Page 60 of The Forever Queen

Lir waited, watched, fought past the growing grin even now. Nothing was happening. The elixir wasn’t working.

Dread filled the Sidhe king, bottomless and black. He shook his head.

She wasn’t drinking the elixir, still fast and hard asleep. Several sky-blue droplets leaking from the corners of her mouth.

No, no, no, no.

Lir—perhaps driven mad by his desperation—tipped the elixir back and filled his mouth. He cut through the grin one more time, holding his breath as he brought his lips to Aisling and kissed her.

Gently, the Sidhe king spilled the elixir from his mouth to hers. Lir wasn’t certain how long they lay in the meadow of Kaster, his lips to hers. He only knew that if they both died there, buried in the forest’s death, he’d be happy he’d died beside her.

CHAPTER XXVI

Incorporeal, Aisling watched her father limp through clouds of ash. He dragged his iron prosthetic through the charred flesh of the forest, followed by a procession of black knights glimmering in the pale judgment of the moon. Their eyes red with wystria.

Torchlight floated amidst the darkness like the hideous, luminous eyes of a succubus, spotting Aisling amidst the stars and pinning her to the ink of Fiacha’s sky—the Lady’s signature written in the sadistic turn of the blade that pierced her and held her in place.

“This way!” her father yelled: Nemed, high king and fire hand of the North. The violet of his eyes as violet as Aisling’s own: a cruel reminder of the blood they shared.

Aisling grimaced, the gravel of his voice conjuring spirits of her past. His soldiers heeded his orders, emerging from the woodland alongside their sovereign. Behind them, a stain of death was left in their wake—Sidhe and forge-born corpses piled between the mounds of broken oaks.

For the most part, the knights were faceless ghouls. A mystery of opalescent blood wetting their garments, their weapons, their boots. All save for Starn, her eldest brother and the crown prince of Tilren, standing behind their father with the crow-sharp scowl of their mother.

“Are you certain it’s this way?” Starn asked. His crooked nose was smeared with blood and ash, and the whites of his eyes were bloodshot from too much smoke. Aisling’s chest seized, despite herself, with memory. She’d rushed Starn into the kitchens when Fergus had accidentally broken their eldest brother’s nose in a fist fight over the litter of kittens Aisling had found near Castle Neimedh’s cisterns. They were so much smaller then—wisps of the men they’d become. Now, Starn’s eyes shone with the brutality of war, of death, of violence, and of loss. There was something tortuous in the harrowed glances he cast to the shadows, startling when a branch snapped too loudly in the distance.

“I’m certain,” their father replied.

Nemed and his fleet approached the edge of a craig. Vast and storming, a sea sprawled before them, hammering against the forge-made rocks beneath their iron boots. The wind whipped their torchlight till each flame danced, casting shadows across soot-soiled helms. And upon the bone-white crests, bobbed mortal fleets with their cannons and flame and iron. They’d come to meet Nemed, Starn, and his small fleet at the edge of the continent.

Aisling’s eyes pricked with heat. This was not the North. They were somewhere else. Somewhere far away, where colossal trees grew from the sands of the sea and stretched their limbs so their canopies might whisper breaths of fresh salt air between the bellies of ships that narrowly avoided their spindly, wooden claws.

“You believe it’s run somewhere out there?” Starn asked, eyes studying the steely gray of the horizon.

“I’ve no doubt,” Nemed said.

“Is it possible?” Starn continued, his voice brittle after weeks of inhaling smoke. “Can Leshy truly run so far? Especially with such an injury?”

Nemed laughed. A horrible cackle that sent shivers down Aisling’s spine.

“You’ve seen it yourself,” the fire hand said. “You watched it rise from the earth. You held your breath as it reached for you, stumbling on its giant limbs after centuries asleep and rooted to its throne.”

Starn’s lips pressed into a thin line. His eyes glazed over, focused on the memory his father described.

“Can we trust her?” Starn asked. He referenced the Lady.

“No,” Nemed confessed. “And neither can she trust us. But to bury the Aos Sí once and for all, I’ll accept the blade my enemy hands me.”

“Even if it’s laced with their venom?” Starn crossed his arms over his chest.

Nemed turned to his son, meeting his eyes. “You already have.”

And as if its ears burned, the sword at Starn’s back shuddered, twitching in its scabbard to be unleashed. Indeed, the Lady had lent Starn a pearl of magic—one he’d used to rob Dagfin of his life at Lofgren’s Rise.

Aisling’s draiocht growled, the hair on its haunches standing at attention as Racat dug its claws into the caverns of her soul and kneaded like a cat.

“Rest easy,” Nemed continued. “We’ll hunt Leshy down within the fortnight and all will be over. Once and for all.”

“And Aisling?” Starn asked.

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