Chapter 43
Seamus’s room was small and dark, but clean. The bed was covered over with a brown muslin blanket, the windows shielded by thick brocade curtains.
Magdala made Asherton sit on the bed and helped him strip off his wet clothes. He grinned up at her.
“Stop it,” she said, laughing irritably.
The closet door was open, and Magdala rifled around until she found an oversized cardigan and a pair of cotton trousers.
Asherton pulled them on. His breathing was ragged and labored, and he gave into another violent coughing fit.
Magdala bent over him, reminding herself to breathe—it was hard, when his lungs sounded so jagged.
The door creaked open and she glanced up to find her father standing in the crack of light, watching her.
“What?” she snarled.
“Dry clothes,” he said, laying a plaid skirt and a heavy, knit sweater on the dresser by the door.
She held her breath until the latch clicked shut and he was gone.
“One moment,” Magdala said to Asherton. “I need to change.”
He nodded, and she quickly changed into her dry clothes. They were bulky and inelegant, but wonderfully soft and warm.
She found her father’s shotfire in the nightstand and took it with her as she climbed onto the bed. Asherton lay down, resting his head on her thigh. One hand on the shotfire, Magdala twined her fingers through his damp hair, parting the tangled curls. The rattle in his chest eased.
“Try to sleep,” she whispered.
He turned onto his back and looked up at her. His eyes were more gold than green in the faint light, and he was very pale, lending him an ethereal quality that frightened her.
“When I was a child,” he said, “Zephyr used to tell me about the ancient faerie women. Powerful, magical beings who were so beautiful they could bewitch a man with one smile.”
“Hush,” she said. “You need to rest.”
He reached out and twisted one of her scarlet locks around his finger. “I could never quite picture them in my mind. Until I met you.”
Magdala’s heart flipped, but she made a scoffing sound. “Don’t be silly. When you met me, my hair was in a cloud of frizz, and I was sweating and angry.”
“I meant it when I said that I love you,” he said.
Magdala tilted her head and traced her fingers across his brow, down his temple, along his jaw. “I have loved you for weeks. I love you so very, very much, Ash, that I sometimes wish I loved you less so I could protect you better, but you’ve unraveled me. I’m undone.”
The room was dark and quiet, the covers tangled unromantically around their legs.
Asherton was feverish, drenched in sweat, grimy and bruised.
Magdala’s left eye was swollen shut, her lip split, and she was wearing a pilled old fisherman’s sweater.
It was the least romantic setting imaginable for confessions of love, and yet Magdala couldn’t think of a better place.
A grand proclamation in a wisteria garden might suit some silk-clad couple with a sensible future ahead of them, but half dead, on the run, bathed in sweat and mud suited her and Asherton much better.
She bent down and kissed him. “I love you so much, it aches,” she murmured against his lips. “With every beat of my heart, MoCrida.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means ‘my soul match’,” she whispered.
He smiled, then he coughed again, his chest shuddering.
“Oh, Ash.” Her calm shattered, and tears started in her eyes.
“I’m alright.” His voice grated. “I’ve just got a cold.”
He was a terrible liar. His lungs rattled, and Magdala’s own chest pinched as though she were slowly dry-drowning with him.
“I think after this, I would like to quit and find a new position at Elegy,” she said.
“Something more elevated?” Asherton asked. “Something more permanent?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Until death.”
“The position is open, if you want it,” he said.
“There now, you have something to keep breathing for.”
“Ah, witch. I see your scheme.”
She forced a smile, but she just felt small and scared, and she wanted her Da to come in and make it all better.
Asherton drifted in and out of a restless sleep, his skin so hot it burned through the thick wool of her skirt.
Dozens of desperate plans lit and dimmed in Magdala’s mind, like pixie bugs flashing and then fizzing out.
A part of her wished she’d never fallen in love with Asherton, because if she wasn’t so terrified of losing him, she might be able to think straight. But doubt battered her.
She’d brought him to the very den of the enemy. And yet, this was home. This was her da’s house. Where else could she possibly have gone?
