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“Thank you,” I whispered.

“You can thank me by reaching into yourself and finding that fire again. I’ll guard the flame. You but have to burn for me, Banfhlaith.”

Chapter 28

Ard Tiarna Emrys of Breacadh an Lae, The Raven of the Dawn

For the first time in weeks, I dreamed without the purple mist of the dark sister or the creeping unseen hands of her crawling all over my flesh, demanding service of my body, or the nightmares that I chased away had made room for the face that I truly wished to see. Dawn caught around her golden hair like a crown. Her tresses had been unbound, gently swaying in a crisp morning breeze. She was so beautiful, a brilliant goddess alive and burning with the power radiating from her. In her hand, she held a melting beeswax candle, and in the other, the leash to a hunting dog with a gleaming coat the color of pounded silver.

She said nothing. She just watched me until the brilliance of the creeping sun turned into full day, and the heat from it scorched me awake.

I knew why she came to me now, knew exactly why the dream had found me. Without the clutter of so many complications weighing me down like the iron chains that had held me down in Daróg’s dungeon, I could see clearly exactly what I had left too long.

I knew she was headed to the Fómhar Court; I knew the Crossroads bordered their territory. It was only a matter of time before she made it to them. And I had sat too long in that assurance. Now I needed to know.

I could go to the Flayed Bride. Could prostrate myself before her and hope that today she was in a particularly amenable disposition. But Melty was easier and a less cunning negotiator.

Melty, or as she was formally known, Emberlight of the Crypts, was a minor noble of the Fómhar. Her family had fallen from grace by leaving the Sidereals during the period before the War of Thorns, called the Perils, when Mabh’s line of succession was proving the most fraught. Joining the Court of the Harvest Maiden had been their own perils. To betray your patron god, especially one such as Étain, was dangerous, but to do so to swear loyalty to the Harvest Maiden was a feat few nobles survived. Very few Fae were clever enough or ambitious enough to outrun the wrath of a goddess, and even fewer were willing to risk the generational curse that could come with it.

And yet they had.

To the knowledge of the Ard Rí’s court and scribes, they never spoke of why. Not a single member of Melty’s family ever spoke of the Árus Adaig court or Lon di Lughae ever again. Nor were they acknowledged by a single member of the court to this day. They had, so it seemed, a mutual animus that had cooled into brittle, sharp obsidian that would slice at the first one to break the silence that held it aloft.

She had come to the palace shortly after the war, taking up the abandoned role of skeppist and, by extension, the chandlery. She was neither a favorite among the courtiers nor particularly liked. After all, the courtiers of the palace were vain creatures, and Melty reminded them of the one thing they disliked: hideousness.

I found her exactly where I knew she would be, deep in the woods beyond the Temple of the Ascended, where the meadows fed both the orchards and the surrounding clover mats with the industry of Melty’s bees. A mound of creamy, semi-translucent flesh hunkered down beneath the cool shade of a large ash tree, its branches hanging low enough to nearly cast her into the dark.

“Melty!” I called as a matter of greeting, and she turned her head.

Whether by virtue of her particularly well-honed skills, a fluke of magic gone wrong, or perhaps even the silent wrath of Étain, Melty had lost almost all vestiges of a Fae appearance. Instead, she looked like several of the exquisite pillar candles she made, melted into stacks of lumpy wax mounds hanging off an often-exposed skeleton. The only things that remained Fae-like were her large eyes, the color of fresh pears.

“Lord Raven, come to tilt at my lovelies again?” She listed her head up and to the side, her waxen body shifting on her solid skeleton, revealing the slick bone of the side of her skull and the cresting arms of two vertebrae in her neck. Her thick black hair—long and braided, matted with leaf litter, a few bees, and a discarded feather here and there—slid over her shoulder, pulling her waxen skin with it.

I smiled; the courtiers may have hated her for her appearance, but Melty was one of my favorites. One of the few courtiers I could truly stand. She was rarely looking to sink a hook in somewhere, and perhaps by the very nature of her status being just as low as my own, she always had a joke for me.

“Ah, my lady! You wish me to perish so quickly? The last time you forced me to challenge your royal pets, I was trounced so summarily I limped about for three turns of the tides!” I crossed the meadow dotted with a dozen or more humming wicker domes filled with bees going about their business. “How fair you, Melty, Queen of the Bees?”

A glow came to her waxen cheeks, and she flapped a hand at me, her flesh sloshing like water trapped in a skin. “Why do you seek me, Lord Raven? Surely the beast has not gone through his entire store so quickly? Is he taking to throwing them at his beleaguered daoras again?”

I joined her under the ash, crossing my legs as I sat on the cool earth next to her. “Perhaps. To be true, that is most likely the case, but I do not come on the Ard Rí’s business. I come on my own.”

“My dear Lord Raven, you must know that I am a singularly preoccupied Fae. Why, my lovers span from here to the Sleeping Grove and back. I am afraid you will have to wait a goodly eternity before I let you enjoy the divine bliss of my warmth.” She grinned, her lips drooping and pulling her yellow-tinted alabaster cheek down to reveal the round underside of her unprotected eyeball.

I clasped my hands over my heart, feigning a grievous injury. “Ah! My lady! My lady, Melty! You have wounded me beyond measure! I shall truly perish from the crush of my unrequited love. Allow me at least the boon of your time? Perhaps we can come to an amenable agreement?”

She snorted and procured a pear the same color as her exposed eyes and a small thumb-length knife coated in honey crystals. She went about slicing the pear, sharing as she spoke. “I have missed your jests, Raven. You always were the most amusing of that lot up there. Have you been keeping well?”

I took the offered fruit, not put off in the slightest by the very thing that Melty had been banished for, the way her skin dripped off her hands. “Well enough. He is more persistent as the days go by. More so now.”

A pear slice found her mouth, and she smacked on the juice of it as she considered me for a while. “The bees are gossips, you know, Raven. They told me of a golden-haired girl who sang with magic and danced between blood droplets. Is she the reason he is so persistent?”

Another slice was divvied up, and I nodded, casting a skeptical eye toward the aforementioned spies. I never could tell whether Melty’s particularly well-informed network was truly fed by her bees or, like the rest of the Fómhar, by a different kind of spy. “It is.”

“He can’t stand to be second choice.” She cleaned the knife on her rough-spun, waxed linen apron and handed me the last slice.

“He’s not even a choice at all now. Nor his sister, whom he’s saddled me with.”

“Again? That same madness?”