Perhaps she found a circle of mushrooms, or the hollow boll of a forgotten beech tree. Perhaps a Gate took pity on she who had once been a Treasure and let her through beneath a full moon. Perhaps she traveled in the Deep-Dream, carried between worlds on imagination alone. Her deer mind did not think of these things—it thought only of the inexorable pull of her damaged heart.
She found her daughter in a castle made of stone and wood and bad human tempers. She watched as the child ran out from behind high palisades, barefoot on a snowy night. She watched as the child transformed a cruel nursemaid into a tree.
She watched as the child became a girl, trained on blades and fists and human violence.
She watched as the girl became a woman and fell in love. Then grew sour and sallow in its aftermath.
She watched the young woman gallop to the edge of the forest on her gray mare and tease flowering vines over sleeping bowers.
She watched the young woman travel to a crumbling fort, then fall in love again. She watched her ride a mare of twigs and leaves amid a host of stone monsters, clad in a gown of black feathers.
For a while, she was gone. Deirdre could not find a way to follow her.
She watched the young woman return to the human realms and find the shape of her soul. Of her mother’s heart. But though Deirdre followed her through the wood to the Gate, she could not cross over.
Now Deirdre watched as the Gates blew open, raining fire upon the horde of dead clogging her forest. Fire and steel. Her instincts forced her to flee, long legs bounding as her ears and tail flicked warnings to the creatures around her. She drove forward, running before the battle raging beside her. She hid behind the trembling branches of aspens, lost to the soothing dark.
She had spent too long as a doe. When she remembered to know things, she knew this.
Sometime later, she crept out. The grotto where her daughter had once toiled was crushed and broken. Above, on the bluff, the battle raged around the keep, and it was no longer just Gentry who fought the shambling horde.
Were those humans?
They were shorter, stouter, less incandescently beautiful than the Folk. They wore battered helms of iron instead of shining silverarmor. Their weapons were simple steel, without the flamboyant decorations favored by the Gentry.
But they were fighting side by side against the ravening horde. Elbow to elbow. Back to back. Beyond, she glimpsed weapons of war she had no name for. A wooden tower with sweeping arms whipping something toward the fort.
Green fire exploded near the edge of the lough; thunder boomed. The screams of the dead and dying echoed. Inside the fort, windows began to glow—light shining like captured stars from behind the thick walls.
Deirdre tried to creep closer, but her doe form balked—the mayhem and havoc triggering something primal in her. She could not go any closer. With supernatural effort, Deirdre conjured her other form—the one she had not used in nearly twenty years. Two legs. Willowy arms. Long dark hair. Slowly, her pelt receded. Her limbs grew thicker, heavier. Her hooves split in five. Her fingers were chilly on the midnight earth as she pushed herself to standing. Her legs wobbled, but she braced herself on the crumbling wall of the keep, creeping along the narrow path until she spied a massive golden oak dominating a courtyard.
Barefoot and nearly naked save for the scraps of clothing she’d worn two decades earlier, Deirdre darted for the door. No one noticed her, focused as they were on fighting for their lives. She slid inside the fort.
The great hall was somehow both inside and outside—carven stone and seething ancient forest alive with staring eyes. Two women stood framed amid a grove of massive golden oaks. One was white-blond, with ribbons of dark mold creeping through her hair. The other was dark-haired, with threads of starlight lightening hers. They stood hand in hand, although it was less an embrace than a compulsion. Magic burst from Deirdre’s daughter’s chest, a collection of sounds and colors so ephemeral and momentous that Deirdre could hardly fathom it. She shielded her eyes—the great hall was awash with light, brighter than sunlight. It was wings; itwas wonder. It was the opposite of the blight that had crept from her after she broke her bond to the Heart of the Forest. It was holy—magic washed clean.
She watched the blond girl crumple, her form slumping on the flagstones.
“No,” Deirdre whispered, as if she could stop what she knew would happen next.
Her daughter collapsed, the weight of the sublime lifting off her body and stealing something vital with it. Deirdre lunged for her, but the radiance collected into an orb before abruptly detonating. Light exploded outward, catching her square in the chest and slamming her back against the door. Her vision sparked, white on black. The fort rocked, mortar and stone dropping from the ceiling. Beyond its walls, she heard the muffled screams of living and dead alike.
Deirdre crawled forward to gather her daughter off the ground, into her arms. Her form was too still. Her head lolled on her neck, and her arms flopped limply, and her mismatched eyes stared blankly into the shadows wreathing the dún.
“No,” Deirdre whispered as she smoothed the short dark tresses away from her daughter’s slack face. Did she remember any other words? She was not sure she did. “No.”
Was this truly her fate? Doomed to hold her child only on the day she was born and the day she died? She had always known the stars were cruel, but this was sadistic. She had wished to meet Death a thousand times, but never like this. She cradled Fia closer, pressing her cheek to her daughter’s forehead, twining her fingers through her fingers, cupping her head in the crook of her arm.
“No!” This time, the scream rent her throat and echoed through the fort, reverberating off the stones. The hall was dark, dark as Death, save for the tendrils of starlight still clinging to Fia’s body. Deirdre clenched her eyes shut as she rocked her daughter like the baby she’d once been. The tears slipping from beneath her eyelashes splashed onto Fia’s cooling skin. “This isn’t how your story ends. It can’t be. It can’t be.”
The echoes traveled along the walls, transmuting her voice into mockery.
It can’t be. It can’t be.
Her eyes dredged the gloom. The primeval forest was fading, the colossal golden oaks petrifying as their bark transformed back to stone. But she swore a face was watching her—a serpent with glowing crystal eyes and a tail that spun round in ever-tightening circles.
“Snip, snap, snout,” hissed the snake, “our tale’s told out. But if you wish to twist the thread… you’ll find the story’s not quite dead.”
“What do you mean?” Deirdre stared, a frown puckering her face. “Who are you?”
