Chapter Twenty-Two
Lily stood like a ghost in the doorframe.
When Shea found her voice again, she demanded, “What are you doing here?”
At first, Lily did not reply. She moved silently into the room, tilting back her head to study the portrait.
She wore a strange expression, one that shifted continually like moonlight over troubled waters.
There was hurt and longing, confusion and betrayal, all of them flickering in and out of focus too quickly to track.
“Lily.” Dread built steadily within her, although Shea could not exactly place why. “How are you here?”
“You opened the door for me.” She traced a fingertip along a dusty writing desk. “Although, this room was once mine.”
Shea stared at her in silent horror—and a mounting self-hatred.
How had she not seen it before? Lily’s familiarity with faerie culture.
Her quest for vengeance. The scars on her hands.
How she’d arrived, unknown and uninvited.
The longer she looked, the more the girl standing beside her resembled the woman in the painting.
Lily’s clever, bright eyes; her cunning smile …
They were unmistakably Fuamnach’s.
She felt nauseated. “It’s you.”
Belatedly, the full weight of that realization crashed down on her. Lily was Fuamnach: Midir’s ex-wife, the sorceress who had been targeting her, the woman who had sworn revenge on her sister. And she was here.
Shea stumbled backward to put some space between them—and caught her foot on the leg of a chair. She hit the ground with a terrible crash. Pain jolted up her elbows, but she hardly registered it. She only scrambled away until her back pressed against the opposite wall.
Fuamnach watched her impassively, clearly weighing what to do.
When she blinked, the clear blue of her irises changed to striking, pure gold.
Her hair shone more lustrously: black with the faintest blue sheen, like a crow’s feathers.
It happened in the space of a heartbeat, along with more subtle transformations that changed the topography of her face.
She understood how Fuamnach had gone undetected.
It was as though Shea had been wearing sunglasses all this time—and now removed them to stare at the full, unyielding brilliance of a star.
Fuamnach’s otherworldly beauty, dulled by her mortal facade, was now on full display.
“It’s been a long time since someone looked at me like that,” she said flatly. “It’s flattering. But there’s no need to cower. I can’t harm you here.”
“Then why the fuck did you follow me?”
Fuamnach approached her. Her boots tapped out a steady rhythm on the floorboards, and with every step, the shadows stirred around her ankles like water. She offered her hand to Shea. “I wanted to talk to you.”
Shea only stared at her hand until she retracted it. “I have nothing to say to you. You’re here to kill Aideen, aren’t you?”
“No.” Fuamnach’s mouth twisted as though she’d tasted something sour.
“I would not escape alive. Besides, there’s no pleasure in it this way.
If I were to kill her, I’d want him to know it was me.
I would want him to see it. I would want for him to know that, this time, there will never be any hope that he will find her again. ”
“You’re a monster,” Shea hissed, not bothering to hide her revulsion.
“You’ve drawn your conclusions about me. But there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“I could tell Midir.”
Fuamnach tilted her head, and the shadows slid back from her face. The mottled band of scar tissue across her cheek caught the light. “You won’t. You and I both need this tournament to continue.”
They did. But if never seeing Aideen again meant she would live …
Shea opened her mouth. To do what, she still did not know. Maybe she would have screamed. She never got the chance, because Fuamnach said, “Silence. Do not move.”
Her voice glittered with the familiar, horrible magic of faerie compulsion.
The command snagged like a hook in Shea’s mind—and she hurried to obey.
Her jaw snapped shut. She could not think of a single thing she’d rather do, or why it’d ever occurred to her to do anything but remain perfectly still and silent.
“I lay you under a bond of heavy enchantment. You will not speak of this encounter to anyone.” As she spoke, the spell traveled through Shea, wrapping itself in chains around her heart. “You will not betray my true identity, until the day you draw your last breath.”
Shea’s thoughts fizzled and plodded, as though she’d just woken from the thick haze of sleep.
She hadn’t fallen asleep, had she? No, she remembered the command—remembered, distantly, her body acting of its own accord.
Horror accompanied the terrible realization of what Fuamnach had demanded of her.
She rested a hand over her collarbone. Humming beneath her skin was that cold knot of faerie magic.
“So, what did you want to talk about?” Shea gritted out.
“I’d hoped to convince you to surrender, since threats are lost on you.” Her voice held some degree of amusement. “There is no hope for you to defeat Midir. Even if you make it to the final round, nothing but ruin awaits you.”
“So you know about his eye.”
“Of course I do.” Fuamnach’s lip curled. “That eye is responsible for all of our misfortunes.”
Guardedly, Shea asked, “What do you mean?”
“You know who I am, so you must know some of what came to pass. When Midir lost his eye, our foster son summoned none other than the god of healers, who crafted for him a prosthetic of incredible power.”
“It allows him to steal talents.”
“Indeed.” Fuamnach crossed her arms. “Shortly after he did away with me, he became known as Midir of the Thousand Talents. He surrounded himself with mortals and fae alike who were the most gifted in the world at their craft. It was as though those in his orbit began to fade, until they vanished altogether. And Midir himself flourished. I hear he was something to behold. Whatever you can imagine—swordplay, painting, dancing—he excelled at. But eventually, his interest in chess became quite singular.”
