Once upon a time, Rogan had talked about drawing the same way I’d talked about gardens. When his hands hadn’t been busy with swordplay, they’d been stained with paint or blackened with charcoal. But that had been a long time ago.
“Some say their bodies are twisted and deformed, tortured into strange shapes by the dark magic they flirt with. Others say they are beautiful enough to drive a person mad.” He finished his drawing with a flourish of his stick. A monster stared up at me with venomous eyes. “Perhaps this Gentry heir will command his cursed flock of swan maidens to peck out your eyes and dance on your bones.”
I snorted to hide the chill caressing my spine.
“Or perhaps they’re just stories told by mothers to frighten children. Or by drunkards to stave off the chill of the night.” Rogan erased the crude drawing with a swipe of his palm. “And he’ll be no different than you. Or I.”
Perhaps. But I’d learned that no stories were everjuststories. Stories had their lies but also their truths. Stories were how we taught ourselves to fear the things we secretly desired.
Dark forests. Beautiful monsters. Broken hearts.
“And Eala?” I conjured the specter of my adoptive sister between us. “What will she be like?”
“They say you looked exactly like her when you first came to Rath na Mara, except for your coloring.” Rogan brushed dirt off his palms. “If you two have grown up alike, then I imagine she will be beautiful.”
I looked at him, startled. In the dimming light his eyes were less like the ocean at dawn and more like the forest at dusk. His arm brushed mine, and I imagined the heat of his skin even through our cloaks. I couldn’t stand his closeness yet couldn’t bear to be farther away from him. Brusquely, I stood and gestured toward the veins of silver netting the trees.
“The moon’s rising,” I said. “It’s time.”
We climbed the stone bridge in silence.
Voice uneven, I sang out the incantation Cathair had given me before we left Rath na Mara. Although it was written in the ancient tongue, the moment I said it aloud, its words etched along my bones and its rhythms rooted behind my teeth. The stones below our feet began to glow, taking up my melody and carrying it onward, like a forgotten lullaby. At first, it sounded sweet, but when I listened more closely, it rang discordant.
It told me if I climbed out of my skin and followed it into the keening twilight, it would carry me home.
“Changeling.” Rogan gripped my hand. “Fia.Don’t get distracted.”
I shook my head to clear the dream-haze of music. Swiftly—before I lost myself to the terrible magic again—I drew out my skean and pricked my finger. Mother had said only a few drops of blood would be demanded of me, but I suddenly knew how many would be required. I counted silently, drawing my hand back when thirteen green-black droplets had stained the earth.
Moonlight blazed above the trees, limning the path in silver and sparking cold flames among the trees. Rogan lifted an arm to shade his eyes. He flew far away, caught somewhere between time and place, and I went with him.
I saw geese flinging themselves in a wide V against the wind. Heard blue water laughing nearby, and the singing of bells. Smelled woodsmoke. Autumn’s chill swept my hair, tinged with the metallic gnaw of dying leaves, and there was a tree, iron-boughed and crowned with fire…
I fell through the sensations until darkness swallowed me up, then birthed me again.
I stumbled, jerking my head up and gasping. Beside me, Rogan put his hands on his knees and doubled over, as if he might vomit. The forest was bright and dim; the moon had sailed high, painting the earth with bands of silver.
But it was not the same forest. The trees seemed to grow down instead of up. The willow was in the wrong place beside the bridge. Everything was backward, like we’d stepped through a great mirror and were looking at our world from the other side.
Tír na nÓg.
“You did it.” Disbelief and awe jumbled on Rogan’s face. “We’re here.”
Sudden hesitation stayed my limbs. Part of me had always doubted we would truly be able to cross over. And yet here we were. Which meant we actually had todothe tasks we were set. Find the princess, break her geas, bring her home. Find the Gentry tánaiste, steal his Treasure, save Fódla.
Relinquish the tiny shred of hope that I might be the one to end up with Rogan.
“Let’s find the dún above the lough,” I said softly to Rogan. “Let’s find your princess.”
White-faced, he nodded. I raised the hood of my cloak and stepped deeper into the woods.
Time and space ran strange in Tír na nÓg. As Rogan and I set off in the direction we hoped would lead us to the lough and the shadowy dún and the swans, the trees shifted and warped in the corner of my eye. Yet when I turned to look directly at them, they were nothing more than bark and brittle leaves. We trudged through the forest for what felt like hours, yet when we at last saw the ripple of moonlight on water, it seemed mere moments since we’d left the Gate.
As we crouched down at the edge of the wood beside the lough, I gritted my teeth. Nothing in this land was real. Already the spells of this wicked place twined between my bones and behind my eyes. I wanted to go home.
A voice soft as moss whispered in my ear,What if thisisyour home?
We’d arrived at a place that looked like Dún Darragh, if Dún Darragh had been crafted from dark dreams and sharp wishes. The sky was black but pricked through with too-bright stars. The moon burnished the unruffled lough into a mirror. A field of glittering white flowers sloped up to a great fort—although calling it afortfelt wrong. It was both more monolithic and less substantial than anything built by human hands. Its bricks were shadow; its windows, tempered starlight. Towers wrought from melancholy loomed above crenellation-fanged walls. To look at it was to lookinsideit, to see staircases twisting like broken spines and ceilings dripping with diamonds.
