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“Impatient fucking Ard Tiarna,” I grumbled to Goose and scratched his ears idly. I didn’t exactly have anything to write him back. It’s not exactly like pens and quills just fell out of the sky in the middle of nowhere. I scowled up to the storm. “I’m going to send him back to my friends, and when he comes back, if you try that shit again, I’m going to be pissed. Got it?”
The magic storm didn’t answer, because of course it didn’t. I kept my eye on it, never ceasing to scratch behind Goose’s ears. “Goose, go back to the impatient little ass and use your Goose Voice to tell him I’m fine. Not to come. And that I’ll be fine. Then come back. Okay? Use your voice, but just this one time. Okay?”
Goose huffed and nuzzled deeper against me, reluctant to be parted from me again, just as much as I hated the idea of sending him back, even though I was the one who had told him to stay on the shoreline. I didn’t know what I would find here. And now that I knew that I was, for some reason, immune to the magic storm, at least he could be here. I didn’t want to risk the entire group of them moving close enough for the storm to hurt them. I couldn’t protect all of them at once. And I wasn’t losing anyone. Not ever again.
“Hurry, Goose. I don’t want to be all alone here when dark fully hits.” I kissed the top of his head and pushed him off me. He grumbled his disappointment at the lack of scratches and, with a puff of smoke, disappeared. Only a few minutes passed before he returned, his head securely glued to my lap for attention. The magic storm never lunged for him again; it watched him with a sense of quiet caution but didn’t make any additional hostile actions.
I was nearly shaking from exhaustion by the time I had the courage to venture into the naked swath of soil. With every footstep, I expected something to happen, something to jump out, some magic fuckery to be triggered. Goose skulked at my heels, his breath hot on my ankles. But nothing happened. The magic storm was the only thing that was different; it followed me as Goose did, a massive new pet above me.
I wandered the entirety of the scar where I imagined a vast manor house had once stood. I searched for the pile of rubble The Raven claimed the Ard Rí had pulled the baby Sapphire Speaker from. I searched for where my mother had hidden my name. I searched for even a single button that might have fallen off a doublet and found its way into the dirt. There was nothing. Just the deep gouge in the land where the footprint of the giant had once lain. There were no bones, no hollow armor long ago liberated of the flesh that had animated it.
I curled up in a ball under the shadow of the magic storm, Goose stretching out over me as a makeshift blanket. Defeat thick in my veins. “There’s nothing here, Goosey boy. There’s supposed to be something here.”
Goose wriggled his big head under my chin and let me use him as a pillow, my eyes staying locked on the barren patch all around me.
Chapter 35
Ard Tiarna Emrys of Breacadh an Lae, The Raven of the Dawn
Days floated past as I waited. What was I waiting for? Was it for the Samhradh to bring me information? Or was it for Melty and the thing that lived within her to deliver . . . deliver what exactly? Was it the confirmation she had executed her half of the bargain? Or was it the denial I was waiting for?
The diaphanous thing I called hope that lived as a specter within me was torn down the middle. Either or both were better than neither. One or the other would allow me to move somewhere or in some direction.
But the waiting on the edge of the void was a special flavor of torture I wasn’t familiar with.
The wound Melty had left me with wasn’t healing, not that I expected it to. I spent hours cleaning and washing it with alcohol to try to flush the loose iron pigment from the wound. Daróg’s lapdog had been too skilled, though, burying the pigment nearly down to my bone, and now that the iron was released to roam, it went about its grim business, melting flesh around the wound to its heart’s content. I should seek out a drui of Ailbhe. I should go to the Temple, but I didn’t want to explain the dark purple tint working its way from my fingertips to my palm. Nor the streaks of it that poked out from under my ear caps.
