Chapter After
After
Gort—Ivy
Autumn
My hope and my love, we will go for a while into the wood, scattering the dew, where we will see the trout, we will see the blackbird on its nest; the deer and the buck calling, the little bird that is sweetest singing on the branches; the cuckoo on the top of the fresh green; and death will never come near us for ever in the sweet wood.
—“The Heart of the Wood,” translated by
Lady Gregory
The kiss of Dún Darragh’s shadow tasted like winter. A keen chill swept the evening as I urged Finan toward the sunset-smeared fort, my cloak streaming out behind me.
I had found the stallion a few days after Eala’s defeat, grazing happily in a farmer’s paddock near Finn Coradh.
The man had not appreciated giving him up, but when he’d glimpsed the strange, bloodied host trailing behind me—battle-worn humans and strange-helmed Folk alike—he’d relinquished the stallion without another word.
The bag of silver I’d sent him a few weeks later hopefully salved the pain of losing such a fine animal.
Now I led Finan to Dún Darragh’s stable block, untacking him before checking he had enough hay.
Outside, dusk lowered like an onyx blade above the toothy silhouette of Roslea.
To the east, a full moon was rising, cool and white as a sail in the night.
In the middle of the courtyard, the massive oak loomed, its leaves golden as summer despite autumn pressing close on cold feet.
I pressed a palm to its pale, strong bark before heaving the fort’s doors open.
Inside, all was quiet. Puffs of dust rose around my boots.
“Corra?” I heard nothing save a distant, half-imagined cackling. “I know what you did, fiend. I wanted to make sure to tell you in person: Thank you for giving me back my ending.”
Corra burst into the guise of a damp muskrat, smoothing its whiskers. “We gave you naught that you lacked before. The time was right—no less, no more.”
“I appreciate it all the same.” I smiled a little. “I may be back here, from time to time, if it pleases you. Perhaps I’ll look after the garden. And I hear there is a greenhouse that needs rebuilding.”
“Pfaugh!” snorted Corra. “You do little that pleases us, that much is true. We asked for a posy—and still, none from you!”
I frowned in mock outrage, even as Corra rocketed from their host in a flurry of motion toward the ceiling, noisily singing, “Chiardhubh is back, Chiardhubh is back!”
The truth was, there was much that needed rebuilding, and not just at Dún Darragh.
Eala had left behind an entire kingdom in shambles—severely underpopulated, starving, and now frightened and bewildered by a sudden influx of Gentry refugees from Tír na nóg.
Although Breas had recognized me as the high queen’s foster daughter, he had not appreciated when I had announced myself as Rían ó Mainnín’s bastard heir and summarily installed myself on the high throne of Rath na Mara.
I supposed he had wanted the seat himself—I hadn’t bothered to ask.
Instead, I had kept myself busy with rebuilding all the infrastructure Eala had destroyed: sending a sad treasury’s worth of aid to the villages and farms she’d ransacked, dispersing the fianna of both humans and Gentry all across Fódla, and managing the argumentative, violent under-kings without starting any new wars.
Acting as high queen was, so far, a thankless task.
As I’d known it would be. I had never been so grateful to have a mountainous Fomorian as my general and guardian.
Balor took to his new role like a fish to water—second to gleefully bashing in revenants’ heads on the Bealtaine moon, I had never seen him so fully in his element.
But after six months of commanding and arguing and delegating and worrying and secretly grieving, I was ready for a night off. I pushed back out into the chilly evening, drew my mantle more tightly around me, and shifted into my anam cló.
My doe’s senses carried me through the autumn forest. The air was sharp with cold earth and dying foliage and the distant scent of woodsmoke.
Moonlight cast strange skeletons upon the forest floor.
The only sound was the brittle crackle of my hooves on fallen leaves, the forest hushed with its midnight secrets.
When stone monsters loomed around me in the dim, I returned to myself.
Although summer had smoothed many of the scars left by the Bealtaine War, I could still see where the battle had raged.
Char blackened one side of the willow; copper stains darkened the stones of the bridge; the undergrowth grew hectically over the lumped forms of revenants in their final repose.
