Chapter Fia
Fia
My Treasure slammed into Eala with the force of a battering ram, forcing her already frail form against the towering golden oak tree. The nemeton shuddered, and she shuddered with it. Green laddered over her own cracked markings, vines strangling her forearms and creeping to circle her throat.
I yanked the Heart of the Forest—now quiescent in my palm as the source magic tithed away from me—from my neck and threw it. It skidded over the uneven flagstones until it knocked against Eala’s boots. She stared at it, not quite comprehending what I had done.
What we were all about to do.
She soon would.
The power of Wayland’s Treasure slammed into her next, pummeling her like a brutish sea upon a stormy beach.
Water gushed down the length of her hair, splatting onto the floor.
She fell to her knees, vomiting foam as waves lapped her forearms, layering over the thorny vines drawing lines of blood down her wrists.
“No,” Eala whispered, but her teeth were splinters of wood and her tongue was seaweed and her words rasped like salt. “What have you done to me?”
“Nothing you have not asked for.” I watched dispassionately as she writhed upon the floor.
“Time and again, you have done unspeakable things for power. You lied to friends for power. You betrayed those who loved you for power. You killed your sisters for power. You stole Rogan’s will for power.
You traded the fate of both realms for power, and only yearned for more.
So now you have it. How does it feel, to be the most powerful individual in both worlds?
You are a vessel for three Treasures now—the elemental magic of three sources surges beneath your skin. How does it feel?”
She crawled toward me, her movements hectic, jerky. Her mouth opened and closed like that of a gutted fish upon the strand.
The power of Laoise’s Treasure flashed over her—a pyre of fire lapping and dancing. Eala roared, and the flames roared with her. Her skin—pulsing and breathing like the inchoate embers of a wildfire—flashed with rose-gold scales.
“Stop!” Her mouth yawned like ashes. Her steaming hair stank of char. “Please, Sister—whatever you are doing to me, stop. I cannot bear it!”
I gazed at my sister, nailing my vengeance like a door so my sympathy could not break free.
I forced myself to replay all the chilling violence she had carefully machinated.
Her hands, slippery with blood, on the hilt of her dagger as she tore the hearts from her sisters’ breasts.
Her voice, cunning and cold as she demanded Gavida forge her a Treasure.
Her mouth, smiling palely as she drove a sword into her own mother’s gut.
Her eyes, diamond bright as she drove Rogan to destroy himself on his own blade.
Irian’s Treasure stormed down on her, bending the giant oaks until their branches fanned and swept the flagstones.
My hair whipped around my face, stinging, but I forced myself to watch as Eala bowed even lower, lightning crackling over her spine.
Feathers burst from her skin, unfurling along her arms until white wings spread sharp pinions into the storm, half lifting her off her feet.
“How does it feel now?” I cried above the sound of the wind howling through the nemeton. “Five Treasures—more power than anyone has ever wielded, or will ever wield again! You wished to be a queen, Eala? I have made you a goddess. All the elements of nature at your command. How does it feel?”
Eala screamed, the agonized reverberation like the screech of falling timber, the crash of waves upon cliffs, the roar of a devouring wildfire, the hollow wail of a distant storm.
“It… hurts! Make it stop. Please, Fia—please make it stop!”
I made myself approach her where she lay writhing and screaming and tormented upon the cold stone floor.
Around us Dún Darragh phased in and out, as if existing and not existing at the same time.
Carvings on the walls… faces in the dark.
Pillars made of stone… vast trunks in the forest. I crouched, taking in every unnatural contortion of Eala’s limbs, every bulge and creak of her livid, living skin, every flash of color pooling over her.
Green grass. Blue water. Red fire. Silver wind. White death.
I could only imagine what she was feeling. I had played host to two Solasóirí, and it had nearly destroyed me. And I was different than Eala—human, Folk, and something else. Something more. Something other.
Eala was, in the end, just a girl.
“Thirteen years,” I whispered. “That is how long you will live with this power. For the Treasures will not let you die—did you know that? Not of natural causes. This pain will not kill you, Eala—it will only continue. Even as your bones rot, they will grow anew. Even as your lungs drown, they will breathe in more water. Even as your skin burns, it will heal. Even as the zephyrs drive you mad, they will comfort you. For thirteen. More. Years.”
“No.” Horror contorted her already warped, broken face. “You cannot… leave me like this.”
“Leave you? No.” I barked a laugh. “I intend to watch. I will watch as the magic consumes everything that made you you, piece by rotten piece. I will devour each one of your screams like candy, each whimper more delicious than the last. I will wait until you beg me for mercy. And you will beg for mercy. For this is the price of power, my dear sister—pain.”
She whimpered as another cataclysm rocked her—a terrible earthquake tearing her body apart even as it put her back together.
I heard her bones crack, then knit—like roots healing from a stray axe.
Her blood surged and gushed, too much volume for her human veins, spewing liquid into her hollow spaces before sucking it up again.
Flames crackled along her tongue and blackened what was left of her teeth.
White feathers grew and then molted, fluttering from her bleeding, distended shoulders to lay limp on the ground, slick with water and fell with moss and licking with flames.
