“There you are, little deer,” he said.
My eyes jerked automatically to the doe who had led me here. But she was gone, and the strange man was not looking at her. He was looking atme. His smooth tenor unhinged something vital inside me, a memory buried so deep I could not be sure it was mine.
Ba dum dum dah dum… ba dum dum dah dee.The sound distant, muted, mottled—sung in counterpoint to the endless, exquisite throb of a pulse. A rush and roar like the sea all around me.
“Who are you?” I demanded, although part of me already knew.
He did not quite smile. “I am exactly who you think I am, little deer. I am Rían Ó Mainnín, last high king of Fódla. I am your father. And I have been waiting for you.”
He hummed:ba dum dum dah dum… ba dum dum dah dee. Except this time, it was not muted beyond the tides of my mother’swomb. It was rich, and real, threading through my veins like gold or glory or hard-earned love.
“This isn’t real.” A single traitorous droplet squeezed from my eye and slid down my cheek. I had cried too much already. This man did not deserve my tears. “I couldn’t possibly remember that. I couldn’t possibly rememberyou. My father died before I was born.”
“Yes, I did.” He turned his suddenly anguished gaze from me, staring toward the dark line of the forest. “What is real, little deer? What is a memory? Perhaps your mind does not remember. But something inside you does. Your bones bear the imprint of love as surely as they do loss. Your heart throbs with my blood as surely as it does your mother’s.” He reached out and touched my cheeks, almost too gently to feel. Once below my right eye, once below my left. “We are both a part of you, little deer. We always were and always will be.”
I jerked back, fighting another wave of treacherous emotion. Even if this were real, Rían had been a villain. He had seduced a Folk maiden for her Treasure, even as he betrayed his pregnant queen. He had been power hungry and unprincipled—a symbol of everything wrong with humanity. Because of him, both realms had suffered through years of war and lingering enmity. His character, I had no doubt, lived on in Eala.
If it lived on in me as well, then it was something to deny. Not embrace.
“You are no part of me.” I mustered malice to mask my pain. “And if you are, then I rebuke you. You are no father to me.”
Torment pulled his fine features into a rictus of despair. He made a strangled, wordless sound of dismissal, as if he wanted to argue with me but did not know where to begin. “Why?”
“Why?” My voice punched from me, shrill and accusing. “Which betrayal to start with? I suppose the betrayal of my mother is the most egregious. She knew nothing of men—not to mention perfidious humans. You led her astray, ravished her, and kidnapped her—all for magic you could not even wield.”
The specter of the last high king of Fódla—this ghostly memory living in my lineage—opened his mouth. But I slashed a hand between us, silencing him.
“But that was not your only betrayal. What of your queen, keeping your hearths lit and your kingdom tended while she grew your firstborn daughter in her womb? What of that daughter, raised without a father in a war-torn kingdom while her mother grieved and raged? What of your people, flung in battle against the Gates of the Folk? What of—” My voice broke, disloyal. “What of me? Raised without parents? Without love? Without anyone?”
For a long moment, beneath the numinous not-sky, Rían sat perfectly still and achingly silent.
“I do not know what stories you have been told,” he said at last. “And perhaps whoever told them believed them to be true. I see thatyoubelieve them. But I, too, have a story. May I tell it, little deer?”
Fury blistered my soul. I did not want to give this man—alive or dead—any more power over me. My time here was short. Talah had found me in my oldest memories—surely she would find me here too. “Why?”
“Because we will never have another chance,” he responded gravely.
I hesitated. I had already learned so much of my past—and perhaps my future. Things I had yearned to know, and things I now wondered whether I ought to fear. I had never—not even once—desired to hear from my blackguard father. I glanced over his shoulder at the cottage, thatched with birds’ wings and shadowed despite its position in the middle of the slaked-silver sunlight. I thought I spied movement behind the fogged glass windows, but when I squinted, I saw nothing.
“I think I’m meant to go in there.” I gestured at the little house. “I don’t have time for you.”
He almost smiled. “He cannot see you yet.”
“He?Who?” Frustration scalded me. “And why not?”
“This is the Deep-Dream,” Rían said, by way of explanation. “Where nothing is real, yet anything may come to pass. Save, of course, what cannot be.”
“Morrigan help me,” I growled. “But if I hear one more obtuse riddle, I’ll scream.”
“Then let me tell you something plain, little deer.” Rían’s pain was evident on his face. “I beg of you.”
Despite my best intentions, curiosity corroded my misgivings. “Tell me why you keep calling me that name.Little deer.”
“Because I did not live long enough to give you any other ones.” Misery arrowed over his aristocratic features. “Tell me your true name, my daughter.”
I clenched my fists. “Fia.”
“You see!Little deer.” Gladness brightened his face before he frowned yet again, as some new emotion ghosted over his features. A memory, a premonition. “Who gave you that name?”
