I pushed away from them, quelling the insistent glow emanating from my skin. I calmed my breathing, then commanded, “Get all the bardaí here by tomorrow. If you wish to live to see Lughnasa.”
I turned on my heel and paced from the throne room. Irian, his smile sharp as a knife, fell in behind me.
We’d barely walked twenty steps before I heard the flutter of wings. I turned and watched eleven doves take wing into the shining morning.
I smiled, but the expression felt grim on my own face.
We were going to war. All of us—Folk and humans. Tír na nÓg and Fódla.
And me and Eala in the middle, surrounded by the restless dead.
The golden-haired Gentry guard grudgingly led us to where our friends were ensconced. I had not been joking about my surprise in finding the Twins still sitting upon their thrones. Between Laoise’s and Wayland’s new powers and strong personalities, I’d half expected them to have already carved up Tír na nÓg between them like argumentative siblings forced to share toys.
Instead, they’d been forced to yet again uneasily cohabitate. I counted at least four of the seven young draigs, piled in corners and sprawled along low couches. Wayland and Laoise were, unsurprisingly, squabbling.
“… when I said you could work here, I didnotmean you could work everywhere!” Laoise was shouting. “If I wanted to wake with ashes on my feet, I would have danced barefoot in the cookfire!”
“They are not ashes,” Wayland yelled back. “They are—”
Both stopped talking when the musical tinkle of the beaded curtain heralded our arrival, their heads swiveling toward the door. Idris looked up from where he was reading on the couch; beside him, Sinéad paused polishing her daggers, which she had apparently not used on Chandi, who stood by a window, gazing out over the plains.
“Oh.” Laoise looked much the same as before, with her tumbled red curls and sparking ember eyes. Her new tattoos were subtler than either mine or Irian’s—dark red scales blending and rippling along the contours of her skin. “There you are.”
“Not the reaction I was expecting,” I said in an undertone, slightly offended.
“Chandi said you and Irian ran off on some new adventure without us,” Wayland said, sounding insulted. The markings of his Treasure were flashier—cerulean waves inked in recursive whorls over the rippling contours of his bared biceps. “We wondered if you’d ever return.”
“Yet here we are,” I said acidly. “Where’s Balor? Linn?”
“In the lower city—they call it the Underbrush. Balor and the aughiskies seem to be settling in well.” Laoise scanned me from head to toe, quirked an eyebrow, and said, “What do you need? A bath? A meal? A stiff drink?”
“Can I get all three?” I passed a tired hand over my face—until the Bealtaine moon, I doubted I would find another time for any of them. “First, I need to speak with Wayland.”
Laoise gave her fingers an irritated flick, as if to say,You know where to find him. Wayland glanced at me. Like Irian, his transformation had changed the color of his eyes—no longer the deep cobalt of oceans at midnight, but the mercurial turquoise of a shallow bay at dawn. The change startled me—somehow more harmonious with his features than the deep blue, it lent him a gravity I had not learned to expect from the playboy prionsa.
“Not a raven? Not a rider?” His easy smile assured me he had not changed so much after all. “Have we been so easily forgotten?”
“I think about you all the time—usually when I’m dodging trouble and wondering who to blame.” I grinned back, then sobered. “Wayland, I need you.”
He slapped his hand over his heart and threw back his head. “My four favorite words. But I fear I’m otherwise attached at the moment.”
“Not like that and you know it.” I rolled my eyes at Idris, who gave me a tepid smile. “Do you have a forge here in the Summerlands?”
“Yes, he does!” Laoise called from the foyer. “He just prefers to track his junk all over my kitchen!”
“I’ll show you.” Wayland made a rude gesture at Laoise’s back, grumbling something that sounded likeShe doesn’t even cook. “This way.”
I shot Irian a rueful smile before following Wayland out the door and up a staircase winding around a slanted bough. A rope bridge wobbled onto another, larger bough. At the crook of two branches, a little hovel was built with a curved roof of emerald moss and a circular door with cracked paint. Even I had to duck to get inside. Beyond was a tiny workshop with a hundred tools and artifacts scattered over uneven tables and falling from listing shelves. A sputtering woodstove barely chased away the damp.
“You’ll understand why I prefer to work in Laoise’s kitchen.” Wayland leaned back against one of the tables, folding his heavy muscled arms over his chest and kicking out his legs. He picked up a conch shell and held it out to me. “Here, listen. Something I’ve been working on.”
I held the shell to my ear and was surprised to hear a voice—Wayland’s voice. He sounded like he was reciting poetry. Abruptly he stopped, laughed. The sound faded.
“What is it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I thought people might like to hear the voices of their loved ones even when they’re far away. I’ve been enchanting vessels to carry voices.”
“Lovely.” It was. “But I need you to do something else for me. And I need it done by tomorrow.”