She was human. Her body was not made to withstand this much power. She was not strong enough.
No one was.
“Please,” she begged, lifting her arms in supplication. “I cannot bear it another moment. It is… too much. Take it away. I want to… die.”
“Die?” I smiled, a little sadly. “No, Eala. This sacrifice must be larger than life. It demands far more than death.”
“What, then?” She choked on bloody water, pushed burnt, sizzling hair off her face. “What must… I do?”
I reached for her, grasped her hands. My starshine instantly burned her, blackening her palms. But so, too, did it suffuse her—light flared up her hands to her wrists, illuminating the bones beneath her fragile skin, the veins choked with too much magic.
“Our lives have always lain side by side—separate, but aligned. Now they are one and the same.” The knowledge I’d grappled with since Marban’s cottage wreathed through me, filling the empty spaces my Treasure had left.
Casting light into my darkest corners even as it shadowed my brightness.
“You were right, on the Longest Night. We were always meant to stand here, together. You are my sister. My other half. We are light and dark aligned. The white swan, the black swan. One breath, one body. One heart. We were created from imbalance and born to restore it. We are balance.”
Eala gritted her teeth, thrashing and jerking as renewed pain throttled her. My starshine climbed higher, illuminating the five colors of her layered tattoos like sunlight through stained glass.
“Tell me… what… I must do.”
“Say the words,” I told her. “Then pay the price.”
“By fire and by sky,” she screamed. “By fast water and by ancient tree. I promise my willing heart to thee—O Fia.”
Magic jerked me—a bone-deep tether hooked beneath my heart.
My starshine burned farther up Eala’s arms, smoothing over the white feathers prickling from her shoulders.
Our palms were fused together, and I could hear them—all five of them, a boundless, soundless cacophony beating about my ears and throbbing along my bones and juddering through my veins.
The cost will be high. The cost will be high. The cost will be high.
The dissonance of all five eternal voices was unbearable. Their demands echoed through us both, caustic and discordant.
Love. Pain. Loss. Hatred. Mercy.
They layered, then merged, finding a common note between them. The word slid like a blade between us, as inevitable as our births. And our deaths.
Everything. Everything. Everything.
I gazed at Eala and saw the moment she understood.
Her eyes widened, not the agonized muddy color of all the elements combined, but the clear, cunning blue of the swan princess I’d met almost a year and a half ago.
I gazed back at her, letting all that had passed between us melt away, until we were just Fia and Eala.
The shadowy changeling girl and the shining storybook princess.
“I love you, Eala.”
She spat blood between broken teeth and snarled, “I despise you, Sister.”
It was as it had always been.
“My name is Fia Ní Mainnín, heir of the Sept of Antlers and child of the stars, and I bring us both balance.” I smiled as my radiance swelled. “I suppose I was the stronger weapon after all.”
Starlight punched out of me, meeting magic like five huge fingers curled into a fist. I gasped, bracing my body as my hands tightened over Eala’s fingers.
A feather so black will rise from pain. A crown so silver will rise to reign.
The starlight wrapped around the magic like a cocoon, cradling it as gently as a mother with a babe.
A heart so green must bleed once more, for light and dark to one restore.
Inside the cocoon, the magic melted together, like a caterpillar inside a chrysalis.
The last love lost, the price now paid—through sacrifice, the balance laid.
The magic unfurled, beating great wings inside me.
My vision whitened as sensation shattered along my limbs.
My head fell back; my hands twined even tighter with Eala’s as the starlight consumed us both.
She screamed, searing and final, as the light devoured her.
My rib cage cracked open, tearing my leather armor in half.
White light coursed from my chest and winged toward the night sky, gleaming with a million destinies I could hardly comprehend.
A piece of folded parchment fluttered disconsolately from my bodice, opening as it fell. I did not look at it—I had read it a hundred times, my tears staining the picture as I read the final lines. Again. And again. Until they were imprinted upon my soul.
So white and black, the swans must die, for stars to weave their fate on high.
I cried out as the power left me—the starlight and all it had touched.
Earth, water, fire, air. Spirit. No longer tainted by separation, throttled by a thousand years of terrible enslavement.
The sources no longer bound to conduits; the conduits no longer tithed to vessels.
In my starshine, all that magic was lustrated.
Cleansed, renewed. Made numinous, divine.
Around us, Corra’s nemeton glowed, the trees catching the starlight like plasma.
It branched through the sky and rooted through the earth.
The sacred circle careened, rings upon rings, circles within circles.
The heartwood of an ancient tree, the ripples in a pond after a stone is thrown, the sweeping spiral of a distant galaxy.
We were all the same. We were all different. By the circles we were all bound.
Eala’s hands went boneless in mine as she fell backward. Dimly I saw that she, too, had been cleansed. Her fine hair made a halo around her perfect face; her pale feathered dress splayed out like wings behind her.
Distantly, I felt a boundary begin to close. A torn seam being restitched, an infected wound being healed.
Then I, too, was falling. Flying. I soared through a thousand dusk-lit skies toward something so bright I could only name it love.
I was made of light and triumph and overwhelming ecstasy.
I was made to tell my own story.
And this… this was where it ended.