Chapter 34
Ash
I can’t breathe.
That’s not metaphor. My lungs have forgotten how to work. Every inhale catches on something sharp in my chest. Fear, rage, the bond to Finnian that’s gone quiet in a way that makes me want to claw through realms to find him.
“I hate this.” The words have worn grooves in my throat by now. “He’s with her. With that—”
“She is Tiana’s to kill.” Badb passes us like she’s commenting on the weather.
The firepit crackles. The Dagda chats with someone about the ways of Faerie. Casual. Unhurried. Like the world isn’t ending.
I can’t sit still. Can’t accept that he’s just gone.
“Amarantha has been summoning Finnian for over thirty—” Orion tries, then winces at the look on my face.
“Exactly.” I spin on him. “And no one thought to question that? Thirty years of her calling him to heel like a dog and everyone just—”
“Well, no.” Kieran pinches the bridge of his nose. The gesture is so human, so exhausted, that it almost breaks through my rage. Almost. “She is family.”
“Family doesn’t try to fuck family!” I’m losing it. I’ve accepted the mental loss. Embraced it, even. “Family doesn’t murder your parents and then spend three decades trying to crawl into your bed!”
“Trouble.” Kieran grips my cheeks and turns me to face him. His hands are cold, they’re always cold, but the touch grounds me. “We didn’t know about the sword. How could we?”
I open my mouth to argue.
“Ash.”
His ice-blue eyes hold mine. Steady. Patient. The prince who chose treason for a woman he barely knew, looking at me like I’m the only thing in the world worth seeing.
I close my mouth.
“Wonderful news.” Badb pokes her head out of the tavern door. Her silver eyes glint with chaos. Hard to tell with war goddesses. “Finnian is back.”
I shove Kieran out of the way and scan the tree line. “Where.”
“With Tiana.” Badb’s smile stretches too wide. “He’s to kill her.”
Then she disappears back inside.
Oh hell no.
I follow that crazy goddess right into the tavern because she can’t just drop a bomb of that proportion and expect me to—what? Let it go? Accept it? Sit quietly by the fire while the man I love is being used as an assassination weapon?
Hell. No.
“Badb!” I storm through the tavern door for the first time since we arrived.
And stop dead.
All three of them are here. The Morrigan. Macha. Badb. Seated around a table, cards in hand, tankards of something dark at their elbows.
Playing poker.
“What the hell are you three doing?”
“Poker.” The Dagda appears behind me with a tray full of beer that he sets on a nearby table. “Want me to shuffle you in?”
“No.” I draw the word out, staring at the scene before me. Three ancient war goddesses, responsible for more death than I can comprehend, playing cards while Finnian is— “Why are you playing poker when Finnian is supposed to murder Tiana?”
“What do you want us to do about it?” Macha asks, not even looking up from her hand. She studies her cards with the intensity of someone contemplating whether to raise or fold.
My mouth falls open.
“Ash, darling.” The Morrigan sets her cards face-down on the table. “You should rest.”
It is not my fault what happens next. Just putting that out there.
The Dagda grabs the drinks just before it happens.
My thorns surface under my skin. Not the controlled pulse I’ve been learning. Something wilder. Something that looks like Fae poison ivy spreading across my forearms in patterns that glow sage green and pink.
One second there’s a table. The next my thorns are inside it somehow, and then—
POOF. Gone. Absorbed into nothing. Like the wood never existed.
I stare at my hands. They’re glowing sage green at the edges.
Huh.
Macha sighs, laying her cards out on the not-there table. “Royal flush.” Her cards flutter to the floor.
She has a pair of fives. Not a royal flush. But you try correcting a war goddess.
“Oh.” Badb blinks, looking at me like I’m a mildly interesting specimen. “I see you’ve had a tantrum.”
“Her eyes are Fae again,” the Morrigan notes.
“No sclera.” Badb.
“Full green.” Macha.
I catch my reflection in the window behind the bar.
The face staring back isn’t mine.
My eyes have gone full green. Not hazel-with-green-flecks green. Not dramatic-lighting green. Full alien-abduction, no-whites-visible, something-ate-the-human green.
And my hair—
“Why is my hair pink?” I grip the strands—when did they get so long?—and watch the color bleed through my fingers. Sage green at the roots fading into pink at the ends.
I look like a fucking houseplant.
“Glamour is failing.” Macha rises, stepping over the mess of scattered cards. “This is salvageable.”
I back up. They follow.
“Salvageable?”
My ass bumps the bar stool.
“Yes, salvageable.” Macha rolls her eyes. “We must strip the last of the glamour.”
“As I said.” The Morrigan sighs. “You have work to do.”
“No, you—”
“This glamour must go.” She tsks, examining me like I’m a project she needs to finish.
“Barely any threads left.” Macha nods approvingly. “Well done, sister. The best glamour work you’ve ever produced.”
Which reminds me.
“You did this to me.” I step closer to the Morrigan, anger flaring fresh. “You put glamour on me. Which also reminds me, I have three years of my life missing.” I squint at her. “Where was I for three years?”
She barely twitches. Doesn’t move.
“And?”
“AND? Where was I for three years?”
“With me.” Like it’s obvious. Like it answers everything. “Working on the glamour.”
I’m going to assault a war goddess.
“Three years?” I sink onto the damn stool because my legs won’t hold me anymore.
“It didn’t happen on the run, child.” The Morrigan glances at the others. “A moment?”
I watch Badb and Macha leave with the Dagda, heading upstairs. I’m not going to question what ancient war goddesses and the father god of the Tuatha Dé Danann get up to in their spare time.
Some things are better left unknown.
