“I’m sorry, Idris,” he said again, with more significance. “But you don’t need to hide from me.”
Idris hesitated for one more moment, then ducked his head and began gathering his scattered medical supplies.
“This was a bad idea.” He grabbed for the bowl of bloody water;it spilled, sloshing aquamarine fluid over Wayland’s boots. Wayland tried to help; their hands collided. Again, Idris shied away, reaching for the soiled rags strewn on the floor. “You should go.”
Wayland levered himself off the bed. He paused by the door, slinging one arm up onto the doorjamb, to watch Idris gather bandages to his chest, his shoulders hunched protectively and his hair swept over one eye.
No, Idris was not particularly young. He was older than Fia, older than Sinéad. But he had spent the past thirteen years entombed in this mountain with no one but his sister and a brood of baby draigs for company. He was clearly inexperienced. Vulnerable. Possibly traumatized.
And Wayland could not bring himself to mind. He rubbed a still-bloody palm over his aching head and wondered whether he had shite for brains or just the worst luck in the entire world.
“Idris.” He pitched his voice to be heard over the rushing water far below.
Idris turned in surprise, as if he had expected Wayland to be long gone. Wayland met his eyes and chose his words carefully, fighting tooth and nail for a sincerity that did not come naturally.
“Whatever might have happened to you.”Don’t make a joke.“Whatever you look like.”Don’t make a fucking joke.“I think you’re beautiful.”
Idris stared at him.
“I’m not afraid to see you, Idris. Whenever you are ready to be seen.”
Then Wayland shut the door and wobbled off toward the kitchen in search of a bottle of mushroom whiskey to dull the pain.
To dull all the fucking pain.
Chapter Eighteen
Within
The doe set a brisk, nearly unmatchable pace through the wood. This forest was dense with undergrowth, and there was no path to speak of. I squinted between the vast old trunks and heavy canopy, trying to get a sense of my bearings. The light was dim and murky in places, yet shafts of pale sunlight slanted through others, as if both dusk and dawn were occurring simultaneously. The trees’ foliage was also strange—lime-green shoots and frothing white flowers peering between brittle yellow leaves painted red at their tips; waxen green fronds nudging between grasping black branches.
I hacked my feet through tough brambles and thorny bushes and tried to keep sight of the doe’s twitching white tail amid the gloom.
We walked for hours. Or perhaps mere moments. Time felt ghostly amid the vaulting buttresses of the eternal forest—a sepulchral parade not of minutes or even hours, but of years and centuries and millennia. Even the tallest tree here would one day be brought low by decay or storm or hungry beetles, and that was all right. From their fallen trunks mushrooms would nudge redspotted caps; ants would bore infinite highways; seedlings would sprout new fronds.
Time was rot and rebirth. Time was death. It was nothing to be afraid of.
I glimpsed clearings beyond the path, sometimes—glades suffused with light and ringed with powerful trees. No—not always trees. Branching tongues of flame, or sentinels of pitted igneous rock, or reaching fronds of multicolored coral. I peered at these circles as we passed by, but they were hazy and undefined, as if seen through smoky mirrors.
The doe finally stopped, poised where the forest’s shadow gave way to the light of a clearing. I raised my hand to shield my eyes from the spill of sunlight, harsh after the gloom of the forest. But the light did not warm my skin and seemed more silver than gold. Behind the sun, stars were stenciled sharp against a laminate sky.
Day… night. Both… neither.
I kept forgetting—this place was not strictly real. It was as real as I was, I supposed. But none of this existed outside my own mind.
Still, I couldn’t help but wonder exactlywhereinside my mind I had now managed to wander.
“What is this place?” I asked the doe out loud. The delicate shells of her ears flicked forward, then back. She trotted a few steps, hesitant, then pawed one hoof through the long grass. My eyes twitched toward where she indicated.
Across the glen sat a strange, sturdy little cottage. Familiarity breathed a shiver down my spine—I had been here before. I had dreamed it. Or something similar to it. Half-remembered images layered over the scene before me—rough-hewn stone walls the color of river stones, a roof thatched with a multitude of birds’ wings, wildflowers like a kaleidoscope path designed only for me. I hesitated, then began to walk, my steps unspooling toward the door.
A figure sat in profile beside the wall, basking in the silver-gold light. I slowed. I was not afraid—not precisely. I did not think the doe had brought me here for harm. But after so long hiding fromTalah within the labyrinth of my memories, then wandering with the Bright One through time and space, I had become well and truly lost. I glanced over my shoulder in the hopes that my guide would be shadowing me. But Ínne had left me to walk this path alone. I felt suddenly ill-prepared to confront whatever lurked here, at the heart of all I knew.
Would it be damnation? Or deliverance?
The figure turned as my footfalls neared, surprise etching his fine-boned features. His hair was light—a paler gold than Rogan’s. I could not tell his height from the lanky stretch of his legs flung out before him. His eyes were pleasantly brown, a warm counterpoint to his angular features and blond hair. He could not have been much older than me. Five-and-twenty, perhaps. Thirty, at the most. And he was… human.
Untethered familiarity rushed through me once more, vertiginous. I stumbled, and the man rose as if to catch me, before subsiding back into his chair among the wildflowers. He gazed at me, and I stared back in return, trying to shackle his image to some memory, some understanding beyond this piercing sense ofknowinghim.
