Page 15
The face I turned up to was not her though. Just a wine-stained autumn image with no features and no pumping heart at its center, like melting wax across a stained glass window.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” I screamed, hands moving across the Fae’s face trying to push away the wax, desperate to find the hope buried beneath it that it was really her.
“Stop,” the Fae commanded, desperately trying to slap away my hands. “Stop!” she commanded again, this time sharing in the intoxicating fear and panic that ran marathons with my own misery.
But I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop until I freed her. Until I got to her. I had to save her. I had to uncover her from the prison of wax that held her.
Magic, foreign and warm like caramel, wrapped arms around me, prying loose the dark sister’s hold to replace it with theirs for a short time. Just long enough to slip fingers into my mind and stroke it into comforted sleep. Drowsiness replaced the angry, bitter, hateful, terrified sorrow, and I slumped across the body of the Fae that held me.
“You were right to come to get me,” I heard the Fae say as I floated somewhere in an amber glow above the melted wax scene below me.
“What’s wrong with him?” the other voice, the buzzing voice, asked.
“I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I saw him like this, but he stinks of Siur Dobh and milúll. I’d guess he’s high off his gourd and hallucinating.”
“Why would he attack the gods though?” There was genuine, perplexed concern in the younger voice.
“He has not exactly been treated kindly by them, especially in their silence, but this is new.”
“Will he remember?”
“I think it’s best if he does not. The shame he will feel for this violation of the sanctity of the Temple would rot within him. And he has enough shame curving his spine, this might snap it.”
The amber around me glowed warmer, and I floated further away, cradled in the soft comfort of its serenity as I became one with it. Coins flowing into each other filled the warm space and sang me lullabies from a childhood long forgotten, long abandoned and taken too soon from me.
And then there was nothing. No thoughts. No sensation. No inevitable dreams or nightmares, not even the dark sister invading my mind to tempt me further into her clutches. Just sweet, gentle, nothingness where I could exist without the weight of everything around me and within me.
Chapter 7
Ard Tiarna Emrys of Breacadh an Lae, The Raven of the Dawn
“Are you hiding from your duties or from your soldiers?” The question floated above the hungry midnight haze lurking at the edges of my consciousness and the whimpering snorts of my opponent being helped from the inner bailey.
The elite soldiers of the court had been moved as close to the heart of the castle as possible to protect the courtiers who floated through the inner halls without a single care in the world. None of them were overly concerned with the lives of the four daora that had gone missing. None of them even considered that they might be out there in the unforgiving wilderness of Magh Meall, let alone if they survived at all. All they cared about was if the venom they heard had been used against the Ard Rí had spread.
Fickle beasts. Fickle, fickle creatures. Every day I watched them, I grew wearier of the palace. The ache to retreat fully into the broken teeth of my ancestral home and let magic claim me for breaking my oath was a cruel temptation barely staved off with the bottles of Siur Dobh I drowned myself in every night to get away from the ghost of her perfume, the echoes of her breath, and the hauntings of her touch across my battered flesh.
I looked up from unwrapping the shreds of cloth that held together the broken knuckles of my brutalized hands. The Ard Rí leaned heavily on a black wooden cane, his long golden-blonde hair dancing in the faint breeze. He had forgone his usual frippery. No luminous crown of foxglove adorned his head. No glittering ear cuffs sat proud on the naked tips of his ears. His soft cornflower-blue eyes were warm and welcoming. Another time, another lifetime, I would have felt the thump of my heart pound low in my chest with the majesty of his beauty.
Whether he was cruel or adoring, the Ard Rí had always been an exquisite specimen of magic. When we were children, I would climb the creeper vines running up the side of his family’s tower and stare at him for hours between the stone spindles of his balcony. It had taken me decades to work up the courage to kiss him for the first time. He had been this glittering beacon of radiance, and I had just been a mud-covered gangly string of a Fae that barely knew how to work his elbows and knees compared to his ethereal grace with blade and bow.
I ripped myself away from memory and sat back to let the drui of Ailbhe set the two broken ribs. A mildly annoyed grunt was all I could answer him with.
Daróg’s sky-kissed eyes flicked from the drui to my ribs, and then they scanned me up and down, taking a quick assessment of the extensive list of injuries upon my body. Did he notice the nightshade tint to my lips under the reddish-brown stain of dried blood? Or the way my fingertips had woad buried deep under cracked nails from grinding it into the resins. Did he note the way my sweat was thicker and stank of crushed plants? Did he see all the familiar signs we had ignored or hidden a thousand times in our youth? Was he annoyed that there was another slice into the tattoos, these wounds he had not inflicted?
“When the drui is done stitching your nipple back on, I would have words with you. If you will allow me your time, Captain?” His throat had grown weak, too many hours spent parched or burning with fever as the venom worked its way through his body. Even more hours spent lacerated by unending screaming as they tried to heal the damage to his spine.
“When have you asked before?” I growled as the curved needle slid between the petals of my flesh and began stitching the flap back to its rightful place.
I had to admit, whether it aligned with the pretty picture of chivalrous battle that the rest of the court liked to imagine or no, the Bull’s attack was a stroke of genius. It had disarmed me both mentally and physically. I would be nesting that move into my personal grimoire of battle maneuvers.
A wry, almost coquettish smirk crossed the pale blush of his full lips. “There was a time once. Long ago.”
“A very long time ago.”
“Will you yield?”
The drui flicked her eyes between us and tied off the last of the stitches before bowing to the Ard Rí and making an exit as quickly possible. Fae had a way of making themselves scarce around the two of us.
