“You are quite lovely.” Gently, she stroked my dark hair behind my ears and, taking hold of my cheeks, tilted my face toward the brazier’s dancing light. “And the resemblance is indeed startling. Although not a perfect copy by any means.”
She was right—this close, it was possible to see where our features diverged. Her blond eyebrows winged higher than mine—aquestion mark to my constant scowl. Her nose turned up fetchingly; her dimpled chin was softer than my stubborn jaw. I had no mirror to compare us, but I’d seen my own face enough times to know we looked our parts. Even gowned and jeweled, surrounded by frosted fancies and starlight, it must be obvious—she was a princess. And I was—
“My sister.” The words surprised me. But the full-bodied embrace she gave me a moment later shocked me. Her slender arms curved around my neck, and her cheek pressed soft against mine. In that moment, no sensation could have been more foreign to me. It was pure comfort—worlds different from Mother’s rare, brusque hugs or Rogan’s heavy male touches. It wassisterly, and the moment she pulled back, I missed her closeness.
“You do know,” I choked out around unfamiliar emotion clogging my throat. “You do know we’re not really sisters?”
“We are.” She swatted my words away like flies. “Raised by the same mother, if not at the same time. We are bound in love.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that, but I liked the sound of it. And it occurred to me—with sudden, blinding clarity—that contrary to Mother’s words, I might be worthy of more love than she had ever offered me. Mother had taken years to warm to me, to accept the sharp thorns and dark leaves tangling in my veins. Eala had loved me instantly.
“I would ask a favor of you, Sister.” Her voice dropped, intimate. “In return, you may ask something of me.”
“I’m happy to help you however I can.” Her phrasing struck me as odd yet familiar—although I couldn’t place where I’d heard it. “No reciprocity necessary.”
“Oh!” She squeezed my hands. “And I will not be in your debt?”
“No.” I frowned, unable to suss out why she was making such a point of this. I stared at her more closely. In the glow of the brazier, Eala’s eyes were lambent, her pale hair gilded. When she smiled, I swore her teeth looked just slightly too sharp.
The sudden thought shook me: She looked like one ofthem. Butthe unnerving realization was followed just as swiftly by a surge of heartrending sympathy. Why shouldn’t she look like them? Behave like them? Speak like them? She had been stolen from her home as a child, cursed to live in the realm of her enemy for twelve long years. I knew better than most—survival was a volatile, capricious beast. So what if she seemed more Folk than human? Surely she had learned their ways in order to walk more easily among them, learned to mask her true self in order to be whatever they needed her to be.
Just as I had.
“Very well.” She clasped my hands. “I hear you have made the acquaintance of our warden. What do you know of him?”
“Besides the fact that he keeps trying to kill me?” I shrugged. “Nothing.”
Gently, Eala nudged me around the side of the brazier and pointed across the feis.
At the other edge of the clearing, on a raised and canopied dais bedecked in mistletoe and greenery, sat a handful of finely gowned Gentry. Their uncanny beauty set my teeth on edge, but I forced myself to study them. They did not look much alike, as the lords and ladies of Fódla looked alike. Mingling atop the dais, splashed with firelight and moonglow and snow shine, the Gentry were a study in wild contrasts. Skylit eyes matched with sunfire hair; cat-white skin with a flicking tail to match; night-dark complexions and diamond teeth; close-cropped raven hair above eyes like stars.
My gaze stuttered.
The Gentry guard wore the colors of a forest in winter: black bark and green moss and pearly frost. A burnished onyx torc gleamed around his neck. Shadows like black wings swathed his figure, twisting dark around him even as torchlight flared.
The twilight edge of confusion fell away before the cold dawn of realization.
As he sat atop the dais, surrounded by Folk Gentry and bedecked in finery, it was suddenly so obvious that I felt an utter fool. TheGentry guard was noguard. He was the mysterious tánaiste who’d kidnapped and cursed Eala and the swan maidens. He was the heir to the Treasure Mother coveted. He was my enemy, mymark.
And Eala had brought me straight to him. He was sittingright there, drinking ruby liquid out of a delicate goblet shaped like a night-blooming flower.
I swept backward until the brazier hid me from the dais. Everything fell away—the otherworldly revelry and the exquisite gown and the sweet-sharp liquor still warming my throat. I felt as naked and exposed as if I wore moonbeams and naïveté. My hand flexed at my hip, but Chandi had disappeared my skeans along with my fighting leathers.
I should not have come here unarmed and unarmored.Idiot.
“Who is he?” I hissed. “And why have you brought me to him?”
“He is our oppressor.” Eala’s voice was soft as the snow sighing down around us. “And I beg your help in breaking the geas binding us to him.”
Only the real fear glittering in her pale blue eyes convinced me. I relaxed slightly, although every one of my instincts screamed at me to turn my back on this place and never return.
Eala drew me once more around the brazier. One among the host had begun singing—a winding, wounding melody that threatened to latch on to my bones and steal my heart. I blocked it out, focusing on the princess’s cool hand resting on my arm.
That, andnotlooking at the lord lounging like a coiled predator atop the dais. He sat slightly apart from the other Gentry, and his keen gaze methodically swept the feis.
“Twenty years ago, a human king begged Tír na nÓg for aid,” Eala began softly. “It had been years since any diplomacy between mortals and Folk had been attempted, and the four great Septs were curious. They allowed the king to enter their realm.”
I knew this story. This king was Rían Ó Mainnín. Mother’s husband. Eala’s father.
