Chapter Forty-Two Fia
Chapter Forty-Two
Fia
Why can’t we fly to this Feral Moor, again?” I asked, for the third time in as many days.
Taking turns between our Gentry forms and our anam clónna, Irian and I traveled across Ildathach, a dazzling, undulating plain of flowers that shifted colors with each passing breeze—violet, sapphire, and golden hues all shimmering together in waves of soft light.
Blossoms with petals tipped in pollen opened and closed rhythmically, as if breathing.
Delicate birds with iridescent wings flitted through the blooms, their songs pealing like crystal bells upon the rising wind.
We’d made decent time, but as the sun descended on the third day of travel, I grew fretful.
We sought a person who might not exist. Or worse, who did exist but had no idea how to solve the problems burying me in worry with each passing breath.
How could I kill my sister without warping the magic she now wielded? How could I unforge not one or two, but five powerful Treasures? And how could I do it all without sacrificing my own heart for balance?
“We cannot fly, mo chroí,” Irian patiently explained, also for the third time, “because I cannot go where I have never been before. Lest you wish to materialize a thousand feet above a flaming volcano or entombed inside an inconvenient tree.”
“I see your point.” I shuddered, memories from the Deep-Dream ghosting over my flesh.
If I could not find a way to unforge the Treasures before I died, I would someday end up in that grove—that mausoleum.
Part of me was already there—the piece hewn from my soul as the price of my tithe beneath the Ember Moon.
I forced lightness into my tone. “But if you cannot shorten our journey, then I am not sure why I have let you accompany me.”
“Indeed, colleen.” He favored me with a glance ridged in mirth. “I am good for little, in the grand scheme of things. That is why the gods made me so tall. And so very, very handsome.”
I laughed a little. “You sound like Wayland.”
“Please.” Irian’s smile dazzled me with its easy perfection. “Anything but that.”
I watched him stride beside me, his back straight and his hair flying like black feathers in the stiff wind.
He was but an arm’s length away from me, yet a chasm yawned between us, chiseled by our physical distance and shadowed by the secret I kept from him.
I longed to touch him—to twine my hand in his or graze the angle of his jaw or thread my fingers in the hairs at the nape of his neck.
But touch was not the only bond we shared.
A strange impulse needled me—sharp as a thorn and soft as a rose petal.
“Tell me a story, tánaiste,” I asked. Or, perhaps, commanded, as one of Irian’s stark brows lifted in humorous affront at my tone. “Please?”
“For you, my heart, I would tell a thousand.” His eyes softened on my face. “Only, what sort of story might you like to hear? I have told you much of my past. Our present is yet to be fully written. And—”
“Our future,” I suggested. “Tell me a story of our future. A story not of what is or has been, but what could be.”
“What… could be.” Irian’s ease fell away, and he mouthed the words as if they were pieces of glass upon his tongue that might shatter if he spoke them too quickly.
He and I had rarely spoken about our future—it always seemed less a blank slate than a half-written parchment riddled with holes. “Very well. Once—”
“Once?” I laughed, to hide a sudden sharp spasm of grief. What if there really were no more stories to tell? Only stories already told? “Surely it cannot be once if it has not happened yet.”
“Someday, in a time of hard-earned peace and well-deserved quiet—”
“Peace and quiet?” I interrupted, again. “Is that all we have to look forward to?”
“Would you prefer war and chaos?” Irian made a face. “On second thought, do not answer that.”
I stuck my tongue out. “How about… passionate equilibrium? Comfortable thrill?”
“Do you plan to heckle me at every turn, colleen?” He frowned at me theatrically. “Or shall I be allowed to tell the story you requested?”
I mimed locking my lips and throwing away the key.
“Someday, in a time of playful tension and… magnetic balance?” His lips quirked and he raised a questioning eyebrow for my approval.
But although his mouth teased over words, they died upon his lips before he gave them breath.
The restless breeze sighed over the plains of Ildathach, feathering petals and winnowing his sleek black hair.
“When I was a boy, I thought the isolated life I shared with my mother was the most tedious existence a child could be cursed with. Repetitive, lonely, and wearisome beyond belief. I yearned for adventures like the ones in Deirdre’s stories.
Exciting exploits. Fearsome foes. Brave battles.
I longed to live at the center of a grand story and shape it with my valiant actions.
To become either a great, virtuous hero or a wild, wicked villain—at the age of seven, either seemed appealing. ”
I listened without interrupting, even as a bleakness rose inside me, fleeting and gray as mist over a blasted moor.
The black-haired boy who climbed cliffs and snuck into Deirdre’s garden had once known such innocence, only to have it stripped away, replaced with swords and sorrow, curses and contempt.
“But as I have grown older, I find myself dreaming of those routine, mundane, straightforward days.” His thumb ghosted over the Sky-Sword’s hilt.
“Dreams are dangerous, potent things, colleen. They give us hope in dark times. But so, too, do they whisper of what could be, instead of acknowledging what is. Some stories are just as bad. They live quietly in the heart, disguised as harmless diversion, but their pull can be as fierce as any tempest. Longing for what can never be has the power to unravel even the strongest resolve.”
We crested a small rise overlooking a wood of strange, slender trees topped with triangular canopies.
Late afternoon sun turned them to torches, casting long shadows over the rippling fields.
Irian turned to face me, keeping an arm’s-length gap between us.
I fought the grief tangling in my chest like briars.
