Chapter Thirty-Seven Fia
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Fia
There were exactly two outfits in the wardrobe.
My gown was black, with long tight sleeves and a skirt like a cascade of midnight satin, embossed in pale thread with a delicate motif of ebony feathers.
I was so transfixed that I almost didn’t notice Irian staring askance at his own outfit for the evening.
“What— Oh.” I recognized the clothing immediately, the sight like a poorly timed punch to the gut. The dark blue trousers beneath a golden tunic; the bold checked mantle in shades of green. Bridei’s colors.
“These are Rogan’s clothes.” Irian’s voice was low.
I swallowed. “Perhaps he is the only man in the fort tall enough to lend you clothing?”
“That may be so,” Irian replied, “but I am certain it is not the only reason.”
We dressed in silence. The clothes were far from perfect—the dress hung loose over my bodice and dragged on the floor. And though Rogan was tall, Irian was taller—his wrists showed beneath the cuffs of the tunic, and his shoulders strained at the seams of the mantle.
“Perhaps this is her ploy,” Irian growled. “To make me ridiculous.”
“I fear no one could do that, my heart.”
The same platoon of guards greeted us at the door and escorted us to the feast. The sun had set—torches flared in sconces, and the sound of music wafted from the great hall. But nothing could have prepared me for what greeted us when we stepped inside.
Eala’s feast might have been a fresco, daubed then dried, or a tapestry, painstakingly picked out in careful colors.
Save for the music trilling from a frenzied band of wide-eyed musicians and the torches scattering golden light, all was still and silent.
The tables were full of revelers, decked out in finery.
But no one lifted so much as a goblet. No one chatted with their neighbor or flirted with the bard or leered at a serving girl.
Even the hounds lay quiet beside the hearth, heads on paws and tails tucked.
“Sister!” Eala stood from the queen’s place at the center of the high table and beckoned Irian and me to join her.
I tried not to look too hard at the other guests at the high table as I passed them—I needed only my nose to tell that some of them were no longer living.
Yet my eyes could not help but graze over a few familiar faces.
Chandi, her tall spine bowed as she stared fixedly at the table, her skin wan and her hair dull. Dual arrows of fury and sympathy spiked my heart.
Mother, with Cathair beside her. Something cool and unnerving spooled through me—something slightly more venomous than relief—when I saw they were both alive. Eithne glanced up sharply as I passed her, her diamond-blue eyes scathing on mine. She gave her head a tight, tense shake.
Eala no longer wore her strange fluttering assemblage of rags—she had donned the pale twin to my outfit, a gown white as driven snow and embroidered all over with a delicate motif of feathers picked out in ebony thread.
I fought a shudder as she waved me close, guiding me into the chair beside her own.
The same chair I had once occupied as the queen’s foster daughter.
There was no chair beside it. No chair for Irian.
I thought perhaps it was an oversight until my gaze caught on the figure standing behind Eala, broad-shouldered and golden-haired. Clad in a tunic braided in gold beneath a mantle of green. Blank-eyed and deferent.
Not an oversight. To dress Irian up like Rogan and deny him a place at the feasting table? It was a grave insult.
Irian noticed at the same moment I did. He visibly bristled, his shoulders bulging at the already strained seams of his tunic and his silver eyes narrowing to crescents beneath the fall of his black hair.
He was impossibly tall and unbelievably menacing, and whatever hold Eala had over her guests flickered—murmurs erupting as the human courtiers shifted fearfully in their seats.
Most of these people had never glimpsed the Folk outside their bedtime stories, let alone laid eyes on a towering Gentry lord with violence etched upon every line of his impressive figure.
“Sister.” I held out a gentling hand to Irian, remembering Mother’s head shake. Angering Eala was not just foolhardy—it was potentially life-threatening. “You seem to have forgotten a place for Irian to sit.”
Her laugh was high and chiming. “I forgot nothing.”
I hardened my tone. “He is my consort.”
“But you are his queen.” Eala’s tone switched from humorous to grave in a breath.
“Should you sit, his duty is to stand behind you in support. Should you climb a stair, his duty is to follow one step beneath so he may gaze upon you from below. Should a blade threaten you, his duty is to shield you with his body. And should you sit upon a throne, his duty is to kneel at your feet. That is how a queen ought to be treated.”
