Chapter 15
Kieran
“Fucking dragons.”
I wake gasping, the bond at my wrist burning hot. The dream lingers. Vanessa’s slitted eyes. The bar that smelled like hops and human sweat. Ash’s face when I appeared.
I drag my hands down my face. Try to breathe through the knot in my chest. Ash is awake. Afraid. Or maybe that’s me. The bond pulses with something I can’t name, bleeding between us until I don’t know where she ends and I begin.
Your sister.
“Oh, tell me more.” Chewing tickles the hairs of my ear. I know it’s Whispen.
“Flame lord says you snore.” He crunches. “Personally I find it soothing.”
“Get out.”
He doesn’t move. Just crunches louder.
The words from the dream won’t leave me alone. Kestra is in that court. With Ash. And whatever Ash was trying to tell me before I woke, I didn’t get to hear it.
“What do you know of dragons?” I roll onto my back, scrubbing sleep from my eyes.
“Oh, I know a great many things about dragons.” He drops the popcorn to perch on the edge of the bed. “Why?”
“Because one just threatened to eat me.” I flip the covers off and grab a shirt. “Specifics.”
“Well, they aren’t quite all there.” He taps his temple with wide eyes. “If you know what I mean.”
“I do.” I draw the word out. “Fae?”
“Dragons?” He blinks. “Depends. Some are Fae, some are not. But they can give Fae a true death.”
A true death. Not just a sleeping for years, but death.
“This is an unhelpful conversation, Whispen.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Gods? Fae? Witches? Shifters? What are they?”
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed. My muscles ache. My eyes burn. Three weeks of jerking awake every time the bond pulses with her nightmares. I haven’t slept. Not really.
“D, all of the above.” He smirks that pointy smile. “Did you meet one? We haven’t had a dragon in Faerie in a long time. Not since your mother queen”
I freeze.
“Don’t speak her name.”
“I didn’t.” He tilts his head. “You did.”
Snowflakes drift from my fingertips. Pathetic.
Mab.
Her name. Hardly spoken in centuries. It’s a ghost. A curse. The bogeyman of the Unseelie Court.
Cold. Ruthless. One of the most legendary queens Faerie has ever seen.
Murdered by her consort.
My father.
I was young. Not a child, but young enough to still believe in things. She never let me call her mother in public. Said it made her look soft. But sometimes, late at night, she’d sit at the edge of my bed and trace frost patterns on the window while she told me about the old queens.
The ones who ruled before the courts forgot what they were.
Tatiana. Medb. Nicnevin. Beira.
“You have her eyes,” Kestra said once, and I nearly hit her. Because she was right. And because every time I look in the mirror, I see the woman my father butchered in their marriage bed.
The air turns frigid. An icy wind blows through the window. For once, it isn’t me.
Faerie remembers. Even if I’ve spent three centuries trying to forget.
I force myself to move. Dress. Walk downstairs to the tavern’s main room where Orion is pretending to read a book.
It’s upside down. I don’t ask.
The bond at my wrist pulses again. Stronger. Insistent. Like Ash can feel us shifting from stillness to motion. Like she’s been holding her breath for a month and finally lets herself hope.
Or maybe that’s me. Maybe I’ve been holding my breath, too.
The door slams open.
Not a storm. A herald.
The Morrigan enters first, followed by Macha. And behind them, a third figure. Badb.
Her eyes track movement like a predator recently woken from a very long sleep. Because she has been. The war triad is complete now. Three sisters. Three aspects of the same terrible goddess.
Fucking finally.
“Kieran.” The Morrigan’s voice carries smoke and battlefields. “Orion.”
Orion sets his upside-down book aside. “You brought company.”
“She brought herself.” Macha’s black eyes find mine. “The sleeper wakes when war demands it. We just sped it up.”
Whispen materializes at the edge of the bar, takes one look at Badb, and faints. Just collapses. No one moves to help him. Fair enough.
The three goddesses shift. Merge. Separate. It’s disorienting to watch. Woman. Three women. One woman. I’m not entirely certain anymore.
“We have news,” they say with voices that layer and split. “And a path.”
Orion leans forward. “A path where?”
“Through the Dark Forest.” The Morrigan’s face surfaces from the merged form. “To the Unseelie Court. To your queen.”
My chest tightens. “You told us to wait here.” I say it slowly, giving her time to hear how absurd this is. “If the forest was an option, we would have gone weeks ago.”
“It wasn’t.” Badb speaks for the first time. Her voice is rust and old blood and the sound of crows picking bones clean.
“The forest answers to our sister. Her creatures guard the paths,” Macha says.
“While I slept, even we could not grant you passage safely,” Badb adds.
“And now?”
