The heat wave was over.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Coll—Hazel
Late Summer
Dún Darragh echoed with unspoken thoughts and muddled feelings, and I was restless and bored and weary. Yet again, I’d drunk too much and eaten too little, and now the torchlit carvings on the walls writhed at the corners of my vision.
I snatched the half-empty bottle from the table, barely stumbling as I slipped out into the warm blue night. A waxing moon draped lengths of sheer silk across the world. I staggered into the trees.
I knew where I was going, although I wasn’t surewhyI was going. There was nothing for me there. Nothing for me anywhere.
But I was trying not to think about that.
The uncanny stones of the bridge by the willow glowed as if sun-touched, casting eerie shadows on the trees. Movement flashed on the other side of the stream—lofting antlers, muscular limbs, a face like a forest path. But then I saw it was someone else.
Hestood on the arch of the bridge. He was like moonlight pooling between the trees, or rippled starlight on black water. He was—
Abruptly, I wondered when I’d stopped hating the inhuman smoothness of his marked skin. Hating the way he stood so still, like he encompassed a universe beyond himself. Hating the way he looked at me like heknewme.
“It’s you,” I murmured. “The one whose sword sings my name.”
“What name?”
But I couldn’t remember. “What is yours?”
“I was made of storm-rattled cliffs and star-hollow sky and the shadows beneath the moon. My name is—”
But the word he spoke was torn out of his mouth by the wind.
“What is your name?” he asked again, more intently.
“I was made of rot and moss and endless things,” I told him. “But I don’t know who I am.”
Displeasure made his face grotesque. His limbs warped and twisted, the black feathers along his arms lengthening. He rushed toward me, even as he grew into something monstrous and malformed. My feet were too slow. He caught me, sweeping me up in great black wings.
“How can I have your heart?” His scream shattered the sky. “If you do not even know your own name?”
I bolted upright in bed, my pulse hammering in my chest. The nightmare clung to me like tatters of shadow. I jerked out of my clammy bedsheets and flung myself toward the open window. Cool night air dried the sweat on my neck, and I leaned my forehead against the stones of the casement.
The night was clear; the moon, a sliver shy of full. For three weeks I’d grappled with all the things I knew—or thought I knew. And now the full moon was two nights away, and I was running out of time.
We were all running out of time.
I had to make a decision. I had todosomething. Even if it was the wrong thing.
I could continue to follow my heart—my wild, wicked heart. My heart, which was steeped in so much Folk magic I could no longer trust it. My heart, which told me to abandon Fódla—my family, my training, my loyalties—and put all my faith in the darkest parts of myself. The quiet, mossy corners that whispered secrets of home; the throbbing, root-tangled depths that sang acclamations of love.
Or I could follow my common sense. My calm, calculating warrior’s mind, sharpened by years of training and whetted on poison and vengeance. My shrewd practicality, honed by a mother who raised me despite my Folk origins. My stubborn strength, ground into me by a man who saw my potential despite my small size and innate softness. My sound judgment, which told me my sister had no reason to deceive me.
Irian had every reason to deceive me. To seduce me—inebriating me on his treacherous beauty and sating me on carefully prepared stories. To steal the very thing I had fought so hard to make my own.
After the Treasures of the Folk, a heart is the most powerful magic in Tír na nÓg.
I clenched a fist prickling with tiny stinging spines. I remembered Irian’s story at the Folk wedding—the origin of the wedding vows. A Gentry princess with greedy demands. And a foolish, lovelorn warrior, bleeding to death in the dirt because he thought he had to prove his love for it to mean something. And I remembered the first story Irian had ever told me—the story of Deirdre, the maybe mother I never knew, and the dastardly king who seduced her for her power. What had Irian’s words been, when I complained about the ruinous ending?
Love is rarely anything but a prelude to tragedy, colleen.
