Chapter Five
Laoise
Laoise of the Sept of Scales was born a princess, became a pariah, matured into a warrior, and attained motherhood by neither merit nor fault.
The first draig egg—Blodwen’s egg—had belonged to Laoise’s own mother. Ceridwen had not been born in Tír na nÓg—she had been raised beyond the Barrens, in the place her people, the Ellyllon, called Annwyn. The egg-shaped ruby had been part of Ceridwen’s dowry when she married into the Sept of Scales—an heirloom of her family since the age of legends. If anyone had known it was more than a priceless jewel, they had not told Laoise. But after the tragedy of her thirteenth birthday, no one in her family had bothered to tell Laoise much of anything. Except, in the end, that they were exiling her to Dún Scaith, Lady Scáthach’s Fortress of Shadows, where she would not be able to harm anyone else they—or she—cared about. Her banishment felt like a curse. It became a blessing.
Laoise wished she could say her mother had given her the jewel as a parting gift or a token of her love or a pledge of her forgiveness. But she had not.
Laoise found the ruby in the smoldering ruins of her family’s apartments in Findias. She had returned too late to save her parents from the Gentry dissidents who would soon name themselvesbardaí. Blighted wild magic billowed and surged over the black parapets the Sept of Scales had, until very recently, lorded over. Laoise’s father sprawled naked in bed, his slashed throat spilling copper blood over ivory bedsheets. Ceridwen had put up more of a fight. Long charcoal scratches smoked from where her fingernails had rent the drapes; starburst scorch marks blazed from the walls; the blackened husks of her would-be assassins slumped against doorjambs. Ceridwen’s own leaf-shaped dagger—damasked with sinuous forms in red and gold—sprouted from her throat. Her powerful, beautiful form lay splayed in the center of the room, surrounded by splashes of red hair and redder blood.
With a burst of horrified realization, Laoise knew the placement was no accident.
She lunged for her mother’s body, weeping as she rolled the limp, heavy frame from where it had fallen. She did not weep in sorrow, for she had grieved her mother long ago. She wept with desperate hope.
The concealed latch clicked. The blood-soaked flagstones parted like a serpent’s hinged jaw. Laoise remembered hiding in the secret compartment as a child, giggling quietly with Elen as their father growled in mock frustration. Now it held her last hope.
Her little brother, Idris, whom she had not seen in seven years, blinked at her from the crevasse. Tears streaked his small face; red light puckered along the old scar. By some miracle their mother’s dying gambit had been successful. The bardaí had not bothered to look harder than they wanted to. They had not noticed the secret trapdoor hidden beneath her body. They had not known what it concealed.
Idris was traumatized and dehydrated. But he was otherwise gloriously, wonderfully, impossibly alive.
Hours later—after Laoise had bundled Idris out of the cityand flown like hell toward the Barrens—she’d noticed the ruby he clutched to his chest. A ruby the size of her fist. Their mother’s ruby. And for the first time in Laoise’s memory… it wasglowing.
Neither of them had thought much of it for a long time. The business of grief, reconciliation, and healing was slow and all-consuming. Cnoc Féigleann—meaning roughlysentinel mountain—had not yet earned its name; it was nothing more than a cave system Laoise had discovered a year or two before when she had nowhere else to go. It seemed as good a place as any to hide from the bardaí, to gather the slivers of all they had lost.
In fact, Laoise came to despise the sight of the ruby. Not because the faintly glowing jewel was the only thing left of their parents, their home, or their legacy. But because it was the only thing her brother would touch, look at, or speak to. When nightmares of bloodshed or conflagration roused Idris, making him scream in the night, the ruby was what he reached for. When Laoise became so frustrated by his distance and silence that she shouted at him, Idris curled bodily around the stone as if he cared more about protecting it than himself. When a hard, dark winter rimed frost through the multicolored caverns and snuffed their meager fires, the ruby was where Idris sought warmth.
Then, in the middle of a chilly spring night, the ruby began to crack.
When a panicked Idris thrust the ruby at Laoise and she saw it was fissured through with expanding veins of jet black and vermilion, a premonition of momentousness thrummed over her skin.
