I dismounted, pressing my face against Eimar’s neck. Her manewas already braided through with fast-growing ropes of flowering vines. Her familiar scent of hay and warm, dark stables had disappeared beneath the smells of turned earth and rotting wood. I unbuckled her bridle, the leather crumbling to brown ash between my fingers. She stamped a leaf-draped hoof. I stroked her soft muzzle, one last time, my eyes burning.
“Go on, then.” I slapped her rump. She trotted away, the dusk swallowing her velvet ghost. “Goodbye, swift one. I’m so sorry.”
I would never see her again. Time and again, I forgot that my love only destroyed. Time and again, I was cruelly reminded. I bit down fury and self-loathing and turned to face Rogan. His eyes were shadowed, high upon his stallion.
“I’ll walk the rest of the way.” I summoned false nonchalance. Finan was strong enough to carry both of us, but Rogan wouldn’t want me near his prized horse after what I’d done to Eimar. He wouldn’t want me nearhim. “It’ll be hard to rescue the princess if I accidentally turn you into a shrub.”
For a split second, his wary expression lingered. Then: “Don’t be stupid.” He leaned down, offered his hand. “I do all my best work as a shrub.”
Oh, how I loved him for it.
I exhaled and reached up. Rogan’s hand gripped mine, warm in the brisk twilight. I swung up behind him and slid my hips flush against his backside. I curled my arms around his hard torso and pretended I didn’t notice when his muscles jumped at my touch. Rogan urged a snorting Finan forward. I buried my hands in his mantle and laid my cheek against his shoulder. I wanted to believe I was made for this. To hold—to be held.
But I knew I wasn’t.
Our stories had all begun the same way—with a queen and her enemies, with war and magic, with stolen girls and vengeance. But this moment—a prince on a fine steed, riding into strange lands to deliver a damsel—was where Rogan and Eala’s story diverged. They would get their tale of rescue, redemption, and true love.
I would never be part of their story. And whatever might happen in mine, I feared it would have a darker end.
Dún Darragh loomed into view, feverish with sunset. Half the fort was crumbled to nothing, roofless arcades gaping at the sky. Other wings were barely begun, a miscarriage of pale quarried stone and empty windows. Rogan’s ghost stories had unsettled me. I shuddered against the sense of unseen eyes surveying me from the shadows.
The last of the sunlight slipped away as we dismounted in the courtyard. The air smelled of a world on the edge of winter: fallow fields and rotting flowers, woodsmoke and wooden hearts.
“Finan needs water and grain,” Rogan told me. “I’ll see if there’s a stall for him. Fancy finding a way into the fort and scouting a place for us to sleep?”
Dún Darragh’s heavy doors were carved from dark oak and studded with twisting skeins of metal. They swung open at my touch, hinges groaning. I squinted into the murk, musty smells of old stone and dust tickling my nostrils.
“Hello?” The irrational sensation of being watched lingered. “If anyone’s in here, you should know I’m extremely well armed. And, um, really,reallybig.”
Fragments of my own voice echoed back at me. But no one else answered. I grabbed for a cobwebbed torch in a crumbling sconce. A spark from my flint caught on the dry wood, and the firebrand flared to life.
The torch smeared gold against the edges of things: a spiraling staircase, a doorway, an arching ceiling. Another sconce holding another torch. The stone leached cold through the soles of my boots as I touched flame to the second taper. Shadows ebbed, lapping at the base of the staircase. I climbed, searching for more torches.
Finally, the vast hall sighed with light. Four pillars broad asancient oaks reached toward a ceiling carved with intricate shapes. No—everythingwas carven, from the pocked stone walls to the contoured stairs. The engravings gyrated in the dancing torchlight, reminding me of nothing so much as Cathair’s illustrated bestiary. Fawns with the heads of wolves; birds with too many beaks. Growling, howling, leering faces with beards of hawthorn leaves and acorns for eyes.
I grimaced, suddenly more inclined to believe Rogan’s far-fetched tale of the human fénnid driven mad with love for a Gentry maiden. This place had too much of the Folk about it for my tastes.
A cough came from over my shoulder, shattering the silence. I shrieked and swung the torch, jabbing it toward the sound. It was a carved face—mournful eyes looked out over a long, drooping nose. Broad hazel leaves choked the figure’s gaping mouth, spilling over its cheeks and chin.
The muffled cough came again. I jerked back a step, then gritted my teeth and leaned closer.Surelythe goblin was only a carving. I reached out and touched the tip of my finger to its nose.
Green flashed—sunset through summer trees—and the shadows striping the wall lengthened and deepened. I stood in a forest at night, full of grasping branches and rough black trunks knobbed with faces. A breeze brushed my hair from my nape.
I blinked, and dim torchlight kissed my cheeks once more.
The dour face spluttered as it worked its thick stone lips, spitting foliage until its wide mouth gaped empty. Then it cleared its throat. Andspoke.
“Hello, chiardhubh!” it said. “You’re late.”
I stared. The archaic word—chiardhubh—thudded in the back of my mind with strange familiarity.Sable-haired.
“Or early.” The froth of hazel leaves surrounding its face rustled and shook. “We tend to stray as time slips away—centuries, years, and minutes at play. No one to talk to. Well… no one who’ll stay.”
The realization of what thisthingmust be cut through thebabble and brought me back to my senses. I swiftly made the sign against evil, invoking the goddess Brighid’s protection.
“Restless ghost,” I hissed. “Begone from this place!”
“Ghost?” screeched the head, sounding amused.
