Chapter 33
Chapter thirty-three
SO MANY DRYADS
Ornella
“Easy. You are alright,” whispered a deep, soothing voice, bringing me gradually to awareness.
I was curled into a tight ball on my mattress with tears covering my cheeks, a whimper in my throat, and Sage’s shirt clenched in my fist under my head.
I was mortified once I fully regained my senses and realized I must have awakened Ciaran.
He had a knee braced on my bed so he could rub my shoulder with firm but careful strokes that were clearly meant to wake me gently.
The lantern on the table between our cots had been turned on so the room was filled with a warm but dim light.
He must have felt me tense because he took his hand away and stepped back as I raised my head to glare at him through my tears. I saw his gaze fall to the shirt I had clenched under my cheek and understanding flooded his expression before I shoved it back under my pillow.
“I miss him too,” he assured quietly while I scrubbed furiously at my face with the heels of my hands, but some of the tears had already dried.
After a moment, I gave up trying to hide the evidence of my heartbreak and flopped back down onto the bed. My mind was instinctively drawn toward my bond with Pyrope to seek the comfort I had come to rely on recently, but it was muted while we were so far apart.
“I need him back,” I whispered, clenching my pillow hard enough to crack my fingers from the force.
Ciaran sighed and leaned against the wall next to my bed with his arms crossed. “I know. Me too.”
“If we cannot…” I broke off in uncertainty of whether it was a good idea to continue.
But the words weighed so heavy in my heart that I did not think I could keep them to myself any more.
“I cannot do this without him. I don’t even want to,” I whispered finally, giving life to the truth that had been growing in me.
Ciaran was silent for a moment before he surprised me by taking the liberty of sitting on my mattress again with his back against the headboard.
“You do not get to quit. I will not allow it,” he told me calmly but without any room for argument in his tone.
“If I cannot get him back—”
“Then you will find a way to go on,” he interrupted me more firmly.
I shook my head in frustration, and he turned to lean over me abruptly so I was forced to meet furious tabby eyes.
“You don’t get to quit!” he ground out again.
“Whatever you must do, whoever needs to suffer to make it bearable, I will help you, but you will not quit on me.”
“Why?” I snarled, too curious about all this intensity to hold my tongue.
“Because he would never forgive me!” he exclaimed, becoming emotional for the first time since I’d met him.
“You are the most precious thing to him. And if you are all that is left of him, all I’ll ever have left of my brother, then you should know I will die before allowing anything to happen to you,” Ciaran revealed.
I lay blinking at him, trying and failing to hold back the fresh tears as they spilled down my cheeks.
“So you will find the strength,” Ciaran reassured me, although the harshness in his voice was softened by a rasp of emotion. “If I have to drag you kicking and screaming through the rest of your life, then so be it. Understand?”
I was too stunned to speak for a moment as I wiped the tears off my cheeks, but I nodded.
“I really fucking hate you, Ciaran, you know that?”
“I can live with it,” he assured me dismissively as he leaned back against my wobbly headboard again.
“Sage is… really important to you. I mean I knew that already since you wanted to kill me for hurting him...” My voice trailed off suggestively, but he refused the bait. He remained staring ahead at the door until I sighed with exasperation at him. “Tell me how you met him!”
It was the first time I’d deigned to really talk with him about Sage, despite a few prompts from him. But I was desperate for something, anything, about my mate to keep me from splitting apart at all my seams.
“I grew up in Aes Rurrinn,” Ciaran revealed, and I felt a bit sheepish that I had never asked him about himself in all the time we’d spent training.
I supposed I was so used to hiding my own past that it rarely ever occurred to me to ask others about themselves.
“I did not meet him until one Mabon Festival, about two hundred years ago, when the tribes gathered for harvest feasting. We got into a fight.”
“You did?” I laughed, amused but not at all surprised since Ciaran was rather grumpy and confrontational.
“It was my fault—”
“Obviously,” I snorted and bit my lips together to stop my laughter when he shot a glare down at me.
“It was late into the festivities, I’d had far too much to drink that day, and the males had started challenging each other to some good-natured competitions.
