“Hold on,” she hissed in the moment before she lofted toward the sky, Blodwen and Barfog launching themselves behind her. She was larger than they were—she had to pump her wings hard to cast herself skyward, raising clouds of dust and pollen to swirl around them like mist. Her belly skimmed the tops of the flaming trees as she fought to climb above the lip of the sinkhole. Then—wind and sky. A thermal updraft filled her wings and gusted her steeply upward in a rush. As she banked hard to the south, the remaining four draiglings (save little Hog) soared close to graze the edges of their wings against hers, familiar and affectionate.See you soon.
On her back, Sinéad whooped, her voice nearly lost to the wind and the wild lands sweeping out below them.
Insofar as a draig could smile… Laoise smiled.
Laoise needed no map. She had flown over these regions a thousand times. Wings stretched taut and wide, she swept high abovethe glittering patchwork tapestry of Tír na nÓg, Blodwen and Barfog keeping easy pace behind her.
They left the mountains behind as the sun dipped, passing beyond Mag Tuired over mist-swathed valleys. Laoise flew until she spied a silver thread of water, then tucked her wings and dived for the ground, the draiglings squawking and whistling as they explored the glade she’d chosen for the night.
Sinéad climbed off Laoise’s back, stretching stiff limbs in a way that made it clear she was trying not to offend. Her face was bright red from the wind whipping it all afternoon; her honey-blond hair was an absolute disaster, her undone braids matted and coiffed in an astonishing helmet atop her head. Laoise shifted back into her Gentry form, pressing her lips together so she wouldn’t laugh.
“What?” Sinéad patted her head as she lowered herself gingerly onto a rotten tree stump. “Surely it’s not that bad.”
“It’s that bad,” Laoise confirmed. “Here—let me.”
She straddled the tree trunk to sit beside Sinéad, slowly finger-combing through the snarled strands and tangled braids.
“I suppose this is why you keep yours so short,” Sinéad observed, with a note of apology.
“Something like that.” In truth, it had been more about slicing away the parts of herself she no longer wanted to look at, excising a life she had lost. Her long hair had reminded her too much of Elen. “Idris is a real bore about his hair. I figured one of us ought to be practical. If it was up to me, I would have chopped his all off in his sleep—alas, I sacrificed my vanity instead.”
Sinéad choked on a laugh. “Spoken like a true sister.”
“Siblings are beastly,” Laoise said genially as she began to rebraid Sinéad’s hair. “Although I suppose you’d know even better than I.”
Sinéad stilled, and Laoise cursed her fool mouth. Sinéad had spoken of her human family only once, on the Silver Isle, and they’d all been in their cups. Laoise, Sinéad, and Chandi—a pleasant, intuitive triangle. Before Chandi had done the unthinkable.
Sinéad had been born a shepherd’s daughter—the seventh of nine children, and one of only two girls. By the age of seven, when she’d been spirited away by the Folk, she’d already taken on the bulk of the family’s laundry and cooking and was expected to look after her two younger brothers while her parents herded the flock or drank themselves into a stupor.
“They bred sheep.” Sinéad had laughed into her wine. “And people. The latter far more successfully than the former.”
Now Sinéad wasn’t laughing. She looked discomfited, and a pang of guilt sliced Laoise like a sword.
“I had a sister, you know.” The words spilled over Laoise’s lips like something bad she’d eaten that did not want to stay down. Funny, considering she had not spoken about Elen for two decades.
Sinéad looked up. “You did?”
Laoise bit her lip and tried to decide whether to recount the whole awful tragedy. It had been a long day and she wished to rest, not exhume ancient memories that would surely bury her in grief and regret. Perhaps someday, when all this conflict had ended, she would tell her friend the sordid tale. She thought she might even like it—she could picture how Sinéad would listen to her words without judgment, quietly absorbing the gravity of what had passed. After, she would not try to hug her—no, neither Sinéad nor Laoise were women of easy embraces. But she would say something compassionate and unvarnished, and Laoise would be glad to be seen. To be heard. To be understood.
“I did” was all Laoise said, in the end. “Relationships are fraught and tangled. But it’s normal to miss the pieces of our past that felt like home. Especially when they’re gone forever.”
On the third day they saw the smoke.
Laoise’s intelligence must have been outdated—they had flown nearly to the ever-flowering fields of Ildathach before she realizedthey ought to have crossed Eala’s path by now. They traveled south along the coastline, then crossed back inland, scouring the valleys for signs of the princess. Wherewasshe?
Sinéad smelled it first, rearing back on Laoise’s neck to shield her face with her sleeve.
“Whatisthat?” she called, above the shrieking of the wind across Laoise’s back.
A suffocating reek of filth, decay, and dense, oily smoke struck Laoise’s nostrils. And she knew: It was death.
She had experienced her fair share of destruction. She recognized—all too well—the stench of skin crisped by fire and bodies laid to waste, the carrion call of blood and guts spilled over heaving earth. But the horrors of the battlefield never grew easier to bear. Trepidation cleaved her sense from her body, and she saw herself as if from a distance. Laoise, all of thirteen, as flames engulfed the warehouse, devouring flesh and hair like brittle kindling. Laoise, seventeen, vomiting bile after a skirmish with renegade gruagaigh in the Altaír stole three of her Sisters’ lives. Laoise, twenty, rolling her mother’s heavy, fetid body off the trapdoor that had protected her brother from slaughter.
She snapped back to her senses. Slanted her wings, banking hard. Wind rippled over her back, nearly unseating Sinéad, who yelped and clung harder to her spikes. Beside her, Blodwen and Barfog barrel-rolled, easy in the air without the terrible weight of knowledge Laoise carried.
She had to protect them from that.
“What are you doing?” Sinéad howled over the wind whipping past them. “Eala’s that way—just beyond the ridge!”