She smiles. It’s not comforting. “Now I’m awake. And I can speak to what we made.”
She reaches into the folds of her cloak and withdraws something. A bone. Long, curved, carved with symbols that make my eyes water to look at.
“Carry this.” Macha presses it into my palm. Cold enough to burn. “Our sisters’ creatures will not touch you while you hold it. They will not hear you. They will not see you. It won’t help against the exiled.”
“What is it?”
“My rib.” Badb says it like it’s nothing. “Carved fresh this morning. The blood of the war triad runs through it now. You’re welcome.”
Orion makes a sound beside me. I don’t blame him.
“The passage was never possible before.” The Morrigan’s form flickers. “Badb’s waking was the final piece. Now you can travel paths that would have killed you.”
That’s why we waited. Not cruelty. Not games. We literally could not survive the forest without the goddess who made its monsters.
I close my fingers around the bone. It pulses against my palm like a second heartbeat.
Creepy. But also helpful.
“Finnian?” Dagda emerges from behind the bar. Same stubborn jaw as Orion. Same barely contained fury. Same refusal to acknowledge it.
I look at Orion. The same question has been eating at both of us since he vanished.
“Summoned. By the Seelie Court.” The words taste wrong. Summoned implies he’ll return. It’s been hours. He hasn’t.
We encouraged him to go. We’ve all been exiled, no summons. Nothing.
A summons is the quickest way to the courts.
“Then you have additional motivation to move quickly.” The Morrigan’s merged form solidifies briefly. “The Summer Sword binding grows stronger by the hour. Much longer, and there may be nothing left of your scholar to save.”
“Did you say the Summer Sword?” I interrupt.
“I did.” Morrigan nods slowly.
I need to sit. To pace. There’s no out for Finnian. Amarantha just locked the chains around his ankles.
“And Ash?” My voice comes out rougher than I intend as this news settles around my shoulders like a weighted blanket.
“Alive. Angry.” A flicker of what might be approval. “She’s made allies in the court. Your sister among them.”
Your sister.
“Is she safe?” The question scrapes out before I can stop it.
“Your sister chose her path. As you must choose yours.” She gestures toward the back of the tavern. “The forest entrance lies beyond those doors. We cannot accompany you. But Whispen knows the way.”
On cue, Whispen revives with a dramatic gasp. “I heard my name! Yes! I know many things! Some of them even useful!”
“Can we trust him?” Orion mutters.
“We need him anyway.” I grab my pack. I’m running on fury and fear and the fumes of whatever stubborn refusal to quit my mother bred into me. “What else do we need to know?”
“The Dark Forest does not forgive hesitation.” Macha’s voice carries through the merged form. “Move forward. Do not stop. Do not listen to the voices. The rib will protect you from my creatures, but the forest itself answers to older things.”
“How comforting.”
Dagda hands Orion a pack. Inside: supplies, weapons, a jar of something that smells like death and sulfur.
“Whispen’s suggestion,” Dagda explains. “The forest dwellers hate it.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t ask.”
I decide not to ask.
“One more thing.” The Morrigan’s gaze finds mine, and for a moment all three sisters look out through those ancient eyes. “The dream-walking. You reached her. Continue to do so.”
I did. And I’d reach for her again and again and again.
Before I walk away I pause, and then turn back to The Morrigan, “Dragons?”
The sisters merge and smile, all teeth and excitement. “Oh yes.” They purr. “It has been quite some time since dragons have arrived.” She sighs almost wistfully.
“Dragons.” Orion’s voice cuts through. “Coming to Faerie. Coming for her.”
“The last time dragons walked these lands, they burned three courts to rubble over a territorial dispute.” Dagda chuckles, rubbing his hands together. “Did she mention which realm?”
“Tartarus.” I don’t want to answer but Finnian would say knowledge is power, and we need all the knowledge we can gather.
Dagda chuckles loudly. “Splendid.”
And Ash has one for a cousin. Has a whole family I knew nothing about. People who love her. People who would burn worlds for her.
Just like us.
Something ugly twists in my chest. Jealousy. That she has people. That she never told me about them. That maybe she doesn’t need us as much as we need her.
I shove it down. Now is not the time.
At least she’s not alone. At least someone else is fighting for her, too. Even if it’s a dragon who threatened to eat me.
“Ready?” Orion checks his own pack. His jaw is tight. His eyes are steady. His wound is seeping again. He’s pretending it isn’t.
I’m pretending I don’t notice.
“No.” I adjust my pack. “You?”
“Not even close.”
“Let’s go get our queen.”
The edge of the Dark Forest looms through the tavern’s back windows. Trees that shouldn’t move shift at the corner of my vision. Something screams in the distance. High and thin, like a child in pain.
It isn’t a child.