrigan, but everyone was acting strange toward me. Wayland subsided back into his chair as my pale, unearthly glow joined the homey light of the candles. “Up late reading when everyone else is in bed? That doesn’t sound like the prionsa I know.”
Wayland did not so much smile as bare his teeth. “Does it not?”
“The prionsa I know would himself be in bed. His, or someone else’s.” I continued past him to the bookshelf, skimming my eyes over gilded spines and scrolls curled like fiddleheads. “Although likely not sleeping.”
“Perhaps I have changed, Thorn Girl.” His voice was like a hand on my shoulder, turning me toward him. “At the very least, I am prionsa no longer. My father is dead. Which makes me a king.”
“King of what?” In the dim, his cobalt eyes glittered like an ocean at midnight. I could not tell whether he was joking, and I felt abruptly guilty for teasing him. “I am told Emain Ablach fell into the sea. What makes a king if not his kingdom?”
Without missing a beat, Wayland said, “You mean besides his very large—”
“Shush!” I almost reached out to smother his ridiculous, incorrigible mouth before remembering what I’d done to Irian. Wayland’s smile grew with my shock—he always loved to provoke.
“I was going to say throne, Thorn Girl. What did you think I was going to say?”
“Stop it,” I chided as I turned back to the shelves. “You aren’t allowed to flirt with me anymore.”
“Why not?” He rose from the chair, leaning his hip against the shelf. “Because you don’t like it? Or because Irian doesn’t?”
I glanced up at him—his smooth golden-brown skin, his deep blue eyes, his half smile and heavy musculature.
To be honest, I’d never really minded the flirting—it had been a constant undercurrent tugging at us since the moment he and I had met.
It meant nothing—there was little between us but friendship, as far as I was concerned.
But I knew Wayland’s familiarity bothered Irian.
Perhaps it ought to bother me too. So I said, “Both.”
“Then I shall endeavor to cease any and all flirtations with you from this moment until the end of time.”
I faced him. “That was shockingly easy.”
“That’s what most people say about me.” He winced, pulling a face. “Sorry. Was that flirting? Old habits.”
“That was solidly self-deprecating. We’ll let it slide.” I cocked my head. “Speaking of your father—”
“We weren’t.”
“You said he died. What happened?”
Wayland’s easy stance hardened, his good humor evaporating like smoke. “I killed him.”
“Good.” The word came out venomous. I bit my tongue, for Wayland’s sake. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He lowered his head, spilling sleek mahogany hair over one shoulder. “Mothers leave. Fathers die. It is as it has always been.”
Horrified sympathy choked me. I thought again of Rían ó Mainnín.
His words to me in the Deep-Dream: I would have liked to have loved you.
And I thought of Deirdre, the last missing puzzle piece of my shattered past. I thought perhaps I understood a little of how Wayland felt, grieving a dead father and an absent mother.
“But he set you free, in the end.” I gestured to Wayland’s throat, where the outline of his heavy collar stood out pale against his skin. “You have your magic back.”
“And my destiny.” Wayland’s hand curled around his neck in a gesture that was at once violent and vulnerable. “Do you know what he said to me, in the end? Destiny is a bastard who longs to kick you in the balls.”
“That sounds like him.” I glanced down at where my visible skin glowed faintly in the dim. “I daresay he was right. But surely it’s better to have a destiny and an aching arse than be cut off from your stars entirely.”
“Do you think that’s true?” Wayland had always looked at me like my words mattered—something I still wasn’t used to. Now his deep blue eyes glowed with an intensity I wasn’t sure I liked. “Is it truly preferable to be destined for adversity than chained to happy mediocrity?”
“I think the cost of free will is the burden of choice.” I could not seem to banish Rían’s specter, his words in the Deep-Dream cutting furrows through my wakefulness. “Those who are not willing to sacrifice their hearts for the prospect of truly living may never learn what it is to be alive.”
“And do you feel alive?” Wayland asked gravely. “With all you have already sacrificed?”
“I don’t know.” I fought the urge to pull the sleeves of my tunic over my glowing skin. “But at least I know the choices I’ve made were my own to make.”
“Were they?” Wayland shook his head, then gestured at me. “Your… starshine. Is it harmful to all? Or just your husband?”
I shrugged, discomfited. “It seems a foolish thing to test.”
Before I could react, Wayland reached out and gripped my lucent hand. Light flashed in the space between us, searing my vision.
“Wayland—!” I jerked away, and he released me, inspecting his palm with curiosity in the waning brilliance. I stared, horrified, then relieved when I saw no blackened skin, smelled no seared flesh. “You gods-cursed idiot! What were you thinking?”
“That you deserve to know how much others ought to fear you.” Wonder touched his voice as he continued to stare at his unblemished palm. “It… saw me. It tasted me. And it told me… soon.”
His words sent a shudder spiraling down my spine. “What does that mean?”
“What did she say to you?” Wayland’s eyes bored into mine, devouring as a midnight sea. “The Year. Did she tell you why she… cursed you with this?”
I closed my hands into fists. “She told me she was granting my wish from the Longest Night, when I asked to become whatever I needed to be to withstand her. The cost and the reward are the same, she said. Truly star touched.”
“Then you burned Irian.” Wayland once more reached for me, tentative. Though trepidation fluttered like moths between my ribs, I let him touch the tips of his fingers to my arm. Yet again, my glow flared but did not harm him.
“But not you.” I frowned. “What if it is because you are not yet a Treasure?”
Wayland cocked his head. “Go on.”
“The Solasóirí came from the stars. Their magic flows through the Treasures but is bound by Gavida’s geasa—the laws of the tithes.
” The words came slowly, then faster as my theory grew.
“If I am indeed truly star touched, then maybe whatever power now flows through me is pure wild magic? Light, instead of dark. The counterpoint to the warped wild magic released from the destroyed Treasures.”
“And this pure star magic wants to, what?” Wayland looked skeptical. “Destroy Treasures?”
“Or perhaps… just the vessels.” A thrill and a threat wended through me. “ínne told me, Balance is not voluntary. Perhaps the pure wild magic was forcibly trying to set the magic of Irian’s Treasure free when it burned him.”
“But you’re a Treasure too,” Wayland pointed out. “Why isn’t it harming your… vessel?”
The radiance bathing my skin seemed suddenly perilous—less a benediction than a curse. A heart rended and a heart mended. “How do you know it’s not?”
The door creaked open. Wayland and I jumped nervously apart, although we had not been standing particularly close, nor discussing anything untoward.
It took me a long moment to recognize the stranger in the doorway.
But when the golden candlelight caught on his long auburn hair and glinted in his dark brown eyes, I remembered.
Laoise’s brother. Idris. I wasn’t sure why he had come to the library in the middle of the night, but he was probably wondering the same thing about Wayland and me.
“Idris!” Wayland braced his miraculously uninjured hand on the table and gazed at the other man. “It’s late. What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.” He hefted a lopsided tome bound in hairy leather by way of explanation. “This kept moaning at me while I was trying to sleep.”
Wayland grinned. “Are you sure you finished it properly?”
Idris didn’t smile in return, simply strode purposefully toward the shelves. His gaze flicked toward me as he passed, his dark eyes cold. I flinched, offended. Until I saw his eyes continue on past me to settle with confused concentration on Wayland.
Ah.
“Well!” I said brightly. “This has been anything but illuminating. My bed summons. Good night to you both!”
I fled the library. Listening to Irian snore would be far preferable to intruding on this brewing lover’s quarrel.