Aisling: A Spell Unbinding, page 24
Lir cringed at the memory, glaring at the druid.
“Your Majesty, Crown Prince of Roktling,” the druid addressed Dagfin, bowing his head in greeting. The priest, a spiritual guide for the druids, nevertheless unable to see through the simplest of Lir’s glamors.
“I, Chief and High Priest Veran, intended to request an audience with Your Majesty, not realizing you were to leave as swiftly as you arrived.”
“Apologies,” the Faerak replied. “Our business here was short-lived and our time of the essence.”
“Please, Your Majesty, I only beseech you to stay until the end of Samhain. Our people have caught word of your heroism elsewhere, slaying the beasts that plague our kind despite our mortal tendency to ignore all that is Other. To recognize the magic of our realm as anything more than stories. It is an honorable service.” The priest bowed, the bones hanging from the circlet, clacking.
“And so, I request such heroism on behalf of my people.”
Lir struggled to bite his tongue. He needn’t draw unnecessary attention to either himself or his knights, especially during Samhain, when the draiocht was especially mischievous and lawless. Capable of unveiling his glamor should Lir indulge in his rage.
“You worship the feywilds, the beasts, the Aos Sí. What reason would you have for my services?” Dagfin asked, forcing Lir to wonder if the princeling was aware of the Phuka wandering the streets and claiming souls yestereve or if he’d been too consumed with inhaling Ocras to notice. Enough to kill a weaker human. And if Dagfin hadn’t wreaked of it, Lir would’ve noticed regardless. The sharp transformation from wounded mortal to gleaming Faerak in a handful of hours. His dependency deepening.
“All things worship out of fear, Your Majesty. We’re attuned to the earth and the churning of the Forge, harboring utmost respect for all its creation,” the druid paced nearer, his cloaked followers, matching his movements. “But with you here, Prince of Demon’s Death, we bare the tools to end bloodshed until the next beast arrives, and we’re forced to strike a deal we must abide by lest we starve.”
“You wish me to hunt this Unseelie down?”
Peitho and Filverel both glanced at Lir, gauging his reaction.
“The Phuka, Your Majesty.”
Aisling considered the priest through narrowed eyes, reminding Lir of their conversation the night before and wondering if Aisling felt the inclination to help once more. Angering him further.
“There’s no time,” Lir growled from up ahead, meeting Dagfin’s glare. “And this isn’t our concern.”
The druids all scowled at Lir, noticing him for the first time. Tempting Lir to strip himself of his glamor and have them fall to their knees.
“Fionn and the Lady are still nipping at our heels,” Aisling spoke to the princeling, her words nearly a whisper. “We cannot wait till the end of Samhain.”
Dagfin worked his jaw, considering. A fact which annoyed Lir more than most things. For despite the priest’s ignorance, the choice was not the princeling’s.
“I cannot refuse them help,” he replied to Aisling, just as low. “And if placed in my position, neither would you.”
Aisling grimaced.
“You think too highly of me,” she said.
“You sacrificed your life for the mortal race once before. At the expense of all you held dear. Why should today be any different?”
Aisling held Dagfin’s gaze, expression unreadable. But Lir saw the conflicted curve at the edge of her lips. The frown that settled across her brow. The way her eyes slid to Lir’s own, weighing the correct choice. Caught in between. And so long as Aisling was lost somewhere in the middle, Lir suffered, drowning in his own longing.
“We ride now,” The Sidhe King growled, his patience spent.
Lir nudged the mount onwards, his knights following suit while Dagfin and Aisling lingered behind. A shred of doubt blooming in Lir that perhaps Aisling wouldn’t follow.
Lir’s horse reared, startled by a figure approaching from the feywilds.
Lir knew before he could make sense of its details the figure was mortal. A child, no older than a handful of years, racing for Bludhaven. Mud and blood alike, streaked across its blue cheeks and lips purpled by the cold. It wept as it collapsed across the drawbridge, but not a druid moved. Instead, they glared at him, whispering useless prayers to the Gods. The guards at the front entrance, raising their crossbows and aiming at the child.