A graveyard of a different sort—a mausoleum of my own memories.
I sighed, carefully drew a looking glass from my pack, and turned my thoughts toward hope.
Encased in a frame of twisted silver vines, the mirror gleamed with ethereal light, its surface neither glass nor metal but something in between.
Tiny jeweled flowers bloomed along its beveled edges, nearly hiding the plain dark pebble set into the handle.
I flipped it over—its reverse was nearly identical, except the stone set into the base glowed a pearly white in the moonlight.
It was Wayland’s creation, inspired by a forging his father had designed. He had frowned when I first asked him, the repercussions of my request swiftly rippling through his mind.
“You believe the Gates will close,” he guessed, “when the Treasures are unforged.”
“They will either close completely or blow open,” I confirmed. “I believe the former is more likely. And I fear I will not be able to make it back to Tír na nóg in time. If I am even alive to try.”
Wayland had frowned harder but had not attempted to dissuade me.
I loved him for that, although part of me had longed for someone to argue with the terrible destiny awaiting me in the human realms. Instead, Wayland had used a prototype based on his father’s design, supplemented by my own supplies.
A moonshadow, caught between panes of hammered quartz.
Dream steel, flexible metal said to catch nightmares.
And two pebbles—one from Fódla, and one from Tír na nóg—to hold the geasa in place.
Luckily, a dull black stone from Dún Darragh had lodged in the sole of my boot during my mad escape from Eala’s ravening hordes. The other pebble, I found on a quiet, secretive foray to the Willow Gate, while the bugles of war sounded in the distance as the Gentry fianna marched and trained.
Wayland had finally finished it the night before the Bealtaine moon, teaching me the incantation as he demonstrated how to use it.
Now I repeated his motions as I carefully recited the verse.
My face stared at me as I slowly passed the mirror behind my head until it returned to the front.
Then I flipped the looking glass, the pearly white stone winking.
The world slid sideways, slipping free of its moorings before snapping back into place.
I stood in the forest beyond the Willow Gate. The trees seemed to grow down instead of up. The willow was in the wrong place beside the bridge. Everything was backward, like I’d stepped right through the mirror into Tír na nóg.
Sudden nerves pummeled me, flashing heat through my veins and cold along my spine. Thorns nettled the inside of my skin, though less sharp than they’d once felt. Unforging my Treasure had not stolen away my Greenmark. That inborn magic belonged to me—not even the stars could steal it away.
I tucked the mirror into my pack and started forward as the moon netted between painted autumn branches.
A lone bone-fox paced me in the undergrowth; a few sheeries startled at my passing, arcing above the canopy like falling stars.
When I reached the shore of the lough, I felt him—less a thunderclap than a heavy footstep in the brush. I turned.
The arrow trained on my heart gleamed bright from twenty paces. The man holding the bow made no effort to hide himself, and the moonlight seemed to love him—cascading over his night-black hair… his angular cheekbones… a jaw like metal.
Only his eyes were shadowed—dark as a dream I longed to share. His was the beauty of the night—full moons and fuller hearts. His was the beauty of the forest—growing thorns and blooming flowers. His was the beauty of black ice—deep and endless and perfect.
He was perfect.
I stepped closer. Recognition blew his pupils wide—deep black amid moon-chased gray.
In his grip, the arrow faltered.
“It’s you,” Irian murmured, with a touch of wonder.
My heart thrilled in my chest. I quickened my footsteps, even as his expression shifted. Hope curdled toward disappointment—the angles of his face sharpening back toward danger. He lifted the bow once more. I stilled.
He did not know me after all.
I squeezed my fists so hard my nails dug crescents into my palms.
After meeting Irian’s mother, I’d known this might happen. I’d seen how cruel the patterns etched in the stars could be—I’d tasted their torments firsthand. There was nothing I could do now, save stay the course.
“Good evening,” I said inanely. As if we were guests at a feast, partners in a dance.
Instead of enemies. Friends. Lovers. A thousand things he was to me, and none of them simple.
