“You intrigue me, colleen.” His moonlit gaze lingered overmy face. “The practice of leaving Folk changelings in the human realms fell out of fashion a long time ago.”
The thicket in my chest convulsed, digging sharp thorns into my heart. He’d stolen Eala—surely it had also been he who left me in her place? “I suppose it must be easier to steal human children and leave nothing in return.”
I regretted the jibe even as it fell from my lips. I was here to win his favor, not disparage his transgressions. But his expression barely changed. If anything, his lazy half smile slid wider. “You truly have no memory of your origins?”
The brambles inside me tightened. His hot, calloused hands might be gentle on mine. But he wasremorseless.
“No.” Fury wrapped its vines around me. “But you know that, don’t you?”
His smile disappeared. “How could I?”
“Was it not you who abandoned me—a friendless changeling with no memories—in the human realms to die?”
Fresh emotions flickered across Irian’s face in quick succession—interest, anger, yearning. A split second later, his expression smoothed back to calm menace.
“I have done many unforgivable things, colleen. That is not one of them.” Irian’s voice was expressionless. “The bleeding has stopped.”
Our hands were still clasped—his heat had suffused me, soothing my clenched muscles. I glanced down—my fingers looked delicate against his large, sword-calloused palm. Removing the stained rag, he deftly curled a clean length of bandage around my finger. He tucked the ends but didn’t let go of my hand.
“I know why I invited you into my fortress.” His head tilted. “I cannot fathom why you accepted.”
Invitedwas a strong word. But unlike the heat of his skin and the intensity of his eyes, I was prepared for this. I inhaled, Cathair’s oily voice sliding through my mind.The best falsehoods, little witch, never stray far from the truth.
“That night on the beach… you stared at me like I was a ghost. What did you see when you looked at me?”
For a long moment, Irian said nothing.
“A friend once told me our lives are like a great lake.” His voice, when he finally spoke, was dark as purple hellebore. “Each moment in time is a stone tossed in the water. Our memories are the ripples, washing over us until at last they fade. The bigger the moment, the stronger the ripple.”
I was losing patience with this conversation. “Am I supposed to be the lake or the stone in this incredible metaphor?”
“You are a ripple.”
“So I remind you of someone.”
“Very much so.”
“Not Eala?”
He shook his head. “Your resemblance to Eala is striking but merely physical. Your resemblance to my friend is more… ephemeral.”
Treacherous hope slammed against the inside of my chest. Somewhere, sometime, I must have had a real mother. Someone who birthed me, who nursed me, who sang me to sleep. Perhaps this woman he spoke of—
Ididhave a mother, I reminded myself. As real a mother to me as I was a daughter to her. A mother who’d raised a changeling girl whom others encouraged her to execute. Who’d given me love, strength, purpose.
Irian might not have been the one to swap me for Eala, butsomeonehad. Either my birth mother had allowed me to be abandoned in the human realms… or she had discarded me herself.
Everyone knew the only thing waiting for a changeling in the human realms was death.
But all I needed was an opening—something to keep Irian talking, interacting with me. After what happened on the beach, I wasn’t convinced that I was nothing more than a ripple in his memory. I remembered flying water, screaming trees, lofting pebbles.
It’s you.
“There’s more you’re not telling me.” I tilted my head, a mirror to him. “You recognized me. ‘It’s you,’ you said. Tell me what you thought you saw.”
“You may make demands of me, colleen, but I owe you no answers. Despite the familiarity of your appearance, you are no friend to me. You are a stranger. And strangers only ever enter my realm for one of two reasons. The first is to try and kill me. The second—” I didn’t even see him draw his sword. The blade simply appeared in his hand, hammered black and sharp as sin. He held it out in front of him, the light from the fire dancing along its edge. “The second is to try and takethisfrom me. So why have you come? Death? Or magic?”
I stared down at the blade, grasping for a new strategy even as dread hammered on my bones. I’d asked Eala whether the bardaí had ever tried to kill him. I hadn’t thought to ask what happened to those who tried. “Would you believe me if I told you I wanted neither?”
