Fear threaded down my spine. I longed for my knives.
Irian didn’t move. Even here among the elegance and grace of the assembled Gentry, he was tall and devastatingly handsome. He wielded his height and beauty like a weapon. His jaw was sharp as a blade, his shoulders thrown back as if he were marching into battle. Slowly, he held out an arm to me. I gently placed the tips of my fingers upon it. Even through the dark leather of his vambraces, his skin radiated heat.
He stepped forward, and I followed.
Guests fell away before us like sheaves of wheat. Although most of the attention was reserved for Irian—revering and reviling in equal measures—many glances were directed at me. I tried not to wither beneath their regard, lifting my chin like I belonged here.
No one knew I was not of the Folk. How would they know? I didn’t even know.
Finally, the gauntlet came to an end. The music resumed with a jaunty reel that sounded like hummingbirds and honey days. Folkreturned to their conversation and their drinking and their dancing. Beside me, Irian dropped his arm. His shoulders relaxed.
“You weren’t lying when you said you weren’t invited.” I tried for levity and failed.
“No.” He slid a glance over his shoulder. Despite his claims about the rules of hospitality, his vigilance bordered on violence. “But I should have been.”
I shot a nervous glance toward the wedding bower. “You’re not planning to claim their firstborn child or place a geas on their descendants, are you?”
For the first time since we’d arrived, Irian looked directly at me. He wore no mask, and his face was frozen into hard, meticulous lines. He looked as deadly as the first night I’d seen him, and I suddenly questioned the wisdom of my decision to come to a Folk wedding on the arm of a dangerous Gentry tánaiste who was a pariah among his own people. Fear laid cold fingers on my neck.
But then Irian’s sensuous mouth curled into a sharp smile.
“Maybe. But only if the wine is unforgivably bad.”
The revel whirled around the colossal old tree festooned in lights and flowers. Irian led me toward it. Its boughs—thick as the trunks of smaller trees—arched low over our heads, nearly brushing the ground beneath the weight of millennia. I gazed in awe toward its canopy, but its branches laddered too high for me to see. I placed my palm against its mighty trunk. Beside me, at the same time, Irian mirrored my gesture. Impossibly, the tree begansinging. Music welled up inside me, as wide and deep and endless as the eons between stars.
Irian lifted his hand and I reluctantly did the same, dragging myself back to reality. For a moment, my handprint lingered green upon its brindled bark.
“We call it the Heartwood.” Irian’s voice was close to my ear. “Legends say this tree has stood here since the dawn of time andwill stand here at its dusk. All magic is said to pass through its roots and branches. The Flaming Shield was carved from its wood. It is holy to us.”
I believed it.
“Many of our ceremonies are performed beneath it. Naming days. Coronations. Weddings. Tithes.”
“Here?” My attention sharpened. “Why?”
“Because of the principle you mentioned last month—i gcothromaíocht.” Irian’s eyes narrowed to glittering crescents. “My education had barely begun when the bardaí slaughtered my Sept and drove me from my fosterage at Emain Ablach. But this, I remember. It is the principle of balance that governs all magic. It means for whatever power is taken, something must be given.”
It was the same thing Chandi had told me at the Feis of the Nameless Day.
“Yet it is more complex than that,” Irian continued. “You translated the phrase to meanin counterpoise. That is part of it—the cost of magic is usually equal and opposite. Light demands darkness. Heat demands cold.”
“What is the other part?”
“The balancing is eternal, but it is not immutable.” His gaze slid over my face. “Neither the magic nor its cost is ever fixed. That is why the swans transform back to maidens by night. Why the Treasures must be renewed beneath the Heartwood every twelve years—the original tithe paid again and again. And it is why the price of using the wild magic is so high. Why it warps all it touches.”
“Because endless growth without dormancy isn’t natural,” I guessed. Nature did not thrive in constancy. Everything had its cycle—that truth was engraved on my bones.
Irian nodded. “Gavida forged the Treasures the way he did for a reason. Freed from the natural cycle of regeneration—of rebirth—the power they once contained now violates the most basic principles of magic.”
“Wild magic is like summer without winter. Day without night.”An involuntary shiver cascaded down my spine, and I thought sharply of Pinecone crumbling to dust. Of Eimar devoured by the hungry forest. “Life without death.”
“Indeed.” The flash of his smile did not quite hide bleakness. “But come. Let us leave such grim talk for later. This is a wedding, after all. And the vows will soon begin.”
Irian took my hand. Curving upward against the side of the tree was a carven set of narrow steps inlaid with mica and opals. Together, we climbed.
Above, the broad boughs were wide enough to walk on. Hollows carved from the tree’s natural bolls boasted pillows of moss and cushions of dandelions. Around us, Folk began settling in the tree or on the grassy sward facing the wedding bower. Irian lifted me down into one of the hollows, behind a garland of milky flowers. The only way to sit comfortably was to lounge, and it brought me uncomfortably close to Irian’s long, well-muscled body. I leaned over the lip of the hollow, trying to ignore the press of his shoulder against my shoulder, the way his hand came to rest against the slope of my back, igniting fire along my spine.
Before the heat climbed to my face and gave me away, music swelled from below and the ceremony began. The bride was gowned in green and crowned in white flowers that shone like diamonds in her scarlet hair. The bridegroom wore russet and gold, autumn-warm against his brown skin. They made a stunning couple as they came together beneath the bower.
