“Does she mean handsome prince Rogan?” Corra’s tone was airy. “Gone.”
“Where?”
Corra’s fox began cleaning a tufted paw.
A thread of worry snagged me, but I tucked it away. Tonight was to be Rogan’s wedding night—he was probably in Finn Coradh at the Muddy Ram, drinking away his cold feet. He’d be back before dusk. “I have one more project I need to do. Would you like to be useful one last time?”
Corra helped me scour the ruins of the dún. At first, I despaired of finding anything, but then they began to appear—in shattered niches and broken crooks, behind listing statuettes and beneath broken furniture. The black feathers winked like shards of night, beckoning me with a wicked luster.
Irian’s words echoed in my mind:All you must do is swear yourself to my Sept—to the Sept of Feathers.
If tonight was also to be my wedding night—if I was truly prepared to tithe my love for magic—then I might as well look the part.
I sat before the roaring hearth. I sewed quickly, the needle darting in and out and in again, threading feathers like the resolve I’dstrung on a broken hope. Both were desperate; both were sloppy. But I didn’t know what else to do.
“Corra,” I said as I sewed. “You either cannot or will not tell me who or what you are. I know that. But will you confirm, if I guess correctly?”
“When seeking answers, keep this in mind.” Above the hearth, the arching boughs of a vast tree bobbed with a stout, gnarled figure hanging upside down from its branches. “Things lost to time are not always meant to find.”
It was as much permission as I was going to get.
“Once—in a time of disparate realms and estranged lovers—there was a warrior.” My hands were clumsy and the feathers were sharp. The vicious vanes cut lacerations along my fingertips and shredded my nails. My blood stained the dark feathers even darker. “He fell in love with a Gentry maiden. Perhaps she returned his love; perhaps she did not. Either way, she returned to her home without him. The inconsolable warrior tried to follow, but the Gates to Tír na nÓg were closed to him. He broke his oaths and abandoned his duties, spending his days building a fortress to his grief and spending his nights writing endless treatises about magic.” I paused. This next part was nothing more than conjecture, but I needed an ending to the story, even if it was only one of my own invention. “In his desperation, he wrought forbidden magic. A geas—a binding—unlike anything a human had attempted before. He captured a being, a god—a thing above and beyond both mortals and Folk. A thing of damp earth and endless skies, wild fire and frothing water. And he bound it to the stones, to the garden, to the very earth itself. And with its magic he built himself a bridge between realms, a door between worlds. A door that has never fully closed.”
“The magic of nature—you reap what you sow.” The goblin shriveled and lengthened, dropping from the boughs of the tree in the guise of a sinuous serpent. “Things given, things taken—always more than you can know.”
“Then it was consensual—an agreement of some kind?” Myhands stilled in my lap. “Corra, whatareyou?”
“We are broken hearts and old sorrows.” The serpent, now giant, wound around itself in concentric circles around me, until I did not know where its mouth began and its tail ended. “We are open doors and untold stories and the tolling of the bell in the highest tower. We are whatever we need to be.”
I supposed that was the answer I deserved for the question I’d asked. I shook my head and kept sewing.
I sewed all day, until a great swath of darkness swept down from my shoulders. I donned one of Corra’s ephemeral gowns—sheer black save for delicate silver embroidery that looked like constellations in the night sky. I braided inky feathers into my dark hair, weaving them in a complicated corona around my head until I, too, looked wreathed in shadow.
In the end, I was transformed into the next tánaiste of the Sept of Feathers.
I searched the dún one last time for any sign of Rogan. He still wasn’t here. But surely he knew Eala’s geas needed to be broken before the zenith of the Ember Moon—he must already be waiting at the Gate.
Finally, I glanced up at the ceiling.
“Thank you for all you gave us, Corra.” Despite their mischief and muddlement, I was actually going to miss the fickle beastie. “I hope I was able to give this place something in return.”
“Something given, something gotten,” Corra sang, unconcerned. “Nothing taken, nothing taught-en. Whatever you need, just ask—and we promise it will be brought-en.”
I smiled. If that wasn’t an appropriate goodbye from Corra, I didn’t know what was. “And a fond farewell to you, too, fiend.”
I stepped out into Samhain Eve. The goose autumn had flown, and stars of frost spangled the grass, bloody where sunset’s red-gold stain touched them.
Sunset.
I was late. Irian’s transformation would be upon him, and if I wasn’t there—
Dread chilled me as I rushed toward Roslea. The gray woods reached for me in the dim, bare branches grasping the hem of my dress and tearing the feathers from my hair. Rooks hopped from branch to branch above my head, curiously silent in the blue blur of dusk. The sheen of their black wings mirrored the burnish on my wretched, resolute heart.
I reached the graveyard of monsters. In the dusk, scales rippled along sinuous limbs, and the groans of sleeping giants rumbled through the earth. Their contorted arms reached for me; their gaping black mouths howled. Beyond, the stream flashed a warning, the last rays of day flaming through the bare branches and striking the stones of the bridge.
I rushed through the Gate. And nearly slammed into a tall frame.
It wasn’t Irian. It wasn’t even Rogan. It was Chandi.
