Nestled beside the blade, the Heart of the Forest beamed cool radiance. My own body responded, my blood throbbing eagerly along the inside of my skin as my starshine slipped, glancing in rays from my skin. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted as my flesh pebbled. Thorn-studded vines slithered from my Treasure and embroidered outward over the Sky-Sword and Fáilsceim, embossing the pale trident and dark blade with filaments of bright green, then threaded over the glossy, uneven edges of the ruby shard.
Flowers grew, tiny and delicate, with petals sharp as daggers. White as glittering stars. And black as the night sky between them.
“I think you should touch your Treasure, Fia,” Wayland said, his tone wondering. “You too, Irian. Think of your Bright Ones. Complete the circuit—source, conduit, vessel. Perhaps it will show the new conduits how to link to Laoise and me… and our sources.”
I laid my palm on the Heart of the Forest. At the same time, Irian touched the hilt of the Sky-Sword.
The Deep-Dream lingered, near as my own shadow. Ínne was there, waiting for me. Their imposing figure now brought me nothing but comfort. The burnished fur slicking their shoulder blades was leaf mulch on a forest path; the planes of their golden torso were the smooth bark of an ancient oak; their face was the dimming closeness of a shaded wood. Antlers pierced the sky and smeared blood upon the blue.
In that blue, I saw another figure. This one was not so well known to me, though I had glimpsed them before. In a faded memory, a dream I’d forgotten, a story I’d heard long ago. They resounded inside me, not in my human veins or even my Folk heart, but in the starry marrow lining my bones.
The Bright One of Irian’s Treasure was colossal as a cyclone, thunderous as a tempest. Their eyes were dark as burned-out stars and bright as struck lightning. They were the endless night and a clear cold morning. They raged, in the space where all the skies of the world met, yet they were also perfectly calm. They were the wilds of the weather and the silence between the notes of a song.
Their name rippled through me, ineffable and inexhaustible and irate:Geth.
The wordless sound of it tangled with Ínne’s name and somehow, distantly, with Talah’s. And there were other sounds, too—othernames, syllables and contours I had never heard, never imagined. They were the whispers of the universe carrying eternal secrets: the endless song of starlight, the deep groan of continents shifting, the murmur of seas unfurling, the susurrus of stories unraveling. As foreign as a stranger’s dreams, yet as familiar as my own name spoken by someone who loved me.
And two of them wererotten.
Not a vow but a curse. Not a blessing but a blight. Not a memory but ahaunting—beauty and bounty, now twisted and defiled. The syllables of their names came to me in the same way that Ínne’s and Geth’s had, but they floundered slick as slugs between my teeth. If I tried to speak them, they would come out wrong—guttural and gluttonous and warped. And the figures lurking beyond were just as corrupted. Bloated, shrunken. A sucking tide, a smoking ruin. Wrongness clung to them like a dead hand.
Solasóirí corrupted by violence and greed and destruction. Wild magic turned in on itself. The sources of the two lost Treasures.
“They’re here,” I breathed. “I can… sense them.”
“As can I,” Irian said, his low tone touched both by awe andmisgiving. I suddenly remembered the first time he had showed me the blighted wild magic billowing above an abandoned Folk city. What had he told me, that night on the moor?I might not mind oblivion, if you were the one to deliver it.
Perhaps Irian had known exactly what he spoke of. Oblivion suddenly seemed very close by—terrifying yet tempting.
“Try to maintain the connection.” Wayland’s voice—so real, so warm, sophysical—was like a shock. The sensation dragged me back from the edge of the beckoning corruption. “Laoise? Are you ready?”
I heard her reedy inhale. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Fia
As Wayland and Laoise touched the objects they hoped to forge into Treasures, their psyches flickered to life in the endless depths of the Deep-Dream like tremulous candles in the dead of night. Wayland was cool and deep as a midnight tide, with a ripple of humor frothing like foam. Laoise was a sharp red flame, staunch but brittle enough to extinguish.
Against the undulating mass of the corrupted Solasóirí, the two Gentry heirs looked small. Fragile, even. Fear clutched me. How could they possibly face such odious, overwhelming power? They would be consumed. Devoured. Unmade.
“I don’t think—” I almost snatched my hand away from the glossy, clinging surface of the Heart of the Forest.
Stay the course, child.It was Ínne’s voice, strong as an oak and ancient as a stone.We are all the same. We are all different. By the circles we are bound.
I fought my instinct to stop this before one of my friends got hurt. They had both already lost their homes because of me; I did not wish to be the architect of any more pain. “I’m afraid.”
I was speaking to Ínne, but it was Irian who responded.
Together, mo chroí.He did not speak out loud. In the endless dark and blinding light of the Deep-Dream, his voice rang steady and true as the Sky-Sword’s song. As the wailing wind. As the drumming stars.We go forward together. And not in a thousand lifetimes will I ever let you go.
Together.We reached toward the blighted wild magic.
Touching it was like biting on something rotten—bitter and cloying, the metal taste of decay sharp as rust on my tongue while the dense residue of rot seemed to cling to my skin.
I wrapped tendrils of the wild magic around my hand like the reins of some terrible beast, thenyanked. I shoved all that wrongness along the tether of my physical senses, pouring it into the Heart of the Forest and beyond. It thrummed like a blight along the vines my magic had grown over Fáilsceim and the draig egg. Veins of black embossed over the Treasures, releasing bursts of toxic spores. A nauseated heartbeat of terrible magic throbbed outward. Around us, the creation we had wrought abruptly reversed, life dying away in an instant as the soil was poisoned, the air clogged, the spring ran dry, and the fire died in a puff of sour smoke. A dull ache reverberated through me as I forced my hand to lift from the Heart of the Forest; the once-emerald vines binding the Treasures together sifted away to gray ash.
“It’s done,” I whispered.
