I freeze.
“Don’t speak her name.”
“I didn’t.” He tilts his head. “You did.”
Snowflakes drift from my fingertips. Pathetic.
Mab.
Her name. Hardly spoken in centuries. It’s a ghost. A curse. The bogeyman of the Unseelie Court.
Cold. Ruthless. One of the most legendary queens Faerie has ever seen.
Murdered by her consort.
My father.
I was young. Not a child, but young enough to still believe in things. She never let me call her mother in public. Said it made her look soft. But sometimes, late at night, she’d sit at the edgeof my bed and trace frost patterns on the window while she told me about the old queens.
The ones who ruled before the courts forgot what they were.
Tatiana. Medb. Nicnevin. Beira.
“You have her eyes,” Kestra said once, and I nearly hit her. Because she was right. And because every time I look in the mirror, I see the woman my father butchered in their marriage bed.
The air turns frigid. An icy wind blows through the window. For once, it isn’t me.
Faerie remembers. Even if I’ve spent three centuries trying to forget.
I force myself to move. Dress. Walk downstairs to the tavern’s main room where Orion is pretending to read a book.
It’s upside down. I don’t ask.
The bond at my wrist pulses again. Stronger. Insistent. Like Ash can feel us shifting from stillness to motion. Like she’s been holding her breath for a month and finally lets herself hope.
Or maybe that’s me. Maybe I’ve been holding my breath, too.
The door slams open.
Not a storm. A herald.
The Morrigan enters first, followed by Macha. And behind them, a third figure. Badb.
Her eyes track movement like a predator recently woken from a very long sleep. Because she has been. The war triad is complete now. Three sisters. Three aspects of the same terrible goddess.
Fucking finally.
“Kieran.” The Morrigan’s voice carries smoke and battlefields. “Orion.”
Orion sets his upside-down book aside. “You brought company.”
“She brought herself.” Macha’s black eyes find mine. “The sleeper wakes when war demands it. We just sped it up.”
Whispen materializes at the edge of the bar, takes one look at Badb, and faints. Just collapses. No one moves to help him. Fair enough.
The three goddesses shift. Merge. Separate. It’s disorienting to watch. Woman. Three women. One woman. I’m not entirely certain anymore.
“We have news,” they say with voices that layer and split. “And a path.”
