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“I want it anyway! I have known you longer than any other Fae in this godsforsaken place, and in all that time, I have seen your moods, your struggles, your obsessions, your capriciousness, your grief and sorrow. I have been by your side through it all, and you have never once touched the Siur Dobh, or anything else! So why now?”

“You ask me this now?” I looked up at him, annoyed with his persistence. “Before you knew me, Silvertree, I was a devoted lover of the dark sister. I worshipped her every night and every day. Whole years lost to her purple kiss. I am not above her; on the contrary, I am barely even worthy of her.”

Silvertree began pacing, his head tipped back as he watched the ceiling, searching for his own patience. “But why now? You have found her again. You know she lives. There is no reason for this!”

“Every lullaby, every bedtime story, every sad song about a bond lost? All of them, Silvertree, every last one of them is a lie. It is so much worse. It is living with your magic turned to razors in your blood. It is colors bleeding into paleness. Food with barely any flavor. It is a walking prison.”

“But she’s alive!”

“And that has changed nothing! She was alive when I lost the bond, and she remains alive today! And yet! And yet I have nothing but misery and agony to hold at night! Nothing until the Siur Dobh, so you will leave me to my medicking in peace, or you will leave me altogether!”

That revelation stilled his pacing, and pity found his stormy gaze. “Still?”

I nodded solemnly to him. “But with a small dose of the dark sister, not enough to call her truly to my side, just enough to ease the pain, I can survive it. I can move and act as I once did.”

Exasperated and knowing fully the weight that this loss I carried quietly pressed in on me, Silver flopped onto the edge of the bed. “Étain’s tits,” he quietly cursed. “There has to be a better way, brother.”

“If there is, find it for me, and I will take it.”

He grunted in response, letting the silence stretch out between us while I finished my work. “What’s the letter say?”

I pulled it from my belt and tossed it to him.

“A debt is owed. We ask no more. The scales will be balanced,” he read before tossing it back to me. “There’s no signature or seal. Who’s it from?”

I frowned and snatched it up. An owl feather was drawn in the margins of the top of the paper. “I haven’t a clue. Whomever it is will announce themselves in short order, it seems.”

“Debts and drugs. What have you gotten yourself into, Captain?”

Chapter 33

Cricket

The road through the mountains was treacherous. The caravan of suspicious humans and oblivious Fae was slow; every step closer to the border between the Fómhar lands and the lands once dominated by the House of Magic seemed to take ages. At each hoof-fall, my companions grew less uncomfortable with their Fae escort. It was Emerald who broke the tension completely between them, flirting with a Fae named Black Hermit with hair the color of fresh snow and eyes the shade of moonlight, who looked to be built of great boulders of muscle.

Even their delicate flirting and his jovial laughter when she flashed a pornographic scene when no one was looking did not cut the apprehension in the Fómhar soldiers, though. And as we neared the peak of the crags pushing through the soil toward the sky like skeletal fingers, a hush washed over them. Gone were the subtle jabs between lifelong compatriots and the simple banter between the caravan. Even Brittle Spear, who had conceded our game, fell silent. I excused it as the bitter wind blowing icy through the canines of the mountain ridge called The Old Teeth, at first. When even my questions about the strange way the stones twisted and contorted into the vague shapes of horns, bones, and what I could have sworn was a mountainously large skull went unanswered for long stretches, I abandoned the conversation.

“Is that the peak?” I asked, pulling the buttery soft woolen scarf down as I eased my horse to a slow stop.

Brittle Spear towered over me as he leaned over the pommel of his saddle to get a better look. His voice was soft, barely heard over the claws of the wind. “Yes. And the moment we cross it, we will be descending into the land of the léaspáin.”

“I don’t like that word.” It meant witch in their language. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree that it might be fitting for a kingdom built on the foundations of magic to be populated by witches; it was that the term was not benign. It had an ugly, evil connotation. It was derogatory. It sat in my ribs like the cold oatmeal we had for breakfast, making no room to breathe.

“Excuse me, my lady,” he mumbled in apology. “We should see the ruins of Canai et Duthracht when we come free of the mountain pass. There is a way meadow at the base. We will set up camp there.”

A way meadow was a campground, a place that journeyers would stop at repeatedly. A rest stop on the hard-packed dirt highways connecting each of the multiple kingdoms and great houses that carved this land up. Brittle Spear had said that during Mabh’s reign, they had been small commerce centers too, built of vibrantly painted canvas pavilions that would house all manner of traveling merchants and minstrels. Since the War of Thorns, the roads had been nearly abandoned though, the danger of being caught outside of a fortress or fortified town too great. The only Fae who truly risked the roads unaccompanied by soldiers and legions for any great distance were roving bands of bandits and land pirates. No one else wanted to risk being unwoven by a magic storm.

I nodded and rocked my hips to urge the sweet pony I rode into the path that would take us down the mountain.

We moved in silence, a slithering orange and red snake switchbacking down the mountain until we leveled out into the way meadow.

The lands of the House of Magic stole my breath from my lungs the moment the flakes of the snowstorm dissipated. “I . . . I . . . what am I even seeing right now?” I whispered, fearing the sight before me was a mixture of snow blindness and the slice of the loss of my anam cara.

Grasses of pure silver swayed with the gentle breeze, dusting off the Old Teeth. Trees of dark, almost black oak, adorned with radiant green leaves stretched dark arms toward the palest blue sky I had ever seen. Flowers that shimmered and swayed with a ghostly pale blue glow sprouted along the road where the dappled sunlight broke through the canopy of trees.

“The colors of this area are a bit off-putting at first,” offered one of the soldiers as he helped me down from the mare. “I imagine for someone used to the Bláth an earraigh splendor of the palace, it would be even more so. But just in case, the grass is silver. The trees are black. And the flowers are an unknown shade.”

My face crunched up, my hand halting its removal of the scarf that kept the snow out of my face. “They’re blue.”