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“Are you sure you don’t want the mushrooms?” Gillie asked, causing Nua to hiss and smack his arm.
“He’s just had half a bottle of whisky. Just becauseyoucan take anything and everything and come out the other side doesn’t mean Ash can.”
Gillie chuckled and pressed a kiss to Nua’s temple before standing up with the bottle and the bowl filled with wrinkled brown mushrooms. “I’ll bring you some water and make that salve.”
“Thank you, love,” Nua said absently, fiddling with the bandages as he watched me.
His words made me lift my weak head to look at him, distracting me from the pain. He’d thanked him. I knew how much trust that required from the Folk. They never thanked anyone.
A pang of overwhelming sadness overrode the pain momentarily, but I had no idea why. Maybe because I had no one I could trust at all.
“Who is he?” I asked, my mouth dry and my breaths still coming too fast.
Nua smiled, but it was soft even though his sharp teeth gleamed. “One of the solitary Folk. Always has been. We’ve been together a long time.”
“And you… live here?” I asked, bleary eyes looking round at the dirt room. The whisky was kicking in, relaxing my tense muscles just a little.
Nua nodded. “Yes. But I haven’t always.” He paused, watching me closer. “Did you figure anything out while you were there? Did the book help?”
I suddenly remembered theSpellsmithsbook, but it was the notes that had been tucked inside that crowded the front of my brain. Those ominous, disjointed messages about death and black things watching me and the Carlin’s frost.
“Wh-what were those notes?” I asked. “In the book. The weird messages.”
His lips thinned into a grim line. “I wasn’t sure whether we should give you those, but Gillie said it might have helped.” He gestured towards the doorway that Gillie had disappeared through. “He takes his mushrooms and has visions. He had several about you. But they were never all that clear. We wrote down what we could. I wrote what he mumbled while in a trance, but sometimes he did it himself.”
Some of those messages had been in Nua’s handwriting. And now it made sense why the others had been looping and shaky. Gillie had been off his head while he’d written them.
“Really?” I managed to give him a flat look, even though my face was tight with pain. “You got your boyfriend to take magic mushrooms and transcribed his hallucinations thinking that would help?”
Nua’s cheeks stained a deeper gold. “They don’t affect us quite the same as mortals, Ash. And Gillie is special. He has a special… affinity with fungi.”
I quirked a brow at that, my body loose. The pain in my arm was still there, but I cared less about it now as the alcohol sent a different kind of lazy heat through my remaining limbs. My eyelids drooped.
Nua sighed. “I’m guessing they didn’t help, then.”
“No,” I slurred. “They didn’t. And the book didn’t either. I don’t understand how reading about old spellsmiths was supposed to help me. Why didn’t you just tell me what I needed to do to become full fae?”
Nua’s face flushed a deeper colour, and his big eyes lowered as he fiddled with the edge of the furs. “Well, we… didn’t really know.”
I stared at him. “What?”
“We didn’t know what you needed to do. No one does. It’s never… I doubt the Carlin knew either, which was why she left you on her land and waited to see if it would happen.”
Anger exploded, as hot as the agonising pain in my arm. “Are you saying you’ve all been telling me, for months, to do something thatnone of youeven knew how to do?”
“We didn’t want you to do it for the same reasons as her,” he said quickly as I sagged back, the burst of anger exhausting me. “We wanted you to do it so you could escape. We knew it would be the only way you could.”
I didn’t have the energy to even answer, resentment turning into a low throb in the pit of my stomach. Fucking Folk.
Nua was watching me carefully. “In… In the book, did you read the passage about the Brid?”
The word pinged in my sluggish consciousness, but not from the book. I could hear the Carlin hissing it in her deep, raspy voice. Talking about the Brid’s sons—as if I was one of them.
She’d said I was Seelie High Fae. She’d said the Seelie Queen’s blood ran through my veins.
My breathing sped back up as I looked at Nua. “Is… Is she my mother? My fae mother?”
His face was grim. “Yes. Our mother.”