“Be gone!” the priest shouted, fear mingling with anger and breaking his voice. “This is no home to you now, child!”
The child stuttered. Unable to use its tongue for shock or the cold, Lir couldn’t tell.
The Sidhe King hesitated, his mount huffing and stomping in place.
“I said be gone!” the druid repeated, voice echoing amidst the silence.
Without thinking, Lir leapt off the horse and approached the child in one movement. He felt Bludhaven stir, their whispers scraping against the cold.
“Do not touch him!” The druid’s face burned red, shaking with fury. “That child is the Phuka’s now. Touch him, and you will condemn us all to certain death for entertaining an escaped sacrifice! He must go back, and our payment must be paid unless His Majesty slays the Phuka.”
Lir ignored the priest, kneeling before the child. He was just a fledgling.
Sidhe children, as rare as they might be, lived decades as children. On the other hand and at the cost of mortal lifespans, human children lived only a handful of years from birth to adulthood. Meaning, this child hadn’t entered life but perhaps three years prior. Its handful of years a blink in comparison to Sidhe children. Nothing more than a bairn.
Lir reached out and held the child’s cheek. Its flesh hard and waxy to the touch. Lir’s loathing for the child’s mortal blood cooled by the streaks of tears and the child’s cooing. The fluttering of its lashes, the innocence, so akin to Sidhe bairns it almost ached.
The memories of a hungry cry echoed in his mind. Nightmares of a Sidhe bairn calling out to a mother who’d presaged its own death as Lir cradled it in his arms. Desperate to keep its small fire burning if just for a breath longer. To hear its cries for an eternity. And at the time, Lir didn’t realize that despite the bairn’s death after Narisea’s, he’d indeed hear its cries forever. Its precise decibel finding him in a quiet room, a dreamless sleep, a still morning. The pain of every memory, a reminder he still bore a heart. That Lir had once loved and lost greatly.
“This is but one of hundreds of mortal children they’ve given to the Phuka, Damh Bán,” the forest whispered. “He rode the Phuka far between our trees until at last, the creature stopped for its meal, and the child—clever child—escaped, screaming for its mother. But where is she now?”
Lir glanced over his shoulder at the crush of townsfolk gathering to witness the spectacle. Aisling and Dagfin stood nearest the flock of mortals. And beyond them, he could smell the mother from where he crouched. The same blood as the child intermingling with potent terror and regret.
Lir scooped the boy into his arms.
“Tell me, what do you see, Damh Bán?” the forest continued, groaning. “Is it possible you see what you’ve lost in something left living? Even if that something is a mortal child? Ahh, I see now, yes, yes, there is a child-shaped hole in your heart, Damh Bán. A wound that will never heal.”
Lir stood before Bludhaven, sheltering the child from their judgement. A moment of confusion unspooling before Lir dropped the glamor and allowed his audience to glean his true self. The Barbarian Lord of Annwyn towering before them, their sacrifice in his arms.
They gasped, staggering back in shock. Veneration muddled with potent horror. The chief druid, paling, his old bones supported by the followers around him. All of Bludhaven, holding its breath with no sign of release.
“I’ll kill the Phuka,” Lir said. “And in exchange you’ll not only care for and take in this child, but you’ll also offer yourselves before you ever sacrifice another child again. Lest I allow the feywilds to swallow this village whole, consume you from the inside out, and spare only the young.”
Chapter XXX
AISLING
Racat was obsidian.
Its sinuous shape tangled between two others of similar size, cut and glazed into stained glass portraits. One red and winged. The other green and three-headed, coloring the interior of the cathedral as morning light crept inside.
Aisling had never seen Racat in all its glory. Only in dreams, in darkness, beneath the boat that’d sailed her into Annwyn.
“Racat, Muirdris, and Aengus,” a familiar voice sounded from behind.
Galad stood a few paces from the entrance to the temple, appraising the stained glass for himself.
