“Do you remember the first Bealtaine after I became a woman?” I asked softly. I’d been fourteen, and it had been the first holy day when I’d be allowed to leap over the bonfire, hand in hand with a man, if I so chose. Rogan had teased me mercilessly, pointing out various young men in the fiann and extolling their dubious virtues. Secretly, of course, I’d wished he’d be the one to choose me. “You sang me an old song and swore up and down it was true.”
“I remember.” He grinned. “The fair maid who, the first of May, goes to the fields at the break of day, and washes in dew from the hawthorn tree, will be irresistible to he who holds her heart.I’m fairly certain I made it up.”
“I know you did.” I couldn’t muster a smile to meet his. “How you howled with laughter when I tried to sneak into the fortress at dawn, utterly drenched in hawthorn dew and reeking of the cow manure I stepped in on my way back from the fields. And in the end, you were able to resist me quite well.”
Rogan’s own smile slipped, regret ghosting over his face. “For a while, at least.”
“But you see,” I continued haltingly. “I have always been at your mercy, in a way that you never were at mine.”
He reached for me. “Fia—”
“Let me finish.” I held up a hand to keep him at bay. If he got tooclose—if I let myself touch him—I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do this. “I loved you from the moment you brushed snow from my shoulders and warmed my hands in your own. And that love only grew with everything you shared with me—everything from your outgrown boots to your spare coins to your precious secrets. But much as I wished it, my love for you could not transform me into any of the things I wanted to be. Rich. Beloved. Royal.Human.I was such a poor fit for you, in every possible way, that any story I told myself that ended with us together necessitated my change.” The old hurts needled at me like nettles, but for once I didn’t repress the pain. I let it boil to the surface in snatches of resentment and regret. “That didn’t stop me, of course—for years I told myself those stories, endlessly. Stories where I was a princess in disguise. A lost heiress. Made lovely enough by Bealtaine dew to attract your attention. But if love demands alteration to exist, is it even love at all?”
Ever since we were children, I’d been able to read Rogan’s moods like a book—from his spirited jags of energy to his petulant sulks to his occasional fits of introspection. I’d mapped the way his eyes changed color to suit his temper—aquamarine for surprise, emerald for desire, azure for fury. I knew every expression, every lift of the mouth and narrowing of the eyes. And I’d seen this look on his face only once before.
It was that cursed day over four years ago. The day he’d mounted his tall black stallion and ridden away with his father’s fianna. The day he’d said goodbye to me.
This time, it was me saying goodbye to him.
“It doesn’t have to be that way, Fia.” He closed the space between us in one long stride. He reached out and twisted a dark curl of my hair around his forefinger. “We can make this work—”
“How?” The word abraded my throat. “By sacrificing our dignity? You making a mockery of your marriage vows, while I hide in the shadows as your whore? Should I keep hiding my magic, too, to make you comfortable? Should I keep pretending to be someone else, in the hopes that you will someday forget that I am no one?”
High on his cheek, a muscle jumped. “What are you saying?”
“You know.” I swallowed my ire, made my voice gentle. “It was only supposed to be one night. It’s time we let go, Rogan.”
He leaned down toward me, lifting my chin. I let him kiss me, one last time. We lingered on each other’s lips as all the secret things he and I had shared this spring—thislifetime—slid against our tongues and clashed between our teeth.
Honeyed echoes ofbefore. Hiding from Cook’s wooden spoon after she learned we’d put frogs in the stew. Hiding from the hunt, by the brook deep in the forest. Hiding from training, beside the pond, as fireflies flickered to life in the dusk. Heated memories ofnow—desire mingling with the creeping feeling that we didn’t fit together as well as we thought. And finally, secret hopes forthen—for an impossible future that had all but vanished.Thentasted the most bitter on my tongue, and I pulled away from Rogan first.
“Fia.” His voice broke on my name, and I nearly broke with it. “I will never be able to let you go. You will always have a piece of my heart.”
And you will always have a piece of mine, I wanted to say. I wanted to scream it, to write it in the sky, carve it in stone. Because the truth was, part of me would love part of him for as long as I lived. He was my oldest friend, my dearest companion, my first love. But I was starting to understand—he wasn’t going to be my last.
“A piece is not enough.” My whole body hummed with regret. “I was made of earth and sky and endless waters. I was made to be loved fully, or not at all.”
Grief grooved his handsome face. “What am I supposed to do without you?”
“You will always have me, Rogan.” I gripped his biceps, firm. “I will always be your friend, your ally. Yours and your lady wife’s, too, once she is freed from Tír na nÓg.”
His face shifted, confusion and then resentment birthing shadows in his eyes. “So this is about Eala.”
“She needs you, Rogan. In the same way I once needed you.”Doubt weighted his gaze. “I mean it, Rogan. She, too, is struggling to get past her difficult beginnings. She needs your strength, your safety, your optimism, in the same way I once did. She needs someone to stand beside her who is steadfast and loyal. Someone who is willing to love her for all that she is, instead of leveraging her for power or status or gold. It may be the thing that saves her. So you have to try.”
“To love her?” His words were flat. “I don’t know if I can.”
“You won’t know,” I said gently, “until you try. And I know you have not tried.”
“Because I still believed in us.” His eyes searched my face. “Brighid help me, I still do.”
“We were only ever a story we told ourselves, Rogan. The worst kind of story—a story without an ending.” I cupped my hands briefly against his face, memorizing the rasp of his stubble against my palm, the planes of his cheekbones beneath my fingertips. “We were never meant for each other.”
Turning away from him was the hardest thing I’d ever done. And yet, somehow, it was easier than I’d expected.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ifound Irian pacing at the edge of the wood. I’d vowed to maintain my composure around him, but with the spring breeze in my hair and warm air on my arms, the sight of him sent tendrils of restless green to quicken my pulse. My outfit didn’t help—Corra’s moth-wing gown whispered silky against my skin, pale as cobwebs and delicate as yearning. I clutched my fists in the cascade of white and green gossamer trailing from my waist, even as I sent tiny green vines laddering my bodice and twisting over my collarbones.
