Chapter Thirty-Nine Fia #3
“We make for Tír na nóg,” I told Irian. “I will explain as we go. But first… do you mind doing something about this dress?”
Irian knelt before me, using the Sky-Sword to hastily shred the suffocating layers of gown and the petticoat beneath, until the skirt fluttered freely above my knees.
Chandi wrapped her arms around her torso as if holding herself together. “I can show you to the stable block where Finan is kept.”
“I know where the stables are,” I said, a little tartly.
She hung her head. “Of course you do.”
I wasn’t sure Chandi deserved my forgiveness—her betrayal had been a heartbreaking shock, and I didn’t know if I could ever trust her again. But I did know she didn’t deserve to be abandoned here, in the midst of all this death and violence, to suffer at Eala’s hands.
I had not been able to save Rogan from my sister’s clutches. And I did not have to be a queen to understand the value of mercy.
“But you can show me anyway,” I told her. “After all, you’re coming with us.”
Her head snapped up. “I am?”
“You can ride Finan.”
Another round of tears threatened to fall from her amber eyes. “But… why?”
“Twice now, I have left you behind in the heat of conflict,” I told her. “I will not do it a third time. But you will have to ride hard, and if it comes to blows, I am not sure we will be able to protect you.”
“I understand.” She nodded gravely. “Thank you, Fia.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” I gestured curtly. “Shall we?”
As we climbed the steps through pools of torchlight, I felt Irian watching me. I turned to him, lifting an eyebrow. But my husband was not frowning in disagreement. His expression verged on adoration—the flames catching in his silver eyes and transfiguring them to gold.
“The woman you are, mo chroí.” His smile, sweet and sharp, cut me to my core. “I never weary of following you to the most unexpected places.”
False dawn grayed the horizon. Cathair pressed the vial of Eternal Fire into my palm before he parted ways with us, reiterating its uses.
“We do not need it,” Irian said. “We have draigs.”
“How thrilling for you.” Cathair raised his eyebrows. “Take it anyway. Perhaps the Folk may be able to replicate the formula for the battle to come.”
Irian grunted, but I tucked it into the lining of my bodice nevertheless, next to the wrapped starstone.
Few guards stood watch in the cold, silent hours before dawn; fewer still were alive. I fought sorrow for the ones who were, as the Sky-Sword silently and brutally cleared our way toward Finan.
Any violence tonight was only the beginning.
We saddled the drowsy stallion. He moved too slowly.
I cringed at the ringing clop of his hooves on the cobblestones, but there was nothing to do about that but pray.
I jimmied the infamously fickle lock on the postern gate—I’d snuck out of Rath na Mara a hundred times this way.
The gate opened onto the steep rise to the west of the keep—our strange trio picked down the rocky slope as swiftly as we could manage without falling, leading Finan by his reins.
Pink and gold dusted the horizon like flower pollen.
Too slow. The morning watch would soon change.
We were nearly to the shadow of the forest at the bottom of the hill when a lone figure burst from the palisade.
Irian and I—both keeping a steady watch behind us as we made for the woods—tensed. Irian had not sheathed the Sky-Sword—he lifted it now, ribboned with gore. But as I squinted into the morning, I saw it was Cathair again, betrayed by his graying hair and the glinting charms braided into it.
Then I saw what he was running from. Movement along the ramparts—a terrible lurching wave as undead soldiers pushed over the top of the wall.
Movement near the postern gate—more revenants streaming through the narrow opening like ants.
Movement at the main gates, the thunking of the bar lifting and the grinding of the doors opening and the hurried, ungainly tramping of a hundred boots on packed earth—
“Get her up!” I cried to Irian, panic making my voice shrill. He hoisted Chandi onto Finan’s saddle. The stallion stamped and sallied as the tall maiden gathered his reins, her fear seeping into the beast. “Go.” Then louder. “Go!”
“Colleen,” Irian growled.
“I must try to help him,” I bit out. Cathair was already faltering, his mad dash taking its toll on his middle-aged body. He was not a fit man—his talents lay in spheres other than the training yard. His earlier words to me rang in my ears: I believe in you. “I will catch up. Please!”
Chandi did not protest. She nudged Finan into an eager canter, weaving along the edge of the trees as she sped southeast.
Irian did not budge. “There is no time, mo chroí.” The dead soldiers spilled over the top of the walls, slamming onto the hard ground before tottering back to their feet.
They stomped through the gates with newborn sunlight glinting off their bloodstained armor.
“I am sorry, but he is a dead man. We must run, lest we share the same fate.”
I hesitated one last second, then sprinted back toward Rath na Mara, ignoring Irian’s roar of frustration as I flung myself toward my old teacher, meeting him halfway across the plain.
“What happened?” I urged, fear and exertion making my voice raw.
“I was discovered,” he wheezed, his face red and his eyes bulging.
“With the scroll. But that isn’t all. The Book of Whispers spoke to me.
