“Eithne Uí Mainnín. My adoptive mother. And your widow. Unless you forgot about her?”
“No.” The name triggered visible horror in Rían. He paled, his skin ashen beneath his light golden hair. “Then you have truly been a pawn of destiny. An instrument of the stars. And I am sorry for it.”
“Did you not hear what I just said about riddles?” I growled. “Tell your tale, sire. Then leave me in peace.”
For an aching moment, the specter-king—my dream-father—was silent.
“Once, in a time of warring chieftains and mounting plague and gnawing famine, a young king and queen wondered how to save their people.” As Rían spoke, the metal sky began to shift and blur with colors and images. I saw a human wedding, a fort beside the sea. A beautiful maiden with dark golden hair and ice-blue eyes leaned to murmur in the ear of a serious blond man with warm brown eyes. Both wore royal torcs around their elegant throats. “Theirs was not a match born of love, but of ambition. The kinghad been born to rule but longed for his books and his poetry. The queen had been born to weave and breed but longed to lead armies and gird herself with power. They both thought they could sacrifice a little happiness in order to gain all they desired. But the stars tend to punish those who deny their destinies.”
A chill rippled over my skin. My eyes were glued to the sky as the picture shifted to the young queen—Eithne—slyly clasping hands with a young, clean-shaven Cathair before turning back to her husband.
“A druid blessed with visions of the Fair Folk told the queen of a path toward power—magic. But the Folk Gentry were wary of diplomacy. They would treat only with the high king of Fódla—no emissaries, no generals, no underlings. And so the reluctant king traveled into Tír na nÓg alone.”
I glimpsed wild revels, devious plotting, councils that went nowhere.
“Defeated, the king returned to his queen and told her all that he had seen. When she heard of the Treasures, both her imagination and her ambition were inflamed. Surely even one of these magical Treasures would turn the tide of wars, cure plagues, solve famines. And though the king told his wife how jealously the Treasures were guarded by their heirs, this only made the queen more eager to possess one. She placed her hand upon her stomach, still flat beneath the bodice of her kirtle, and begged him to bring back the magic they needed to cure their ailing realm, to make their kingdom a home safe enough to raise a child in.
“Together they hatched a plot—to steal one of the Treasures of the Folk and bring it back to Fódla. The king returned to Tír na nÓg with new determination, ingratiating himself into the Sept of Antlers. He bided his time, attending revels and war meetings alike under the guise of seeking counsel from the Folk. And then—then he mether.”
The young woman whose image splashed across the sky was Deirdre—there was no one else she could have been. She lookedlike me; or, I supposed, I favored her. Not in the way I resembled Eala, with our twin features we’d inherited from our shared father. I echoed Deirdre like a candle does a bonfire, like a raindrop a waterfall. Through Rían’s eyes she was luminous and breathtaking and terrifying as she approached him beneath a long-ago moon. Dark hair cascaded like shadow down her back. Her green eyes were lush as wild, ancient forests. Her frost-pale skin gleamed as if woven from starlight. Her smile was enchantment and ruin.
“At first, the king intended to seduce the young woman, new heir to an ancient Treasure. He assumed her an easy mark, a naïve target. But as he sought to bring her under his spell, he found it was he who became swiftly seduced—by the maiden’s exquisite grace, her quiet power, and her deep, devastating sorrow. For she was in mourning—for her only friend, whom she’d lost; for an unwanted life, thrust upon her; for her foretold death, creeping closer with every day she lived.”
The two handsome figures—Gentry maiden and human king—walked slowly in the woods. Their hands brushed. Flowers bloomed behind them, dark and bright as night pierced by falling stars.
“She told the king how she had been born to a destiny she never asked for. How she had been born to die. How the magic she inherited longed to be freed, and she with it. How she yearned for a life beyond the bounds of her Sept. With every word she spoke, the king began to yearn for the same things. He saw how trapped he himself had become, although he had never thought to rail against his silken prison. He began to dream of a destiny beyond the high walls of his fine castle, the tight bonds of his duty, the brittle charade of his loveless marriage. He began to dream… ofher.”
