Chapter Forty-One Fia
Chapter Forty-One
Fia
The unlit forest swallowed me, a strange and somber mouth studded with cracked wooden teeth and whispering with fell voices. I ran as fast as my deer legs could go, bounding and leaping with abandon, irreverent of any path.
I was grateful for a form besides my own.
Even as I fled Eala, I hid from myself, and from the grief and rage threatening to flay the skin from my bones.
The doe was fast and frightened, but the determined drum of her delicate hooves on the earth was focused on one thing alone: survival.
She was made for flight, and she met our purpose with an agile kind of peace that soothed me.
Time lost meaning. There was just me, the trees, and all the shadows between.
After what I thought must be an hour, something began to pace me in the dark.
An arched, elegant neck. Russet fur ridged with the faintest impression of pale dots.
A white signal flag of a tail. Eyes fathomless as the night sky.
Another deer. Another doe.
But when I turned my head to look at her head-on, I saw the fog had grown heavy, and it was but my own shadow.
At last I wove between stone monsters punctuating the earth like guideposts—my fiann from last Samhain, returned to their eternal slumber. Beyond, the path flashed golden as coins. The rushing of a stream filled my ears. A stone bridge arched beside a bent willow.
Irian stood at its peak, carved silent as stone and deadly as a nightmare. I shifted with some difficulty back into my human form, my shorter limbs dense and stocky after the effortless grace of the doe. Profound relief tangled with renewed worry on Irian’s perfect features.
“What happened?”
“They’re dead.” The words came out flat, as if my voice was determined to mask all the emotions roiling beneath my flesh. “The high queen… Cathair. The people who raised me in the human realms—she killed them all.”
Irian rocked toward me, his closeness the only balm he could offer. I could tell from the hardness of his features that he did not sorrow for them, only for me—for how their passing would affect me.
In another life, under other circumstances, I thought, he would have gladly killed them all himself.
I clenched my fists, although I longed to wrap my arms around his chest and bury my face in his shoulder and scream until my insides were abraded clean.
“She will not be far behind,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
We crossed the bridge side by side. The Gate rippled a silver whisper over our skin as we crossed back into Tír na nóg.
I exhaled as the full extent of my Treasure came rushing back, twining vines of gladness and green glory around the ecstatic thunder of my Heart.
And there was something else—something new and unfamiliar.
A third melody joining the chord of my Treasure’s near-silent humming, an atonal harmony to the Sky-Sword’s louder tune.
A song of embers stirred into a bonfire, a symphony of distant blood-red skies.
A surge of power erupted through the night toward us—a wild blaze roaring over the horizon, consuming the stillness and leaving behind a trail of heat that pulsed like the heartbeat of a distant star.
“Do you feel that?” I asked Irian, wonder in my voice.
“I do, colleen.” His voice held an echo of my awe. “I believe Laoise has reforged the Flaming Shield.”
I brought my attention back to the Willow Gate, dredging the shadows until I spied Chandi. She sat huddled in Irian’s—Rogan’s—cloak with her back to a rough-hewn boulder. She did not look well. But she was conscious, at least.
Her eyes flicked to mine, then away, the air tangling with a thousand unspoken words. I set my jaw. I hummed with violence and felt numbed by confusing grief. Perhaps there would be time for forgiveness later.
I turned, ignoring Irian’s questioning look, and knelt in front of the Gate.
I plunged my hands into the dirt and called on the full force of my magic with all the wrath and grief roaring through my veins.
The earth answered with a thunderous rumble.
Tree roots punched from the earth, knotted like clubs ready to strike at my enemies.
Vines twined them, curved with thorns like deadly scythes.
Flowers burst to life as the structure growled higher, red as blood and black as night and white as stars.
The wall grew tall as Irian, then taller, until it towered high into the dark.
It was not enough. I had seen Eala’s ghouls scale Rath na Mara’s palisades as if they were playthings. If she tried to pursue me here—as I believed she would—I needed more assurance that she could not cross into Tír na nóg with her army. Not yet. Not until I was ready for her.
With all the strength left in my limbs, I curved the top of my wall of trees and vines and flowers.
It bent with a groan of protest right into the shimmering, wavering outline of the Gate.
The barrier between the realms pushed back—nothing but Treasures was meant to pass.
I shoved harder, threading the power of my Heart with Talah’s curse.
Starlight rushed along bent boughs and blew from the pollen of flowers and limned huge thorns in silver.
My botanical wall pushed through the Gate, curving over into the other realm.
I anchored it there with ropes of starlight, fused deep between tangled roots where the bones of the earth hummed.
I reeled back on my heels, brushed dirt from my palms, and looked up at the monstrosity I had created. It curved around and above the gate, an impenetrable barrier of magical foliage.
“Mo chroí,” Irian murmured, a note of wonder rasping along his voice. “What is that for?”
“Eala will chase me. She will open the Gate for her revenants. But I will not let her in.” I stood.
Swayed. Irian reached for me, but I regained my balance on my own.
“Let them cut themselves to ribbons on that. Let them try to chop it with axes or burn it with fire. It will last until we return with all the troops we can muster. Then I will bury my sister in the grave she has dug herself.”
We stayed that night at Irian’s crumbling fortress, though only Chandi slept.
Irian made a fire in the hearth, waiting quietly until I began to talk.