” A page fluttered in his grip—parchment translucent as human skin stretched too tight, inked with words and images and trailing threads that looked like hair.
“I know you asked me not to. But it whispered to me of how the story ends.”
“Ends?” The dead fénnidi were drawing closer now—I glimpsed stumps of broken teeth and the rolling of glutinous eyes. “How what story ends, Cathair?”
“A feather so black will rise from pain,” he intoned, shoving the brittle parchment into my hands, even as fear widened his eyes and his limbs began to shudder. “A crown so silver will rise to reign.”
I fell back in retreat, heedlessly shoving the paper into my bodice as my own fear warred with my need to know the next lines.
“A heart so green must bleed once more, for light and dark to one restore.” Cathair suddenly straightened, shedding his exhaustion and cowardice like a cheaply made jacket. “The last love lost, the price now paid—through sacrifice, the balance laid.”
He stared at me, hazel eyes glinting. I did not know what he saw when he looked at me, but for the briefest moment, I saw him.
Not the middle-aged druid, the queen’s whore, the cunning spymaster.
But a younger, more hopeful man. A man who believed in magic in a realm that had shunned it.
A man who had loved a young, ambitious queen married to a distant king.
A man who had been forced to foster all the worst qualities in a little changeling girl who knew nothing but fairy dust and a deep longing for love.
And as the horde of the dead surged around him, he blended in my mind with Rían. Rían, dragged back through a field of wildflowers toward the cottage where his memory lived. Rían, with his pale hair billowing around him as he was torn from me for the final time.
I had had two fathers. Rían, my blood father, who had never even known I existed, who had loved me only in theory. And Cathair, my foster father, who had known all my terrible weaknesses and exploited them, who had hated that he was not allowed to love me.
One perfect—either perfectly bad or perfectly good, for he did not truly exist. The other utterly imperfect—for all his big mistakes and his huge failings and his infinite cruelties.
Cathair smiled in the moment before a soldier’s blade pierced his chest from behind. And as blood bubbled from his lips, he said, “Run, little witch. Run.”
I must have screamed—a blade of fury and anguish pierced my own choking throat.
Irian was pulling me by the waist, dragging me away and pushing me south.
But I could not tear my eyes away—could not help but watch as the horde swallowed Cathair’s broken form beneath their ravening strides.
They did not stop, did not even slow, flattening him into the trampled grass.
I began to run. Haltingly, crushingly. I thought I must be weeping, for my eyes were hot and my cheeks cold.
“Run,” Irian echoed, his light touch on the small of my back the only thing anchoring me to the world. I gazed at him, and his eyes were blue as the morning and gold as the sun. “Dig deep, mo chroí. For you will not be able to outrun them like this.”
I did not understand what he meant. I pushed myself harder, my legs pumping beneath me with all the strength I had in my muscles.
It was not enough—I had barely eaten. I had not slept.
I called on the power of my Treasure, infusing the Heart of the Forest—weaker, here, in the human realms—into my flagging limbs.
It was not enough. I called on the starlight ínne had fed me in my childhood and Talah had fused to my bones, and I felt myself begin to glow, radiance pearling off me into the dawn.
It was not enough. The relentless thud of boots was like the pounding of a terrible heart. Weapons flashed in my periphery. Armor clanged like a death knell.
Run, little witch. Run.
I thought of my fathers: one too weak to love me… the other too dead.
I would have liked to have loved you, little deer.
The horde’s hot, rotten breath gusted upon my neck. Their skeletal fingers scrabbled for my arms. Even if my starshine destroyed a few of them, there were so many. They would drag me back to her—back to my mad sister. And she would not give me another chance to escape.
I closed my eyes and thought not of my dead fathers, but of my absent mother.
Deirdre, the doe. Deirdre, the heir of the Sept of Antlers. Deirdre, my mother.
Where are you? I screamed into the cacophony of panicked voices crowding my head. Mother, please! Help me!
The change began with a pull beneath my skin—an unraveling of sinew and a reshaping of bone.
It hurt—an ache both ancient and novel. My muscles rippled along legs that felt suddenly too long, too slender.
My fingers fused and stretched, tapering as I fell toward the ground.
But I did not trip, did not fall. I caught myself and kept running, my gait now impossibly light and astonishingly fast. My pulse quickened, pounding in time to the wild rhythm of magic coursing my veins.
The world shifted, my senses sharpening to the unseen world of shadow and light, predator and prey.
I was newly made—a transformation both as natural as breathing and as profoundly alien as shapeshifting.
Beside me, feathers rippled along Irian’s tall form, lifting him away toward the heavens.
I felt as if I could leap high enough to follow him, so I did, bounding lithely and quietly through the swallowing forest. My tail flicked, and I left the shambling horde to slog ungainly through the undergrowth.
And as the forest swallowed me, I knew—I had at last found my anam cló.
Little deer.