“Those were the words of a younger and more foolish man.” Marban jerked, as if in pain. “Upon the night of Fionnuala’s tithing, I offered my willing heart in exchange for her life.”
“You offered your life for hers?” I interrupted, aghast but impressed. It was what I had done, in the last moments before Irian’s tithing beneath the Heartwood.
“Do you think awilling heartis the bleeding red thing you pull from your chest? How rudimentary.” Marban looked disgusted. “You, of all people, ought to know that magic is not so literal. No, child of my brother’s children—I did not cut an organ from my body and offer it to Fionnuala while I lay dying upon the ground, as the stories like to tell. In offering my willing heart, I sacrificed that which I loved most in the world.Her.”
A cold vine twined my spine, caressing each vertebra with a deliberate, chilling thorn. “What do you mean?”
“Fionnuala’s life could be saved, in return for an oblation.” Marban put his head in his hands, as if, even after a thousand years, this pained him to discuss. “The Solasóirí are governed by laws we are not—and never will be—privy to. Laws of balance in nature. Laws of time and the cosmos. Laws of darkness and light. Laws of beginning and ending.” His voice held accusation, although I knew it was not for me. “Notions of human morality—or even Folk morality—are wholly inconsequential to them. All that matters is counterpoise. And in the infinite balancing of the cosmos, love weighs larger than life. It is a force that outlasts the fleeting span of years and burns with a brilliance few things can match. It etches itself upon the stars’ patterns with vivid thread, enduring where life inevitably falters. It shapes the world long after the hearts that kindled it have stilled. Love is the most powerful force in the universe.”
A strange kind of satisfaction flared to life inside me, even as Eala’s mocking words from Emain Ablach echoed in my mind:Is that still your grand message? Love conquers all?
“But that is because love is a sacrifice larger than life,” Marban continued, his voice shaking with an emptiness I could not comprehend. “And demands far more than death.”
“Tell me,” I made myself say, although I was not sure I wanted to know.
“I believed my sacrifice would be romantic love, ripped directly from my heart. It was a price I was willing to pay, in return for Fionnuala’s near-immortal life. But in the end, I did not choose the price. The magic did. And it was far higher than either of us anticipated.” He held up a hand. “Fionnuala!”
A dove fluttered from the rafters, a glowing vision in the dim. Her pale gleaming feathers were as lustrous as fresh-fallen snow. She came to rest on Marban’s fist, graceful wings poised. Her dark, knowing gaze carried the weight of centuries. Marban lifted the bird to his face, and she nudged a sleek head against his grizzled cheek.
Nausea churned in my gut. “No.”
“As she tithed away her Treasure, my willing heart bought her life,” Marban confirmed. “Just not one in her Gentry form. Our love was not annihilated, but made perfect—at least, according to the rules of balance. Eternal and unrequited. I am doomed to love her forever, in whatever form. And she me, although I have only her cooings to confirm it.”
Horror pressed me deeper into my chair. I felt Irian’s eyes scald my face, but I refused to look at him. Refused to acknowledge the radiance lurking below my skin, the way our love had been resigned to an arm’s cruel, infinite length. The way my own destined sacrifice coiled inside me like roots beneath frozen earth—pressing, twisting, aching.
“But you are human,” I said woodenly. “How have you lived a thousand years?”
“I do not know.” He gestured forcefully toward his walls. “Do you think I have wished to live so long? Under such circumstances? I can only hope that once I have bestowed what knowledge I can, I will be released from this awful half life. And may be reunited with my love in the afterlife, if one exists.”
Sorrow burbled inside me. “You believe that my arrival heralds your death?”
“Yes,” he spat, “and I am glad for it.”
We all sat in silence as the fire crackled and the birds rustled in the rafters. Then I straightened in my seat and said, “Then tell me all you know, great-uncle. And we will leave you to die in peace.”
Again, Marban looked at Irian with venom. “Leave, heir of feathers.”
Irian went hard all over, his thumb ghosting over the hilt of the Sky-Sword. I pleaded with my eyes—I would not speak of my fate in front of him. Finally, he slowly stepped from the cottage into the night beyond, shutting the door behind him.
Marban cleared his throat, leaned close, and began to speak.
It was nearly dawn when I emerged from Marban’s cottage, dazed and nearly delirious with all he had told me. The sky was leaden, the smudged gray of ash. Irian stood a dozen paces from the cottage, facing the woods in silent vigil.
What did he think about when he lost himself to his duty? Or was it easier not to think at all, when confronted by the endless darkness before the rising dawn?
“Irian.” I longed to wrap my arms around the sharp cut of his waist, to slide my hands up the front of his jerkin and clasp myself to his hard torso, to lose myself to the heat of his skin. Instead, I wrapped my arms around my own ribs, trying to hold myself together in the aftermath of my terrible, enlightening council with Marban. “It’s time to go.”
The gray half-light turned Irian’s face to a mask of hard lines and stark angles, a specter of sorrow foreseen. Irian was no fool—he may not have heard everything Marban had to say to me, but he had sensed the edges of the truth, the weight of my secret heavy as a storm on the horizon. “Where would you have us go?”
The light along the tops of the trees was cool, glancing. A slight breeze ruffled the feathers molting eternally off the top of Marban’s cottage and turned the smoke rising from the chimney to a ghost. I set my jaw and said:
“To war.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Fia
Though I had heard both Irian and Chandi speak of it, I had never been to the Summerlands, one of the Folk enclaves situated near a Gate and ruled over by a barda. Or, in this case,bardaí—the Summer Twins, Siobhán and Seaghán, claimed joint sovereignty over Geata Tinne and its lands.
