He ran out of the bedchamber, down the staircase, and out into the darkness, praying for their safety along the way. Ailith followed but could barely keep up with him.
The vision lurched into the cold night air and open ground. From behind him, she could hear him breathing, harsh and ragged, the baby tight against his chest. He was moving fast across the uneven ground, but two shapes appeared out of the tree line. One was Gruin. She knew the bogle immediately, that squat, hunched silhouette, and beside him a taller Unseelie, moving with that liquid wrongness she’d seen before.
“Hand over the child.” Gruin’s voice scraped like stone across stone. “A bargain was struck. Hand him over, and no harm will come to you or the woman.”
Determined, Reginald did not stop moving, his pace increasing. He did not look at the bogle or speak to him, instead veering toward the stable, startling the spooked horses.
Even the animals sensed but rejected the Unseelie.
The tall Unseelie reached for him, a long arm cutting the dark, and Reginald twisted away, nearly losing his footing, clutching the infant harder. The baby did not cry. Not a sound. But the Unseelie bellowed.
Reginald got his foot into the stirrup and hauled himself up, pressing the blanket against his chest with one arm and seizing the reins with his free hand.
The black sky cracked open.
A woman called out, “Leave the bairn alone, Gruin!” The voice sounded much like Lia’s.
Lightning struck so close that the flash blinded her even in the vision, and she heard the Unseelie cry out, not in pain but in something like revulsion. The horse bolted. Gruin shouted something after him, then screeched toward the woman. But thestorm rolled in from nowhere, thunder following thunder, and the two figures at the stable door fell back.
Reginald rode into the dark and the rain, and the vision went with him. Ailith charged after him.
But the vision shifted again, and Ailith stopped.
Edan stood near the faery hill.
Not as he was now but as he would be. She felt the difference the way a seer always did, past and future carrying different weights. He was walking into the fairy hill, into that underground darkness, and the iron in his blood was reacting to something the hill carried. She could see it happening inside him, the slow catastrophic injustice of it, a body turning against itself. He would not make it out.
She opened her eyes.
The others were watching her. Dyna had, without her noticing, set a hand on her knee at some point.
“Reginald bargained his firstborn away to the Unseelie,” Ailith said. Her voice was quieter than she intended. “Before Edan was born. When the bairn came, however, he broke the bargain, wrapped Edan in a plaid, and ran. Gruin and another were chasing him. He reached a horse just as a woman called out to Gruin, telling him to leave the bairn alone. A fierce thunderstorm then drove them back, with lightning striking close by.” Then she glanced at Lia. “Were you there?”
Lia nodded, then glanced over at Dyna with a look Ailith could not interpret.
“That explains the iron blood,” Lia said slowly. “A broken Unseelie bargain. The fae magic, instead of completing its claim, turned inward within the child’s blood. The touch. That brief brush of skin turned Edan’s blood protective. The bairn’s body did what it could to protect itself from the Unseelie, using their power against them in the perfect way. Iron blood in a bairn witha fierce constitution.” She stared at her hands. “I had no idea that man I tried to assist was Edan’s father.”
“There is more.” Ailith made herself say it. “I saw Edan entering the hill. If he goes in—” She stopped, then started again. “The iron blood will kill him. The hill will read him as a stolen child, and the magic will—” She couldn’t finish it cleanly. “He will not come out.”
The silence that followed was heavy.
Sylvi opened her eyes. She had the slightly dazed look of someone returning from a great distance. “I heard warriors inside the hill. Their thoughts were violent. They appeared controlled and full of raging fury. Soulless. It was a tongue I couldn’t interpret, a foreign tongue. They guard something they fear.” She jumped to her feet, shivering. “I don’t… it’s not…”
Dyna approached and wrapped her arm around Sylvi’s shoulder. “It’s not going to happen to you. Tell me what you learned.”
Tears flooded her eyes. “Only a true seer’s touch can weaken the walls. Only a seer can free the bairns. But they feel nothing. They are truly frozen in time. How will we free them? Mama, I cannot go in…”
“You’ll not go in. I would enter before I would ask you to go,” Dyna said.
“Nay, Mama. Please say you won’t go in.” Sylvi buried her face in her mother’s shoulder.
A rustle at the cottage door made them all turn. Tora appeared in the opening, wrapped in a blanket despite the warmth, her golden hair loose and sleep-creased. She looked at the circle of them and didn’t hesitate. She crossed the grass and dropped down beside Sylvi without being invited.
“I heard,” she said. “Some of it.” She paused. “I had a dream. I couldn’t sleep because of it, and when I finally did, I dreamed it again.”
“Tell us,” Lia said, her green gown sparkling in the sunlight.
“Evil men inside the hill. Armed. Standing before a row of crystals, great clear stones with the bairns trapped inside each one.” Tora’s voice was flat, reflecting the unwelcome nature of her vision. “Warriors near the crystals, frozen like statues inside a different cage. They were not dead, I don’t think. Held. And I saw two people standing together in the center of it all, and the crystals began to crack.”
