Chapter Forty-Five Fia #2
The golden-haired Gentry guard grudgingly led us to where our friends were ensconced.
I had not been joking about my surprise in finding the Twins still sitting upon their thrones.
Between Laoise’s and Wayland’s new powers and strong personalities, I’d half expected them to have already carved up Tír na nóg between them like argumentative siblings forced to share toys.
Instead, they’d been forced to yet again uneasily cohabitate. I counted at least four of the seven young draigs, piled in corners and sprawled along low couches. Wayland and Laoise were, unsurprisingly, squabbling.
“… when I said you could work here, I did not mean you could work everywhere!” Laoise was shouting. “If I wanted to wake with ashes on my feet, I would have danced barefoot in the cookfire!”
“They are not ashes,” Wayland yelled back. “They are—”
Both stopped talking when the musical tinkle of the beaded curtain heralded our arrival, their heads swiveling toward the door.
Idris looked up from where he was reading on the couch; beside him, Sinéad paused polishing her daggers, which she had apparently not used on Chandi, who stood by a window, gazing out over the plains.
“Oh.” Laoise looked much the same as before, with her tumbled red curls and sparking ember eyes. Her new tattoos were subtler than either mine or Irian’s—dark red scales blending and rippling along the contours of her skin. “There you are.”
“Not the reaction I was expecting,” I said in an undertone, slightly offended.
“Chandi said you and Irian ran off on some new adventure without us,” Wayland said, sounding insulted. The markings of his Treasure were flashier—cerulean waves inked in recursive whorls over the rippling contours of his bared biceps. “We wondered if you’d ever return.”
“Yet here we are,” I said acidly. “Where’s Balor? Linn?”
“In the lower city—they call it the Underbrush. Balor and the aughiskies seem to be settling in well.” Laoise scanned me from head to toe, quirked an eyebrow, and said, “What do you need? A bath? A meal? A stiff drink?”
“Can I get all three?” I passed a tired hand over my face—until the Bealtaine moon, I doubted I would find another time for any of them. “First, I need to speak with Wayland.”
Laoise gave her fingers an irritated flick, as if to say, You know where to find him.
Wayland glanced at me. Like Irian, his transformation had changed the color of his eyes—no longer the deep cobalt of oceans at midnight, but the mercurial turquoise of a shallow bay at dawn.
The change startled me—somehow more harmonious with his features than the deep blue, it lent him a gravity I had not learned to expect from the playboy prionsa.
“Not a raven? Not a rider?” His easy smile assured me he had not changed so much after all. “Have we been so easily forgotten?”
“I think about you all the time—usually when I’m dodging trouble and wondering who to blame.” I grinned back, then sobered. “Wayland, I need you.”
He slapped his hand over his heart and threw back his head. “My four favorite words. But I fear I’m otherwise attached at the moment.”
“Not like that and you know it.” I rolled my eyes at Idris, who gave me a tepid smile. “Do you have a forge here in the Summerlands?”
“Yes, he does!” Laoise called from the foyer. “He just prefers to track his junk all over my kitchen!”
“I’ll show you.” Wayland made a rude gesture at Laoise’s back, grumbling something that sounded like She doesn’t even cook. “This way.”
I shot Irian a rueful smile before following Wayland out the door and up a staircase winding around a slanted bough.
A rope bridge wobbled onto another, larger bough.
At the crook of two branches, a little hovel was built with a curved roof of emerald moss and a circular door with cracked paint.
Even I had to duck to get inside. Beyond was a tiny workshop with a hundred tools and artifacts scattered over uneven tables and falling from listing shelves.
A sputtering woodstove barely chased away the damp.
“You’ll understand why I prefer to work in Laoise’s kitchen.” Wayland leaned back against one of the tables, folding his heavy muscled arms over his chest and kicking out his legs. He picked up a conch shell and held it out to me. “Here, listen. Something I’ve been working on.”
I held the shell to my ear and was surprised to hear a voice—Wayland’s voice. He sounded like he was reciting poetry. Abruptly he stopped, laughed. The sound faded.
“What is it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I thought people might like to hear the voices of their loved ones even when they’re far away. I’ve been enchanting vessels to carry voices.”
“Lovely.” It was. “But I need you to do something else for me. And I need it done by tomorrow.”
He cocked his head, curious but wary.
