“Not yet, Corra,” I whispered, to the air. “Not quite yet.”
I sensed Eala immediately, standing at the top of the curving staircase, drenched in shadows dark as death. Her very presence was like a blot of damnation seeping sick and sour through the stones, tainting the grout and tarnishing the plaster. Killing the moss and lichen growing on the walls. Devouring the rats in the holes and the spiders in their webs until—
“Down here,” I commanded.
“No,” she hissed. “You are armed. I am not.”
I dropped my sword and dagger to clang upon the flagstones. “It is as it was always meant to be. You and me. Face to face—no guardians or armies or weapons. Just Fia and Eala. Our Treasures. And our wills. Shall we see at last who is the stronger weapon?”
Eala snarled but did not refuse the challenge. She trod slowly down the stairs, and where her hand trailed along the railing, veins of blackness spread, cracking marble and furrowing carvings and sweeping the hall with the stench of decay.
“I will make you kneel,” Eala purred. “I will take your heart. Then I will send your corpse into Tír na nÓg to ravage your Gentry lover.”
I waited until Eala stalked close enough, her hands outstretched as if to choke me.
“There are times when you have made me bend. But for you, I will never bow.” Then I crouched, planted my palms on the stone, and screamed, “Corra, now!”
Again, that feeling of the hall cracking open. Moonlight streamed in, dancing as if through broad leaves. I poured all the magic of my Treasure into the sensation, anchoring it to the earth, the roots, the branches. Shadows striped the wall, lengthening and deepening until I crouched in a forest at night, full of grasping branches and rough black trunks knobbed with faces. A breeze brushed my hair from my nape. Still I drove my magic deeper, awaking the ossified trunks of ancient oaks that for so long had been encased in stone. Bark replaced the sinuous carvings on the four massive pillars ringing the great hall; the arching buttresses lofting toward the ceiling began to sway as heavy boughs shook off their thousand-year slumber.
“What—” Eala reeled away from me, her back striking one of the massive ancient oaks. “What have you done?”
“Once, in a time of lovelorn mortals and haughty Gentry maidens.” The ancient forest hooted and whispered around us, alive with a thousand fell faces and skittering woodland creatures. “A prince named Marban found a sacred grove near the edge of Tírna nÓg—one of the last bastions of magic in the human realms. He did not know it then, but the circle of four vast oaks was called a nemeton. He soon learned that the grove was home to a being called a Bright One—one of the Solasóirí who came to these lands long ago from the stars. He bargained with that being, whose name was Corra. He would build them a haven, a home—to protect them from the ravening eyes of greedy humans. In return, he asked for knowledge. And so he built Dún Darragh around the grove, with stones he quarried by hand, as Corra poured all their knowledge into his willing ears.”
“A Bright One?” Fascination and avarice swept across Eala’s ruined features. “What element? Which dúil?”
“Imagination. Creation. Story.” Corra was everywhere—in every knot of wood and rustle of the branches and whisper in the night. “Dream.Corra taught Marban how to access the Deep-Dream, where nothing is real yet where everything may come to pass. And so he learned how to move between realms without use of a Gate. But he left this place, thisgrove, behind, albeit swathed in off-putting rumors of suicides and hauntings and curses. A protected pocket of vast magic. Hidden, dormant. Until now.”
Eala said something, but I didn’t hear her. My head snapped—a pull yanking me, like a string attached to my sternum. I felt them—even across the barrier between the realms, I felt them. A lick of fire. A trickle of water. A breath of cool air. I felt my own Treasure writhe along my arms, stinging as it caressed. And I felt the starshine harboring beneath my skin dart soft and pearly around my bones.
I stared at the moon, half real and half imagined, perfectly full and sailing high overhead.
It was time.
“By fire and by sky,” I intoned, with only the barest shake in my voice. Eala’s gaze widened, greed and then suspicion flashing in her diamond eyes. “By fast water and by ancient tree. By the power of my willing heart, I tithe my Treasure to thee… O Eala.”
I closed my eyes.Theywere there, as they always were—corded muscles wrapped in russet fur, a face like the forest path, silver antlers chiming among the stars. They towered over me, but I was not afraid, and they were not threatening. Instead, they seemed mournful.
The cost will be high.
“I know.” I gazed back at them, fighting my own grief as I asked, “What must I sacrifice? What price does balance demand?”
I knew what they would say before they said it.
Everything.
Wayland
Wayland should have worn a shirt. It hadn’t occurred to him ahead of time, but the ravening hordes of the recently dead all had incredibly sharp fingernails. Scratches scored his chest from throat to stomach, rather ruining the illusion ofdemigod spawned from the seahe’d been aiming for.
Still, he managed to fight his way—covered in gore and striped with sweat—to the Heartwood. He had not been here in years—he had forgotten how colossal the sacred tree was. Festooned in brilliant bouquets of wisteria and eglantine, it struck him dumb. Fáilsceim fell to his side, forgotten. He felt it then—a sensation not unlike hunger. A gnawing pull beneath his belly button. A thread of magic, woven across space, connecting him to something else. Someone else.
Somewhereelse.
He stared at the sky. The moon stared back. Panic jerked his head on his neck in an eager circle. Where were they? Where were Laoise and Irian?
Something was happening. A sundering—a crucial point wrenchedfrom the circuit they’d all renewed. A living vine hacked from its roots, grasping with creepers for purchase as it was flung into the abyss.
Wayland drove the tines of his trident into the earth, using it to prop his suddenly weak limbs. It was time—he knew it was time. And although he thought he had prepared for this… it suddenly seemed too difficult. Why must he sacrifice all he had gained in the bargain he’d made with Muir—all this mastery and ease and comfort—in return for the man he’d been before? Even more excruciating, he knew he must pay dearly for the pleasure of it.
