Not me. Not anymore.
Part of me longed to turn—to buoy to the surface alongside Irian and let this moment play out the way it was supposed to. To latch my legs around his waist and tangle my fingertips in his damp black hair and press my yearning lips to his. But the rest of me knew—this moment was long gone. It was a dream, a memory. And if I lingered here—if Istayed—thenshemight catch me.
Let me in.
I swam deeper. My breath bulged in my lungs, yearning for escape. The moonlight bled away, a last gasp fading into nothing. If this had been real, I would have long ago reached the bottom of the pool.
It was not real.
I thrust myself deeper still, my senses furling away from me like petals from a dying flower. My sight, gone. My breath, stolen. My skin, chilled. I did not know which way was up, down. Whether this was still water, or something colder. Darker. Emptier.
I only knew I had to keep moving.
You cannot hide here.
As if summoned by the words, light appeared—a warm glow green as ivy and gentle as jasmine. Surprise forced my gaze to my chest, where a river stone suddenly hung above my breastbone, pulsing a deep blue-green in the endless dark. A slender sapling of hope grew inside me. I grabbed for the stone, and it hummed between my fingers. Vines clambered up my wrists with tiny sharp thorns.
A forest grew before me. Diamond-barked trunks arched tangled limbs. Branches exploded with serrated leaves scaled green as lizards’ bellies. Ferns embroidered lace through teeming underbrush. Vibrant flowers trembled, iridescent as butterflies’ wings.
A familiar figure stood amid dappled shafts of moonlight. They wore a crown of silver antlers lofting toward a star-strewn sky. Their muscular limbs were slicked over with russet fur. They had a face like the forest path.
You are mine, they intoned, slow as the seasons and patient as the dusk. Long fingers tipped with claws beckoned me, and I followed without thought. Without fear. Even as the figure turned, disappearing into the darkest part of the wood, I heedlessly ran after them.
Let me in!
The soundless scream chased me, rattling the boughs of the trees until their glass leaves shattered on the path. My bare feet crunched through the litter, pain lancing my calves as blood fletched my steps. Still I ran—as skeleton birds pecked at my eyes and metal trees unfurled into starbursts of violence and my silver crown slipped down over one eye. I jerked it away from my head, and some of my white-blond hair came away with it, silvery strands twining my fingers like wire.
“No,” I moaned as my steps slowed. I threw the silver tiara to the ground, but that was no better—gray-fleshed arms punched from the dirt, clawing toward the shining metal with broken fingernails and palms crusted with grave dirt.
You cannot hide here.
I forced myself forward, even as the forest charred to dust at my passing. The ring around my finger burned molten. The scent of scorched metal and bog tar chased me. I swallowed, the sickly sweetness of apple nectar coating my tongue until my teeth began to rot in my mouth.
Still, I ran. Because I was not trying to hide.
I was trying to escape.
Chapter Two
Irian
Every person had a limit to their strength. Irian was approaching his.
This was not the first time in his life his strength had flagged. Though he had been forced from an early age to make himself a fortress, he knew hardness and resilience were not the same things. Endurance was a muscle that weakened as readily as an arm or a leg. There had been countless times over the years when Irian had longed to give up. Tosurrender.
More times than he readily cared to admit.
When he had been a little boy rowing himself across a raucous ocean and climbing clamorous cliffs, only to find his own beloved mother did not remember him.
When he had been a young man, cast out from the only home he knew by the only father he’d ever wanted.
When he had been a man grown, and his wife of three minutes had taken her own life instead of his, leaving him devastated in the wake of her sacrifice.
Irian looked at Fia now. She lay quiescent in his arms, rockinggently to the motion of the aughisky plodding heavily beneath them. Irian could almost ignore the shifting patterns of metal tracing like lace beneath her skin, the slick scales bulging at her temples before smoothing away, the sharp black pinions spiking her dark hair before softening to sable waves. He could pretend Fia was sleeping in his arms. He could pretend nothing had changed.
But everything had changed. And Irian, yet again, had been powerless to prevent it.
How long since Emain Ablach collapsed? He had lost count. Three weeks—perhaps more.