Then he listened in silence, letting the jumbled events of that night flow from me in a torrent.
I told him everything—the archive in the tower, Corra’s confusing words about Marban, the high queen speaking against her daughter… and Eala killing her for it.
No—not everything.
Cathair’s prophecy, crumpled still in the lining of my bodice, seemed to whisper an ongoing curse, trailing between my ribs and infecting my heart. So white and black, the swans must die, for stars to weave their fate on high.
I couldn’t accept it. After everything I’d done, all I’d fought for? I couldn’t accept that my story ended like that. And though I knew I ought not to keep it a secret from Irian… I could not bear to tell him. As if speaking the words out loud would weave them indelibly into the fabric of my fate.
When I was finished, Irian stirred the fire with a poker. Sparks leapt like fireflies, gilding his hair and glossing his silver eyes.
“This Marban,” he said softly. “Wayland sought him too. He found a record of him in Laoise’s library—something that put me to mind of a story I heard when I was very young. It was a favorite of Deirdre’s. Of your mother’s.”
My pulse spiked. “Tell me?”
“It was a long time ago.” He tilted his head. “I am not sure I remember the particulars.”
“Please try.”
“Once, in a land of eternal youth in the days of legends,” Irian began, with the faintest whisper of a smile.
“A human prince sought the heart of a Gentry maid so fair none could match her wit nor her beauty. He wooed her without flagging, and after a time her heart softened toward him. But though their love was strong, the human prince’s mortality wore on him.
His bride stayed young as the morn, even as he passed into the afternoon of his life.
One day he plucked a single gray hair from his beard and, in a fit of anguish, carved the heart of his lady love from her chest with his sword.
He presented it to the Sept of Feathers in return for his immortality.
This they granted him, for the Songbird’s Heart was a powerful emblem.
But so, too, did they banish the human to the Dúluachair, to live out his immortal days alone and unloved, in a cottage thatched with birds’ wings, so he might never forget his terrible crime. ”
I jerked, my spine going rigid. “What did you say? About the house?”
“It was said to be thatched with birds’ wings. Thousands of them. But it is only a story, colleen.”
“When I was locked inside my mind, in the Deep-Dream, I spoke to—” My voice could not manage the phrase my father.
I was not sure if I had truly spoken to Rían ó Mainnín, slain twenty years past, or a ghost of my own invention.
I was not sure it mattered. But I could not forget what he had told me, a phrase I had heard before in dreams. He is to blame for your troubles, little deer.
Not I. “I believe I must seek this Marban out. I believe he holds the key to my fate. And I believe he lives in a clearing in a strange wood surrounded by wildflowers, in a cottage thatched with birds’ wings. ”
Irian passed a hand over his face. “Then we make for the Dúluachair in the morn.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Because the Dúluachair—also known as the Feral Moor—is said to be the gateway to the underworld. Many believe it to be haunted by wraiths and patrolled by bog cats.” Irian flashed me a swift smile that carved my own heart from its soft chest. “Truly, mo chroí—your taste in destinations is unparalleled.”
Chandi roused at dawn, looking tired and ill and sick at heart. There was nothing for her to eat, little for her to wear beyond Rogan’s oversized cloak. I quelled guilt as I crouched before her in the rheumy light filtering from high windows and told her briefly of our plan.
“Are you asking me to come with you?” she asked, shuddering in folds of green and gold. “Or telling me I must stay behind?”
I honestly wasn’t sure. “Do you have anywhere else to go, Chandi?”
“Where are the others?” Her face pinched. “Sinéad… Laoise… Balor?”
“Our agreed waypoint after reforging the Treasures is the Summerlands,” I told her.
“Then to the Summerlands I go,” she announced.
“Do you know the way?” I asked lamely.
“I lived here for thirteen years, Fia.” A flicker of the old Chandi sparked in her amber eyes. “I daresay I know the way better than you.”
I glanced helplessly toward Irian, who was kicking the last of the cinders into the grate, then back to Chandi. “I fear Sinéad may try to kill you if you arrive without protection.”
“I know my sister.” Chandi’s expression warped, then hardened. “And I’m not afraid of her.”
As the sun rose above the lough, I climbed to the tower and traded my torn and muddied black gown for some of Irian’s lamentably ill-fitting clothing.
I had nothing else to wear. I found a worn knapsack and tucked the shard of starstone and Cathair’s terrible prophecy inside, along with some weapons and a spare cloak.
We parted ways with Chandi on the beach. I tried not to let my worry chase after her.
An hour later—as we hiked the bluff overlooking distant Murias—Irian and I both felt it.
A surge of power coursing through the morning—a savage tide crashing upon a distant shore.
It swept over the horizon, stirring the forest like a whisper, trailing salt and foam in its wake.
The earth and sky pulsed with the steady beat of a distant ocean’s heart.
I smiled. Irian nodded once.
“Wayland did it,” I said, a little wonderingly.
“He did.” Irian’s voice held more certainty. “He only had to find it within himself. As we all must do.”
I gazed up at him—his night-dark hair and sky-bright eyes. How I suddenly longed to tell him—to let his strong, capable shoulders bear the weight of Cathair’s dire prophecy so mine didn’t have to. But resentment and denial squandered my bravery. I bent my head and walked forward. “So we must.”