Chapter Forty-Four Fia #2
“Once, in a time of fractured realms and missing magic, a young prince of Fódla swore to his family that he would be the one to return what the Fair Folk had stolen—the magic bound by Gavida in the four Treasures spirited away to Tír na nóg.” Marban’s voice curled like smoke, collecting in dark corners and pooling in the rafters.
“He was fair of face and fleet of foot and huge in his own importance. Using all his wiles, he laid a trap for a Treasure. But it was sprung instead by a Gentry maiden of exquisite beauty. She escaped his confinement and fled back to Tír na nóg, shutting the Gate behind her. The prince should have given up. But he had fallen impossibly, irrevocably in love with the only woman he could never have. So he broke his oaths, abandoned his duty, and made for himself a cursed home in the place he had set his trap, built brick by brick with stones he quarried by hand.”
The words rang with haunting familiarity as vines of destiny threaded around me like a living snare. I shivered with the creeping knowledge that I had been bound to this path I could neither see nor escape for longer than I understood.
“But you—” I struggled to remember what I’d guessed about the warrior whose fate had, for a year and a half, seemed to parallel mine, even separated by a millennium.
“You did not stay in the human realms. You found a way to build yourself a bridge. To connect Dún Darragh with Tír na nóg. You wrought one of your geasa droma draíochta—your inviolable magical bindings. And you caught yourself a Corra.”
Marban did not seem surprised by my knowledge of the sprite. “One does not catch a Bright One. But I did perform a binding, in much the same way Gavida did with the Treasures.”
This revelation punched through me with the force of a tree root breaking through solid rock. “Corra is… a Bright One?”
Marban looked at me with contempt.
“I thought—” I clawed desperately for everything I knew of the obnoxious, irritating entity haunting Dún Darragh.
I had always assumed they were some strange Folk beastie.
But what had they actually told me about their origins?
We are broken hearts and old sorrows. We are crumbling rocks and empty glasses and forgotten hallways and the tolling of the bell in the highest tower.
My head spun as if I had drunk a tankard of wine on an empty stomach. For a whole year I had lived under the roof of an ineffable being of unimaginable celestial power, and I hadn’t even realized it? It was too much. It all made perfect sense.
“What element?” I asked faintly.
“You do not even know your dúile?” Marban scoffed. “Not only na?ve but poorly educated too. My bloodline has degraded far indeed.”
“There is no need to be cruel.” I mustered haughty calm. “Unless you do not wish me to hear the rest of your tale.”
Again, Marban fixed me with that look of resigned bitterness—as though this was not something he wished to do, but had to do.
“You are correct: With Corra’s aid, I built myself a bridge into Tír na nóg—a path walked once, with no way back.
My tribulations were great, but that is another story.
I found Fionnuala and spent years wooing her—that, too, is another story.
But our great love was doomed—she was a Treasure, and her bell was tolling its death knell. ”
By the door, Irian shifted his feet. The Sky-Sword let out a plaintive note. Marban’s eyes flicked toward him, then back to me. His mouth twisted.
“From all I had learned in the human realms, I knew there must be a way to dissolve her bond to the Sky-Sword without corrupting the cycle of magic. The balancing is eternal—”
“But not immutable,” Irian finished, his voice low. “What did you learn?”
“Every binding can be overridden by another binding, if it is more powerful than the one before. And the most powerful magic of all—”
“Is a willing heart,” I finished. “Our hearts were made for breaking; that magic made for mending.”
“Those were the words of a younger and more foolish man.” Marban jerked, as if in pain. “Upon the night of Fionnuala’s tithing, I offered my willing heart in exchange for her life.”
“You offered your life for hers?” I interrupted, aghast but impressed. It was what I had done, in the last moments before Irian’s tithing beneath the Heartwood.
“Do you think a willing heart is the bleeding red thing you pull from your chest? How rudimentary.” Marban looked disgusted.
“You, of all people, ought to know that magic is not so literal. No, child of my brother’s children—I did not cut an organ from my body and offer it to Fionnuala while I lay dying upon the ground, as the stories like to tell.
In offering my willing heart, I sacrificed that which I loved most in the world. Her.”
A cold vine twined my spine, caressing each vertebra with a deliberate, chilling thorn. “What do you mean?”
“Fionnuala’s life could be saved, in return for an oblation.
” Marban put his head in his hands, as if, even after a thousand years, this pained him to discuss.