“Someday, when days are easy and nights are long and time seems plentiful, a gray-eyed man and a changeling woman build a life as they choose.” His eyes were not gray—in the shards of light cresting along his jaw, they were the lacquered blue of broken pottery.
The tenuous gold of hoarded treasure. Again, sorrow pierced me, but now its blade was coated with the breathtaking poison of hope.
“There is a house, neither too big nor too small. Its walls are not crumbling, and its halls are not haunted, and it stays warm in the winter when a fire is lit. There are meals at a sturdy table decorated by a vase stuffed with wildflowers. Sometimes there is wine, and they stay awake too late, curled beside that fire as they speak of things past and things yet to come. There are chores—floors to sweep and errands to run and animals to feed. There is a garden—too large and poorly tended, with weeds and slugs and vermin, but they do not mind, because it is impossibly plentiful and they never want for vegetables or flowers.”
I bit my lip, the pain chasing away the sting behind my eyes.
“There will be a bed,” Irian continued, his voice solemn.
“A lovely feather mattress. Not too large, for the man could not bear sleeping too far away from the woman. He would climb into her dreams, if only he knew how. But he will content himself with resting his arm around her waist and drawing her close when she murmurs in her sleep.”
“With pillows?” I asked softly.
“So many pillows.” He dropped his eyes, the vanes of his eyelashes painting black ink along the sweep of his cheekbones. “And someday there may be a child. With dark hair and curious eyes and a sharp, stubborn chin.”
My pulse vaulted, a sudden bloom of pale, secretive cereus—beautiful and thrilling, yet burdened by trepidation. I managed, “Not in the bed, I hope.”
“Gods alive, no.” Irian’s smile was like a daydream I kept returning to. “Although I have been told parents have less choice in that matter than they are led to believe.”
I held Cathair’s awful prophecy like a thorned rose—wishing to share it yet dreading its sting. I had to tell him. I could not bear to tell him.
“I am not certain I can have children,” I said, instead.
“The way I was born, the way I was raised—” I trailed off.
“Even beyond my unusual biology, I am not certain I wish to have children. Motherhood hasn’t always been the most comforting notion in my life.
Where it has not been absence, it has been manipulation and cruelty. What kind of mother would I be?”
“What kind of father would I be?” Irian was as serious as I had ever seen him.
Yet his expression bore a lightness, like a man in a dark room gazing at shadows upon a distant wall.
“We are not bound by our pasts, colleen. Neither are we bound to any future. This is but a dream. You are my reality. And I have sworn never to let you go.”
I reached out, grazing my bare fingertips over his heavy gloves—close enough that I could imagine his heat, far enough that I could taste his longing, sweet and bitter as blackberry wine.
“That night in the tavern, Irian, you said—”
“Oh,” he interrupted, rueful. “Do not taunt me with the nonsense I spewed while in my cups.”
“You said that without me, you were nothing.” I lifted my eyes to his, even as I maintained the tenuous touch of our hands. The half-memorized lines of Cathair’s prophecy throbbed in time to the beat of my heart, a bane I could not shake. “What did you mean by that?”
Irian’s gaze scathed over mine before lifting toward the horizon, jeweled in a cacophony of colors. When he spoke, the wind nearly snatched the words from his mouth.
“All I have loved, I have lost. My mother, my dearest friend, my brother. The life that was promised me, the death I had earned. All that is left to me now are my oaths. My promises.” He lifted his hand from mine, grazed his thumb over the hilt of the Sky-Sword.
“This is all I am. You are all I have. It is not melodrama to say that without you, I am nothing.”
His words were a blade to my gut, twisting as it cut.
I had not always appreciated how much my sacrifice beneath the Ember Moon had devastated Irian—in time, I had learned the depths of his desolation, and how far he would go to prevent such a thing ever happening again.
How could I tell him that yet again, the prospect of my death clattered like a feeble pawn upon a game board stacked by destiny?
An oath made not by him or by me, but by the stars wheeling in the careless dark?
I couldn’t. The vow I had wrenched from my husband on the Longest Night had been made in fear and love in equal measure. It had saved my life. I feared it had scarred his. And it might break us both to sever that bond.
But I began to see how an oath could be a chain. And how love, held too tightly, could bruise the thing it was meant to protect.
“Let us make a bargain, Sky-Sword.” I pruned back my regret and tilted my head to look Irian in the eye.
“Colleen.” His smile was a pale scythe. “Surely you have been warned not to make bargains with the Folk.”
“You have already kept me long beyond my welcome.” I could not quite muster a grin. “I am not sure what more you can threaten me with.”
“Peace and quiet, apparently.”
“My bargain is this.” I barreled through the ache of my disquiet.
“If we survive the next month of war and chaos, then you shall have all the peace and quiet your heart desires. We shall have our sturdy house and our regular meals and our overgrown garden. And perhaps in time—after a few late-night discussions over a bottle of wine—perhaps we shall have our child.”
Irian’s gloved hand grazed over my hips. I rocked forward; his lips hovered a bare inch from mine. A spark passed between us, sharp but not unpleasant. “And in return?”
“Remember him,” I whispered. “The boy who climbed cliffs and picked cockles on the beach and listened to Deirdre’s stories. Before he traded winkles for war and songs for steel. Remember Irian, before he learned to kill.”
“For you?” he murmured in return. “Anything.”
“Not for me. For you.”
Irian’s stark eyebrows winged together in something that was not quite a frown. Beyond the canopy of the looming forest, the sun had sunk, casting the world in shades of vermilion and taupe. The space between us tautened, a string pulled too tight.
“I will,” he promised.