He slid away through the dusk, dark as a specter and sharp as a blade. I followed him with my eyes until the trees beyond the fort swallowed them.
I reached for Finan’s dragging reins and briskly untacked him, tossing his fine saddle and bridle into the tall grass edging the path. The horse bobbed his head and flicked his tail, as if in thanks. I slapped his rump, not ungently.
“Go on, old boy. This is no place for you now.” He shook out his mane, then ambled away into the falling dark.
The distant, grotesque sounds of a thousand feet marching upon the country road shoved me toward the forbidding stones of Dún Darragh. I raced across the courtyard, my changeling feet heavy on the cobbles after my anam cló’s light, slender hooves. The heavy carven doors fell open before me. I let a little of my starshine slip as I dashed through the great hall, illuminating the four arching pillars, the curving staircase, the carvings etched in stone.
“Corra!” I shouted, as I took the steps to the second level two at a time. “I know you’re here!”
There was a time when I knew these hallways better than the lines on my palm. Now I struggled to recall the exact route to the hidden archive I’d found over a year ago. There—past the annex with the windows shaped like eyes, through the hall draped in dusty tapestries, behind the crumbling mantelpiece carved with rosettes. I didn’t bother with candles or torches as I slammed up the tight staircase—my starshine cast enough light to see by.
Beyond, the library was as I’d left it: a narrow worktable stacked with handwritten journals; statues veiled with dust; shelves choked with volumes. I labored beneath the weight of countless hoursdeciphering ancient murky texts as I grabbed a tome at random and began riffling through it.
“Corra!” I shouted again. “I need you!”
“Need orwant? Do be clear,” sing-songed a voice from one of the veiled statues. “Either way, we’re already here.”
“Thank the gods,” I breathed, slamming another stack of journals on the table and hurriedly paging through them. “It’s your help I need. I know better than to expect straight answers from you… but can you tell me whether the man who wrote these was truly named Marban?”
“Marban, you ask?” A few knots in the table shaped faintly like a mouth and two eyes winked to life, making me jump. “Well, that depends. On where we should begin… and how the story ends.”
How the story ends.Morrigan, in the day’s mad dash I had nearly forgotten about the paper Cathair had shoved at me in his final moments. Perhaps part of me hadwantedto forget. But now it niggled at me, like a rotten tooth in a painful gum. I fished the crumpled parchment from my bodice, recoiling instinctively from the feeling of it—like papery skin strung with human hair. I smoothed it onto the table before me, pinning its edges with my hands.
The page depicted a white swan sailing upon an expanse of black water beneath an even blacker sky, ringed with a thousand branching trees. Stars fell from the sky, pricking out the swan’s black shadow on the mirror of the lough. Heavily illuminated words caressed the edges of the page. I skimmed them, unable at first to decipher their meaning. Then Corra began to sing, and I knew their meaning.
A feather so black will rise from pain,
A crown so silver will rise to reign.
A heart so green must bleed once more,
For light and dark to one restore.
The last love lost, the price now paid—
Through sacrifice, the balance laid.
So white and black, the swans must die,
For stars to weave their fate on high.
I read through it once. Then again, even as panic choked me with brambles and the thorns in my chest grew into a thicket that scratched at my ribs with foreboding.
“No.” I fought the urge to crumple the paper and shove it back into my bodice. As if that might reverse the death sentence it preordained. A hot tear slid down my nose and splashed onto the page, cutting ripples into the midnight lake. “No.This cannot be true.”
“Some tales ring true, and some deceive.” I swore I detected a note of regret in Corra’s voice. “But all endings are real, chiardhubh. Both to those who must die… and those who must grieve.”
“No!” I scrubbed at my burning eyes with my filthy black sleeves. Had I not already sacrificed myself? Once, to the Heart of the Forest. Twice, to Talah. Why must the gods-damned patterns demand my death yet again? “I’ll find another way. I will not let this happen.”
“The path is laid, the stars decree… And still we walk, both bound and free.”
“Are you telling me there is no way to escape this fate?” Now I did crumple the parchment, folding it unevenly and shoving it back in my bodice to rest uneasy between the small vial of Eternal Fire and Cathair’s starstone. “Am I truly bound to a destiny I never asked for?”
“The stars may weave, the gods may smite,” Corra sang, dancing on half-seen carvings somewhere near the ceiling. “But cunning hands may twist the light. Through deepest dreaming, Marban broke free. But were his bonds gone… or just harder to see?”
“Marban. Yes—Marban.” I scraped away the last of my traitor tears and returned to my purpose for coming here. According to Wayland, Marban was a master of bindings—and unbindings.Perhaps he could tell me how to break free from this awful fate. “Please—I think he’s important. Tell me how to find him.”
Across the archive, a journal sidled off its ledge and flopped open on the floor. I flung myself toward it, my knees scuffing painfully over the rough flagstones. The open page was curlicued with my ancient warrior’s familiar looping script; it took all my concentration to read it.
