“Power is not freedom,” Laoise scoffed. “To wield power is to be bound by it. It may be endless—but it is an endless web of consequence and desire. The stronger one grows, the tighter the noose. Power is not freedom—it is merely the illusion of control over a force that is always, in some way, in control of you.”
Then let power be a blade. To carve out a home. To strike down your enemies. To take what you need.
“True power is not in what you can take, but in what you care to protect.” It was one of Scáthach’s favorite sayings—she who could have ruled kingdoms or destroyed kings but chose instead to build a haven for women who wished to find their own strength.“A blade is poor protection—for it cuts both ways. What I need is a shield.”
Not-Elen stared at her, the Bright One’s impermeable gaze full of layered, unpredictable flame. Flame that could raze a forest to the ground but spark new growth by clearing away old dead things. Flame that could tear apart empires with chaos and war or bring gentle warmth to hearth and home. Flame that sparked life into being and, within it, carried the darkness at the end of all creation.
The Shield is broken. Its flames are dead, the Bright One said, harsh.I can give you power. Or I can give you death.
“A new Treasure rises in the darkness of unchecked power. Many will cower before it, many more will die because of it; more still will break the bonds of nature’s balance and rise again.” Laoise had never yearned to inherit the Flaming Shield—not like the other potential heirs. She had always seen it for what it was—a noose at the end of a finely decorated rope. But now she had to find a way. “If you will not give me what I need to shield them, then I will have to take it.”
Yes, slithered Not-Elen’s voice as she circled Laoise. Heat licked along her cheeks and kissed her throat.Take it. Let it turn your blood to fire and your voice to flame and your hand to claws. Let the world fear Laoise of the Sept of Scales.
“I do not take it for myself,” Laoise cried. She pulled the shard of Blodwen’s egg from beneath her tunic, running her thumbs over its jagged edges. “I take it for those who cannot protect themselves. I take it as a shield for the weak. Come with me, and let us right what has been wronged. Then I swear, if it is in my power, I will set us both free.”
I am already free!Their voice was passion and restraint, curse and benediction, end and beginning.You cannot cage me again!
“You forget, Bright One—I was raised on your lore.” Laoise cupped the shard between her palms. “We are one. We are none. We are everything together.”
No.The Bright One crackled and snapped, Elen’s featuresmelting and scalding as they had that long-ago day in the warehouse. Her hair, a tongue of flame; her golden dress, a conflagration.Do not speak the words. Do not speak my name.
“By fire and by sky, by fast water and by ancient tree.” Laoise murmured the words like a prayer, even as she sliced the sharpest corner of the egg over her skin. Glowing scarlet blood welled, lacquering her fingertips. “I promise my willing heart to thee… O Flaming Shield.Grian.”
The name was a simplification—a distillation of wildness so deep it could not be named. Shadows cast upon ancient walls by dancing flames. Fullness and emptiness. Heat and cold. Light and the darkness beyond it. They rushed into Laoise with the force of a star plummeting from the firmament, slamming into her with visceral power. Her mind unmoored—slipping free of her body like a yolk from a broken egg.
She was a dying star, fierce and consuming, haunted by the vast, eerie emptiness that waited beyond. She was heat pulsing in molten veins, her skin like embers, her breath curling into gray smoke. She was flame itself: a boundless, searing force with no beginning and no end.
Then she was just Laoise, crouched on a teetering platform of stone between the arching ribs of an obsidian nemeton. The volcano rumbled a warning around her, dark stone plopping into the rippling, seething magma below. For the briefest moment, fear gripped Laoise. But then a memory soothed her—of the only tithing she had lived through, when she was seven. She remembered watching from her family’s apartments as the usually dormant Hollow erupted in a great pyre of lightning-streaked smoke. The crater wept rivulets of glowing red, like tears of flame. The spectacle had lasted only a few hours, but the cloud of smog had hung over the city for weeks, blanketing the streets with black ash. The month after, Laoise had made her first pilgrimage to the nemeton—one of the potential heirs for the next tithing.
It was as it had always been. In fire and in smoke, in ash and instone, she would be reborn. Unmade, remade. This fire would not harm her, would not consume her; it would simply strip away the pieces of who she had once been, leaving only her core. And from that she would rise—awesome and fierce and unknowable. This was the true crucible: flame, heat, and force transforming what had been shattered into something whole. Something powerful. Something impenetrable.
This was a reforging.
She shifted into her anam cló as the magma surged beneath her, molten blood pushed through the earth’s veins from its burning heart. Lifting her. Carrying her. She screamed as she arose, the throat of the crater compressing the lava into an inexorable embrace. It was agony; it was ecstasy. The pressure built—scorching, unbearable tension coiling tighter and tighter until it finally reached a breaking point.
Laoise shattered through the mouth of the crater. Filaments of light scattered around her; smoke belched in great furling sweeps; lava splashed the side of the volcano. Her large wings instinctively snapped open in the blinding, burning mayhem of the eruption. Gusts of heat carried her. And when the blackness of the night at last curled around her, cooling her scales and clearing her mind, she angled herself toward a plateau a mile from the crater.
The draigs all winged to meet her—she must be shining like a beacon in the night, even with the volcano erupting behind her. She tumbled through the air with them in affectionate greeting before finally transforming into her Gentry form upon the plateau. Sinéad was on her feet, and Laoise noticed with a jolt that the human girl had been weeping—tears etching rivulets through the light layer of ash coating her face.
“When the volcano erupted—” Her voice was smoky with resentment and choked with relief. “I thought for certain you must have died.”
Laoise wasn’t sure she had not. But it did not seem to matter so much, in this moment. “I was reborn.”
Sinéad nodded, then wordlessly unfastened her cloak from one shoulder and handed it to Laoise. She frowned, not understanding, even as Sinéad’s agonized worry shifted into something closer to discomfort.
The tithing had stripped away not only Laoise’s old self… but her old clothes too. She was naked as the day she was born. A network of markings climbed her arms and chest and shoulders, filigreed over her skin in a red so dark it was nearly black. Stylized scales, smooth and shining as her draiglings’ ombré scutes, licked her skin from the tips of her fingers to the wing of her collarbone, fading in and out of sight as the light played over them. And upon her forearms were vambraces, forged from volcanic obsidian that reflected the flaming night, each one set with half of the draig egg shard.
Laoise laughed—she couldn’t help it. She had never been bothered with shame for her physical body, and in this particular moment, clothes seemed silly. She was a vessel for enormous power, linked by a resonant conduit to a source so unknowable that their name was less a word than an idea. She was aTreasure.
But to Sinéad, she was just Laoise. And Laoise wore clothes.
“Keep it—you need it more than I.” She waved away the cloak. “We shouldn’t stay here. Can you fly?”
Sinéad nodded, her mettle returning.
“Good. Then we wing toward the Summerlands.” Laoise smiled, her euphoria like an ardent banner carrying her forward. There was no time to waste—there were dead armies to rout and royalty to reign in. There were so many people who needed her protection. “Perhaps the Summer Twins will lend me some clothes before we embroil them in a war.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