Her father’s rejection was a knife in her back. She was his only daughter, and she’d supported him for years. How could he treat her like this when she came to him for help?
Something shatters when a child sees their father as a man, not a god or an angelic protector. When the idol cracks. Magdala had revered Seamus, but the guise slid away and she found the lion was actually just an angry cat hissing in an alley.
The door creaked open and Zephyr entered with a tray. “Is he asleep?” he asked.
Magdala nodded.
“Is there a physician in town?”
“A royalist,” she replied.
He set the tray on the nightstand and sat softly on the edge of the bed. Gently, he touched Asherton’s brow with the back of his hand. He raised his eyes to Magdala’s.
“I tried,” she choked. “I swear, I tried. It was all against us from the start.”
Zephyr took a cloth and wetted it in a basin of water on the nightstand, then dabbed Asherton’s forehead. “Do you think we’re safe here?” he asked.
“I was just wondering the same thing,” Magdala replied. “I don’t think my father will betray us. I’m all he has.” But was she? He had the royalist zealots, too. Which did he love more?
“No.” Zephyr paused, gazing at Asherton. “A man won’t lightly give up the only thing he cares for in the world.”
Magdala understood his meaning, and she touched his hand. He winced and pulled it back.
“I was not an anxious man until I had a child,” he said. “For seventeen years, I have worried day and night over him, and all my fears are coming true.”
Magdala shook her head. “Nothing else will happen to him. We will get him back to Elegy and everything will be well again.”
“I wish I had never complained about any silly thing he did,” Zephyr continued, more to himself than to Magdala.
“Sometimes, I saw him as an inconvenience or an interruption, but so are all worthwhile things in the world.” He wetted the cloth again and washed Asherton’s hands, his arms, his cheeks.
“Truthfully, I was a very miserable man until Ash entered my life, and as strange and muddling as it was being thrust without warning into fatherhood, it was also as though the clouds parted and the sun shone on my face again. Everything is better with children. Sunny days are warmer and cold nights cozier and all holidays are much improved. No, Ash brought me new life when he came to my island, and now …” The words died and he turned away, busying himself with squeezing out the rag and wetting it anew.
“Explain it all to me, won’t you, Zeph? How you two ended up together, and about his brother, and Julian. Why did you kill Julian?”
He sighed. “I am, as you have probably worked out, not actually human.”
“Yes, the scales alerted me to that.”
“I’ve inhabited—or haunted—Elegy Island for centuries.
Most of the time, I can shift in and out of my nix form at will, but when the moon is full, I must transform, and when I do, I am not myself.
Marwenna, the queen of Ashkendor, liked to maroon her enemies on my island when the moon was full and then watch from the sea as I destroyed them one by one. ”
“Oh,” Magdala gasped. She realized it was rude and covered her mouth with her hand.
“Your father was my warden, your grandfather as well, and back and back for generations.”
Magdala’s neck warmed with shame. If her father had kept the house, would she have been Zephyr’s warden, too? She turned away from the thought in horror.
“And then, one day,” Zephyr continued, “I was in my fits, prowling the beach, and I came upon a little boy.”
Magdala’s jaw dropped, and she looked down at Asherton. “How did he end up on Elegy?”
“Fearing the curse and the superstitions of the people, Queen-Regent Madelaine sent Asherton to live with Tiernan—his father—in Ashkendor. But what Madelaine did not know is that Marwenna, Tiernan’s queen, was not the legitimate mother of her only son.
Evander was born of another of Tiernan’s mistresses, and so Asherton threatened her line.
And in so doing, threatened her claim to the throne.
“And so she intercepted Ash’s boat, took him from his guards, and left him on my island.
To be devoured by me. She is a vicious woman.
And so, one night, as I prowled the beach, I came upon a child kneeling on the sand.
I remember the moonlight on his face,” Zephyr continued.
“He was holding a bullfrog in his hands, and as I approached him with my teeth bared and madness in my mind, he thrust the creature in my face and said, ‘It looks like you!’”
