I watched the dozen elegant swans ruffling pale feathers over crystal blue water. They stared at me with depthless black eyes before diving for pondweed. I wondered if they knew me. I wondered which of them was Chandi. Which of them was Eala.
I closed my eyes and listened to the trees whispering secrets. They told me of broken magic and rotting earth. They told me of coming winter. They told me of doorways between the realms of the Gates—copses of bloody trees and porticoes of fallen cities and corridors of ravines where the wind eddied crystalline leaves. Theywere the secret ways Chandi used when she led me through Tír na nÓg.
I began to learn them. I wended my way like a ghost, conspiring with the forest to keep me hidden. I saw ghillies bathing in crystal ponds, cooling their pale, striated skin and damping their mossy hair. I glimpsed colonies of sheeries spinning webs of sunlight designed to catch daydreams. I spied on clusters of incandescent Gentry, but their sunlit promenades looked like battle marches; the cacophony of their fluted voices sounded like a carnyx of war.
I climbed the hills above Murias and stared into the warped cloud of wild magic until my eyes ached. I imagined what it would feel like to be the only force standing against it, and what a toll that must take. I imagined what it would be like to take that tainted power inside myself. I imagined what it must be like to transform, day after day, into something that disturbed me.
When I hiked to the fort, tiny black flowers began to sprout beneath my boots. I paused, then ground them under my heel.
Tír na nÓg by darkness was fragile, intense, heartbreaking. It was the most wondrous dream and the most tragic nightmare I’d ever experienced.
That was when I was with Irian.
Dusk wafted silent across the windowsill, that first night. He rushed in like a nightmare, wrenching shadows from light. Inky feathers scattered across the flagstones. I dived for him as he reached for me. Claws like thorns pierced my palms, even as black feathers receded along his forearms. I locked eyes with him, watching his pain disappear into the murky oubliettes of his geas.
He rested his forehead against mine, sliding his hands around my waist in the way of things held too tightly—as though he feared I might slip through his fingers if he wasn’t careful. Heat flared through me, painting my bones in shades of dahlia and rose.
“I hoped—” Irian’s whisper cracked. “I hoped you would still be here, colleen.”
Colleen.Something about the tender way he said that nickname—that stupid, annoying, perfect nickname—splintered my composure. I breathed in the sharp scent of him and swayed closer. Close enough for our bodies to mold to each other, the hard planes of his torso unyielding through my clothes.
“Why would I want to be anywhere else?”
His lips brushed mine as if he were waking up from a bad dream. My blood quickened at his touch, and I reached up, twining my fingers in the hair curling damp at the nape of his neck. He pulled me closer, tracing the notches of my spine with his fingertips and sending pleasure stitching golden along the fabric of my skin. I fell into his arms.
Maybe if I wished it hard enough, we could have this forever.
“The transformation,” I said later, as we lay together, limbs tangled. “Your anam cló. Has it always been that way?”
“When I first discovered my wings, it was the most incredible feeling.” He raked sweat-slick hair away from his face. “I used to throw myself off the white cliffs of Emain Ablach at the instant I began the transformation, just to see how far and fast I could fall before the wind caught me up and carried me off.” He paused. “Then I tampered with the wild magic. It climbed inside me, warped my mastery of my anam cló. It stole my control. Once, I transformed at will. Now I am myself only by night. By day… I am something else.”
He was silent for a long time, lost in the memories.
“Emain Ablach?” I asked gently. “You’ve mentioned it before.”
“It was where I was fostered, colleen.” He tensed, his eyes returning to my face. “But it is a story for another night.”
I nodded, curling myself against him. We both knew that was a story I might never get to hear.
I soon learned that while all his transformations were bad, some were worse than others.
When he fell into my arms the next evening, his skin was feverish to the touch, yet he quaked and shivered as if he were frozen. His hair was soaked with sweat and jagged with midnight feathers fluttering desolately to the floor. Blood streaked his throat and caked his chin, crusting in the stubble shadowing his jaw. But worst of all were his eyes: no longer the silver of moonlight nor the gold blue of day, but hollow as a dug grave.
“Irian.” My hands fluttered around his shoulders. “Tell me what to do.”
“Colleen.” The word on his cracked lips was an unpolished gemstone: rough but precious nonetheless. He captured my hands in his and kissed them, leaving streaks of blood and sweat along my fingers. “Talk to me, colleen.”
I stared into his pain-harrowed eyes, feeling helpless. “About what?”
“Anything,” he ground out.
I hesitated. “Once—in a time of sunlight and songbirds—there was a girl. A girl who spent all her days longing for night.”
He collapsed against me, curling arms around my waist and laying his head in my lap. “Why would she do such a thing?”
I stroked his damp midnight hair. He shuddered at my touch.
“Because night feels like forever,” I whispered. “Even when the crickets rasp their fiddles in the grass, and the wind howls over the moor, sending autumn leaves whispering to each other, there is a stillness at the heart of the night that goes on forever. And when she lets herself drift toward that infinity, she becomes very small. So small that she is everything. Everything and nothing all at once. Like a star that has died and been reborn so many times it has forgotten its own name.”
