We dived into the seething crowd. Faces flickered toward us, strange in the gloom: blood-red eyes and wine-curdled mouths and swelling hate. I tightened my grip on Irian’s scalding palm and ran faster, plunging through the night. Black feathers and flowering vines ripped from my hair and gown.
We were trapped in a nightmare. Pounding footsteps echoed close behind us. I tasted rancid breath against my neck. Heard frenzied voices screaming for my life. They would be upon us in moments; they would—
We passed beneath the trees, and the dark forest swallowed us whole. The careful human voice living in my head flung fears to reverberate against my skull. Mortal fears: the forest at midnight, dark with secrets and hungry with the unknown. The shadowed pathway, the twisted tree. The tang of rot, decay… death. But beneath that anxiety my heart began to pulse tranquilly, soothed by the soft promise of growing things. The serene sweep of wind through leaves. The unexplored wilds beyond the calm clearing.
I was coming home.
Instinct carried us deeper. Grass pushed between my bare toes, and petals brushed against my dirt-stained fingers. Twilight hushed between branches; silver antlers chimed against bark.
The Heartwood reached up and up, piercing the vaulted sky before curving down and down to thrust into the earth. Branches—roots—curved around us like ribs around a heart. A breeze sighed, ruffling my hair and scattering the last of my inky feathers across the green growing bower. The moon shone down. High—too high.
We were running out of time.
Irian crushed me against him, his tattooed arms like barely caged lightning against my skin. He brushed a bruising kiss over my lips.
“It is time, colleen.”
One of his huge, rough hands gripped mine. With the other, he reached up, tearing a flowering vine from my tangled hair. He wrapped it brusquely around our joined hands, whispering frantic, familiar words.
“Blood of my blood, and bone of my bone, I shall not permit thee to wander alone.”
Hesitation and heartache prickled through me, a thicket of grief and yearning. I looked up at Irian—at his silver eyes fastened to my face; at his lush mouth, twisted with duty and despair. Then down at our hands, about to be bound forever. For no more than a few heartless moments.
I inhaled, then repeated the words. Above us, the Heartwood began to sing—an elegy for love found. Love lost.
Next, Irian tore the tie from his mantle, black as night. This, too, he wrapped around our joined hands, as he spoke the next verse of the vow.
“Give me your heart and let it be known: that then, now, and after, you are my home.”
It was too late to change course. I repeated the words, although they clawed disconsolately at my throat. The moment I spoke them, magic rippled between us. For a moment, I swore our palms fusedtogether—our skin one skin, our blood one blood. I gasped, and he kissed the sound from my mouth, one last time.
Then he shook off the ties binding us together. He pressed the singeing hilt of his singing sword into my boneless hand. He dropped to his knees before me.
“I need you to be ruthless, colleen.” His gaze was parched, pleading. “I need you to do for me what I cannot do for myself.”
I stood motionless. There had already been so much violence tonight. My mind swam with images. Rogan’s blank, terrible eyes. The expressions on the swan maidens’ faces when they’d stepped up to their princess. Blood staining the ground. Their hearts throbbing in Eala’s grip. My own fingers convulsed in horrified commiseration, and when I opened the green-veined hand that wasn’t holding the sword—that hadn’t handfasted with Irian—I saw it still held Rogan’s cracked river-stone brooch. Somehow, after I tore it from his cloak, I’d never let go of it.
It throbbed against my palm.
“I told you once, colleen—I would not mind oblivion if you were the one to deliver it.” Irian’s voice stole my attention. He reached out, grabbed the black blade. Lines of silver scathed his palm as he slid the sword against his own neck. “You promised.”
But I hadn’t. Amid all this death and destruction and betrayal, I had never promised to kill the man I was beginning to love. I understood his reasons for asking me—I understood them down to my bones.
But I’d never promised.
Above us, the Ember Moon slid higher.
“Our story wasn’t supposed to end this way.” My words were nearly inaudible.
“Because this was never a story.” His voice was hoarse. “I was always going to die tonight, colleen. Let it be by your hand. Let it be so magic survives. Let it be so Eala does not triumph.”
I stood transfixed by dark skies and dismay.
“Please.” I couldn’t stand to hear him beg. “It must be you, Fia. You are my heir. You are tánaiste of the Sept of Feathers.”
“No.” The word crept out of me, half-wondering. “No. I don’t think I am.”
With those words, the wrongness I’d been fighting against for months laddered waving green fronds through me. It spoke to me of shaded golden paths and flaming forests and cool stones and pliant plants. It reminded me of what I’d always known.