“Before I became a Treasure, I was able to breach a Gate from dusk to dawn on the night of a full moon.” I held out my arm, as if he could see beneath my skin to the green-dark blood beneath. “It required my blood and an incantation. Do you think you could replicate the effect? To create a… key?”
“For a Gate?” His eyebrows lifted. “The Gates are powerful magic—they were forged in tandem with the Treasures, which have now all been renewed. I’m not sure your blood would be sufficient.”
“Treasures can open the Gates at will.” I leaned closer. “What if we all gave blood? All four heirs?”
Wayland frowned, reaching for a sheaf of vellum already half-scrawled with notes and ideas. “If we could somehow isolate that effect and amplify it—” He muttered to himself as he scratched charcoal over the paper. “Tell me why?”
“I need thirteen keys so I can give them to the thirteen bardaí. In return, I believe the bardaí will follow us into battle against Eala. True mastery over the Gates is all they’ve ever wanted.”
“The bardaí.” Wayland stared at me, then whistled. “They are dangerous bedfellows, Thorn Girl. You cannot count on their loyalty.”
“I’m counting on their betrayal,” I told him. “Will you please trust me?”
He gave me a considering glance, then nodded. “I can do it, although a day may not be enough time.”
“Can you make me just one, then? Like a prototype?”
“I’ll try.” He shoved the paper at me. “Write your incantation.”
I tried to remember the words Cathair had taught me over a year ago, while trying not to remember that he was dead.
But when Wayland pulled the paper from my hands, I held on, careful not to let our fingers touch.
Now that he was a full-fledged Treasure, my starshine was a danger to him as well as Irian and Laoise. And Eala.
“I have another favor to ask you. Well. Two, really.”
“You know, I was actually beginning to miss you.” He whistled again. “Remind me again where you learned to be so demanding?”
“I refer to it as persuasive,” I said sweetly.
“Persuasion rarely involves a knife to the throat,” he grumbled. “Metaphorical or otherwise. Go on, then. What invaluable services might I render you, milady?”
I sat heavily on a three-legged stool, pulled close another sheaf of papers, and tried to explain.
The bardaí began to arrive the next morning in their most extravagant regalia, surrounded by expansive retinues.
I’d left Wayland in his tiny workshop to return to the rooms the Summer Twins had given us, desperate for my promised meal, bath, and heavy pour of summer mead.
Instead, I’d gotten a lesson on the current politics of Tír na nóg from Laoise, which I only half listened to but could sum up: Everyone was still fighting.
With the Treasures renewed, the wild magic many of the bardaí had drawn on for power had dissipated, leaving them scrambling for sovereignty in the vacuum Eala’s retreat to the human realms had left behind.
That suited me fine. I didn’t need true unity—I just needed the illusion of it.
Now I borrowed some clothes from Laoise, then descended with Irian into the Underbrush, a cheerful if unsophisticated slum below the city.
Taverns and brothels and gambling dens were patronized by citizens of the Summerlands and soldiers from the encampments alike—I saw many Gentry concealed beneath hoods or hiding behind masks as they fulfilled their basest desires.
Balor wasn’t hard to find—he sat outside a tavern whose roof barely cleared his shoulders, collecting bets on what appeared to be water wrestling. The main contestant was Linn, waiting fetlock deep in a spring-fed pond for her next opponent, a hairy gruagach whose gemstone eyes gleamed with greed.
“Balor!” I pushed back the hood of my mantle, shocked but amused. “Tell me you are not running a fight club down here!”
“Lady!” He stood swiftly, banging his head on a branch that wouldn’t have been low-hanging for anyone else. “Lord Scary Husband! You have returned!”
Linn clambered from the pond at the same moment, shaking moisture from her dark mane and sea-foam pelt. She nudged her delicate nose into my shoulder, favoring me with an image of her dragging me into the spring instead of the gruagach and merrily dunking me beneath the surface.
“Is that your way of saying you missed me?” I gently stroked her inky forelock and smiled. “Now, if you lot are finished swindling the locals, I have some jobs for you.”
Behind Irian, Abyss stomped his feet as if to say, Finally, some honest work.
The aughiskies’ jobs were straightforward.
For Balor, I hoisted myself onto the thatching of the tavern, then leaned to whisper my request in his ear.
He turned his huge head in surprise, but the glimmer in his terrifying eyes was anything but lacking in comprehension.
His smile revealed all seventy-nine of his sharp, rock-eating teeth as he said, “I thought you would never ask, lady!”