But when I gasped, fisting my hands in the sheets and sending tiny pink blossoms netting across his mattress, Rogan’s face shifted.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he muttered at me in the dark.
I moved my hands. The blossoms crumbled into dusty smears of brown pollen.
And just like that, with a handful of words, Rogan reminded mewho I was.WhatI was. Too other—too Folk—for his liking. For his love. For his forever.
The night of the full moon—without discussion or fanfare—we changed into our fighting leathers and dingy tunics. And as we traipsed in silence to the Willow Gate, I knew, as I’d known from the start, that the story we’d been telling ourselves was coming to an end. And in real life, stories didn’t end in grand climaxes or tragic denouements. They simply faded—dim beneath the dust of duty, dark in the afterglow of burned-out lust.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Tír na nÓg was wild with blooming.
Knots of candy-colored petals burst open as we passed. Hook-leaved ferns waved in shades of blue. Flowering vines prickled with thorns white as teeth. Golden-edged fronds with spots like liquid eyes watched us walk by. I shivered with the delicious promise of unfolding, unfurling, unbinding. I surreptitiously ran my fingers through the garlands of colors and smiled when my fingers came away stained with the shades of spring. Heady chrysanthemum, bold magenta, ambitious blue.
Rogan—who was celebrating the first properly warm evening of spring by wearing a close-fitting sleeveless mantle that hugged his powerful torso and showed off every one of his sculpted arm muscles—peeled off near the lough to follow the elegant gaggle of flower-clad maidens sweeping toward their monthly revel. After spending nearly every moment—waking and sleeping—in his company for the past two weeks, I felt his departure keenly. I tried to name the emotions whirling inside me. But they were restless as the spring breeze tangling in my hair—jealousy giving way to relief, coiling toward guilt.
I forced myself to turn toward the fortress. Although I’d barely looked at the archives these past weeks, I wanted to ask Irian his insights on that phrase I’d come across—i gcothromaíocht.Counterpoise.But as I moved between the trees, I found nothing of the tall Gentry heir.
Instead, I found Eala.
She waited, framed by the branches of a frothing dogwood. The glow of the moon outlined her slender frame in silver. Shining flowers glittered in her hair, but she was not yet gowned. When she saw me, she stepped toward me, smiling that broad, gentle smile. Her sister’s smile. The one that spoke of shared secrets and hidden laughter.
I smiled back, although more tentatively. The last time I had seen her, Eala had been angry with me for returning the Sky-Sword to Irian. At the time, I’d thought I didn’t deserve her pique. But in the months since, I had shared secrets with her captor and begun to sympathize with his plight. I had also shared a bed—and many not-beds—with the man who would one day be her husband. Contrition and shame chilled me despite the warmth of the air. I steeled myself for whatever censure she might decide to lay on my head.
“Sister.” She took my hands. “I missed you last month.”
“I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure which of my many sins I was apologizing for. “I didn’t think you’d want to see me. I assumed you were angry with me.”
“Not angry, no.” Her voice was breezy. “Surprised, perhaps. But only that you were quick to trust a stranger over me. I suppose I expected you to be more… dutiful to the bonds of kinship.”
She said it pleasantly, but I wasn’t entirely sure she meant it as a compliment. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I speak of our mother, of course.” Confusion must have registered on my face, because Eala’s own expression gentled. She held out a slender white palm to me. “Come, Sister—shall we walk together? I have been longing for a moment alone with you.”
I nodded and she linked her arm through mine, leading me through the effervescent forest.
“Do you know how old I was when Mother first betrothed me for personal gain?” Eala leaned close, her voice confidential—intimate. “I hadn’t even been born yet. She sold her unborn daughter—not even knowing she’d be a girl—to a man. And not just one. Publicly, she gave me to a small princeling whose still-grieving father wanted to wage war against the world, but not the Folk. My future maidenhead bought his fianna—the first armies to die beyond the Gates.”
Disgust rose up in me, instinctive. But such were the ways of royalty. “You are a princess. These things are common.”
“That does not make them good.” Eala’s tone remained conversational. “Privately, Mother gave me away again. Not to one under-king. Toallof them. To their sons if they had them. To them if they didn’t. Before I had even been named, I had been sold several times over.”
Mother could be mercenary—she was a war queen infamous for her ruthlessness. But Eala’s accusations bordered on the barbaric.
“Mother mourned you deeply when you were taken,” I said carefully. “And always spoke of you with great affection. I know she loves you.”
“Even loving parents make tools of their children.” Eala laughed, rueful. “Shovels to bury their pasts. Chisels to chip away at their ambitions. And weapons sharp enough to carve out revenge.”
A tendril of alarm tangled up my spine. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I see she has made a weapon of you, as she did me. Although I wonder whether I haven’t been more rigorously forged.”
The space behind my eyelids burst green and black with rushing blood. I thought of the words Rogan told me Mother had said over four years ago.
She said you were made of poison nettle and forged steel—not something to be loved, but something to be wielded. A weapon, not a girl.
Much as I’d tried to explain them away, those cruel words hadwormed themselves deep into my mind, infecting me with bitterness. But I wasn’t sure I was ready to admit that out loud.
