The rumble of his dragonire hitting the ground eased, and I raised my hand to shield my eyes enough to see the swath of destruction left in the dragon’s wake. I lowered it again once I realized the brightness was more bearable after he had swept back into the sky, but the ruin he had wrought took my breath away.
Distant trees had turned white with frost that glittered prettily in the muted sunlight. Some eerie combination of snow and ash was falling, and the morning sky had turned a violent blue-and-green colour, which rippled like water. We were too far away for me to see what had become of the Fuath that were hit, but I could see an immense black gash in the earth. And I could see the thousands of Fuath lying still around it, as if they were frozen.
This was not elemental magic. It was not fey magic. This was something else. Something truly ancient.
The half of the Fuath army that managed to survive the dragonwas closest to our troops since Darragh had kept his dragonire far away from them. Those remaining Fuath had devolved into complete panic and were trying to stampede away from the dragon and through our ranks. Thankfully, our warriors were able to overcome their shock at the appearance of the dragon and reacted as soon as the Fuath surged toward them again.
I got to my feet slowly as I watched Darragh banking, but this time he flew toward the eastern fields from which those fireballs had come. I thought the rising sun glinted off something there, but before I had a chance to decide what it was, the dragon flared his wings to hover over it. His tail dropped as his wings flapped hard to keep him aloft while he breathed another steady blast of silver fury. The concentrated ferocity made the air waver until I saw a red-and-green dome appear under him. The dragon only stopped briefly for a breath, and then the stream of silver erupted against the shield once again.
I had not realized I was slowly moving forward until Sage took my arm to stop me and pulled me into his arms. He held me as we all watched that red-and-green shield crack and shatter.
Chapter fifty
THE ESSENCE OF AUTUMN
Nuala
Iwas in a horrible place that reminded me terribly of my own dark prison filled with unspeakable pain. Only this place felt more like a labyrinth in which every hallway was a strand in a web that formed some kind of hive mind woven with blood magic.
I could have wandered in that place forever and never found anything. So I put my hands on the walls to try and get a sense of how to get to the middle where I was most likely to find the one who had created this hellscape.
The second I tried to spread my consciousness through the labyrinth, it was like the walls had sensed an intruder and began to converge upon me. The air grew too thin for me to breathe, and I was abruptly forced to crouch down as I was confined in a tiny stone box. The earth was cold and wet with decaying leaves and mushrooms beneath my bare feet. The stone was rough and unyielding above and around me with patches of browning moss. I might have succumbed to claustrophobia, but I knew it was not real. This place wasnot real.
Even if she could very much hurt my real body here.
“Bandruí!”hissed that chillingly familiar voice that made my skin crawl, but I held my ground.
“Yes, I have returned,” I answered. I did not speak her dialectof Sìth Gaeilge, but I could understand her in this place that was shaped by her will. Her meaning was in the stone and in the earth and in the very air.
Queen Aoibheal hissed long and lowly as she drew so near that I could feel her hot breath on the back of my neck through the stone.
“I have been waiting for you, little Seer,” she boasted. “Your mind will be mine. What a perfect weapon you will make against your would-be usurper.”
I felt her claws scraping along the outer walls of my mind in a cruel taunt. I knew that she could rip me open at any second, but she wanted to savour my fear first.
“He is going to consume you, Aoibheal,” I assured her, and the claws began to dig in until I felt the blood rolling down my scalp.
“I know what you are to him. He will not risk harming me if it means harming you,” the Autumn Queen retorted before her claws began piercing through my skull.
I gritted my teeth, breathing in through my nose to try and alleviate the agony as I let her seep into my mind in her attempts to steal it from me.
“You know what I am… to him,” I acknowledged as she drew deeper and deeper and closer to where I needed her to come. “But do you know… what he is to me?”
I felt her hesitate as if she realized this could be a trap before she tried to pull back a little. So I closed the doors of my mind behind her to keep her locked inside with me, and then I unleashed Rian’s ruthless power upon her.
“He iseverything,” I snarled in disgust that she could think I’d ever allow myself to be used against my mate.
Queen Aoibheal screeched in fury and pain. I did not get much of a taste of her before she yanked herself away and thrust me out of her labyrinth. Such a violent exit shattered the mind of the mage through which I’d come.
But it had been enough.
The Fuath convulsed while I regained consciousness, and then it flopped to the ground. Rian still stood over me looking furious with his hand on my head. He had already healed the cuts Queen Aoibheal made on my scalp.
“Did you find her?” he asked hopefully, just as a roar made me turn toward the east. My mouth fell open at the sight of a silver dragon hovering over that red-and-green shield, which was about to shatter under his barrage.
“Nuala?” Rian prompted urgently, and I whipped my eyes back to my mate.
“Yes,” I reassured him with a grin just as the shield shattered with a resounding boom and crackle of magic. “But you will need to trust me for what comes next.”
