Page 86 of Immortal Game

It was too late. Her words had hit their mark. Aideen looked stung. “I’m sorry you took it so hard, but what was there to figure out? I didn’t lie to you. I wanted to go. It wasmydecision, not yours—”

“Liar.” Shea gestured around the room. “You’re really happy with this dusty old castle? Your sadist of a husband?”

Aideen flushed. “What does it matter if I am or not? I tried to tell you how I felt so many times, Shea. You didn’t listen, and you still won’t. I don’t know why I expected any different. No one has ever listened to me.”

“Am I wrong?” It came out more uncertain than Shea intended. They were strangers to each other now, maybe, but… “Drop the act. You can’t want to stay here, spending every day surrounded by these monsters.”

“I’mone of those monsters.” Aideen’s quiet indignation rang in the air between them.

Ciara’s unwelcome words came flooding back:Have you considered that your sister wishes to remain in Tír nAill?Shea felt as though she’d been punched in the gut. She couldn’t draw ina full breath. When she cast her mind’s eye back to those memories, would she find that this truth had always been there?

“I don’t expect you to understand.” Aideen tucked a strand of hair behind her own ear. “It’s been more than half a decade since we saw each other. Life goes on.”

“Well, maybe it didn’t for me.”

She had meant for it to sound mature: like something a battle-hardened adult might say. But her throat was tight and her voice thin. It seemed she wasn’t an adult at all. Before she knew it, before she could stop it, tears burned in her eyes. It was mortifying. She swiped them away before they could spill. All she could think about was their mother saying,There’s more to life than playing chess all day.All she could think about was her own empty house and all the time spent alone, locked away like a prisoner in the highest point of a rook.

Aideen’s abduction had stopped the clock for her. It changed the rules of the world as she knew them. It broadened the scope of what she even thought was possible—the depths of suffering she could experience. How could life go on? It was the simple facts of life that Shea resented most in the months that followed Aideen’s abduction. She hated how people moved through the world. Walking to work, to cafés, to shops. The flow of cars on the highway, the press of a crowd on a train platform. All of these people, heading somewhere, when she was trapped forever in a moment.

“It has to.” For a moment, Shea thought Aideen would grab her by the shoulders. She only withdrew a step. “I’m already gone.”

“I’m trying to save you, Aideen. Just this once, let me!”

“How can I make it more clear? I don’t want to be saved!”

“Well, me neither. So I guess we’re stalemated.”

Aideen gave her a look—one she’d been on the receiving end of many times before. It was pitying, like she doubted Shea was a functioning person at all. “This isn’t like chess.”

She left her, then. Shea could do nothing but stand in the middle of the tournament hall, utterly adrift.

Do you remember?

This was the question Midir asked most, in that first year in Tír nAill. Sometimes, she did. Aideen remembered riding a white horse across white sand. She remembered swimming in the warm, shining rivers that ran through her father’s land. Sometimes, she even remembered her husband as he used to be a millennium ago, in that blissful year they spent together.

Do you remember?

The first time he asked, they had just arrived on the shores of Tír nAill. She’d been too disoriented to answer. They had flown all night in the form of cranes, and she was still adjusting to the weight of her human bones, the sudden loss of her wings. She’d cried the entire journey—inasmuch as birds are capable of tears. Shea was too young to understand why she’d chosen this, but she would forgive her someday. Aideen drank in her new home, as desolate as it was beautiful, wreathed in fog and aglow beneath the pale dawn sky. She had no answer for Midir. So she took his face in her hands and kissed him. That, she thought, felt almost familiar.

Do you remember?

He asked again on their wedding day. She did not, and yet, it hardly mattered when Tír nAill seemed to her a paradise. Her mother’s voice was so far away now. Here, no one yelled at her. No one feared her. No one hated her for what she couldn’t help. It was everything Midir promised when he wooed her. After the ceremony, Midir held a feast that all the Irish fae attended. They danced and sang and presented gifts. She wore a crown of gold upon her head, and her cup of mead never went empty. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so carefree. It wasn’t until her third drink that her perfect bubble of happiness popped. She felt at home among the fae—and yet, still somehow apart. It wasn’t her rounded ears or her ability to lie. It was Midir’s arm around her. It was the way his gaze locked on each guest when they greeted her, heavy and dangerous.

Do you remember?

He asked next when they returned from their wedding tour and settled into Bri Leith. This time, he sounded almost apprehensive. As he led her through the halls of the castle, images resurfaced in flashes. Sharp golden eyes. A crystal bower. A howling wind. A plunge into dark waters. And then, there was no more.

Midir was good to her in those early days. He comforted her through the nightmares that plagued her. He took her riding in the heath, showing her which paths were safe. He swam with her in the lake. He draped her in jewels and recited poetry and played the lyre. He called her Aideen Echraide and Be Find. He called her Wanderer Careworn. He gave her everything she’d ever wanted: beautiful things, meaning, answers, belonging. But there was still some emptiness he could not reach.

It was easy to forget most of the time. She could content herself with her doting husband and the wild, beautiful world around her. Eventually, the cold stone of the castle and its silence closed in around her. Sometimes, she heard the servants whisper about her husband: Midir the Proud, Midir the Ungenerous. She would come to understand with time that ungenerous was among the worst things a king could be. But she did not know it then. All she knew was that no one came to visit Bri Leith.

“Where is everyone?” she asked him one day.

“It is only you and I here in Bri Leith now.”

“Why do we never have guests?”

“I will tell you, one day. But not today.”