Chapter Fifty-One Deirdre
Chapter Fifty-One
Deirdre
Deirdre of the Sept of Antlers had been born to die.
Bright stars had fallen on the black night of her birth, heralding delight and doom.
It was foretold she would be an heir to her Sept’s Treasure—desperately few in the waning days of dying magic.
But so, too, was it foretold that she would bring waste to Tír na nóg.
Her beauty would start wars; her destiny was naught but ruin.
So they hid her away. As if a childhood isolated behind high walls, singing to rocks and telling stories to flowers, would inoculate her against the plague of her fate.
As if anyone could hide themselves from destiny.
Death was Deirdre’s lullaby as a baby, sung over her cradle in the dark of night. Death was her bedtime story as a girl, repeated as the sun rode low. Death was the throb of her heart as a young woman, as she yearned for a world she had never tasted, with all its terrible, fleeting desires.
All came to pass as was foretold. The stars do not lie—their magic is measured in eons, stories unfolding silently in the great, endless dark. There is no hiding from fate, no outrunning doom.
She loved Rían, the human king from beyond the Gates, from the moment she saw him. For his long limbs and curling hair, yes. But also for his hope and his honesty. For his softness and his care. For all of herself she saw in him, and all of him that was nothing like her.
She loved Rían from the moment she saw him, though she knew in her heart that his name, too, was Death.
Still, she loved him. Still, she lay with him. Still, she plotted with him—to save both their lands from the looming disaster set in motion long ago by the forging of the Treasures.
Still, she fled with him, though she knew they would be pursued. Though she knew they would never escape the doom etched in black ink between lambent stars. Though she knew they would both die.
Danu caught them on the high cliffs above the reaching forest. Late winter ice slicked the high stones, and snow capped the branches of the black pines far below.
The chieftain slaughtered Rían without mercy for the crime of his human heart.
His blood spattered Deirdre’s face and stained her dress. She reeled back in dismay, weeping.
Perhaps she meant to fall. Perhaps she did not.
Her slippers slithered. She lost her balance.
Frigid, empty air made for a poor final embrace.
Branches slashed her as she plummeted down, down, down, tearing her clothing and ripping her hair and eviscerating her skin.
The earth smashed her, the impact shattering every bone in her body.
Bursting her veins. Cracking her skull. As she lay broken upon the bank of a half-frozen stream, the icy water lapping over her outstretched arms, she knew that Death had finally found her.
She was wrong. Her Treasure would not let her die.
She screamed, shattered and ruptured and nearly split in two, as the magic of the Heart of the Forest tried to knit her back together. Vines splinted bones; nettles sutured wounds. She begged for release—begged for the pain to stop. Begged for Death.
She begged the tall being with the antlers, whom she had known since she was a babe, to let her go.
They simply shook their head, their shadowed face impossibly sad.
Not yet, child. There is life in you.
She did not understand.
Hours or days later, she did.
She had not known she was pregnant. She had not yet missed a moon course. She had not even known she could fall pregnant to a mortal man—their worlds had been separate for so long. Yet his seed quickened inside her. A seed that would, in time, blossom into his child.
Her child.
She could not bear it. She longed for nothing else.
Still, she begged for release. The pain she felt was unfathomable—her healing too slow, the anguish too great. She wept and screamed and raged.
“Set me free!” she demanded. “I will give anything. I will rip my heart out if only it means I could be free of this curse.”
ínne said, The cost will be high.
She bared her teeth. “I will give anything. Everything. Take my willing heart, for I have nothing left to barter.”
They knelt, gently touching her twisted stomach, then the stone resting cool above her mangled breastbone. Balance will decide.
It decided on torture. It did not set her free—not right away. It continued rebuilding her body, bone by bone and nerve by nerve. Fire raced along her limbs and curdled in her stomach. The sun and the moon and the cruel, cruel stars wheeled overhead.
Days. Weeks. Months.
As the pain at last began to ease, the stone above her breast cracked, a noise so horrendous Deirdre thought her ears must burst. Magic spilled from her, dense and oily and clinging.
Not the cool, creeping power she had flirted with since childhood, then married upon the last heir’s tithing.
No—this magic was wrong. Warped. As twisted as her body before it healed.