The Bandrui would have words for me. Words and platitudes about how I didn’t need the dark sister to get through this, that she would be there for me. I could almost hear her earnest voice in my ear telling me she understood my pain, but returning to the arms of my oldest and truest lover was a mistake. She didn’t know. She could never know. There was no possible way she could understand all the horrors I had weathered and the unraveling of my connection to sanity. How I had kept it through these centuries of warfare, both on the field and off, I didn’t know, but I did know that without the bottle of dark ichor sitting on the side of my bedside table, I would not have had the courage or thought to set some of the traps and bait that I had done.
I would be lying here in the bed I sat upon, unwinding bandages to clean my wound, staring up at the ceiling. Or worse, already committed to the Tears of Odharnait for the madness I had succumbed to.
No, with the Siur Dobh, I was strong enough to push past the pain of my lost anam cara. Strong enough to stand under the gravity of the loss of my family and court. Bold enough to set forth a strategy to return to my side the pawn Daróg moved around so easily. My sister would be liberated. I just had to keep my consumption low, a little taste here and there, just enough to dull the edge, and I would be able to keep going. And occasionally, when things got too bad, I could indulge just a little. Just enough to float weightless in her arms. Not enough to get truly out of control, never that, I would never do that. Just enough.
I could control it. I could control her. She didn’t control me. It was medicinal, strictly medicinal, and not recreational. It was like the limbs the Árus Contráth expertly crafted. Nothing more. My limb just happened to be in a bottle and prescribed by the apothecary in my head. There was no difference.
I hissed in pain as I pulled away one of the closer layers of spider silk gauze, and it caught on a scab, pulling it free.
“Captain?” Silvertree asked, concern painting his voice from the doorway.
I turned, noticing a small bloodied white and brown feather caught in the ooze of my wounds, and my gaze flicked away as I balled it into the gauze. “Ah, Silver. Come.”
His dark brows knit together as he watched me finish unwinding, stepping around the bed to lean half of his ass on the low stone ledge of my window. “Gods be bastards of their own making! I knew you said you had taken a wound while sparring with the Samhradh, but what possessed them to use iron for a friendly spar?”
I snorted and tossed the dirty bandages into the small basket where I had been collecting them for cleaning, taking up the bottle of wine already dosed. I would need help to bear the pain of cleaning the iron bite. “Grimhand took a special interest in me.”
The lie was easy, almost as smooth on the tongue as the great mouthful of Siur Dobh I swallowed. Lying had become second nature again. Easy, just as natural as it was to the other Fae. Lying about where I was going, who I was seeing, who I was talking to, and about what. I even had lied to Silver and told him the Bandrui herself had prescribed the use of dark sister to keep the madness at bay. He would never check. He never did. He trusted me above all other Fae, and I was fine with letting him. It was harmless in this case. And I would never lie to him about things that truly mattered.
Silver cast me a conspiratorially jesting grin. “Oh ho, did she now? I’m sure she did. She has a reputation in the barracks, you know.”
“Does she?” I asked with very little interest. Grimhand was a Fae like no other, a Fae that, had I met her in a different place in my life, perhaps before I knew my little bug, I might have been attracted to. I was aware of her proclivities, though. Aware of the games she liked to play. They sang a tune too close to those that Daróg liked to play for my tastes.
“They say her father has been trying to get her married and producing the next line of warriors since before the war. She told him she would marry when she met a Fae who could take a single strike from her sword and remain standing. Only a Fae who was able to stand across from her in the square with no fear and without submitting the fight would be worthy of being her mate.” He grinned, watching me raise the clear bottle of alcohol, splashing it onto a clean cotton rag.
I grunted in response and pressed the burning rag to my wound. Searing pain raced through me for but a second before it was swallowed by the purple venom of the Siur Dobh. I dabbed, dragging the cloth over the bleeding, oozing gash, coming away with all manner of filth mixed in with the black iron pigment that had once been my tattoo. When the pain beat back my dose, I took another two drinks, constantly chasing down the white-hot fury of it.
“Man, she got you good.” He shook his head. “So . . . did you bend the knee?”
I looked up from the tallow salve I was spreading on a clean spider silk gauze. Silvertree swam in a hazy purple night sky, swirling and wavering between popping stars.
