She loved Rían from the moment she saw him, though she knew in her heart that his name, too, was Death.
Still, she loved him. Still, she lay with him. Still, she plotted with him—to save both their lands from the looming disaster set in motion long ago by the forging of the Treasures.
Still, she fled with him, though she knew they would be pursued. Though she knew they would never escape the doom etched in black ink between lambent stars. Though she knew they would both die.
Danu caught them on the high cliffs above the reaching forest. Late winter ice slicked the high stones, and snow capped the branches of the black pines far below. The chieftain slaughtered Rían without mercy for the crime of his human heart. His blood spattered Deirdre’s face and stained her dress. She reeled back in dismay, weeping.
Perhaps she meant to fall. Perhaps she did not.
Her slippers slithered. She lost her balance. Frigid, empty air made for a poor final embrace. Branches slashed her as she plummeted down, down, down, tearing her clothing and ripping her hair and eviscerating her skin. The earth smashed her, the impact shattering every bone in her body. Bursting her veins. Cracking her skull. As she lay broken upon the bank of a half-frozen stream, the icy water lapping over her outstretched arms, she knew that Death had finally found her.
She was wrong. Her Treasure would not let her die.
She screamed, shattered and ruptured and nearly split in two, as the magic of the Heart of the Forest tried to knit her back together. Vines splinted bones; nettles sutured wounds. She begged for release—begged for the pain to stop. Begged for Death.
She begged the tall being with the antlers, whom she had known since she was a babe, to let her go.
They simply shook their head, their shadowed face impossibly sad.
Not yet, child. There is life in you.
She did not understand.
Hours or days later, she did.
She had not known she was pregnant. She had not yet missed a moon course. She had not even known she could fall pregnant to a mortal man—their worlds had been separate for so long. Yet his seed quickened inside her. A seed that would, in time, blossom into his child.
Herchild.
She could not bear it. She longed for nothing else.
Still, she begged for release. The pain she felt was unfathomable—her healing too slow, the anguish too great. She wept and screamed and raged.
“Set me free!” she demanded. “I will give anything. I will rip my heart out if only it means I could be free of this curse.”
Ínne said,The cost will be high.
She bared her teeth. “I will give anything. Everything. Take my willing heart, for I have nothing left to barter.”
They knelt, gently touching her twisted stomach, then the stone resting cool above her mangled breastbone.Balance will decide.
It decided on torture. It did not set her free—not right away. It continued rebuilding her body, bone by bone and nerve by nerve. Fire raced along her limbs and curdled in her stomach. The sun and the moon and the cruel, cruel stars wheeled overhead.
Days. Weeks. Months.
As the pain at last began to ease, the stone above her breast cracked, a noise so horrendous Deirdre thought her ears must burst. Magic spilled from her, dense and oily and clinging. Not the cool, creeping power she had flirted with since childhood, then married upon the last heir’s tithing. No—this magic waswrong. Warped. As twisted as her body before it healed. And it no longerbelonged to her. She reached for it, but it snapped at her, tense and devouring. Then clung to her, devious and tantalizing. She scrambled away, her arm curling protectively over her swelling womb.
“I don’t understand.” She reached for her Heart, but the chain around her neck had somehow snapped—the dusk-lit river had already tumbled her Treasure downstream. “Why was it not tithed anew?”
There is no heir to accept the magic. So the magic must go free.
Deirdre hardened her heart. The burdens of the Sept of Antlers were no longer hers to shoulder. “Then why am I alive? I traded my willing heart to be set free from the cycle. Take it. And let me die.”
We did.Ínne shook their great antlered head. The stars chimed above them.Your greatest love. That is the price balance demands.
Deirdre had always known the Solasóirí were governed by laws the Folk were not—and would never be—privy to. Laws of balance in nature. Laws of time and the cosmos. Laws of darkness and light. Laws of beginning and ending. Notions of morality—human and Folk—were inconsequential to them.
But this? This was wrong.
