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Chapter One
Ash
“He’s waking up.”
As those words drifted into my slowly rousing brain, I was convinced that I was going to open my eyes and see the moving forest above me, feel the sway of the cart bumping over uneven ground, sit up and see Caom and Idony staring at me. That I was going to have to relive it all again. The grief. The misery. The fear. The crushing loneliness of my empty cottage on the edge of unseelie land. The agony of my burning death all alone in the Carlin’s throne room.
But when I opened my eyes, I saw a golden face peering down at me with a worried expression, green eyes blinking frantically. Sideways.
“N-Nua?” I rasped, voice low and hoarse.
His striking face broke into a weak smile, and I felt a warm hand on my bare chest. “Yes. It’s me.”
I struggled up onto my arms and looked around blearily. I was in a small, cramped room with low ceilings. It smelled loamy in here, and weak firelight flickered over the dim space. After a second, I realised the walls and ceiling were actually made of dirt. Thick beams of wood stretched above me, stopping the earth from swallowing me whole.
Nua leaned away, drawing my gaze back to him. I stared at his face, so familiar yet not, because I hadn’t seen it for years. The narrow features. The sharp teeth and big eyes. The golden skin and long, dark green hair.
He was wearing a brown shirt, but one sleeve had been rolled up, and a thick bandage was wrapped around his left arm—what remained of it. It ended just above his elbow, and gold-green blood was seeping through the fabric.
I sucked in a breath as memories flooded back. My desperate run across unseelie land. Guards chasing me, Ankou and his death hound watching me. Balor bursting out of my cottage, his blue eyes flashing, the sword gleaming silver in his hand before it cut off my arm and blood spurted over the icy grass.
I jerked my arms up and stared at them. Both of them. Both whole. Both hands there.
“What?” I said numbly.
Nua exhaled, but his face twisted into a pained grimace as he gripped his left bicep.
“I took it for you,” he said. “It was the least I could do.”
“What?” I repeated, lifting my gaze from my weirdly golden arms to his face. My eyes darted immediately to the stump. “Took it for me?”
His lips pursed. “I can… absorb things from others. I didn’t want you to bear this, so I—”
“No.”
Anger flared, making my hands clench into fists. Both hands, because the left one was suddenly back, even though I remembered tripping over my own severed arm before I made it into the forest.
Nua stared at me. “No?”
“Give it back.”
His green eyes blinked sideways. “What?”
“Give it back.” I gritted my teeth, staring at him.
I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trustanyone. I hadn’t in so long. Just because he’d been leaving me notes, just because he’d been screaming at me to run, didn’t mean he was on my side.
No one had been on my side for months.
“Give it back,” I repeated in a hard voice. I didn’t want to owe him anything.
“Ash, I—”
“If he wants it back, you should give it back, my love.”
The new voice made me jump, and I quickly turned until my back was against the wall, still sitting on the pallet of soft furs that I’d woken up on. I didn’t want anyone behind me, creeping up on me.
I let out a hard breath when I realised that I recognised the man who had walked into the room through a low doorway. The dark hair. The silver eyes. I remembered those eyes creasing with mirth as he showed me different mushrooms when I was a child, telling me what he could do with them.
