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“Good. And he never draws too close?”
“Just as we discussed. Should he draw too close, another illusion trap of a haunt triggers. He’s never able to get close enough to touch me. Just close enough to see me clearly.”
Brittle Spear’s borrowed face stretched into a strange mix of villainous malice and pride. “Good.” He turned his attention to me. “You should know something, little bird.”
Jackdaw’s attention fell back to me again as if she had forgotten I was there while she was busy adoring what was very clearly a substitute father-like figure.
“This is Cricket, she is your brother’s anam cara.”
Jackdaw and I’s faces mirrored the twin flooding of emotion and confusion. My jaw loosened at the hinge. I had my suspicions that she might have been a member of his doomed court and known him, but I hadn’t truly suspected that she was Emrys’ sister!
She recovered first, “He still lives?”
“Last I saw him, yes.”
A complex tangle of bramble-thorned emotions too controlled to manifest clearly passed across her face. “How long ago was that?”
“I don’t know. A few weeks, maybe?”
“Where?”
I scowled at the interrogation but acquiesced. “The Crossroads.”
Brittle Spear seemed to note the rising tension and inserted himself to keep it from boiling over. “I found Jackdaw wandering the coastline perilously close to a den of Fomori warriors deep in my territory, not long after the war. She’d survived on her own long enough to get out of the lands of Árus Láigh. She lived within the Fómhar Court and swore fealty to the Harvest Maiden. She has grown to be a fine courtier and earned her position as warden of this village. She is a warrior and a protégé of illusion magics.”
He explained this all to me as if I should be proud of her, as if he wanted me to share in the pride he had in her accomplishments. Instead I felt a hollow ache of jealousy that she had been an orphan that found a home where I could never find the same.
“Does The Raven know?”
“Is that what they are calling him now?” She asked, ice starting to frost in her words.
“Yes, The Raven of the Dawn.”
She scowled at the moniker. “That’s hideous. But to answer your question, yes and no. Lord White Throat of the Samhradh stalks me and thinks he has me imprisoned as a tool for the Ard Rí, and we assume that my brother knows I live but I don’t know if he knows where I am.”
“You haven’t tried to tell him? That you’re not dead?” She had a family, a mentor and a purpose, something I would have killed for at her age, and she was throwing it all away.
Brittle Spear took a deep breath and exhaled it as if preparing for a battle that was about to crash down on him.
Jackdaw fell silent for a long time as if the question was one of great philosophical weight. When she finally broke the silence, she rocked back on her heels. “No. I haven’t. My brother . . . is the architect of all my suffering and the murder of our family. He was once the only Fae alive that could tell me anything, the only Fae I would listen to. Feidlimid’s own gift rose and fell in my brother’s smile, but after what they say he did . . . I’m not ready to see him. I’m not ready to talk to him. The wound is still too fresh. I don’t know how to let him be my brother again after holding my mother’s severed head in my hands and watching our sisters be slaughtered because of his supposed choices.”
“He’s your brother, though.” I would give anything to have a brother. Anything to have a family. Excuse any misdeeds and any transgressions, and yet here she was throwing him away. Was it my love for him or my desperation and orphan’s emptiness that had me pushing?
“And he was part and parcel to my life as a destitute exile.” She exhaled the twisting tension of a thousand different emotions spiraling within her. “I’m not ready to be found just yet. I don’t know how I can forgive him. I don’t know how he forgives himself.”
“He doesn’t.” I whispered. “I can’t tell you how to feel about him, Jackdaw, but I can tell you that The Raven torments himself every day for what he has done. He sacrifices all potential for a scrap of happiness to repay his debt to what he might believe to be a graveyard. He hates himself for it.”
“Not enough.” She hissed before pulling herself back. “Either way, I’m just . . . I don’t understand why he did what he did. We were close when he lived at home, I knew him better than anyone else. Before he pledged his heart to that cunt with a crown, that is. The Fae I knew idolized the knights and warriors of old and their oath of the blade, he would have never murdered innocent Fae. He sang, and danced, and painted. He told me tales of honorable warriors of legend as bedtime stories. He told me that one day he would be a knight of the Well and I would be his first squire. He wanted to be a soldier of justice and harmony, not one of destruction. And until I know what happened to that Fae I loved . . . I’m . . . I’m not ready to be found just yet. Promise me you won’t tell him?”
I huffed a bitter laugh. Perhaps I knew her better than I thought. I knew what it was like to love someone so much and not recognize them anymore. It was the same reason I was running from him.
“I promise I will not tell him, Jackdaw. As long as you promise not to tell him you saw me.”
Brittle Spear smirked. “Our lady might be running from that same beast, little brat.”
Chapter 31
Cricket
