“I’ll send word to your parents. I know it’ll mean they have to leave their lives behind too, but I know they’d do it for you in a heartbeat.”
“Aoife.”
“Stop. I know you’re about to tell me why my plan doesn’t work, and I don’t want to hear it.” She almost wanted to put her hands over her ears.
“I can’t run. Not in Athraith form.” He glanced at his shoulder and the pieces fell into place in her head.
“I thought it was better? You said you heal faster than humans?”
“We do, but not that fast. It’s healed well enough to use as an arm. Not so great as a leg.”
“That’s why you were caught.” She was angry now, not just at Halverton and the injustice, but at Cormac too. “What were you thinking?”
“I couldn’t sit around and do nothing.”
“We weren’t doing nothing. We had a plan. We were getting food out. And now that’s over.”
Cormac shook his head, slow and weary. “Aoife… you can’t stop because of me.”
“It can’t happen again,” Aoife whispered. “It’s too dangerous.”
“You have to hear me.” His hand tightened around hers. “Even if I’m gone, you have to keep trying. The village, the county, won’t survive the winter without you. Halverton’s bleeding them dry, and the empire doesn’t care.”
Her breath caught. “You’re not going to die.”
He gave a small, sad smile, accepting her denial because it was kinder than the truth. “If I live, we’ll find another way. But if I don’t… promise me you won’t let it end with me.”
“No,” she said fiercely. “No. You’re going to be fine. You’ll see. You’ll—”
A low, keening wail drifted through the stone, thin and mournful. Aoife’s blood ran cold.
“They’re wailing for someone else,” Cormac said, but his voice shook, and they both knew he didn’t believe it.
“Please,” she whispered, “don’t let it be you the banshee’s crying for.”
Aoife’s hands shook.
“I can’t—I can’t watch you die tomorrow.”
Cormac’s breath shuddered. “Aoife—”
“I have to go,” she said, stepping back.
She let his hand slip from hers.
“Aoife, don’t let him win! Aoife!”
Her footsteps echoed up the tunnel, steady at first, though her throat burned and her vision blurred. Behind her, she could still hear him calling her name.
When she reached the passage above, the tears she’d been holding back slipped down her cheek. She brushed them away and kept walking, calm and upright, until the air shifted and the stairs gave way to open night. Only then did she run. She ran from the cells, from her name, from the wailing that followed her, rising and falling like the wind through stone.
She told herself Halverton was right, that it was only the wind, but her chest ached with the fear that it wasn’t.
Chapter 26
Aoife had not slept. Every time her eyes closed, the banshee’s wail rose again in the dark, thin, terrible, and echoing as though the lament had lodged inside her skull. When dawn finally bled pale light into the room, she felt hollowed out, brittle as frost.
A soft knock preceded Clara, who slipped through the door with her usual practised quiet. She carried a dress box balanced against her hip, her expression composed in a way Aoife envied.