“The Solasóirí are governed by laws we are not—and never will be—privy to. Laws of balance in nature. Laws of time and the cosmos. Laws of darkness and light. Laws of beginning and ending.” His voice held accusation, although I knew it was not for me.
“Notions of human morality—or even Folk morality—are wholly inconsequential to them. All that matters is counterpoise. And in the infinite balancing of the cosmos, love weighs larger than life. It is a force that outlasts the fleeting span of years and burns with a brilliance few things can match. It etches itself upon the stars’ patterns with vivid thread, enduring where life inevitably falters.
It shapes the world long after the hearts that kindled it have stilled.
Love is the most powerful force in the universe. ”
A strange kind of satisfaction flared to life inside me, even as Eala’s mocking words from Emain Ablach echoed in my mind: Is that still your grand message? Love conquers all?
“But that is because love is a sacrifice larger than life,” Marban continued, his voice shaking with an emptiness I could not comprehend. “And demands far more than death.”
“Tell me,” I made myself say, although I was not sure I wanted to know.
“I believed my sacrifice would be romantic love, ripped directly from my heart. It was a price I was willing to pay, in return for Fionnuala’s near-immortal life.
But in the end, I did not choose the price.
The magic did. And it was far higher than either of us anticipated. ” He held up a hand. “Fionnuala!”
A dove fluttered from the rafters, a glowing vision in the dim.
Her pale gleaming feathers were as lustrous as fresh-fallen snow.
She came to rest on Marban’s fist, graceful wings poised.
Her dark, knowing gaze carried the weight of centuries.
Marban lifted the bird to his face, and she nudged a sleek head against his grizzled cheek.
Nausea churned in my gut. “No.”
“As she tithed away her Treasure, my willing heart bought her life,” Marban confirmed.
“Just not one in her Gentry form. Our love was not annihilated, but made perfect—at least, according to the rules of balance. Eternal and unrequited. I am doomed to love her forever, in whatever form. And she me, although I have only her cooings to confirm it.”
Horror pressed me deeper into my chair. I felt Irian’s eyes scald my face, but I refused to look at him.
Refused to acknowledge the radiance lurking below my skin, the way our love had been resigned to an arm’s cruel, infinite length.
The way my own destined sacrifice coiled inside me like roots beneath frozen earth—pressing, twisting, aching.
“But you are human,” I said woodenly. “How have you lived a thousand years?”
“I do not know.” He gestured forcefully toward his walls.
“Do you think I have wished to live so long? Under such circumstances? I can only hope that once I have bestowed what knowledge I can, I will be released from this awful half life. And may be reunited with my love in the afterlife, if one exists.”
Sorrow burbled inside me. “You believe that my arrival heralds your death?”
“Yes,” he spat, “and I am glad for it.”
We all sat in silence as the fire crackled and the birds rustled in the rafters. Then I straightened in my seat and said, “Then tell me all you know, great-uncle. And we will leave you to die in peace.”
Again, Marban looked at Irian with venom. “Leave, heir of feathers.”
Irian went hard all over, his thumb ghosting over the hilt of the Sky-Sword. I pleaded with my eyes—I would not speak of my fate in front of him. Finally, he slowly stepped from the cottage into the night beyond, shutting the door behind him.
Marban cleared his throat, leaned close, and began to speak.
It was nearly dawn when I emerged from Marban’s cottage, dazed and nearly delirious with all he had told me. The sky was leaden, the smudged gray of ash. Irian stood a dozen paces from the cottage, facing the woods in silent vigil.
What did he think about when he lost himself to his duty? Or was it easier not to think at all, when confronted by the endless darkness before the rising dawn?
“Irian.” I longed to wrap my arms around the sharp cut of his waist, to slide my hands up the front of his jerkin and clasp myself to his hard torso, to lose myself to the heat of his skin.
Instead, I wrapped my arms around my own ribs, trying to hold myself together in the aftermath of my terrible, enlightening council with Marban. “It’s time to go.”
The gray half-light turned Irian’s face to a mask of hard lines and stark angles, a specter of sorrow foreseen.
Irian was no fool—he may not have heard everything Marban had to say to me, but he had sensed the edges of the truth, the weight of my secret heavy as a storm on the horizon. “Where would you have us go?”
The light along the tops of the trees was cool, glancing. A slight breeze ruffled the feathers molting eternally off the top of Marban’s cottage and turned the smoke rising from the chimney to a ghost. I set my jaw and said:
“To war.”