The grove flailed and jerked as if caught in an invisible storm.
All magic comes at a cost, Talah warned, but I heard only her fear.It may break your heart to pay it.
“Our hearts were made for breaking—that magic made for mending.” The fire from the tree felt as if it was beginning to leak into my flesh—a blinding incandescence that illuminated my skin from the inside. But I could not have drawn my palm away even if I’d wanted to. “The balance is not voluntary. It is essential. Eternal. But mutable. By these laws I bind you, O Talah.”
My skin thrummed. Throbbed. Shone. Somewhere deep inside me, Talah thrashed.
“Before, you were bound by threes. Three shackles, three kings, three elements. Thrice three trees.” The words juddered out of me, hasty. Uneven. “We bound you anew with fours. Four heirs. Four shackles. Four elements.” I dared take my eyes from the flaming tree in front of me long enough to sweep my eyes around the grove. I had counted six other trees, had I not? I could not falter. “Now I bind you by seven. Seven flaming trees.” What else? My mind raced, unsteady. I glanced at Laoise, gripping Irian as if she had any hope of holding him back, should he truly wish to shake her. I had glimpsed Sinéad back in the caverns. Who else had made the journey with us? Balor? Wayland? Linn? I had to hope it was enough. “Seven companions, their friendships forged through hardship.” Inside me, Talah loosened, as if the invisible strings binding us together were snapping, one by one. “Seven—”
“Dragain!” Irian’s roar shattered my concentration—I whipped my head around to look at him. The word shuddered through me, evading my full understanding.
“Irian—” Laoise cried in protest, glancing up at the shadows whirling above my head.
“Sevendragain!” Irian repeated, adamant.
Wonder and bewilderment beat wings around my head.
“I bind you, O Talah, with seven mythic dragain.” My palm, connected to the tree, was on fire—heat and light bleeding into my veins. Inside me, Talah had almost stopped struggling—as if she, like me, realized this moment was inevitable. Whatever I had set into motion—for good or ill—must now be completed. “By earth and by sky, by fast water and by ancient flaming trees, I bind you, O Talah!” My rising voice was echoed by the cacophonous shrieks of the creatures winging overhead. The words crackled along my throat, throbbed along my bones. Talah began to slip away from me at the same rate she had once colonized me—slowly but irrevocably. Her molten consciousness sluicing hot between my ears, her flaming force slurping through my marrow. I held myself still, although I was shaking. I stared at the hand connecting me to the flaming tree, the skin unblemished despite the tumultuous pain making me sure I was burning alive.
That is not the price, Talah whispered as she was dragged away by her new binding.The night you freed me from Gavida, you ate of my apples. I could not grant the wish you spoke, for I had already been torn from the network of groves I have heard you callnemeta. Now I am returned to the source of my elemental magic. This is not my home. But it is… home.
I could barely focus on her words. I remembered biting into the last morsel of the wishing apple, swallowing its tender, sweet flesh. What had I wished for?I wish to become whatever I must be to withstand her.Sudden fear rose in me, white-hot. Surely that wish had already been granted. Surely all I had become in the Deep-Dream—all I had done to withstand her—had been because of that magic.
Have you learned nothing, star child?Talah murmured as the last of her consciousness ebbed away like a falling tide. As always, she sounded vaguely regretful, as if her actions were beyond her control. As if she were simply performing a role already scriptedfor her by the patterns etched between the stars.The cost and the reward are the same—both a heart rended and a heart mended. It is as it has always been. Now you have become truly star touched.
The grove exploded with light. Fire screamed from all seven sacred trees, light and heat lofting in magnificent columns of gold and red and smoking black. I snatched my hand away and scrambled back. The energy coursing upward abruptly changed direction. The frenzied flames swirled into the ground. The stones shook, deep and deeper. The caves Laoise and I had sprinted through groaned. I braced myself against shattered memories of Emain Ablach on the Longest Night, suddenly terrified that whatever I had done to free myself from Talah had doomed me instead.
Doomed all of us.
With one last heaving shudder, the earth stilled. I slowly looked up. The trees werealive, breathtaking and brilliant, their blown-glass trunks and crystalline branches coursing with molten firelight. Veins of silver and gold now joined the red and yellow, plunging into the earth where the roots stretched. High on the branches, tucked between red leaves embossed with metal, I swore I saw apple blossoms, pink and gold as a long-awaited dawn.
A tall black-clad figure hurtled toward where I crouched. Irian’s arms gathered me; his hands fluttered at my shoulders, swept over my hair, cupped my cheeks. His lips parted as if he meant to speak to me. Or perhaps kiss me.
Instead, heroared.
The raw sound tore from him, born from an instinct so extreme it could only be physical pain. His head dropped, his spine convulsed—and then he wrenched away from me. His hands did not so much lift from my skin aspeelaway. His palms, when he spread them in shock between us, were blackened and smoking, the skin destroyed.
Burnt.
“Fia?” His voice warbled with desperate uncertainty, as if he was not sure who I was. His eyes, when they lifted to mine, wereharrowed with pain and wide with creeping shock. “Gods alive, Fia. You are—”
Surprised, I glanced at myself, barefoot and barely clothed, smeared with cave dirt and tree soot and stone dust. I wasglowing. Shining. Not in the way all the Folk Gentry did—as if they were lit from within by soft, luminous candles. But aggressively. Astonishingly. Incandescently.
My skin shone white-hot, concentrated and cold and fierce. I ran my hands instinctively over my arms, braced for whatever scathing pain had injured Irian. But to my own hands, my skin was cool. Pliant.Normal.
Horror wavered through me, chasing away the triumph of Talah’s new binding. I was not normal. Not anymore.
Irian was still staring at me as if I had fallen from the sky. “You are—”
“Star touched,” I breathed.
Chapter Twenty-One
Wayland
The mood in the Cnoc was like someone had accidentally kicked a hornet’s nest and now waited for the inevitable sting. Tense, heavy anticipation haunted the halls with unspoken fears. Wayland had barely been here for five minutes and already he was tired of it.
News of Fia’s awakening had buzzed swiftly through the caverns. Mere moments after Fia and Laoise had begun their race toward the nemeton, Sinéad had slammed into the library where Wayland and Idris were working, wild-eyed and spouting gibberish. Once Wayland had worked out what she was trying to say, he’d left the library at a dead run, leaving Idris to stare open-mouthed after him.