Magdala snorted. “That sounds like something he would do.”
Zephyr laughed softly. “It jarred me so profoundly that I shut my teeth and stared at him. He wasn’t afraid of me, and he began to circle me, prodding my scales, bending over to stare at my webbed feet.
The indignity of it undid me. Never before had I known mercy in my fits.
I did not know I had the capacity for it.
But, perhaps because he was not afraid of me, or perhaps because he was so small and abandoned and his wonder reached me in my soul, I recalled myself.
“The waves sang on the beach as I reached out my hand. He put his little fingers in mine, pointed toward the house, and said, ‘Is that home?’
“I was shattered. I swept him up in my arms and I carried him into the forest. When I awoke in my human form, he was asleep on my chest. I sent a message to Queen-Regent Madelaine and told her what had happened, and while I waited for her reply, I built him a little hut in the woods, and I fed him berries and mushrooms and laughed when he turned his grubby nose up at them. And, worse of all, I told him my real name.”
“Why is that worse of all?” Magdala asked.
“Because a nix is a kind of faerie and our names have strong magic. Anyone who knows our name may control us. When I gave him my name, I gave him power over me. Any command he gave, I had to obey.”
“Is that the name he used for you in the river?”
Zephyr nodded. “Don’t get any ideas you can use it. Overhearing the name doesn’t give it power. I must tell it to you.”
“Then why give it to him? If it had such power?”
Zephyr lifted one shoulder. “Because I feared I might eat him. And if he had my name, he could stop me if I tried.”
“And that is why you could not tell anyone you killed Julian,” Magdala mused. “Because he forbade it.”
For the first time since she met him, Magdala saw Zephyr’s age in his eyes.
“He had never invoked my name before. Not once. Even when he was a child and could have made me do all manner of ridiculous things. But after I killed Julian, he turned on me and invoked my name and told me I could not tell anyone what had happened.”
“And the house? How did you get the house?”
“By the time Queen-Regent Madelaine sent someone for Asherton, I realized I couldn’t trust his mother in Allagesh or his father in Ashkendor.
So I frightened her messenger away and told him to tell the queen-regent that I would keep her inconvenience here on Elegy, if she would let me have the house.
She was all too eager to hide her shame.
Tiernan owned the island, and he was happy enough to let her use it.
Marwenna dared not go against them, or else threaten the dragon trade.
And so I became Asherton’s guardian, and I raised him to be more nix than human. ”
“So it’s your fault my father lost the house,” Magdala said with a smile.
Zephyr shrugged. “Your father is not a good man. I know that is hard to hear.”
Magdala didn’t reply. She wished it was hard to hear, but it felt like wondering if you’re ill and then having a doctor confirm it—a bitter kind of relief.
The door creaked and Seamus leaned in. Asherton stirred.
“I’ve made some porridge," Seamus said. “Magdala, come and let me see to your eye. It looks angry.”
“If you won’t help him, you won’t help me either,” she snapped.
“Go,” Zephyr said. “Asherton will be angry if you don’t.”
“I don’t wish to wake him,” Magdala said, as an excuse. She didn’t want to leave.
“I should try to get some more of the water from his lungs,” Zephyr said. “There’s no purpose in you being here as well.”
“Will it hurt him?”
“Not much.”
Reluctantly, Magdala assented, but Asherton woke when she shifted. He tried to sit up, jostling his swollen, twisted arm. Magdala drew a sharp breath, feeling his pain in her own bones, and pressed him onto the mattress.
“I need stitches in my cheek,” she said. “But I won’t go unless you promise to lie still and be good.”
“I’ve never been a good … a day in my life,” he panted.
Magdala rolled her eyes. “Ash, please. For me.”
Asherton nodded. Still, she hesitated, squeezing his hand.
“I’ll stay with him,” Zephyr assured her. “Go quickly now. It will only get harder.”
She left the door open, determined that she would get up at the slightest clearing of his throat and return to him.