I frowned—the words echoed strangely inside me, conjuring a distant kind of familiarity I struggled to place. Someone had said that to me before. Here?
“Who?” The ground beneath my feet lurched. The forest whispered words that sounded likeYou cannot hide here. A figure moved beyond the blurred cottage windows—a shadow in the dim. “Who is to blame?”
“Find your sister. You are her balance. Only you can bring her to the light.”
“Eala?” Hatred and hope were twin pulses in my galloping heart. “How?How do I bring her to the light?”
“I must say goodbye now.” His eyes were panicked, pained. “I am sorry for all I have done. But I am sorrier still for all I never got the chance to do. I would have liked to have held you. I would have liked to have known you. I would have liked to have… to have loved you, little deer.”
His hands fell from my shoulders. He stepped away. Reached for the door to the cottage. I tried to lunge after him, but the wind shoved me backward. The ground bucked, making me stumble to one knee.
“Don’t leave me!” I screamed. “Tell me what I must choose! Tell me who to blame! Tell me how to save my sister!” He turned the knob. Opened the door. “Father!”
The word shattered over him, curving his spine and unearthing a sound from the depths of his chest. But he uncurled as he turned, and when he spoke, it was as if he channeled someone else’s voice—a voice so inhuman I hardly recognized its speech.
“A feather so black will rise from pain.” Rían’s frame seemed to expand, filling the entryway of the hut as his hair blossomed around him. “A crown so silver will rise to reign.”
I froze. I had heard these words before—Corra had spoken them to me the last time I was at Dún Darragh. I had thought them meaningless drivel. But now I was rapt—the weight of importanceclung to Rían like a shroud. I suddenly knew, in the depths of my soul—these were the last words my father would ever speak to me. I crawled toward him over the rocking earth, coughing against the billows of acrid smoke.
“A heart so green must bleed once more,” intoned Rían—or whatever father-shaped thing he was becoming. “For light and dark to one restore.”
Talah screamed into the glade. I covered my head with my hands as the glass sky shattered, raining sooty diamonds around me. When I looked up, everything had vanished—the forest, the wildflower fields, the cottage. My father.
“No.” The word emerged as a whisper, but as the tempest of Talah’s fury roared around me, it became something to cling to—a buoy in the dark. There was more he’d been meant to tell me. More to the poem—the prophecy. And now he was gone. Forever. “No!No!”
Talah reared behind me, colossal in this strange, liminal space between living and sleeping, dreaming and dying. Her hair was a million strands of swirling darkness, ever shifting as the dance of time; her skin shimmered with the molten glow of a thousand suns. Her metal eyes burned with ancient stars; every breath she took shuddered through the cosmos, as if her presence was both creation and destruction. I shielded my eyes from her visage. But it was no use.
She was not truly here, expanding and contracting before me. She wasinsideme.
Come, child.Her voice reverberated in my skull.It is time. There is nowhere left to hide. Let me in.
No. This was all wrong—this was not how my story ended.
Trapped in my own mind, I had experienced a hundred different emotions, relived a thousand different memories. I had witnessed my own conception, glimpsed the beautiful ending at the heart of all creation. I had heard the Bright One to whom I’d bound myself speak longingly of home, heard my dead father speak of the terriblesacrifices he had made for love. All this had occurred in the space of a heartbeat, or perhaps years. Everything crashed over me like the felling of an ancient tree, bludgeoning me with half-remembered facts and confusing rhymes and opaque pronouncements.
My fear and frustration merged into a primal force that burned hotter than reason and darker than doubt. Ínne’s words thrilled through me, birthing echoes to swirl around me.
We are all the same. We are all different. Yet by the circles we are all bound.
I suddenly knew what I had to do.
“You’re right,” I screamed at the molten endlessness of Talah, relentless and unstoppable. “There is nowhere left for me to hide. I am going to let you in.”
I registered her faint surprise as I climbed shakily to my feet amid the shattering spell of the Deep-Dream.
You are?
“I am.” I mustered all my dreadful determination and buckled it over my uncertainty like armor, until I stood ironclad before my psychic oppressor. “I’m going to let you in. Then I’m going to shove you out.”
Again, Talah registered a remote kind of astonishment.How?
I had no earthly idea whether my plan was going to work. I had no idea whether my friends were even alive, or where they had brought me while I fought my internal battle. Perhaps we were still on Emain Ablach as it sank into the sea. Perhaps I was moments from my own true death.
But if there was one thing I had learned over the last year, it was this: There was a pattern embroidered among the stars. I was tangled in it—and had been since before I was even born. And I could either let it take me where it pleased… or wrap my fists in its gods-forsaken threads and steer it where I wanted to go.
By the circles we are all bound.
“My name is Fia Ní Mainnín. First daughter of Deirdre, heir of the Sept of Antlers. Last daughter of Rían, high king of Fódla.Wife of Irian of the Sept of Feathers.” I climbed slowly to my feet on the glass-strewn emptiness below me. I began to run, my boots finding purchase on dying dreams, on scattered stars. “I was made of unscrupulous kings and sorrowful heirs and forbidden love; of burned-out stars and deep green magic and unruly thorns.” I flung myself at the Bright One, expanding until I matched her in size and magnitude and will. We circled each other in the endless dark. I smiled as I wrapped my arms around her. “And I want my body back, you bitch.”
