I gazed at Eala and saw the moment she understood. Her eyes widened, not the agonized muddy color of all the elements combined, but the clear, cunning blue of the swan princess I’d met almost a year and a half ago. I gazed back at her, letting all that had passed between us melt away, until we were just Fia and Eala. The shadowy changeling girl and the shining storybook princess.
“I love you, Eala.”
She spat blood between broken teeth and snarled, “I despise you,Sister.”
It was as it had always been.
“My name is Fia Ní Mainnín, heir of the Sept of Antlers andchild of the stars, and I bring us both balance.” I smiled as my radiance swelled. “I suppose I was the stronger weapon after all.”
Starlight punched out of me, meeting magic like five huge fingers curled into a fist. I gasped, bracing my body as my hands tightened over Eala’s fingers.
A feather so black will rise from pain. A crown so silver will rise to reign.
The starlight wrapped around the magic like a cocoon, cradling it as gently as a mother with a babe.
A heart so green must bleed once more, for light and dark to one restore.
Inside the cocoon, the magic melted together, like a caterpillar inside a chrysalis.
The last love lost, the price now paid—through sacrifice, the balance laid.
The magic unfurled, beating great wings inside me. My vision whitened as sensation shattered along my limbs. My head fell back; my hands twined even tighter with Eala’s as the starlight consumed us both. She screamed, searing and final, as the light devoured her. My rib cage cracked open, tearing my leather armor in half. White light coursed from my chest and winged toward the night sky, gleaming with a million destinies I could hardly comprehend.
A piece of folded parchment fluttered disconsolately from my bodice, opening as it fell. I did not look at it—I had read it a hundred times, my tears staining the picture as I read the final lines. Again. And again. Until they were imprinted upon my soul.
So white and black, the swans must die, for stars to weave their fate on high.
I cried out as the power left me—the starlight and all it had touched. Earth, water, fire, air. Spirit. No longer tainted by separation, throttled by a thousand years of terrible enslavement. The sources no longer bound to conduits; the conduits no longer tithed to vessels. In my starshine, all that magic was lustrated. Cleansed, renewed. Made numinous, divine. Around us, Corra’s nemetonglowed, the trees catching the starlight like plasma. It branched through the sky and rooted through the earth. The sacred circle careened, rings upon rings, circles within circles. The heartwood of an ancient tree, the ripples in a pond after a stone is thrown, the sweeping spiral of a distant galaxy.
We were all the same. We were all different. By the circles we were all bound.
Eala’s hands went boneless in mine as she fell backward. Dimly I saw that she, too, had been cleansed. Her fine hair made a halo around her perfect face; her pale feathered dress splayed out like wings behind her.
Distantly, I felt a boundary begin to close. A torn seam being restitched, an infected wound being healed.
Then I, too, was falling. Flying. I soared through a thousand dusk-lit skies toward something so bright I could only name itlove.
I was made of light and triumph and overwhelming ecstasy.
I was made to tell my own story.
And this… this was where it ended.
Chapter Fifty-One
Deirdre
Deirdre of the Sept of Antlers had been born to die.
Bright stars had fallen on the black night of her birth, heralding delight and doom. It was foretold she would be an heir to her Sept’s Treasure—desperately few in the waning days of dying magic. But so, too, was it foretold that she would bring waste to Tír na nÓg. Her beauty would start wars; her destiny was naught but ruin. So they hid her away. As if a childhood isolated behind high walls, singing to rocks and telling stories to flowers, would inoculate her against the plague of her fate.
As if anyone could hide themselves from destiny.
Death was Deirdre’s lullaby as a baby, sung over her cradle in the dark of night. Death was her bedtime story as a girl, repeated as the sun rode low. Death was the throb of her heart as a young woman, as she yearned for a world she had never tasted, with all its terrible, fleeting desires.
All came to pass as was foretold. The stars do not lie—their magic is measured in eons, stories unfolding silently in the great, endless dark. There is no hiding from fate, no outrunning doom.
She loved Rían, the human king from beyond the Gates, from the moment she saw him. For his long limbs and curling hair, yes. But also for his hope and his honesty. For his softness and his care. For all of herself she saw in him, and all of him that was nothing like her.
