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He steps over a root positioned like a leg casually crossed over a knee. Sion stops in front of the tree closest to the lake. In front of him are the crooked slats of a wooden door wedged between two giant bulges of bark strands covered in glittering emerald moss.
“Is she in there?” I hurry across the clearing to him.
“Go stand by the water, Eala.”
I start to protest, but who knows what the rules of this place might be? Keeping an eye on Sion, I make my way to where lake glass meets clover. Pinpoints of dazzling silver light reflect off the surface. If I reach into these crystalline waters, will I withdraw the chimes of my soulsong?
Sion knocks three times on the door and steps back.
“Whose time has come?” The voice from within is a whisper wrapped in an echo, but I know it.
My grandmother is here.
Before I cry out to her, the voice comes again. “Sionnach?”
“Aye, Máthair.”
My wonderstruck awareness takes a sharp turn toward bitterness. How dare he use the Irish name for mother? I call my grandmother Máthair because that’s what she is to me, more mother than grandmother.
Light suffused with a river of Veil Sprites bursts from between the slats of the door, and my grandmother’s voice winds through the glade. “Is it done then, Mac?” The light flares, and Máthair speaks again, her tone flat. “You’re not alone.”
For a moment, the only sound in the glade is a pair of heartbeats, mine and Sion’s. The light behind the door fades. A keening to shatter bone fills the glade. Sion drops to his knees, palms against the door.
“I’m so sorry, Ma. I had to bring her here. She’s fixing on leaving me before it’s done.”
A gust of wind blows my hair into a snarl. The tree door slams open, knocking Sion backward and striking the trunk with a teeth-jarring crack. Silver mist in the shape of a sideways cyclone streams through the opening. It spirals around my body, sensing me. From within its grasp, I recognize the sensation of my grandmother’s embrace.
“Eala. My dear, dear one.”
There’s no substance to the energy around me. I close my eyes and remember her smile. “Máthair, your ring said to find you. I came here to Ireland.” I spill the words I’ve ached to say again since the day I lost her. “I love you.”
The mist releases me. “Forgive me, my precious swan, a stór. Forgive me.” The fluttering cloud rises above the lake and then plunges into its depths.
“Máthair, no! Don’t leave me.” I move too quickly. My feet tangle, but Sion catches me.
“She’s moved beneath the lake glass so you can see her,” he says and guides me to a large flat stone overhanging the water.
A spectrum of grays bleeds across the top of the rock, dabs of paint on an already water-soaked paper. The surface is as smooth and polished as the stone outside Máthair’s tree. I sit near the edge, aware of Sion hovering close by.
After a slight hesitation, he drops down next to me without touching. “There.” He points a few yards in front of us.
My grandmother’s face, the one I’ve missed to the point of agony, ebbs in the currents beneath the lake’s crystal topcoat. Her gaze fixes on me, and I meet her eyes. “You left me with so many questions. My real name?—”
Her focus switches to Sion, whose cheeks flame the color of his burnt orange hair. “Did my son not tell you?”
My heart thuds. “Your son?” Mac. She called him mac. Irish for son. The enormity of what I don’t understand explodes through my body, and I almost pitch forward into the lake.
There’s an angry exchange in Irish between my grandmother and Sion. I understand every word.
I clasp my hands to the sides of my head. “Stop arguing, and stop lying to me, both of you.” I glare at Sion and then back to Máthair. “You’re his mother?”
“I am mother to you both even though you are not of shared blood. There’s no familial bond between you. Sionnach is my natural child, and you are the child created, then given to me by Finnbheara.”
I am so sick of this Finnbheara Faerie King asshole being everyone’s excuse for whatever the hell is going on. “What do you mean created and given to you? And how can you claim to be his mother and my adopted mother? Sion’s two hundred years old.”
Máthair’s lips twist. “So, he’s told you some.”
Sion raises his arms. “I said that I had.”