And it no longer belonged to her. She reached for it, but it snapped at her, tense and devouring.
Then clung to her, devious and tantalizing.
She scrambled away, her arm curling protectively over her swelling womb.
“I don’t understand.” She reached for her Heart, but the chain around her neck had somehow snapped—the dusk-lit river had already tumbled her Treasure downstream. “Why was it not tithed anew?”
There is no heir to accept the magic. So the magic must go free.
Deirdre hardened her heart. The burdens of the Sept of Antlers were no longer hers to shoulder. “Then why am I alive? I traded my willing heart to be set free from the cycle. Take it. And let me die.”
We did. ínne shook their great antlered head. The stars chimed above them. Your greatest love. That is the price balance demands.
Deirdre had always known the Solasóirí were governed by laws the Folk were not—and would never be—privy to. Laws of balance in nature. Laws of time and the cosmos. Laws of darkness and light. Laws of beginning and ending. Notions of morality—human and Folk—were inconsequential to them.
But this? This was wrong.
“Not the baby,” she choked out. “Not my baby.”
But whatever negotiation she had entered into was finished.
She had failed to trade her life to end her sentence. Instead, she had made a sacrifice larger than life.
She had sacrificed a love she did not yet know.
For months, she disappeared into the forest. Her anam cló devoured her—the lithe dancing of its long, limber legs pure comfort after the agony of her damaged Gentry body; the smooth simplicity of its animal mind a balm for the layers of anguish that threatened to smother her.
She preferred the nights. She liked the moon, rising soft and slow, striking silver sparks off the iron anvil of the lough. The rustle of birds in the dense muffled dark of the trees, their songs fading, then dying in the watercolor sweep of green and black.
She wished she had a voice, so she might join in.
But the nights were punctuated by bright days—burnished branch and gilded leaf. Sharp scents lofting in the moss-scented breeze. Foraging—the susurrus of shifting grasses, hard acorn and crunching nut, scraps of birch bark curled tight as fists. Summer.
Then short gray days—polished silver sky and ruffled undergrowth. Furred head bent to the glass-sharp wind. Cold mud seeping quiet and strange between her hooves. Autumn.
A feather’s touch within her belly—a mote of warmth, curling inward; an embrace like the silent forest.
Then pain. Pain so strong she feared she would once more be broken, shattered, ended.
In a way, she was.
She birthed her child in the cold, quiet solitude of a forest at dusk.
No midwife blotted her sweating brow; no parent nor partner rubbed her aching back.
She fisted her shaking hands in the crooks of saplings, nearly ripping them from their roots as she screamed into the night.
The stars made a silver gyre as she squatted in the grass and pushed until blackness threatened to overwhelm her.
At last, it was done. She scooped the tiny thing from the moss and laid its glistening form upon her distended belly.
Its fists were curled like snails. Its hair was the black of nightshade berries.
And its eyes—open already, and gazing at her like she was everything—were mismatched. One light, one dark.
Not it. She.
A daughter.
“My little deer.” The immensity of her emotion nearly engulfed her voice. “My Fia.”
But the child was not hers. Already, the compulsion tugged at her—the bargain she had made with ínne. With her magic. With her destiny. It called to her, and though she fought it, she was weak.
She had always been too weak to deny her own doom.
She swaddled the baby, then cloaked herself against the frigid night. ínne met her in a clearing, vast arms outstretched. But Deirdre clutched her daughter close. She was so tiny. Deirdre could not imagine how she would possibly survive cradled by those claw-tipped hands.
“She is too new.” Deirdre’s belly was still soft and round; her hair, stiff with sweat; her thighs, slicked with her own viscera. It had been but an hour. “She cannot survive without me.”
She is the price balance demands.
“Please.” Deirdre’s whole body trembled as she tried to fight destiny. Tears spilled over her face like rain. “Let me have a little time before you take her. A year. Even a month. Just one day.”
Do you think it will be easier then? Sorrow wrote a poem beneath the silver antlers. She belongs to us now. She will live. She will love. But she is no longer yours.
And so Deirdre relinquished her daughter to the forest and wished Death had claimed her first.
She tried to keep her distance.
She could not.