At dawn, when a daffodil sun sprouted above endless jeweled ridges, the ruby gave a resounding crack. It splintered like an eggshell, yielding to an insistent pressure from within. A tiny claw crept from the jagged stone, followed by another. The draigling struggled from the confines of its embryonic prison, until—with a final, triumphant burst—it emerged. Radiantly red and shockingly iridescent, the tiny creature unfurled its delicate patagia in a luxuriant stretch. Its eyes glowed like the sunrise. With a tentativewriggle of its sinuous neck, it coughed a shower of sparks. Then let loose an ear-shattering scream of horrific intensity, startling both Laoise and Idris into clapping their hands over their ears.
Idris scuttled away and buried himself beneath his furs and his self-pity, his interest transformed to fear. On some level, Laoise understood the reaction. Six months ago, her brother had lost his family—everything and everyone he had ever known—in one scarring act of violence. Now he had lost the last thing he had left of his heritage through a wholly unexpected transformation. The ruby had been his. Whatever had hatched from it… wasn’t.
Idris had incubated the egg. Laoise would have to figure out how to raise the draig.
Any awe Laoise experienced upon inheriting a mythic creature from the legends of her ancestors swiftly evaporated. From the moment the draigling hatched, it wouldn’t stop shrieking. Barely the length of Laoise’s palm and far narrower, the winged serpent made such a racket that Laoise swore it would bring the caverns down around them. Day or night, gleeful or perturbed—the little thing, adorable and astonishing as it was,never shut up. Whatever concern Laoise harbored for her truculent brother disappeared on the fourth day, after she’d clocked a cumulative three hours of sleep over two consecutive nights. Her focus narrowed, razor sharp, on keeping the draig alive.
She was not going to let a hatchling born of legend die.
She scoured her memories for the stories her mother had told her growing up. A few had featured Y Ddraig Goch—the Red Dragan. There had been a castle and warring kings and a deadly battle. But the stories had never said where the draig had hatched… how it had been raised… what it hadeaten.
What did a tiny, noisy, impossible draigling fuckingeat? Laoise tried to feed it their food—small scraps of the dwindling stores she’d brought with her last autumn from Dún Scaith. But it only mouthed at the dried fruit with utter disdain… licked briefly at the salted meat before caterwauling anew. She held it; it cried. She putit down; it wailed harder. She shifted into her anam cló, but the tiny beast tried to crawl inside her massive smoking mouth, and she wasafraid. Afraid she would hurt it—afraid the scalding cauldron of her grief and restlessness and hunger would swallow both of them whole. She warmed it upon her chest until they both fell asleep, and awoke in panic to find she’d rolled over in her sleep, nearly crushing the little creature beneath the weight of her body.
By the end of the first week, Laoise was at her wits’ end. The draigling had neither grown nor shrunk, only screamed harder. In a fit of irrational desperation, she bared her nipple to its mouth. It stared curiously, licked scorchingly at the mauve areola. Then bit with growing irritation into the smooth, tender flesh of her breast. Its teeth were needle sharp. Laoise cried out, barely suppressing the instinct to bat the dragan away as it began to lap ravenously at the blood pooling like rubies along the swell of her breast. Distaste rose in her. But as the metal tang of her own blood struck her nostrils, so too did an inexplicable intuition.
The stone of the draigling’s egg, which had looked like nothing so much as a ruby. The metallic sheen of its tiny, delicate scales. The way it licked the sweat from her throat, slurped the blood from her breast. The way it had hatchedhere, in the Barrens, of all places.
This creature was nothing like her—not warm flesh or tender skin. Why should it require the same sustenance? She did not think it drank only blood—that seemed an unsustainable arrangement for a creature destined to grow to a massive size. She thought it must have more to do with what wasinher blood.
Laoise strapped her armor on for the first time in months, slid her dozen knives into their cunning sheaths. Nestled the cooing draigling—satiated, on her blood, for the first time since its hatching—on her shoulder. Explained to Idris where she was going, only to have him turn his face to the wall.
She lit a torch, then descended into the caverns. Deep—deeper than she had yet dared go. Multicolored minerals striped the uneven walls. Stalactites dripped endlessly. The infinite weight ofthe mountain bore down. Laoise wasn’t sure what she was searching for. But when her torchlight began to gyrate over massive glowing crystals jutting from the walls and ceilings, she guessed. When the draigling shrieked with joy, propelled itself off her shoulder, and began to gnaw and suckle at the nearest geode, she knew.
This was where they belonged.Allof them—their strange little family.
Whether they liked it or not.