“You remember nothing of your early years?” The Morrigan stands before me now. Not as I’ve seen her in battle: armored, terrifying, wreathed in crow feathers and old blood.
She’s wearing a simple black dress. Spaghetti straps. Basic cloth in the darkest black I’ve ever seen. Her arms are crisscrossed with tattoos that tell stories of battles and blood and names I’ll never know. Her ink-dark hair sits in a topknot on her head.
It’s the most un-goddess-like I’ve ever seen her.
And her face is beautiful. Hard and soft at once. Sharp jaw softened by full lips. High cheekbones softened by the warmth in her silver eyes.
A walking contradiction.
I probably shouldn’t find a war goddess comforting. But here we are.
“No.” I frown, looking past her, trying to find something in the blank space where three years should be. “But I want to.”
I look at her. Really look. This woman, this goddess, who cared for me when my parents couldn’t.
“You’re my true mother in ways I can’t yet name.”
The words fall out before I can stop them. But I don’t take them back.
Something flickers across her face. Pain, maybe. Or hope.
“Is Finnian okay?” I need to know that first. Before anything else.
She gives me a soft smile. “Fighting his own demons. Ones you cannot fight for him.”
I get that. So I close my eyes and reach for whatever memories might be hiding in the dark.
A small faeling. Running through a forest. Chasing—
My eyes flip open. “I remember something.”
“Do share.” There’s an excitement in her gaze. One that says she’s far more invested in my memories than those two words suggest.
“I remember laughing as I ran through the forest. Chasing a—” I smack her arm. “Whispen.”
“You loved to play hide and seek with him.” Her smile goes soft. Nostalgic. “He really was the best babysitter.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” I snort. “Whispen is many things, but a babysitter is not one of them.”
“He kept you alive those years,” she says quietly. “That counts. He still talks about it, you know. The years before. He misses who you were.”
Grief twists in my chest. Whispen misses a version of me I don’t remember being.
I close my eyes again. Reach deeper.
The vision that greets me is so real I can feel it.
“I remember seeing you sleeping on a hammock. In the woods. Between two trees. White with a rainbow.” I can see it—the colors, the light filtering through leaves. “One leg out, rocking yourself.”
“The day we left.” Sadness bleeds through her voice. “Do you know how old I am?”
The question surprises me. Offhanded. Almost casual.
“No.”
“My earliest memory is of blood and death.” That sad smile again. Like she wishes she had something better to offer. “I remember chasing the thrill of death. Summons after summons. Until one day I was more than a thought or an emotion.”
“That implies—”
“Maybe.” She doesn’t confirm. Doesn’t deny. “I wanted so much more for you. From the moment Niamh placed you in my arms, I wanted your first memory to be of love.”
“Oh, Morrigan.”
I look at her. Really look. Because I didn’t realize—didn’t once consider—that this beautiful, competent goddess is at her core a woman. With emotions and feelings and needs.
“I am many things.” She looks into the distance. “Was many more. I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes. And some days I still fall asleep wanting more. More for me. More for you. Always more for you.”
I swallow my tears. Swallow my own pain. And just listen.
“We spent many nights in that hammock. You in my arms, rocking as we watched the stars form and find homes.” Her voice goes thick with memory. “I sang to you as the dryads formed shelters to keep us safe. And I bled when the walls fell.”
She grabs my hands now. Her grip is fierce. Ancient.
“You are as close as I will ever get to a daughter.”
I can’t speak.
Daughter.
An ancient war goddess, born of blood and death, who has lived a thousand lifetimes and watched civilizations rise and fall. And she’s calling me daughter.
My body is shaking. The tears are back. And I don’t try to stop them this time.
“I want for you all the stars in the world. I want even more for you to remember our years. Because they mean more to me than all the heavens.” A lone tear tracks down her face.
She swipes it with a finger and holds it to me.
“Perhaps that’s the cruelty of fate. The best years of my life are the ones you may never recall.
And I have to be okay with that. Accept that all I gave to you, you may never know. ”
She runs the tear across my cheek, mingling it with my own.
And suddenly I’m three years old again.
I’m in her arms. The hammock swings beneath us. The stars are forming—actually forming, pulling themselves together from dust and light while she points and names them.
“That one is for courage,” she whispers. “That one is for loss. That one, little root-born, is for you.”
The memory hits me so hard I gasp. My knees buckle. The bar stool catches me.
I was loved. I was so fucking loved, and I didn’t even know.
Another fragment surfaces. Whispen’s gold glow at the foot of the hammock. Standing guard. His needle-teeth bared at the darkness like he’d fight the whole night to keep me safe.
He’s been protecting me since before I could walk.
And I had no idea.
Another. A song in a language I don’t know, but my soul remembers the melody. Something about roots and wings and growing toward the sun.
“It means something,” I manage through the tears. “Even if I don’t completely remember. I want to.”
“The tears will help you remember.” She clears her throat. “But the glamour must go, Ashlynne Moonshadow.”
I nod. “I know.”
“Already you’re appearing human again. And I worry you are somehow controlling it now.”
“That’s the plan, then? Hang out here and strip the glamour?” I joke, but I’m only partially serious.
“Yes.” She says it simply. “I must strip you of everything I wove, even if it’s no longer there. The scar is. And the scar must go as well.”
“How does one heal from a scar?”
She thinks about it for a long moment. Her silver eyes search my face.
“You should worry more about where your other two mates are.”
That’s not an answer. But the way she says it, urgent, almost afraid, makes me turn toward the door instead of pressing.
The firepit outside is visible through the window.
Empty.
No Kieran. No Orion. No shadows pooling at anyone’s feet. No flames flickering in anyone’s hair.
Just empty chairs and dying embers.
“Where—”
“That,” the Morrigan says, “is an excellent question.”