From Aisling’s vantage point before the altar, she could see Gilrel just outside the doors, Peitho and Filverel guarding the entrance from the now-frenzied mortals eager to set eyes on either the Sidhe and Aisling herself, Galad personally tasked to guard Aisling while Lir and Dagfin hunted the Phuka. A partnership that might find the Unseelie unscathed and themselves both hunter and hunted.
“The dragún of power, prosperity, and immortality,” Aisling conjectured.
“Respectively.”
An awkward silence smoked the temple. The only respite, the druids just outside the doors, collapsed on their knees, bowing and chanting as though entranced. A worship Peitho seemed to enjoy, even if it were mortals who kissed the streets before her feet.
“You’re more than welcome to guard me from outside the temple,” Aisling said: for her own sake or the knight’s, she wasn’t certain.
“I was ordered not to let you out of my sight.”
“You’ve disobeyed orders before,” Aisling said, recalling how Galad allowed Aisling to leave her chambers in Annwyn to deliver a letter to the Fire Hand. A letter, that with hindsight, she wished she’d burned long before it ever flew across the Isles of Rinn Dúin.
“It isn’t the same,” Galad said.
“It isn’t the same? Or we aren’t the same?”
Galad met her eyes. Sapphires that cut into her soul and forced Aisling to feel what she’d desperately attempted to stifle: uncorrupted guilt.
“‘We?’” Galad scoffed. “It has never been a ‘we,’ mo Lúra. Your lips have only ever known ‘I.’”
Aisling winced.
“My decision to leave wasn’t meant to either forsake or condemn our friendship.”
Galad shifted at the final word.
“It hardly matters, mo Lúra—”
“Enough. Don’t call me that after my name has been spoken from your mouth before.”
Galad’s expression tightened.
“Very well, Ash.” Her name like venom on his tongue. “It means nothing what you intended. It only matters what you did,” his voice rose, slapping against the pews, the stone statues, the pillars. “You fled from my king, from Gilrel, from our friendship, without a glance back. Ran with he whose most forgiving crimes were my own branding. A crime I never blamed you for until that day.”
Starn.
Aisling’s eyes pricked with heat, but she willed not a single tear to fall. It wasn’t her place to cry. The stone lodged in her throat, making impossible the task.
“I only ever meant to pursue what it is I am. Could you truly say, without a morsel of doubt, you’d have done any differently, Galad?”
The knight studied her, as though he wished to understand but simply couldn’t. Wished to redeem her, to justify what she’d done, but found her unforgivable all the same. The pain such a realization evoked: flashing across his expression. And the sight of it, enough to crush Aisling’s heart and fill her chest with blood.
“We will reach Lofgren’s rise,” he said. “Yet you’ll find that whatever it is you were searching for; who you are, what you are, why you are, was never anything an Unseelie, a God or even the Forge could give you. It was something unraveling all around you. Something you ran from.”
DAGFIN
Dagfin had always cherished winter. It heralded the death of all the rot that’d grown throughout the sun’s last cycle. The death of everything unwanted.
The summer was hot and gave light to everything better left in shadow. Was endless. Was the anniversary of his eldest brother’s final words. The rightful heir to the Roktan throne.
Yet now, winter was tainted by Fionn.
Dagfin wove lithely between the trees, the Ocras more potent than it’d ever felt before. Near the brink of collapse, his body was suddenly renewed.
The Roktan Prince spun his daggers between his fingers, half eyeing his surroundings for the Phuka and half expecting the Fae King to appear out of nowhere, swinging his axes.
It was Dagfin who’d been tasked to hunt the Phuka and the Fae King who’d bore a change of heart; for Aisling or himself, the Faerak was uncertain. Only that he’d cursed it, wishing to face the Phuka alone rather than align himself with Lir. And mercifully, they’d wordlessly agreed to venture their separate ways the moment their boots stepped foot outside Bludhaven’s threshold.
