Page 63
“And?”
“And if anything is there just waiting to chomp you up, with all of us staying behind you, you’ll be a sitting duck. For all you know, that bastard Raven is waiting with the Ard Rí’s soldiers to collect you.”
“He doesn’t know.”
All three exchanged looks, and it was Green Man who spoke next. “You’re telling me you’re mourning a guy who doesn’t even know you’re the heir of the House of Magic? You’ve been dragging your chin around over a fella you couldn’t even trust with that information?”
“It’s complicated. But yes. I . . . I didn’t want to risk him knowing where he’d be able to find us after we fled. He doesn’t even know I’m Fae.”
Green Man tipped his head back as if praying for patience. “I swear, I Don’t Know, you are the absolute worst at this. Did you at least tell this new one who you are before you fucked him?”
“I didn’t fuck him, dammit!” My voice rose a little too loudly, and two nearby soldiers who were tearing down a tent turned to look at me, grinned, and then went back to their preparations. “Listen, can we just talk less about who I am and am not fucking? At least for now, and just . . . get ready to leave?”
The three of them snickered but were kind enough to listen to me when I asked them to get ready to leave. All three of them went to different tents. Brittle Spear hadn’t been lying when he said he had taken care of my friends. When they emerged, all three had sturdy-looking full saddle packs slung over their shoulders. How he had known exactly who I traveled with and what they would need, I didn’t know.
But I was starting to suspect there was more to the Fómhar Ard Tiarna. Between everything he seemed to know, his command of magic even here in the wilds, and the way he so effortlessly shifted forms from one to another, my suspicions were rising.
Chapter 24
Ard Tiarna Emrys of Breacadh an Lae, The Raven of the Dawn
The nightmares had returned. They were never truly strangers. The occasional reprieve granted either by the grace of my little bug still reaching through the lines of magic to get to me, or by the midnight-purple grip of the dark sister, never lasted. I tossed in my bed as scenes from the smiting of the Árus Láigh flashed across my mind. My family, our common folk, children, humans. Their screams pierced my sleeping ears, making them bleed just as their bodies had. And I couldn’t escape them. I couldn’t help them. I couldn’t stop the swing of a glinting sword. I couldn’t push away an ax from the tender neck it sought. All I could do was helplessly watch as they were all slaughtered and the manor was put to the torch.
Sweat, thick and sticky with the efforts of the Siur Dobh to try and banish the brutality, coated my skin as I tossed in the soiled sheets. My muscles burned and ached from the inaction forced upon them by the paralysis of sleep. My hands itched for the weight of a hammer long ago shattered just as I had been.
My mother’s face, once the very epicenter and beating heart of my joy, came into watery view, twisted and gnarled not with age as it should be but with hate and accusation. This is all your fault, it screamed, denouncing the womb that had brought the greatest calamity upon her and all that she loved. I was the weapon she had given life to that had turned upon her, and as her head came free of her shoulders, it was my hand that held the ax.
I was ripped backwards, not to the exoneration of the waking world, but to a dark, barren landscape, a battlefield at the foot of a hulking mausoleum with two stars burning above it—the House of Magic. I was haunted by this day most of all. I had dreamed of nothing else in the first fifty years after the War of Thorns. I knew this nightmare so well I could predict every footfall, every strike to faceless enemies. There were never any faces. Never any sound. Never any sensation. It was a night filled with war against specters I had excused long ago, being anonymous by the grace of the drugs I had been consuming.
The same drugs that I consumed now. The same drugs that had dulled the slicing within me.
I watched my razing of the House of Magic as a passive observer, disassociated from the hand that wielded the massive blackstone-headed hammer that split heads like overripe melons and shattered bones on contact, leaving the Fae in my wake nothing more than mangled pulp. I advanced on the golden-haired witch standing defiant in the courtyard with all the grace of a wolf, stalking her, knowing I felt hate at that moment, but in my nightmare, it was a hollow, borrowed emotion. Her daggers flashed in the light of the two stars conjured above her head, never missing a joint or throat that came near her. Bodies piled in great towers around her, and she pulled from them golden threads of their luck, tainted and rotting, to use as garrotes to decapitate them.
When a soldier got inside her guard, she would whisper something to them, surround them with a mist of golden dust, and the soldier would turn on their compatriots and fight for the golden-haired witch.
Airgetlám.
She had murdered her husband. I was aware in the dream, always aware, but never knowing how I knew; that was the reason I was here. To execute her for her crimes against magic, for destroying the God of Magic. Why she had done it or even how, I never knew, but I knew my orders.
She pulled a star from the sky and flung it at me; it twisted into a magic storm as it came for me. I floated above my body as it moved out of the way, sliding in under her guard. She howled when my gauntlet-covered hand curled around her neck, but I could never make out the words she said before I crushed her throat. As she lay dying at my feet, she pulled the other star from the sky and collapsed it into the other.
A supernova of a magic storm erupted from the center where they touched and hurled the few living Fae left back into a tangle of bushes. When we rose, there was nothing left of the hulking beast of a building.
Nothing left except the sleeping babe in my arms.
I never remembered pulling her from the rumble. That was never in the nightmare. That was never part of the memory; it turned dark, bitter, and torturous.
I looked down at the baby’s face, and it was empty. A swirling void of nothingness swallowing the light as a tiny hand reached up and captured my finger.
I sat up straight in my bed, suddenly pulled free of the dreams. The ocean eyes I had been hoping to see never came for me. They never rescued me from the pits of despair, and I scrubbed a hand down my sweat-covered face. Exhaustion still hung heavy on me; when the dreams were this crisp, I was better served by not even seeking respite in the den of my pillows. And yet I always did, hoping that this time I would see her again.
Dawn crept over the windowsill, bringing with it the specter of my mother’s scream. I hadn’t been at Breacadh an Lae when the order for their execution was carried out. My nightmares of its destruction were solely crafted from an imagination just as brutal as the torment I had received as punishment for my deeds. They changed every time they came for me. Some nights are more brutal than others—some nights sweet and melancholy as a haunting, keening song.
My head felt too full of restless ghosts. Too full of old crimes to think beyond the next heartbeat. I just needed some space—just a little breathing room to be able to get out of bed.
I reached for the bottle of wine and dumped the resinous ichor I had prepared before lying down. I knew that the odds of my sleep being peaceful were smaller than I liked. The dark red swallowed the sticky purple easily, as if it was just as hungry for it as I was. When I was satisfied that it was dissolved, I tipped the bottle back and let it wash through me.
Where the howls of ghouls had ruled, a pillowy cloud of purple fog pushed them out, and I could finally fill my lungs.
