We pressed forward.
The next hours were a nightmare. Dead bodies and licking flames—stabbing swords and slashing spears and savage screaming. Linn was mad havoc—her shark teeth and eager hooves more vicious and effective than any weapons forged by human or Folk. The aughisky, Balor, and I made a strange but effective trio—barreling and biting and slashing out with skeans and thorns alike. The world narrowed to us, and our simple objective.
Ever forward.
Dimly, I noticed the vanguard of the Folk keeping pace with us, even as their numbers dwindled. I saw at least one barda fall, dragged from his mount by the ravening horde. I swore I saw a flash of russet hair and a pointed, vulpine face. I smiled grimly when he did not rise again. But the others stayed determinedly alive.
Fine. I needed them for a while longer.
We burst from Roslea into what had once been my grotto. The greenhouse had been utterly destroyed—the glass shattered, the metal twisted beyond recognition, the plants and clay pots trampled beneath a thousand marching boots. The spring was a cesspool of mud; the garden beds, little more than muck and dead weeds. I grasped my sorrow as if it were a serpent that meant to bite me, and turned it to fury—fangs and all.
“To the keep!” I screamed, pointing at Dún Darragh. Around us, Gentry warriors—gore-stained but not yet beginning to flag—hurled themselves toward the fort, blades flashing. Linn made to follow, her hooves nimble on the uneven stone, but I reined her back, dismounted abruptly, and laid a palm in the center of her elegant chest.
“Linn, no. This is where our paths diverge.” I pressed my face into her mane one last time as she burned a brief image againstthe inside of my mind, blistering with hope—me exiting the fort’s doors with dawn at my back and victory in my eyes. But I shook my head.
“You need to get back to the Gate. As fast as you can.”
She chattered her teeth in protest.
“Run, Linn. This was never your war. And I know what you’re expecting. You and Abyss deserve your peaceful waters and bloodthirsty family. Run!”
I slapped her rump, ungently. She kicked out, narrowly missing me, then sallied away. Her tail bannered out behind her. She leapt back into the fray, aimed for Roslea.
I dared a glance at the sky, calculating the angle of the lofting moon. About an hour until midnight. I squinted into the night, gazing across the lough. Were those riders on the road, or was it merely wind blowing over the grasses? Were those bombards, or hedgerows? Were those lanterns, or the distant lights of Finn Coradh?
Where were the human kings and their armies? Again I worried that Cathair had not gotten word to them before he died.
A revenant flung itself onto my back. I ducked and rolled, slamming the thing onto its spine and swiftly sawing through its throat with my blade. Black blood gushed over my hands as I ducked another attack, then dashed after Balor, who was gamely filleting ghouls upon the shards of glass piercing from my destroyed greenhouse.
“Balor!” I cried at him. “Do you remember what we discussed?”
“I am your general, lady!” He grinned too broadly as he popped off a revenant’s head like the cork of a wine bottle. “Hold the keep. No one goes in, and no one leaves.”
“Especially the bardaí,” I reminded him. “And when the human kings come—”
“I say, ‘The leaders wear necklaces, and if you kill them, the rest will surrender.’”
“That’s right, Balor.” I nodded in grim satisfaction. “Thank you. Thank you for everything.”
“Lady!” His smile grew somehow even broader as he used onerevenant to knock down ten others like bowling pins. “It is my absolute pleasure. I will see you when the battle is done.”
I readied my skeans, then flung myself up the rise toward Dún Darragh. Only to come face to face with my sister.
Amid the clashing steel and shrieks of war, the princess sat unshaken atop her pale palfrey, clad once more in her silver breastplate and calfskin boots, with a man-at-arms I thought must be Rogan beside her. In the center of Dún Darragh’s courtyard, a ring of stillness clung to her like an invisible shroud that not even the fury of battle dared touch. Violence raged and surged all around, but Eala remained poised and unwavering, her gaze as steadfast as the warped power she clung to.
I fought toward my sister, dodging revenants and Gentry warriors alike, until I burst into the circle of calm surrounding Eala. Only then did I see…
The tortured marks of her Treasure had mutated beyond fractures or spiderwebs, feathers or vines. Veins of black mold now veiled her, spreading across her porcelain skin; ribbons of dark lichen braided through her hair; a crown of night-dark mushrooms sprouted between the palisades of the silver crown resting upon her brow.
Eala had truly become the rotten queen.
Her eyes barely flickered to me as she stared out over the mayhem she had wrought. The cacophony of bugling carnyxes and thundering drums and clanging weapons and shrieking dead nearly drowned out her voice as she said, “Clever sister. You have eluded me longer than I expected. Have you come at last to give me what I want?”
“Remind me—what is that?” I needed to buy a little time. The full moon was not quite at its zenith. And I needed to give my friends as much time as possible to fight their way back to the Heartwood. “My willing heart? Or my head upon a pike?”
“If I cannot have one, then be assured I will have the other.” In the uneasy shadows cast by the stark moonlight, Eala’s featureswere veiled with darkness. She did not look at me, staring over my head at the crush and surge of violence. “For I cannot let you survive as either Fódla’s heir or a weapon fit to destroy me and my children.”
I edged closer. Around us, the battle raged. Here, it was just us—me, Eala, Rogan. This close, I could see that the horses—shockingly calm amid the chaos—were no longer alive. Disgust burned poison through me, and I glanced sharply up at Rogan, his face shadowed beneath his hood. He held a naked blade in one hand; in the other, his dead mount’s mildewed reins. He wore gleaming ceremonial regalia matching Eala’s, but ill-suited for actual battle. His eyes were gray and flat when he looked at me, but at least he still lived.