Sparring and wrestling and the like. I was not…
I did not grow up how Sage did with kind and loving parents,” Ciaran admitted, making the amused smile fade from my mouth as I took in his sombre expression.
“My mother and elder sisters were militant, and I was expected to earn their approval. Especially as a male,” he added and crossed his arms as he rested his head back against the headboard.
“Sage was the son of a Sua, so I saw him as a good opponent against whom to prove myself. I would not take his no for an answer when he tried to decline the fight. I think he could tell that I was taking it much too seriously when it was all meant to be in good fun,” Ciaran explained.
“He is… eerily perceptive like that,” I agreed.
“He is also an exceptional wrestler and had me pinned in about two minutes. I should have been able to laugh it off and congratulate him but was too ashamed and angry. Things got heated, and it came to blows until his mother stepped in. I am not sure if you know, but in our culture, if someone acts against the interests of others, they can be asked to make recompense. It can be anything as long as the action is not contested by the Sua,” Ciaran revealed.
“Really? I did not know that!”
“So Asha negotiated the recompense with my mother. They decided that I would live with Sage and his teine for one year, and then he would come to live with my family for the same amount of time.”
“What? Over a fight?” I verified in disbelief.
“It was a very bad fight. But going to live with Asha and Carrick was perhaps the single most valuable thing to ever happen to me. Not only did I learn a new way of life, but Sage and I became brothers. And when he joined the Wild Hunt, I followed not long afterward,” he finished.
I could not help smiling at the heartfelt story even as tears stung my eyes. Especially when I thought about the utter respect with which Ciaran treated Asha.
“You read the letter last night,” he said in a clear effort to change the subject. I was impressed he had managed to last so long before he asked about it.
My nose wrinkled and my ears flattened as I recalled how Amira tried to justify herself.
They thought I was in danger and that the Wild Hunt were still their enemies.
She swore that what happened to the Spring Court had not been intentional, and she was immensely ashamed by it.
But it was the parts where she talked about Sage that had really turned my stomach.
Her words were pretty enough, but they would never be enough.
She still wanted to meet, which I would tell Rian, but I doubted he was any more interested in parlaying with Riordan than I was.
And if he was still interested in talking, then Amira would have the chance to address him when we took her prisoner.
“She is sorry. They want to meet,” I summed up with a roll of my eyes that let him know how I felt about it.
Ciaran grunted in agreement.
“Tell me what happened with those dryads last night,” he bade me, and I sobered quickly at the reminder of all that I had learned from Prince Faolán.
“They came here from the Oak Wood in Sumarra on a kind of… Rite,” I began, shaking my head in disbelief. The thought of young dryads being encouraged to leave their tribe was unfathomable to me. “I had heard of them before, but I did not know they were ruled by queens.”
Ciaran was silent for some time, his brows pinched as he processed this astonishing revelation.
“My father was not educating me in anything, and he certainly would not have wanted us to know about a clan where females rule,” I continued thoughtfully.
“But I just don’t know how they didn’t know about us if they are so damned worldly.
My father’s name is spoken with fear. Surely they have heard about him? ”
“Is it? Or is that what you were told?” he pointed out.
“The Foraoise elves I lived with feared him.”
“They presumably had proximity to the Rowan Wood, but perhaps his name is not as far reaching beyond your homeland as he would have had you believe. Or perhaps he intentionally stayed beneath the notice of other tribes for fear of retaliation if they knew what he was doing.”
I almost dismissed such an outlandish idea right away, but then I hesitated.
It was almost impossible to imagine my father being afraid of anyone, especially not females.
And yet, I had come to realize over the centuries that he really had feared me.
He had feared my unfettered power so much that he risked alienating the Tiarnaí just to gain control of me!
Because despite what he liked to proclaim, unbound females were stronger than males.
So if he had been so afraid of my potential to topple the society that he so painstakingly built to cage me, then how would he feel about entire tribes of unbound females?
“So does this mean some of your kind are actually… nice people?” Ciaran asked with feigned astonishment.
I scowled and punched him in the arm, but he merely laughed as he got off my bed to return to his own.