“My name is Marban.” The man faded into the shadows of the cottage. “And I have been expecting you.”
I glanced again at Irian, eagerness and dread twin pulses in my throat. He lifted one shoulder in an eloquent shrug, as if to say,We came all this way.
I stepped hesitantly into the cottage, Irian ducking under the lintel behind me. Marban fussed over a low-burning fire, stirring the coals and setting a kettle to boil. On the mantelpiece sat stacks and stacks of notebooks, hand bound and stuffed with more notes and scraps of parchment. The sight of them stirred a nauseated sensation ofknowingwithin me.
“What is all this?” I asked softly.
“The pattern,” snarled Marban. “A tapestry woven by hands whose perfect skill seems haphazard—each thread pulled taut to form a picture you only recognize once it’s too late to change!”
I shrank back from his fierceness, and he mastered himself.
“Forgive me.” His tone dropped, though bitterness coiled his voice. “I have had no company in a very, very long time. My manners are rusty.”
Standing sentinel before the door, Irian made a noise somewhere between a growl and a laugh. His frame loomed hilariously large in the small cottage.
“You know who I am.” I gingerly took the spare seat beside the fire. “You know why I’m here.”
Marban stared into the shifting layer of coals for a long minute before speaking. “A new Treasure degrades the delicate balance already upset by the original Treasures. Magic teeters on the brink as the worlds once more prepare to go to war. And you wish to know how to unbind the greatest bindings that have ever been wrought. So the Solasóirí bound to the Treasures may go free without destroying the vessels.”
“That’s… about it.” I blinked. “Gavida implied that you were a scholar of bindings. Do you know how it may be done?”
“Perhaps.” His strange eyes—green and brown glowing gold in the firelight—lifted to mine. “But first I have a tale to spin. Will you listen?”
Did I have a choice?
“Once, in a time of fractured realms and missing magic, a young prince of Fódla swore to his family that he would be the one to return what the Fair Folk had stolen—the magic bound by Gavida in the four Treasures spirited away to Tír na nÓg.” Marban’s voice curled like smoke, collecting in dark corners and pooling in the rafters. “He was fair of face and fleet of foot and huge in his own importance. Using all his wiles, he laid a trap for a Treasure. But it was sprung instead by a Gentry maiden of exquisite beauty. She escaped his confinement and fled back to Tír na nÓg, shutting the Gate behind her. The prince should have given up. But he had fallen impossibly, irrevocably in love with the only woman he could never have. So he broke his oaths, abandoned his duty, and made for himself a cursed home in the place he had set his trap, built brick by brick with stones he quarried by hand.”
The words rang with haunting familiarity as vines of destiny threaded around me like a living snare. I shivered with the creeping knowledge that I had been bound to this path I could neither see nor escape for longer than I understood.
“But you—” I struggled to remember what I’d guessed about the warrior whose fate had, for a year and a half, seemed to parallel mine, even separated by a millennium. “You did not stay in the human realms. You found a way to build yourself a bridge. To connect Dún Darragh with Tír na nÓg. You wrought one of your geasa droma draíochta—your inviolable magical bindings. And you caught yourself a Corra.”
Marban did not seem surprised by my knowledge of the sprite. “One does notcatcha Bright One. But I did perform a binding, in much the same way Gavida did with the Treasures.”
This revelation punched through me with the force of a tree root breaking through solid rock. “Corra is… aBright One?”
Marban looked at me with contempt.
“I thought—” I clawed desperately for everything I knew of the obnoxious, irritating entity haunting Dún Darragh. I had always assumed they were some strange Folk beastie. But what had they actually told me about their origins?We are broken hearts and old sorrows. We are crumbling rocks and empty glasses and forgotten hallways and the tolling of the bell in the highest tower.
My head spun as if I had drunk a tankard of wine on an empty stomach. For a whole year I had lived under the roof of an ineffable being of unimaginable celestial power, and I hadn’t even realized it? It was too much. It all made perfect sense.
“What element?” I asked faintly.
“You do not even know your dúile?” Marban scoffed. “Not only naïve but poorly educated too. My bloodline has degraded far indeed.”
“There is no need to be cruel.” I mustered haughty calm. “Unless you do not wish me to hear the rest of your tale.”
Again, Marban fixed me with that look of resigned bitterness—as though this was not something he wished to do, buthadto do. “You are correct: With Corra’s aid, I built myself a bridge into Tír na nÓg—a path walked once, with no way back. My tribulations were great, but that is another story. I found Fionnuala and spent years wooing her—that, too, is another story. But our great love was doomed—she was a Treasure, and her bell was tolling its death knell.”
By the door, Irian shifted his feet. The Sky-Sword let out a plaintive note. Marban’s eyes flicked toward him, then back to me. His mouth twisted.
“From all I had learned in the human realms, I knew there must be a way to dissolve her bond to the Sky-Sword without corrupting the cycle of magic. The balancing is eternal—”
“But not immutable,” Irian finished, his voice low. “What did you learn?”
“Every binding can be overridden by another binding, if it is more powerful than the one before. And the most powerful magic of all—”
“Is a willing heart,” I finished. “Our hearts were made for breaking; that magic made for mending.”