My heart squeezed, a vicious throb I wished I were immune to. How many times had I heard this story lurking at the beginning of my own? In how many ways? I did not know which version to believe, yet the soft pith of me wanted it to bethisversion. The story where I was not a product of treachery or betrayal or seduction… but oflove.
Images flashed by, the yarn of my parents’ destinies winding tighter on the spindle of their own destruction. I watched them kissing beneath jewel-spangled trees; passing letters beneath barred doors; stealing away to watch the sunrise; tangled together in rumpled sheets as bells tolled in distant towers. Part of me wanted to look away—this felt too intimate to intrude on. But another part of me could not bear to abandon even a glimpse of the people who had made me. For so many years, I had longed to know my own story: where I came from, who I was,whyI’d been created. Though I knew this would not make me whole, it was a sliver of something jagged coming home—a shard of broken mirror glass pressed gently back into its shattered frame.
Abruptly, they were running, swathed in heavy cloaks against the chill of late winter. Slush gnawed at their boots and made their steps laborious; crushed crocuses cried out a lament as they passed. Their eyes were wide with fear as they fled unseen pursuers; their gloved hands gripped each other tight enough to bruise.
“The king and the heir made plans to escape the stories written for them in order to write their own.” Rían’s voice was choked with emotion—I wondered what it must be like to witness the last moments before your own death. “They wanted to live their own lives, nurture their own love, raise their own family. They made for the Deep-Dream. Deirdre had heard tales of others who had fled there—a place where everything was possible, even if it wasn’t strictly real. But they were discovered.” A tear glistened upon Rían’s cheek. “The king was cut down where he stood. And as the lifeblood gushed from his body, he watched the only woman he had ever loved fling herself from the cliffs in sorrow.”
I, too, was treacherously crying. I swiped at my face as the images all faded, mastering my emotions. “Is that really what happened? Is what you have told me true?”
“What is truth, little deer?” Rían did not try to wipe away the sorrow furrowing his noble face. “Every story changes depending on who tells it. I have told you my truth. Is it enough?”
“Enough for what?” My fury returned, though softer than before. “To absolve you? You may not be the villain I believed you to be, but you are not blameless. You still abandoned your queen for another woman. Abandoned your unborn daughter for a family who existed only in your imagination. Because of what you and Deirdre did, the Gate War decimated both Folk and human realms. The bardaí learned of the Septs’ weaknesses. As a result of your selfishness, the heirs of the Treasures and all their kin were slaughtered.”
“The cost of free will is the burden of choice, and the terrible weight of consequences,” Rían said gravely. “Those who choose their own destinies will forever be cursed by uncertainty and plagued by regret. Those who choose love above duty will forever be tormented by all they have forsaken. But those who are not willing to sacrifice their hearts for the prospect of truly living may never learn what it is to be alive.”
His words hollowed the marrow from my bones. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you will have to choose.” A sudden wind blew in from the forest, harsh and hot. Rían’s hair lifted off his shoulders, and his eyes flashed dark with new fear. “And soon.”
Dread yanked my gaze over my shoulder. The trees beyond the grove were lashing with the force of a growing storm; the air corroded my nostrils with the scent of bog tar and scorched metal. The sky was hammered too thin, veins of red spiderwebbing its surface. Wildflowers sighed in warning around my knees.
Let me in.
Not Talah. Not here. I clenched my fists. How did she find me?
“Choose what?” I ground out, turning hastily back to Rían. But he was retreating toward the strange cottage thatched with feathers. I chased after him, alarm quickening my steps. “Why am I here? Why areyouhere?”
Rían rounded on me at the threshold of the cottage. His hands fell on my shoulders; his eyes bored into mine.
“He is to blame for your troubles, little deer. Not I.”
