“Something called the Songbird’s Heart.”
Irian’s pulse throbbed. The Sky-Sword, clasped between his palms, hummed a strange little melody.
“There is a story,” Irian said, with a touch of perturbed curiosity. “A story I have not heard since I was a child. It was a favorite of…” He could still hardly bear to speak her name—the friend he’d lost so long ago. “Of Deirdre’s. Fia’s mother. A legend about a human prince and a Gentry woman, their true love cursed by a bargain gone terribly, terribly wrong.”
Wayland frowned. “That seems… significant.”
“Your father’s gods-damned pattern.” Irian shook his head, rueful. “But I cannot see how it pertains to the Treasures, nor their forging.”
“No,” Wayland agreed. “It is likely a fruitless avenue, and I should admit defeat before I embarrass myself further.”
“You have never been one to yield for embarrassment’s sake,” Irian pointed out, with some asperity.
Wayland just looked at him.
“Was there something else?”
Wayland hesitated, then extended his hand. “May I hold it?”
Irian stilled. The request slid under his feather-fletched skin and made him shudder, as intrusive and presumptuous as… well… kissing someone else’s wife and having the audacity tolikeit. Just as an example. The Sky-Sword did not justbelongto Irian—it was a part of him. An extension of his being, an avatar of his soul. In all the years he had wielded it, he had let only one other person in the world handle it. Fia.
Somehow, he managed to furl the dark wings of his fury and bite out, “Why?”
Whatever Wayland heard in Irian’s voice made him drop his hand.
“Because I have no idea what I’m doing.” A thread of frustration pulled Wayland’s voice taut. “Small forgings are simple—little geasa strung together. Creating resonances between disparate objects. But in truth, I know not how to craft the larger geasa necessary to bind new conduits—new Treasures—to the sources. Especially not if the sources have been warped. Perhaps if my father had not collared me…”
Wayland’s hand twitched toward his throat, an unconscious gesture. Irian’s anger veered vexingly toward sympathy. He well remembered when Gavida first collared his only son. Wayland had just turned eighteen—Irian was not yet fourteen. Wayland had been summoned one morning into his father’s forge. When he emerged, the silver collar glared from his neck, so thick and heavy it seemed to cow him. Irian’s jaw had dropped, wrath writhing swiftly through him.
But Wayland had never raged like Irian wanted him to. Never complained. Barely participated in Irian’s increasingly frenzied attempts to free him from the magical contraption. Finally, Wayland had stopped him with a brotherly clap on the shoulder.
“Come, now.” His broad face had creased with an affable smile. “Perhaps my father has done me a favor. I’m far too soft to spend all my days hammering over a forge.”
Now Irian exhaled, flipped his grip on the Sky-Sword, and offered the weapon to Wayland. The other man hesitated before curling his tanned fingers around the inlaid hilt.
The blade screamed, furious and atonal. Energy crackled around the length of metal; the pressure of the air abruptly shifted, popping Irian’s ears. Wind whipped the blankets off the bed and lifted the hair off the nape of his neck. Hog dived under the bed with a shriek. Wayland’s eyes fluttered shut, his hand reflexively curling even tighter around the Sky-Sword. Then, with what appeared to be preternatural effort, he unhinged his fingers and dropped the blade to clatter onto the flagstones.
The Sky-Sword went silent as death. The air in the room abruptly returned to normal, popping Irian’s ears again. He bent, palming his Treasure as it hummed a self-satisfied chord, then slowly rose to his full height. He had only a few inches on Wayland; he grappled with a decidedly mean instinct to lord them all over the other man. Perhaps it was because he had spent so long being younger, shorter, and weaker than Wayland. Or perhaps it was some other reason.
“Well?” Irian canted his head to one side, well aware of how intimidating the gesture was. “Did you discover aught of interest?”
“Yes.” Wayland’s eyes were downcast, focused on the powerful shard of metal dazzling from Irian’s grasp. He rubbed absently at his wrist. “Fight me.”
Irian’s head jerked back, his surprise like a slap to the face.“What?”
“You’re angry.” Wayland’s cobalt gaze slashed up, darkening with hesitation, then something like hurt. “At the world, mostly. But also with me.”
Irian’s lips thinned. “I am not.”
“You’re a bad liar, Ree. Always were.” Wayland gestured toward the Sky-Sword. “It’s worse. I couldfeelyour rage. All of it, like a storm painted over a blackening sky. And I—I am one of the clouds. So come and fight me.”
“I am not going to fight you, Wayland.”
Wayland folded his heavy arms over his chest. “Then I’m afraid we’ll have to kiss instead.”
“You disgust me.” The faintest breath of mirth coiled in the corner of Irian’s mouth. He stood. “A fight it shall be.”
Irian’s and Wayland’s shadows stretched long in the light of the torches as they entered the Armory. Carven from black rock and striated with pulsating threads of garnet and malachite, the chamber was indistinguishable from the many other rooms honeycombing the Cnoc. Save, of course, for the array of weaponry displayed against the far wall.