“You’re good,” Shea said begrudgingly. “But you’re not better than the rest of us—or any of the previous finalists whose skill he stole. How do you plan to beat him?”
“I am a sorceress,” she replied cryptically. “And you?”
“I’d hoped to find Aideen. But something tells me you’re not going to let me do that.”
“No. I’m not.”
Rage sparked hot within her. Her every word tasted like blood, as though she were tearing open every old and aching wound. “You said his eye was responsible for our misfortunes. But no, it’s you. You’re the reason my mother’s life was ruined. You’re the reason my family was torn apart. You’re—”
“I was the daughter of a king! I was among the cleverest and most powerful of our women, a master of our oldest form of magic. I was a good wife to him—a good mother to our children.” Cold fury exploded across Fuamnach’s face.
Shadows snaked along her wrist and wove between her fingers.
Every word was almost a snarl, and her yellow eyes burned in her bloodless face.
“One day, my beloved husband went to visit our favorite of our foster children. For a year and a day, he was gone. I received no word from him. I received no news of him from any of our friends or family. I did not know if he was alive or dead. And when he finally deigned to return to our home, he’d brought a girl with him: a golden-haired, doe-eyed thing to replace me. ”
Shea gawped at her. In Ciara’s version of the story, Fuamnach had seemed an unreasonable, jealous woman. But this was …
Fuamnach exhaled a long sigh, recomposing herself.
“She was beautiful—as beautiful as everyone claimed. But she was so very young. She had none of our jadedness, but also none of the cunning or skill or knowledge or depth of feeling I had nurtured over centuries. I despised her, who would take everything from me and acted like I was the interloper.”
“But it wasn’t her fault!” Shea protested. “You’re going to punish her for Midir’s terrible decisions?”
Fuamnach did not acknowledge her. When she spoke, her voice sparkled with compulsion. “There’s nothing more to say. You will return to the dining room with me now.”
Shea had no choice but to comply.
When Shea reentered the dining room, she was shocked to see Lily—no, Fuamnach—still seated at the table.
She glanced behind her. No one was there.
And judging by the unchanged atmosphere at the table, no one had noticed her absence.
Fuamnach met her gaze, but her expression remained perfectly neutral.
Hatred boiled within Shea. She’d officially had enough of faerie magic.
“There you are,” Midir said, as if nothing strange or unexpected had happened all evening. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
Shea slumped into her chair. Immediately, Ciara’s eyes found her. Within them was a question: Did you find her?
Shea shook her head.
“Let us move on to the matter of the remaining rounds. I have reigned as Tír nAill’s chess champion for more than a millennium.
This year, I will allow the challenger to select the format of our final game.
It has been too long since defending my title has presented a real challenge—and clearly, too long since I’ve shown the depths of my generosity. ”
Shea could hardly believe his arrogance.
“It has been a long journey—one that will end in failure for two of you tomorrow,” Midir said. “I imagine each of you is eager to know who you will face.”
“Get on with it already,” Daniil groused. “You’ve kept us here long enough.”
“With pleasure.”
There came the sound of splintering wood.
Something scraped against Shea’s wrist. Startled, she pushed her sleeve back.
The branch fetter tightened—and then began to expand.
Terror, briefly, lanced through the numbness that had settled over her.
Her mind conjured images she’d tried so hard to avoid.
Roots pushing through flesh like tilled soil.
Blood spreading over the board. Branches emerging from her opponent’s chest like a second rib cage.
Shea clawed at the cuff, but there was no stopping it.
Bark crawled up her skin until it encased the entirety of her forearm.
This was it. All of this had been some twisted game.
She braced for the worst. The pain of being pierced and torn apart from the inside out.
Abruptly, the growth stopped at her shoulder. Delicately, it put out a little branch.
The table had gone deathly quiet. The only sound was their ragged breathing. At the head of the table, Midir absently swirled the wine in his glass.
From the new branch, a delicate bud sprouted. Then, it unfurled into a flower. It gave the impression of a cartoon gun spitting out a flag emblazoned with BANG.
She dared to look at the others. Half of Fuamnach’s face was scaled with bark.
In front of her flung-wide eye was a deep violet blossom—a match to Daniil’s, which had sprouted from the tip of his bramble-wrapped finger.
Ciara had plucked the flower from the joint of her elbow and studied it with a mixture of fascination and irritation.
It was pure, radiant white, the same as Shea’s.
Daniil slammed his palm against the table. The glasses rattled menacingly. A carafe of water tipped over. “Cut the theatrics,” Daniil hissed. “What the hell is this?”
Unfazed, Midir rose from his seat. In the firelight, his shadow jumped and thrashed like a snared animal.
The golden strands of his hair shifted, until Shea caught a glimpse of his prosthetic eye underneath.
It glinted almost mischievously in the half-light.
“The pairings are set. Tomorrow, Daniil Tsoi will play against Lily Keenan.”
Shea could hardly hear him through the blood rushing in her ears. She could only stare numbly at her arm as the bark retreated back into the fetter. There was no sense in being surprised. Even less in being disappointed. One way or another, it was always destined to come down to this.
“And Ciara of Bri Leith,” he continued, “will play against Shea Fury.”