The wrongness of her taste assailed Irian. She savored not of sun-warmed stone or cool moss, but ofbog tar. Scorched metal. Flesh heated to searing.
His eyes slashed open. His horror caught at her shoulders. His dismay pushed her back, even as she ground on him.
“Fia?”
This time, when metal sparked in her eyes, he knew it was no trick of the moonlight. Her irises were silver threaded through with gold; the pupils, black as an untold future. They were ancient, unknowable. Fearsome. And theyburned.
With greed. With hatred. With desire.
This was no longer Irian’s wife looking back at him. It was something else. And it longed to be free.
Every night, in the hour before dawn, Irian no longer fought with Fia. He fought with himself, and his own treacherous desires. He fought to hold at arm’s length the form of the woman he wished never to let go… even as the entity inside her taunted him with her mastery.
That was when he felt his strength begin to crack. His endurance begin to ebb. His hope begin to hollow.
He had promised never to let Fia go. But if she was already gone… then so was he.
Without Fia, there was nothing left of Irian.
At least, nothing good.
Morning blushed behind jagged black peaks striped in lavender and rose. These were not the flowering crags of Ildathach, nor the basalt bastions of Mag Mell—not even the pale silver cliffs of Emain Ablach. They had passed beyond the bounds of Tír na nÓg into the unknown lands Irian had only ever heard called the Barrens. A hard, uncivilized region not even the Fair Folk had wanted to claim.
It occurred to Irian with a burst of irony that in all his years of searching for heirs, the reason he had never found Laoise was simply because she had hidden herself beyond where he desired to look.
Dim rocks came alive with color beneath the rising sun. Veins of sapphire streaked between layers of garnet; seams of emerald reached between geodes bristling with sparkling quartz. A thrill of magic bronzed Irian’s veins.
A night’s sleep had revived Laoise—dimples quirked in her pert cheeks, and her hair flamed red as the dawn. She grinned infectiously.
“You feel it, don’t you?”
“I was always told these lands were naught but desert and despair,” Irian growled. The night had been less kind to him than to the Gentry maiden. He curled Fia close so he would not have to regret all the times he had been forced to push her away. “Why would the Fair Folk have steered clear of all this magic if it was free for the taking?”
“Because you can’t.” Laoise’s smile grew. “Take it, that is.”
Irian did not enjoy sayingI do not understand. So he said nothing.
“Don’t fret, tánaiste,” Laoise said blithely. “You’ll see.”
Irian tamped down a brisk surge of resentment before forcing his steps onward. It did not matter where they went, what they saw, or how they lived. It only mattered that they survived.
Thatshesurvived.
Chapter Four
Wayland
Wayland did not enjoy solitude.
He could not remember a time when he had enjoyed being alone. He usually blamed his mother for this indecent character flaw. But then, he had discovered over the past two and a half decades that absent mothers could be blamed for just about anything. It was harder to blame megalomaniacal, narcissistic fathers who defied consequences. Hardest still to blame your deepest, most imperfect, least changeable self. Not that Wayland hadn’t done that too.
Still, in those rare, miserable times when he accidentally found himself engaging in introspection, Wayland worehersilhouette through his loneliness. As though when beautiful, kind, sad Úna had plucked her heavy oiled pelt from his arms, wordlessly turned her back on him, and dived soundlessly into the glittering ocean, she had left her shadow behind. A mother-shaped lacuna gouged in the fabric of his soul.
Over the years Wayland had found he had a great love for filling holes. (Not only in the most perverse sense, although he enjoyedthat too.) When Irian had first arrived on Emain Ablach so long ago—a broken-winged bird—Wayland had shoved him bodily into that mother-shaped gap. Irian had nearly fit;motherandbrothersounded almost alike, after all. In some ways, a brother was even better than a mother—mothers made rules and set bedtimes and forced you to eat your vegetables. A brother dared you to climb salt-rimed cliffs and steal tasty honey-wren eggs, even if it meant a broken wrist and a lashing from your father. A brother made you laugh until you pissed yourself. A brother kept your secrets and trusted you to keep his. A brother never left you alone, no matter if he was smearing frog spawn in your underwear or mercilessly dunking you in the lagoon.
Until he did. Wayland tried not to blame Irian for leaving—unlike Wayland’s mother, Irian had no choice in the matter. But Irian’s exile had cut something sharper and darker into the gulf yawning inside Wayland, etching a kind of understanding into the emptiness. Wayland began to name the cavernous shape living inside himloneliness. It whispered to him, things likeAnyone you ever love will leave. AndNot that they ever loved you in the first place.
Wayland found new ways to fill the hole. Bodies were almost always best—sex the finest facsimile of true connection, without any of the risks. He could lose himself in warm flesh and beating hearts and searing touches and snatched kisses and emerge on the other side unscathed. No new holes gouged in his heart, no new rifts carved from his tenderest spaces. When bodies didn’t work, there was wine. Or tincture of drualas, sliding bitter beneath his tongue until he was lost in incandescent hallucinations.
