Page 14

I found a bottle, half-filled with dark wine, and took it back to the shell.

I had been a foolish child the last time I danced with the dark sister like this, fresh and purposeful. I had nothing to lose back then and had already been so deep in my indulgence it only made sense to flee back into the welcoming constant of her embrace at the earliest opportunity. This was different though. I was being measured in my approach, just a little. Just a sliver of the sticky, dark purple substance, barely even a fingernail scratch from the surface of the spoon slipping into the bottle of wine.

Of all the losses I had endured, this one cut the deepest. I had deserved to lose my family for my trespass against the fundamental laws of a warrior and the laws of magic. They had not deserved to bear that burden for me, but I had. This though . . . did I truly deserve to lose her?

A small, venomous part of me whispered yes. Whispered that I deserved all of this. The blood I had spilled at the House of Magic still stained me and my magic from root to tip. Nothing short of this and more, so much more, was what I deserved.

I swirled the resin into the wine, more than the last time, watching it dissolve and stain it a dark midnight, before tilting my head back and gulping hungrily at every last drop. Where remnants of Siur Dobh still clung to the rim of the bottle, it left a tingling fire across my lips like the kiss of a lover.

Siur Dobh was different than any of the myriad of drugs the Fae had concocted over the millennia walking Magh Meall. It didn’t slowly sneak up on the mind. It was immediate, like the rushing of a flash flood sweeping across a parched creek bed. It flowed in on amaranthine silk and encircled you, leaving nowhere to flee but into her arms.

My head swam in velveteen skies, and I leaned back against the anchoring point of the cool polished runners of my bed, leaning my head back to be cradled by the coverlet. The relief was immediate. The salvation not a moment delayed as soft fingers ran through my hair. All the pain and suffering I had been subjected to over the last few days, over the last centuries really, fled under the watchful eye of my valiant champion. In its place was nothing more than the amethyst arms of the dark sister wrapping around my body, soul, magic, and mind.

So long from me, my lover, her voice whispered on rose petal syllables as my eyelids slipped shut, and I surrendered to her completely. So long and for what? To be cursed by your gods without love to bind you and keep you? So long to merely be cast out into perdition away from me? Tsk, tsk, my giant brute. You let them treat you like this? You let them cast you from their graces? Once you lay with me as I pleasured you for three tides and you let them steal me from you? Let them steal her from you?

The sensation of night-kissed damp grass chilling my feet spun me sideways into the cosmos of her breath.

I would never leave you, my brute. Never cast you from my arms. I would never steal her from you. They did this to you. They took everything from you. They conspire against you.

Distant shouting, annoyed raised voices more than anything else, buzzed in my ears. Someone’s hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off. Just an inconvenient waypoint in the journey through the dark sister’s world.

They conspire against you. They stole her from you. They stole everything from you. They did this to you, her voice whispered in my ear. Take everything from them.

I blinked, the warm light of hundreds of candles burning my eyes as I rubbed them clear. Everything around me was smudged in a kaleidoscope of sunset, shimmering, rippling off the towering figures and blackened stones around me in the Temple of the Ascended.

The gods. None of them had saved her. None of them had saved me. None of them had intervened or even whispered to the shifting tides of fate on our behalf. Faolán, Great Wolf of Spring, certainly not him. He among them all would be best served should I lose her. After all his scion, who had sworn loyalty to him and the one Fae whose very success brought the cunning Wolf more acclaim, hated her.

I tilted my head back and filled my mouth, launching slick spittle all over the statue. “You could have saved her! She died in your care!” I bellowed up at the statue, rage suddenly pumping through me tinted violet and lavender. The dark sister was right, they had all conspired against me to punish me. All of them.

“This was your doing, wasn’t it?” I howled, turning to knock the candles free of the plinth the statue of Senán rose above me from. “You devised this to punish me for taking him from you, from all of you, didn’t you?”

The silence, perforated only occasionally by the annoying buzz of a distant voice, annoyed me. They were all mocking me. All of them. Every last god who peered through marble eyes from this very Temple. They were all mocking me. A cabal of Fae finally springing their trap upon me.

White hot anger burned through me and moved my hand to snatch a half-melted candle from the scattered bunch. I threw it at the head of the blind God of the Dúluachair, spattering wax across his veil and leaving smears across the stonework.

Someone grabbed my arm as I went to huck another candle at him, and I shook them off. I moved deeper into the Temple, and where I found candles, I knocked them over. Where I found offerings, I threw them up at the statues.

Each of them would feel the rage within me. Each of them would feel the bone-deep anguish they had caused me and answer for it.

When I came before my own god, Feidlimid, silent God of the Árus Láigh, I stared up at him feeling the acid of bitter tears roll down my cheeks. “You, most of all. This is your fault. You lied. You bid me swear fealty and promised me good hunting. You swore it to me!”

Candle after candle barraged the rakish smile towering above me. I didn’t care that they were still lit. I didn’t care that the flames licked at my palms. The dark sister kissed each wound and chased the pain away. All I cared about was bleeding my ire out across the sacred face of the god who I had sworn a millennia ago to serve. The god whose blessings I was cut off from and yet still paid homage to.

“You were supposed to hold me in your favor. I was promised good hunting. I was promised music and joy. I was promised endless nights of dancing. I was promised pleasure.” Each sacred promise made between crown and god that I repeated was followed by increasingly more brutal catapults of candles.

The bond between a crown and its patron god was sacred. Inviolable. It was as old as the establishment of each court. We would swear sacred fealty to our gods, swear that we would guide our people in their worship and oblation in act and material goods, and we would live by the principals of that god as our sacred duty to them. And in return, that god would bless us with the power to weave magic in their image, and they would unlock the secrets of our court.

It was a mutual symbiosis that stretched back to the very roots of our people, and no god had ever broken faith, and no crown had ever survived doing so either.

“You swore it to me!” I bellowed with all of my rage, all of my power, all of my suffering and misery still too powerful for even the dark sister to dull. Not that she was trying anymore. I could feel her laughing, though I wasn’t sure if it was at my plight or at the plight of the gods.

I picked up a large candelabra, large enough to hold a hundred candles, and hurled it at Feidlimid, slipping in a puddle of wax as I did so. My body collapsed in on itself, unable to sustain the warring sides within me. Between the dark sister urging me onward and the unwavering and unforgiving gravity of my sorrow infecting my magic.

“Shhh . . . Shhh . . . Peace, be at peace,” whispered a feminine voice as a body gathered me into it and pressed my head to the softness of a bosom. It was too dense, too real to be Siur Dobh. The warmth of her skin was too tangible for it to be the love of the dark sister guiding me through this as unbidden howling, half-screamed sobs ravaged my body. “Be at peace, young one. You are safe. You are loved.”

Loved. Little bug?

I scrambled to turn against the feminine body, shock, hope, all too sharp and all too necessary burned within me fueled by the Siur Dobh’s orchid madness pumping through me. Could it be her? Come to deliver me from this torment?