Let these bardaí think they still had power. Let them think they had a chance of surviving the aftermath of this war.
When the sun grew low and the feasting and drinking were well underway, I mounted Linn in the Underbrush, sweeping my long train over her haunches. Irian swung onto Abyss behind me, with a long, searching look. I smiled, then urged Linn into the amber sunlight spangling over the plain. She cantered with a coquettish cadence, bannering her dark tail and arching her exquisite neck and flinging her graceful legs out long. An obedient breeze caught my skirts and my hair, swirling them like pennants against the massive trees at my back. Attention collected on me, until every bardaí and attendant and fénnid on the vast plain watched me, rapt.
I rode to the council table. Clucked to Linn, who reared up and launched herself with effortless ease onto the broad, oaken surface. She pranced the length of the table with willful, wanton slowness, her hooves shattering glassware and shoving plates to the ground as the revelers reeled backward with cries of outrage, tripping over benches and colliding with one another in confusion. At the center of the table she gave another pretty rear before planting her hooves, lowering her head, and chattering her shark teeth in warning.
I let my eyes travel over the assembled guests. The Summer Twins—seated at the far end of the table and nearly purple with rage—had been true to their word. They’d invited every bardaí. And every bardaí had come. Some I recognized—Dualtach of the Ivy Gate, whose grandchild Irian had cursed; Almha of the Elder Gate, whose daughter I had slaughtered. Many more I did not recognize.
Soon they would all be at my mercy. Not that I intended to give them any.
“Friends. Enemies. And all who dare stand in the shadows between. Hear me now.” I owed Irian the well-placed breeze thatcarried my voice in all directions. “The hour of our reckoning is nigh. A foe waits beyond the Gates to the human realms—a foe we have faced before and, if we are not definitive in our victory, will surely face again. The name of our foe is Eala, she who they call the Deathless Queen… Grave Mother… or the Rotten Princess.” A murmur rose from the host—some must not have heard these names before. “The time has passed for diplomacy—our only option now is war.”
“Who are you to call us to war?” The voice was strident, grating—its owner hugely muscled and russet-haired. Although he had lost the vulpine cast to his features, I recognized him—just as ugly to me now as on the night of the Nameless Day, when he’d tried to assault me. If he recognized me as I did him, he did not show it. “If I wanted to follow a girl into battle, I’d play swords with my niece.”
Linn sallied beneath me, my fury simmering against her own. But I held her in place, raising my voice to be heard by all.
“I will not tolerate derision, mutiny, defiance, or insubordination. This is not rule by many. There will be one general—me. There will be one battle plan—mine. Anyone who cannot tolerate that should leave now.”
Half the bardaí and their retinues immediately stood and walked away, grumbling in disgust. I smiled and fished Wayland’s Gate Key prototype from my pocket. A circular pendant on a long chain, it glinted in the late afternoon sunlight, swirling with fragments of red, blue, green, and silver. Blood. The blood of all four heirs, combined. The chain bore Cathair’s incantation etched upon its metal. Wayland had described the other geasa he’d forged into the object, but the important thing was this: He believed it would work. It would temporarily open a Gate. Any Gate, from dusk to dawn beneath a full moon.
“To those who stay, I offer this: a Gate Key. The price of your obeisance is low when compared to the reward I offer in return—victory over Eala’s shambling hordesandtrue control over theGates, which you have so long coveted.” Those who had retreated all returned. I held the attention of the bardaí rapt, as I’d known I would. A finger of guilt slid around the contours of my ribs when I remembered Wayland’s warning about the bardaí. But Eala’s voice suddenly echoed through me, cool and conniving.Among the many lessons our mother taught me was this gem: Alliances mean nothing. They are a means to an end.If Eala could bend the bardaí to her purposes, so could I. And if I meted out a little of the punishment they deserved for all the harm they’d done? So be it. “It is a simple exchange. Swear your swords to me, and each of you will go into battle on the Bealtaine moon with a key around your neck. But you must swear now.”
For a long, aching moment, the only sound was the wind sighing over the plain. A clatter of steel—a barda I did not recognize threw her scabbard upon the oaken table. Farther down, another heaved off his mace and slammed it on the polished wood. One by one, the bardaí wordlessly promised me their swords, swearing a loyalty I wholeheartedly mistrusted.
They had butchered the Septs. Destroyed the original Treasures. Planned to execute innocent human maidens for access to the Gates. And betrayed existing alliances with my sister, in favor of me.
I did not trust them as far as Donn’s black gates.
Which was, coincidentally, exactly where I planned to lead them.
Chapter Forty-Six
Fia
Preparations for war began immediately.
More encampments were pitched on the fields of the Summerlands, until the rolling plains looked like a cloth of gold studded with thousands of jewels: garnets and sapphires and peridots. The shouts of fénnidi and the clang of weaponry embroidered the air; smoke tooled the blue sky with charcoal.
I spent long hours with the bardaí, who bickered like ill-mannered children, unable to agree to a dinner menu much less a battle plan. When the drawn-out, maddening councils were finished, I repaired to Wayland’s cramped forge, checking on the designs I’d already commissioned from him and helping him brainstorm new weapons and contraptions that might give us an edge against the living dead. I told him of Cathair’s Eternal Fire, which I had sadly spent the night of my escape from Eala, and saw an answering fire spark in his eyes as his mind began to whir.
“That gives me an idea.” His smile broadened. “Although I doubt it will be green.”
What followed was a series of experiments, largely consistingof the draiglings spitting sparks into bottles of various liquids—culminating in at least one of Wayland’s eyebrows being singed clean off.
Then I sat late into the night, poring over battle plans until I could barely keep my eyes open.
Irian came to me one of these nights. It had been about three weeks since we’d returned from Fódla—less than a week before the full moon.
“Fia.” It was late—the waxing moon hammered the plain of the Summerlands to a silver shield. Everyone was sleeping—well, everyone save we four heirs. Wayland was almost certainly in his workshop; Laoise liked to keep watch over Chandi and Sinéad and her draiglings, who slept curled like puppies in a circular bed in one of the rounded bolls. “May I speak with you?”
I put down my sheaf of paper, scrubbed at my tired eyes. Irian knelt beside where I crouched like a goblin upon the low divan, bringing our faces on a level. I had not seen much of him these past weeks—though he stood behind my chair at council meetings and shadowed me through the tree city, we had exchanged little beyond cursory words. My secret lay between us like a widening chasm, turning every unspoken word into a rift neither of us dared to cross. It pained me to feel so distant from him, but I feared even more the hurt of recognizing my own looming death in his silver eyes—a mirror for the fate I feared I could not escape.
But I had never meant to keep it concealed for so long. It wasn’t fair to me, and it certainly wasn’t fair to him.
“Me first.” I still kept Cathair’s prophecy folded in my bodice—as if by its proximity to the yearning of my beating heart, I might change its message. I drew it out, skin-warmed and creased by folding, and offered it to Irian. “There is something I need to tell you.”
“You must think me a dimwit, mo chroí.” Though Irian gazed at the folded parchment, he made no move to take it. “To imagine I do not have an inkling of what you are planning for the full moon.”
My fingertips cut divots into the ragged vellum. “Look at it, Irian.”
