Regan kissed him. She opened his mouth with hers, tasting the corners of his lips, the edge of his teeth, and he tilted his chin, sighing a harsh breath. Connley kissed her back. One hand found her neck, slid up to her skull, fingers dug roughly through her tangled dark hair. A spark—the last star Regan might ever claim. His grip tightened, then went slack as his arm sank slowly again. His breath softened. Hitched.
“No,” she whispered, and the knife in her hand flipped; she aimed the point at her ribs, pausing just a moment to lift her voice to the wind:My heart for his, my life blood for his, take it, take anything.
Weight hit Regan’s shoulder as Osli tackled her, knocking the witch to the ground and snatching at the knife with quick skill.
“No!” Regan screamed, and again, gasping, crushed beneath the other woman’s weight.
“My lady would murder me if I let you die,” Osli said. She tossed the knife far away, pinning Regan still. Regan tried to reach for her husband. Her fingers only grazed his hair.
“Get off me,” she ordered, but in a quiet, desperate whisper.
The captain obeyed.
Regan crawled nearer to Connley, tucking her cheek against his shoulder from upside down, and wrapped one arm around his head.
Sunlight flashed in a long line at the horizon, a signal to the dying night.
ELIA
DAWN BROKE THROUGHthe storm clouds lingering over the White Forest, and the tattered, torn trees glistened with sun-pink drops of rain.
Elia opened the door of Brona’s cottage for Ban’s departure.
Though Elia only had wrapped herself in a blanket over the long shift she’d gone to bed in, Ban wore a clean shirt borrowed from Kay Oak’s traveling bags, and a coat of his mother’s that fit his shoulders. They’d done what they could with his hair, braiding pieces of it back from his face. Still he seemed wild, though that might have been his expression or those hollow cheeks. He paused, framed in the door. His eyes rested on hers, heavy with the weight of all that had passed between them.
But Elia felt grounded for the first time in years. She could see the paths they’d followed, and why, the choices they’d been forced to make for themselves and never for each other. Before she let him go, she needed only one more answer.
Elia folded her hands before her: not in pain, not holding some great, gnawing wound inside, merely regal and sure like the queen she was supposed to be.
She asked, “What do you want, now that this storm has passed?”
“I am the storm,” Ban murmured. He leaned closer to her, until his forehead brushed hers and his words tickled along her cheekbone to her ear. “I want this island to crumble, and see what rises. Discover who can transform all the shattered power into something strong. Will it be you?”
“Stars and worms, Ban Errigal,” she whispered, shivering.
“I had to come home because this is what I was meant to do. To pull Innis Lear apart. To show your father and my father and everyone who believes as they do how fragile everything truly is, and how wrong they have been.”
“Am I wrong, too?”
Ban pressed her against the doorframe. Body to body. “What doyouwant, Elia Lear?” he asked, then kissed her tenderly.
She welcomed the kiss, relishing its warmth and simplicity, when nothing about this was simple. His lips, her tongue, their teeth and hearts.
Elia leaned back and said, “I want to save everyone.”
“So we are opposed,” he whispered, muddy green eyes too near her own.
“No.” She touched his lips with her fingers, nudging him away. “I’m going to save you, too.”
It was clear from the bleakness in his face that Ban did not believe her. Well, she would make him believe, just as she would make her sisters. “Go to Gaela and bring her to me at Errigal Keep. I will get my father and go to Regan. We will wait there, and when you and my eldest sister arrive, you’ll see what I can do.”
“I’ll go to Gaela.” Ban’s lips barely moved under her fingers.
“Good.” She began to kiss him again, but Aefa suddenly appeared.
“Elia,” said a wide-eyed Aefa, approaching through the squelching mud with another woman behind her. “You—um.”
“I must go,” Ban murmured.