Dagfin had never caught or slayed a Phuka before. Yet, by the looks of the clumsy trail it left in its wake, the Faerak knew it’d be a straightforward hunt. Hoofprints in the frozen dirt, broken branches from a heavier gait, lazy lines in the snow—its tail dragging behind it. And most disturbing of all, children’s clothing torn and left billowing on tree branches, tiny shoes discarded atop piles of leaves, and blood, both fresh and old, splattered across a landscape of ivory.
So, it came as no surprise when Dagfin set eyes on the creature curled beside the edge of a steep drop.
It looked no different than a pale stallion. Magnificent in the light of a fair winter’s star, innocently sleeping. And had the Phuka’s trail not led the Faerak directly to the cliff’s edge, Dagfin would’ve second-guessed himself.
The Phuka startled awake, searching its surroundings.
Dagfin crouched between the trees, more silent than the chittering birches or the splintering ice. Steadying his breath and drawing Fionn’s longsword.
One flick of the wrist and the task would be done with.
The Phuka stood, tossing its glittering, moon-white mane.
Dagfin hesitated.
It made no sound, yet the Faerak heard its lullaby. The soft humming of a woman emanating from its magical luster.
Unlike the Murúch, the sound itself didn’t spell him. Only the question of how a creature so resplendent could commit such sins.
Dagfin shook his head. The distraction, he knew, was intentional. The sign of a beast designed to convey innocence so children might follow it into the feywilds of their own accord.
Quick as lightning, Dagfin defeated the distance between himself and the Phuka, raising Fionn’s blade to sink into the beast’s side. The blade plunged the same moment an ax flew across the expanse, both striking the Unseelie with a fleshy thud. The Phuka reared, eyes glazing back, its lullaby dissolving into an Otherworldly scream as blood as black as tar stained its coat and pooled by its hooves. Collapsing against the edge of the cliff.
Lir appeared from the trees, swinging the other ax in his free hand.
“You’re free to return now, princeling,” the Fae King said, eyes focused on the Unseelie’s corpse, transformed into something else entirely. A gaunt, spindly-looking creature whose hair was thin and gray, its mouth pulled to the knobs where its ears should be. A haggard, grotesque beast that gave name to the evil it committed.
“I’m not leaving without the creature’s head.”
The Fae King fixed his eyes on the Faerak.
“The Phuka is mine.”
“Yet felled by my sword.”
Lir’s expression sparkled, darkly amused.
“If you did anything, it was notify the Phuka of your presence. You're fortunate my ax found its throat to commit true damage, worthy of slaying it.”
Lir bent over the beast, wrenching the edge of his blade from the leaking wound. He lifted it above his head, prepared to sever the Phuka’s head.
Dagfin reacted, shifting and unsheathing Fionn’s blade from the body of the Phuka and toward Lir’s axe.
The arc of the blade whistled. Its tip knocking the ax from Lir’s hand and scraping the back of his palm as a result.
Lir hissed, fae blood sizzling after the kiss of the blade’s edge.
“Very well, princeling; I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t hoped to return with two heads instead of one.”
Lir threw his left ax. The weapon spun, wicked fast and straight. And had Dagfin been but an average mortal, it would’ve been a mere flash of color, finding his throat before he’d borne the time to react. But Dagfin stepped to his right, avoiding the strike by a mere hair’s length. The ax striking the birch behind him with an angry judder.
“How much Ocras did you take, princeling?” The Fae King collected his second ax. He adjusted his grip and tossed it.
Dagfin moved, and the second ax sunk into another tree.
“Perhaps the better question is, how many days must bleed before you can’t survive lest you consume your Ocras?”
Dagfin wasn’t surprised Lir knew the limitations of Ocras. That for mortals, magic never gave but always took. And ever since he’d narrowly escaped Peitho’s blade at their union, the Ocras had become irresistible. The only means of surviving. For without the dust, his muscles ached, his head throbbed, his skin paled, and his bones became brittle. On the cusp of death lest he inhale the Ocras once more—both a surety of more time as well as the reaper of it. A cruel mischief Dagfin found the magic enjoyed. Found satisfaction in both the mortals’ denial yet thirst for it at whatever cost.
