The infant’s arm had come free of the wool. Only his arm. A small fist clenched in the cold air.
The fae did not come closer.
Reginald had gone still on his knee, breathing hard, pressing the child back against his chest. Ailith watched him try to interpret what was happening. It wasn’t quick. It moved across his face the way grief moves, slowly.
He rose.
He turned to face them. He put his body between the Unseelie and the tree line, not fleeing anymore but drawing them toward the cliff edge, toward the water below, toward anything that was not solid ground where they could surround him. The child was still making that small, high, insistent sound, and the fae were still not moving.
One of them spoke. She couldn’t hear the words. Vision never allowed her to hear the sounds reliably. But she saw the mouth shape something, and she saw Reginald’s face when he heard it. He had known. Whatever it had said, he had known it already.
He said one word back. She was certain of what it was.
Nay.
The Unseelie moved again. They split apart and flanked, and Reginald lunged left to cut off the angle, and in the turning the infant’s bare fist brushed the lead creature’s wrist in passing. She saw no strike. Only the barest of contacts.
The creature recoiled as if it had thrust its hand into a pile of stinging nettles.
Not pain. Panic. That was what crossed its face. Something rawer and older than pain, a fear of the unknown. It fell back into the others, and all of them stopped, and those beautiful, terrible faces were simply afraid.
The Unseelie had gone from confident and evil to a sheer terror of the unfamiliar.
The unknown was Edan. Gruin had looked the same last eve when Edan had dripped his blood near him.
Reginald stood on the moor with the child on his chest while the Unseelie retreated into the dark behind him, and his hand came up and covered the infant’s head. Not to comfort. Just to hold on.
The last shape disappeared into the forest.
Gone.
The night went ordinary again. Salt wind and a moon too bright. Edan’s father stood there a long time, long enough that his breathing slowed, long enough that the tide sound came back to her. Then he walked east toward the coast, toward the water, toward Jura.
He never looked back.
The vision snapped shut, and Ailith was in her own body again, in her own world with her own heartbeat hammering in her throat.
She knew she should move. Should speak. Should find Edan’s face and see if any of what she’d witnessed had written itself there the way revelations sometimes did on those they concerned. But she sat with it another moment instead.
Many years ago, a man had bargained his son’s soul to save his lands. But when the cost became real, a small, vulnerable face, he refused the terms. That refusal, Ailith now understood,had turned the child, Edan, into something the Unseelie feared. She had never witnessed their fear before.
She wasn’t sure if that was a comfort.
Ailith finally spoke, her voice still hoarse. “Edan, the iron is in your blood. When you were born, your father bundled you and ran, heading to Jura. The Unseelie followed, not just Gruin but many more. You fought against the evil, and your wee fist came out of your swaddling, and when it touched the Unseelie, your verra blood became iron, scaring them away.
“The Unseelie can never hurt you, Edan,” Ailith continued, “but that’s why the ground shudders when you approach the faery hill. Your touch could burn them or even kill them.”
Edan surged to his feet. “Then I’ll kill them all and save my daughter!”
Lia looked at him and whispered, “If you go into that hill, the entire world will collapse, killing all the bairns in the cages. You cannot go in.”
Ailith’s head tipped back. “And I recall something else. John, do you recall? When Gruin called it the Dark Hollow, he said something else.”
John scowled, deep in thought. When his eyes finally lit up, Ailith knew it had come to him, but then his face darkened again. “He did,” John confirmed. “He said, ‘Two days, lass! Two days till the threads start to thin!”
Lia paled and fell onto a tree stump. “Nay. Please. No more.”
“What, Lia?” Dyna asked, her voice hard as steel. “Tell us.”
