The only answer I got was a faint snore. I slowly untangled Irian’s hand from my hair, finished unclasping his mantle, and unbuckled what armor I could reach. Then I stepped out of my own sodden kirtle, draping its gossamer layers to dry before the fire. I hesitated, then slid under the warm woolen coverlet, nestling my small frame against Irian’s larger one. Cocooned in blankets, I was no threat to him.
As his easy breath tickled my hair, I smiled and closed my eyes.
War loomed. Danger waited. Decisions needed making. But it had been a long, long time since I’d danced carefree with the man I loved.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Fia
Morning dawned the luminous blue-gray of a dove’s soft wing.
Irian awoke alert and refreshed, the prior evening’s revels leaving him none the worse for wear. The inn was quiet in the hush of morning, and we were not accosted as we made our way down the stairs and let ourselves out the door. Beyond, the world had been washed clean by rain. Songbirds chirped and twittered from the budding hazel; along the village green, daffodils and crocuses awoke in vibrant bursts of color. The lone goat munched happily upon emerald grass, heedless of the two geese flapping nearby in what appeared to be an elaborate mating ritual.
I nudged Irian and pointed at the gander, honking and strutting and swerving his neck.
“That’s what you looked like last night.”
“I will have you know,” Irian said in mock affront, “that in our youths both Wayland and I were considered the finest dancers Emain Ablach had ever seen.”
“Wayland taught you that dance?” I grinned wickedly. “Now it all makes sense.”
Irian shoved me lightly. “Just admit you loved it.”
We found Finan—drowsing beneath a blanket with plenty of hay in the bin—and saddled him before departing the village. Even the ramshackle houses with their holey thatch and peeling paint looked quaint and rural in the winsome sunlight. Beyond the last houses, I mounted Finan. But Irian caught his bridle, gazing at me with eyes blue as the sheer morning.
“There is something you have not told me, mo chroí. We said we would not keep secrets.”
I bit my lip, guilt nettling between my shoulders. “I did not mean to keep it from you—it’s only that I don’t know if I’m right.”
Briefly, I explained my theory about the starshine to Irian. How Talah had awoken all the dormant wild magic I’d absorbed from Ínne as an infant, in counterpoise to the warped wild magic unleashed by the malicious destruction of the Treasures. And how the fact that my glow harmed only Irian made me wonder if it sought to free the magic bound within him… at the cost of his living vessel.
Irian listened, gravely. “Then you believe it is possible to unforge the Treasures.”
“Not without harming the tánaistí. We will find another way.”
“And you have come all this way to assassinate your sister.”
“I meant what I told the others,” I said. “I must try to reason with her before taking drastic action.”
“You do not owe her that.”
“I owemyselfthat.” I tightened my hands in Finan’s mane and nailed certainty along my spine.Find your sister. You are her balance. Only you can bring her to the light.“Before I destroy my sister, I must try to change her mind. To give her the tools to change her own fate, before I forcibly rip it to shreds. Otherwise I am no better than her. And in the stories they will someday tell of all that has come to pass, I will be as much a villain as she.”
“What if her mind cannot be changed?”
“Then yes. If it comes to it, I will let Talah’s curse unmake Eala’sTreasure, destroy her living vessel with it, and end this war before it truly begins.”
I nudged the stallion forward between the hedgerows as Irian transformed into his anam cló and took to the skies, arrowing above green pastures.
Only to find the war had already begun.
There were no boundaries or markers delineating Bridei from Midhe, the neutral province at the heart of Fódla where high kings and queens kept their capital. But crossing into Midhe was like leaving a heaven and descending into a hell.
I smelled the smoke first, the acrid tang of burnt thatch and charred flesh wafting toward my nostrils on an easy breeze. Then I saw the plume of black sawing the sky in half. Urging Finan over the ridge, I yanked the reins hard at the crest, where the full scope of Eala’s devastation spilled before me.
The farmhouse in the valley had been prosperous, with a large yard surrounded by plentiful outbuildings and well-ordered gardens and pastures stretching toward the horizon, where a fruit orchard and wood coppice grew.
The farm complex had been torched to a blackened husk of wood and stone. The animals had been brutally executed, their carcasses laid out in intentional lines. The fields had been churned to mud and blood and ruin. Even with my diminished Treasure, I heard the fruit and timber trees’ soundless screams as their leaves and bark flaked to ash and their trunks and branches smoldered.
