Page 6

“In the direwood. The scouts found evidence of a wild magic storm moving through. A caoránach crossed over a trail of human tracks while it was stalking them. Looked like it abandoned the hunt, but it had been drawn in nonetheless.” Caoránach were children of Senán, they fed off grief and suffering. Even before my little bug had been stolen to Magh Meall, she would have been the tastiest of morsels for one.

“I think I would know if my anam cara was still alive, Silver. Finding a bit of blood across a caoránach hunting path means nothing. Especially not in the direwood. No human could survive in the direwood—at night, no less. That is the key hunting grounds for all manner of beastie. You cannot throw a stick without hitting some hungry thing. If she lived long enough to make it to the direwood, she’s dead now.”

“We found blood on a tree three hundred paces from where the caoránach disengaged its prey to avoid the magic storm. Anam cara or not, Captain—my lady Pearl was a human. A magic storm would maybe singe her a little, but it would roll right over her and the others. They could be hunkered down in the middle of the forest surrounded by magic storms.” He hazarded a lean-in, his nose just barely missing the invisible edge of the wards. “Captain, what if she’s alive? What if she is hiding within a magic storm and that's why the magic of the anam cara bond feels like it is severed?”

“You know Silver, for a Dúluachair, you’re awfully hopeful.” I pushed a handful of sweat-slicked hair back from my face. It had all come out from my bun somewhere in the evening and fell loose around my shoulders. “It’s fucking annoying. That’s madness. We both know nothing can survive in a magic storm. Nothing. And when was the last time you knew of a human to use a magic storm?”

“Never, sir. But if any of them would ever get the idea and balls to try it, it would be my lady Pearl.” The determination, the pride in his gaze twisted my guts, this time with jealousy. There was no love in his eyes, not like the love that grew in great thorny bushes within me. It was a different kind of love, a love of equals, of someone who looked at her and saw the same thing I saw. A wildfire, unyielding and just as awe-inspiring.

He was right though. If any human were mad enough to use a magic storm as a safe harbor—after seeing what it does to the world around it—it would be my little bug. Still, that wasn’t proof.

I sighed into the realization that while the ground over the tomb might have trembled for a moment, hope was not reborn.

“That doesn’t make sense, Silver.” I whipped around to glare at him, anger coursing through me. “It was but a handful of minutes, maybe what? Fifteen at most? From the time I pulled that damned fork from my balls and went limping after her, to the time the anam cara bond ripped free. How would she get from the palace to the direwood so quickly? The direwood is nearly a full day’s ride from here.”

He frowned, his eyes drawn down my nude body to the new scar that swung between my legs as he thought. I wasn’t ashamed of my body, nor was I ashamed of letting another Fae see it and the evidence of my crimes. It was but the flesh that wrapped my magic, just as easily changeable as my court garb or uniform. Though if I had changed my appearance as so many other Fae did regularly, I still could not rid myself of the shame inked into my skin. It would follow me until the day I returned to magic. “And yet we found human blood and a piece of muddy snowflake lace.”

“You come to disturb me and my tryst with the dark sister and milúll wine over human blood and snowflake lace in the direwood? Did you even stop to think that without a horse there would be no way for her to get that far? And there isn’t a single horse unaccounted for in the stables, as you so helpfully reminded me.” I rummaged around the small thicket of wine bottles scattered about the room, hunting for one that still held some reprieve. One of them must clutch some remnant traces of the Siur Dobh. There had been just enough in the forgotten stash I dug from the broken bones of the armoire and the scallop held only a thin smudge of resin now. “I say it again. Go away, Silver.”

The prepared rationing of glass vials hidden away in a carved-out shelf had announced itself, and the salvation it promised, when the armoire met its demise across the stone wall. It was all too convenient, my old lover calling me back to her arms for comfort. Just this once, she had whispered. Just for now. I had replied. We two telling lies in the hollows of my grief.

“I’ll keep searching, Captain.” His determination was admirable. If only I had that level of delusion to carry me. But her absence was like a firebrand at the center of my being. Without her, all I had left to animate me was my oath to vengeance.