He tilted his head—a tiny yet threatening gesture. Dread weakened my limbs and muddled my thoughts.
I steeled my emotions. I was made of frost and rot and endless things. I was not made to fear my husband. Even if he had forgotten I was his wife.
He moved closer, although neither bow nor arrow dropped.
He was still a warrior, but there was an ease in his gait—less menace than curiosity.
Again his eyes caught the moonlight, and I studied their shifting color.
Not silver anymore, but gray. As storm clouds.
As rough seas. As the cliffs where he was raised.
I couldn’t help but smile.
The blade of his jaw tilted, and he scented the air.
“You stink of the human realms. You speak like a human.” He glanced beyond me. “Yet the Gates are all closed. Tell me what you are.”
I smiled again, a little. “Would you believe me if I told you I was lost?”
“This is no place to be lost.” He circled closer. “Nor found.”
“The pleasure of the losing is in the finding.” I followed him with my eyes. “Or so I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing.”
He stopped an arm’s length away. He appraised me with interest, if not recognition.
“Do I know you?” His voice was husky, as if he didn’t use it often. When his plush mouth moved over the words, I noticed he had a faint, nearly indiscernible scar over his lips. “You speak as if you are not lost at all, but instead wish to be found.”
My throat closed tight around a sudden swell of overpowering emotion. I remembered his last words to me, beneath the Bealtaine moon: I will find you, mo chroí.
I hoped he did not mind me finding him instead.
I gestured to his face. “Your scar. May I ask how you came by it?”
His pursed his lips unconsciously. “I do not remember.”
I did. Oh, how I did. “It bears the shape of… a kiss.”
“A kiss?” His mouth quirked. “It must have been a terrible kiss.”
“Or perhaps a glorious one.”
He stared at me for a long moment. Then sighed and dropped his bow, looking bemused. “Do you intend to leave my domain of your own free will, colleen? Or will I have to chase you?”
Colleen. Colleen. Colleen. That wonderful word scattered through me on the force of my heartbeat, raising hope wherever it throbbed.
“I have another proposition for you.” I sat upon the rocky beach, drawing a bottle of wine and two clinking clay cups from my pack as I did. “I would make you a bargain.”
“Have you never been warned against making bargains with the Folk?”
“Repeatedly.” I gazed up at him, trying to keep the yearning from my face. “I am going to pour you some blackberry wine, then I am going to tell you a story.”
“And in return?” He made no move to sit, looming over me with ink-black hair falling into his eyes. “What do you wish from me?”
“Your next full moon.” I uncorked the bottle and poured two measures into the cups. “The one after that. And, if the story pleases you, the one after that as well.”
“That is many nights,” he observed, “for the telling of one story.”
“Yet it is less than I hoped for.”
Perhaps Irian detected the sorrow spreading like aching roots below the warble of my voice.
Perhaps he was simply bored and wished for diversion.
Either way, he folded his long legs beneath him and sat beside me.
The lough rippled with a crisp breeze as he lifted the cup to his lips, the faint scar puckering as he drank deep.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then reached for the bottle.
I reached for it at the same instant, and when our fingers collided, a spark sang along my arm to burst like starlight against the cage of my heart.
His storm-gray eyes slashed to mine. His pupils blew wide, emotion savage as love or despair or longing spasming across his face before smoothing away. He dropped his gaze, curling his fingers around the neck of the bottle.
“Go on,” he said, as he poured himself more wine. “Tell your tale.”
I took a deep breath. “Once, in a time of realms separated by war, and princesses torn apart at birth—”
“That is a very dramatic way to start a story,” he interrupted, sardonic.
A smile crept over my face as tremulous warmth bloomed in my chest.
“Oh, all right. I suppose I ought to keep this story simple.” I lifted my own cup to my lips and took a deep draught.
The wine was bitter as heartbreak and sweet as the hope beyond it.
It tasted like evil and good… light and dark…
and all the gray shadows lurking between.
It tasted of all the things I’d lost—and, perhaps, all the things I had yet to find.
But most of all, it tasted like a promise.
“She should not have drunk the blackberry wine…”