With her eyes shutting out her half-packed trunks, she could pretend her meeting with Kordislaen never happened. Their mission never went wrong. Ó Connor was safe, back in Álainndore. Maybe she was resting before her next training session. She and Ronan would be eating dinner together later, and she would be hoping they could steal a few moments away.
Her eyes were open, and her heart was raging against the iron gate she’d built.
He’d said he loved her.
She needed to go back to where she knew what to expect. Where there was nothing expected of her.
The palace in Álainndore was always warm, with sunlight bouncing off marble floors and through the halls. She wouldn’t have to watch anyone die there.
Murphy jumped down from his spot on the bed and climbed into her lap. His dark eyes stared at her with concern, and she felt the urge to cry all over again. She stroked his head, looking around at the chaos of her room.
She needed a distraction. Kordislaen’s actions, Ronan’s declaration, Ó Connor’s betrayal—it was all too much. Everything was. Even the sound of her own breathing seemed deafening. If she let her mind linger on the past week, she would break.
On her desk, she saw her letters from Álainndore, the last thing left to pack.
Her hand curled around the papers, crumpling them. She didn’t need the reminder that the one person from Álainndore who cared if she lived or died was gone.
She had never heard from her parents. Months, and not a single word.
Their silence was haunting. Her absence was that trivial to them.
The pressure in her chest was cold and unfeeling. It pulled her down until she was sinking into a ravine she didn’t know how to escape.
Ó Connor was gone. He was a traitor. Yet, despite logic, when she tried to picture him, she didn’t see the man who cornered her in the woods. She saw him teaching her fidchell. She saw him joining her family for every holiday. For her first ball, he had given her a beautiful gold necklace. Where had she put that? She couldn’t lose it; it might be the last piece of him she had.
It was her fault. She killed him.
There was no rise of emotion at the thought. No pain, just a creeping numbness that dulled the world around her.
Ó Connor wasn’t the only person who had fallen beneath her blade. How many warriors had she killed that night? Her hands were doused in blood; it sank into the fabric of her soul, a stainthat could never be removed. How could she go home, return to her normal life, when ghosts followed her every step?
And then there was Sárait, alone here in a hospital bed. If she didn’t survive, would her ghost join them?
Clía shook herself out of the thought. Sárait would live. She wasn’t alone; Kían and Niamh would make sure she was safe, Clía was sure of it. And maybe it would be better for Sárait after Clía left—if she didn’t have to shoulder the burden of Clía’s neediness.
She was an echo away from shattering. If she wanted to leave the castle before dark, she had to hold herself together.
She fell into the routine of closing her trunks and tidying everything away, until she saw the sword beside her bed.
She couldn’t bring herself to touch it.
The last time she wielded it in battle, she’d felt a rush of power, as if the stone gave her some kind of energy. A glow had seemed to radiate from the stone. From her.
As she stared at it, her mind began replaying the battle with more clarity. She’d fought two men at once, something she had never even attempted before. And it had been... almost easy. She’d anticipated their moves and countered them, moving with the speed of an intuition she knew she didn’t possess.
She’d found that crystal in the Diamhair Mountains.
Whispers of myth danced in her mind. The gifts of the Treibh Anam. She had spoken to Ronan about the very subject months ago. They had wondered about Ríoghain’s Jewel.
What if there was more to why the Diamhair Mountains were a no-man’s-land, forbidden? There was a reason the kingdomswere drawn into the treaty centuries ago. What if the thing that made people fight, kill, and die for that land was a power that would turn the tides of a war?
What if the earliest rulers of their kingdoms forbid any one nation from claiming those mountains to ensure Inismian would have peace?
She tentatively reached for Camhaoir. At her touch, a faint hum seemed to emanate from the blade. A slight tingling radiated down her arm from where her fingers curled around the hilt. It was all so subtle, she wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been paying such close attention.
“Is this real?” she whispered.
A strange sensation overtook Clía, one of a nostalgic peace. It was the feeling of watching sunbeams dance through treetops, and morning mist creeping over the hills. She recognized the otherworldly aura from her travels in the Ghostwood, in the mountains. The energy of Tír Síoraí.