I found a half-empty bottle, streaks of midnight purple oil floating slick at the top, and tipped its contents into my mouth before spitting back at him. “Bring me her body, Silver. If nothing else, bring me her flesh.”

The relief was immediate. Pleasure, thick and sticky, washed through me from my scalp to my toes, wrapping velveteen fingers around the shard buried deep at the center of my being me. Color bled into me, not from my eyes but from every sensation receptor along my skin. It filled the holes in my soul where magic was too terrified to go, the darkest parts of me that even I was too scared to acknowledge. Then the weight, the delicious, delightful contradiction of weight as it lifted me from my body, leaving limbs feather-light and the heft of my magic pressing in on me like a sunbaked embrace.

I was both present and not present, held aloft but aware in the arms of the Siur Dobh. And if I wanted to, I could just let go. The call to her was almost undeniable. But even the dark sister paled in comparison to my little bug.

He tilted his head and watched me disappear into my drug of choice. What would he think of his mentor? Silvertree had come to the palace after the War of Thorns, and I had already put my little box of resins and herbs and berries under a loose stone in the corner. I had sworn it off and survived the stingy, itching sweats of the dark sister’s displeasure long before he met me.

“Do you know, Silvertree, in all the time I sat across from her and traded barbs with her, not a single time did I sink myself into that flesh? She was my anam cara. I knew from the moment I first saw her. The moment my hand touched her and my magic leaked into her, she was mine. But the entire time she was here, I held myself aloft. I held back. I wanted her to choose me. I wanted her to see me as I am, not The Raven of the Dawn, but me. I wanted her to see who I was beyond my sins. So I never defiled her. I never—” my slurred, fuzzy words trailed off into the void of my consciousness.

He sighed, “Speak the words to bid me enter, Captain. Let me take you to the bath and clean the sick from your skin. And clean away the wine and sweat. You’re talking about fucking a corpse. I knew you were a little off since the war, but I think the drink has pushed you too far now.”

I grew serious as he tied pieces of my dark-sister-addled tangent together incorrectly. “I would never defile her corpse, Silvertree. Never. I’d fill great rivers with blood just to hear her heartbeat just one more time. But I would never dishonor her by defiling her corpse.”

I swallowed against the emotion clawing its way up my throat. “I just want to lay her to rest. I want to bathe her skin and dress her in the finery I never had the chance to give her. I want to travel back to Breacadh an Lae and light her fires and invest her ashes into the home she would never sit as mistress to. She deserves that from me.”

“Captain.”

“Hmm?” My head swam in the silken embrace of a starless night sky.

“The ward?”

I pushed golden threads of magic into a tablet hidden within the walls of the room and inscribed his name on it. “Enter.”

He did not waste time in slipping past the threshold and closing the door behind him. Then strode to my side, pushing the debris of my rage and agony away with nimble boots. “Captain, you should not say such things with an open door. No one will ever replace my lady Pearl, I know that. I saw it in your eyes in the way you spoke of her. I know what she meant to you, but a human as your anam cara? Are you sure?”

I snorted as I let him lead me to the bathing chamber. “I’m younger than some but not that young, Silver. I know what it is supposed to feel like when you meet them. My magic flowed like someone had stuck a tap in me and I was nothing more than a barrel of ale. Any time I touched her. Any time our skin collided with it was like I couldn’t control it. It longed to be within her more than it longed to be within me. Sometimes, even with my gloves on, I would feel it pull free to fill her.” I hesitated, unsure of my own convictions. “She was human, I’m pretty sure.”

“What do you mean pretty sure?”

“It’s the drink.”

“Or the Siur Dobh,” he said with a frown, struggling between judgement and compassion.

I had let slip something that I shouldn’t have. I was too careful to do that any other time. I trusted Silver more than most Fae; I had even entrusted him to guard her alone when I was unable to. He was loyal and honorable in the ways of the court before that Bastard took the throne, but I would not trust him with my suspicions.