Wayland
Light rippled over his closed eyelids like sun through shallows as Wayland surfaced toward waking from somewhere dark and deep. He lingered at the edge of sleep, reveling in the heightened senses his Treasure had brought him.
Cool dew exhaling off broad leaves. Sap percolating along rigid limbs. Clear, cold water rushing below a city built entirely from trees.
Wayland opened his eyes. Midmorning light filtered through gauzy green curtains slanting over rounded windows in a room carved from the boll of an enormous tree. Beside him on the bed, Idris still slumbered, his face buried in the pillow and the linens kicked low over his naked abdomen. Wayland gazed at him, eyes gliding over the angle of Idris’s shoulder blades, the curve of his spine, the red hair spilling wantonly across the crisp sheets. He longed to nestle closer beside him in the slow, sultry morning. To kiss him awake, one hand cupping his cheek as the other roamed lower. But Wayland restrained himself.
They had stayed up late last night. And the night before that. He supposed a little rest would do Idris good.
Wayland rolled quietly out of bed, disturbing an aggrieved Hog, who flicked her scaled tail, huffed steam from her nostrils, and glared at him, as if to say,I know exactly why I’ve been banished for hours every evening, and I disapprove. Wayland stroked her gently between the nubs of her horns, yanked on a pair of breeches, and strode out into the sunny common room.
The Summer Twins’ guest suites were a series of round hollows carved into the bolls of colossal pine branches. Large and luxurious, they dripped with beaded curtains over the doors and were plumped with hundreds of jewel-toned pillows. Wayland had actually occupied them before, on a diplomatic errand for Gavida a few years back, and admired them for their spacious accommodations and fine decor. They seemed less spacious since he’d been forced to cohabitate with his lover’s peevish older sister. And a human girl obsessed with polishing daggers. And a half dozen rambunctious draiglings who’d taken to teasing him with spontaneous fires just to see how swiftly he could put them out with his Treasure.
“A fine morning, Prionsa,” Laoise snarked from the window. “Shame you almost missed it.”
Wayland just smiled and put water on for tea.
About a week ago, Laoise, Sinéad, and the draiglings had caught up to Balor and the aughiskies, then entered the Summerlands in tandem. They’d caused quite a stir, from what Wayland gathered. The Summer Twins had tried to deny Laoise sanctuary; Laoise had apparently shifted into her anam cló and threatened to burn the whole city to the ground. Hence the fine rooms. Wayland and Idris had arrived a few days later, travel worn but giddy with the fresh bloom of their nascent relationship.
Laoise had taken one look at the two men, holding hands in the threshold of the guest apartments, and nearly combusted.
“Absolutely not,” she had said shrilly. “I forbid it.”
“Laoise,” Idris had said with a laugh. “I’m a grown man. And I’m free to love who I will.”
“Love?Love?” Laoise had spluttered, as if the presence offeelings made her brother’s dalliance with Wayland worse. “I knew our bloodline was cursed, but this is just ridiculous!”
Laoise had confronted Wayland as he unhooked Fáilsceim from the harness on his back.
“I swear on my scales, Prionsa.” Wayland was reasonably certain she couldn’t breathe fire in her Gentry form, but he hadn’t been keen to test the theory. “If you break Idris’s heart, I will—I will—” She had seemed to struggle to invent consequences to fit the enormity of the crime. “Death will be too easy. I will make your life a living nightmare. I will curse your shoes to be always too tight and your tea always too cold. I will hire a bard to compose ballads about parts of your body you never thought could be derided and sing them in taverns from here to the Barrens. I will make you experience the kind of pain—”
“Laoise,” Wayland had interrupted, swallowing a laugh. “I have no intention of breaking his heart.”
Laoise had calmed, but only barely. She had stuck a finger in his face. “Pain. You hear me? Lots of pain.”
They’d subsided into an uneasy truce as, all around them, the Summerlands prepared for war. Although Eala had fled to the human realms and no one knew when, or even if, she would return, her gambit at the Ember Moon had stirred rivalries old and new between the bardaí. A great host was already encamped beneath the tree city, colorful tents sprawled beneath snapping banners, each a bright wound upon the endless gold of the grasslands. In the city itself, built from the living wood of vast ancient trees climbing atop a hill, many Folk also seemed to be preparing for war. Forges spat sparks as hammers clanged; rations were divided and packed. But many residents seemed like simple, ordinary Folk. Wayland had seen ghillies tending ponds of algae suspended in oversized acorn caps, brùnaidhean picking fruit from small trees growing from the garden bolls of much larger trees, sheeries collecting dewdrops in flasks before the morning sun burned them away.
He liked it here. It reminded him of the Silver Isle—or perhapsit just reminded him of his childhood. Before his mother had left… before Irian had been exiled… before his magic had been imprisoned behind a choking collar. When he had still been whole.
Here, now—as the kettle whistled and Laoise glared daggers at him and dew evaporated from broad green spring leaves—he thought perhaps he might like to become whole again.
A tentative knock rattled the door. Sinéad immediately stood, the knives she had been polishing already in hand.
“Who is it?” Laoise called, as two of her draiglings scampered across the foyer.
The door swung open to reveal…Chandi.
Wayland had met the dark-haired girl but a handful of times, spoken to her directly perhaps once. He knew her only by the ruin she’d left behind—less a person than the ghost of a trust grievously broken.
Sinéad fixed her eyes on Chandi with shattering intensity. Before anyone could react, the willowy blonde’s feet flung her toward the other human girl. Everyone moved at once—Laoise, pivoting to intercept her friend; the draiglings, scampering and caroming as if a game were afoot; Wayland, dropping his mug and moving instinctively in front of the door where Idris slept. But Sinéad dropped her blades to clatter onto the uneven wooden floor, sidestepped Laoise, then flung herself bodily at Chandi. Chandi was too weak to hold them both up—the two girls collapsed backward in a heap before clambering to their knees, neither letting go of the other as they embraced.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” Chandi cried into her swan sister’s shoulder, fisting her hands so tightly in the fabric of the other girl’s tunic that her knuckles whitened.
They both began weeping, great spine-racking sobs, as they clutched at each other. Wayland stared, a little mystified. To his immense vindication, Laoise looked nearly as perplexed. He sidled over to her and said, “I thought for sure she was going to kill her.”
“There will be many difficult conversations to be had.” Laoisegave her head a complicated shake. “More tears to be shed… many smiles to share. But in the end, few of us who lose a sister ever get her back. No matter the circumstances.” She dragged her eyes from the girls, still sobbing and hugging in the foyer, and narrowed them at Wayland. “Now go put a shirt on. And wake Idris while you’re at it. Being in love is no excuse for laziness.”
Wayland had asked for a workshop; the Summer Twins had obliged with a tiny, cramped shed he was reasonably sure had been used for storing gardening tools. And recently. Still, he lit a fire in the tiny stove and cleared the cobwebs from the shelves and set down the sheets of parchment and bits of metal and the artifacts he’d begun collecting. It felt good to have a place of his own, however mean and small. It felt even better to begin forging, something not even his countless hours of research in the Cnoc had convinced him he could do.