I stared at her, half expecting her to utter the punch line to a bad joke. But she was deathly serious. I opened my mouth to say something like That is not devotion but domination.
Then Irian forcibly relaxed, every muscle in his powerful body going loose as he stepped slowly backward to stand beside Rogan.
He folded his huge hands across his belt, threw his shoulders back, and set his eyes resolutely forward.
I could not help my gaze from sliding over Rogan beside him, his expression flat and blank as slate.
Whatever spark of life in his eyes I’d seen—or imagined—on Emain Ablach seemed completely gone.
Eala clapped her hands, and servants streamed in with platters of food and decanters of wine.
There was wild garlic and potato soup, but the creamy broth was curdled, and the new potatoes were veined with black rot.
Servants cut steaming loaves of freshly baked bread, but by the time it reached our plates, it was cold and stale, as if it had been baked a week ago.
The meat was spring lamb with mint and pea puree, but it tasted like old rangy mutton, and the fresh roasted vegetables looked like they’d been scooped from a pig’s trough.
By the time dessert was served—a rhubarb tart with custard—my stomach roiled.
I fought not to heave at the sight of maggots squirming in the custard and pushed my plate away.
Around me, the living guests suffered the same struggle. Only Eala daintily sipped at her soup and shredded her meat with her long-nailed fingers and scooped sour, woody rhubarb between her delicate lips.
Nausea curdled my stomach, hobbled my mind. Could my sister not see what she had done? What she was doing? Her Treasure was not power over life, but the quickening of death. She was rotting this land from the inside out. And Tír na nóg would be next.
“Sister,” I said at last. “We come to you with a proposition for peace.”
Eala dabbed at her bloodless lips with a napkin before saying, simply, “No.”
Silence guttered around us like a dying fire. Until Eala leaned close, speaking to me softly and directly. Her breath gusted over my face, tasting of decay. This close, the markings on her skin looked like dark spiderwebs, twisting and shifting in the uneven torchlight.
“Can you not see? I have already created peace.” Behind Eala, Irian shifted his feet.
Eala’s cracked-agate eyes were fervent with a curious need that took me aback.
As if she was desperate for me to believe her words.
Or, perhaps, desperate to believe them herself.
“Beneath our mother, our father, and all the high kings of Fódla before them, this realm was in shambles. Thousands suffered while they engaged in petty squabbles and border disputes. We suffered—swapped and traded like coins on market day, cursed and manipulated to suit the whims of those who held power. But we have taken back the power, Sister. The control I exert over Fódla has only been to its benefit. I have purged corruption, halted petty wars, ended suffering. I have begun the difficult task of repairing a world that has failed its people—and me—one too many times.”
“You cannot make a fist and call it peace, Eala,” I ground out. “Nor can you deal death and say you have ended suffering.”
“I am correcting it,” Eala insisted. “Sacrifice paves the way for growth—surely we have both learned that much. I feel the weight of every death, every lost soul, every undone destiny. But it is all made worthwhile in resurrection—the old giving way to the glorious new.”
I stared at her. In a twisted way, my sister’s words rang true.
One only had to look at Eala to see the toll her magic was taking on her.
The more she forced her vision upon reality, the more reality resisted.
But I knew—this was not growth. It was the opposite—autumn leaves withering to dust, a candle guttering in the wind, a tuneless melody fading to silence.
I curled my hands in my lap, willing my starshine to stay dim.
Between my long sleeves and the soft candlelight, Eala had not noticed anything different about me.
In contrast, I could not stop staring at the blemishes marring her skin.
The more I stared, the more they put me in mind of long, strange feathers with skeletal barbules.
My fingers twitched. Eala was but an arm’s length away—all I had to do was reach for her.
Only you can bring her to the light.
“I need you by my side.” Upon her pale head, Eala’s crown stared at me with winking menace. “You are my perfect balance. The shadow to my light. The ending to my beginning. Together we shall finish what I have started.”
An involuntary shudder coiled my spine. “How?”
“For too long, Fódla and Tír na nóg have been artificially separated. Like us. Torn asunder, like us. Made to hate each other, like us. But they are meant to be one realm. Humans and Folk, one people. The Gates are a travesty, an abomination. We must tear them down to unite all.”
Gods help me, but I almost believed her.