Page 92 of The Red Woman and the White Bear

Then, all Aisling could see of the golden dagger was its hilt protruding from Laure’s breastbone. The Seelie Queen’s eyes rolled back into her head and her features slackened. When Kael released her from the hold of his magic, she dropped heavily to the ground. It was strange, really—an almost anticlimactic ending for an opponent Aisling had thought to be so powerful. But as she bled out into the earth, Laure appeared just as anyone else. Seelie or Unseelie, powerful or not, they were all the same in death.

Unable to look any longer at her lifeless body, Aisling turned to Lyre. The Prelate continued his invocation, steady and unfazed. His cadence hadn’t changed as she would have expected it to as he neared its end. Aisling glanced around, searching the forest for any sign that something had changed. That the ritual had worked.

Lyre’s attention was not on the parchment he held, though, but fixed on something else over Aisling’s shoulder.

When she wheeled around, Kael was kneeling before her. He gazed at her intently, with so much force that he could have only been etching her face into his mind. Every line, every freckle, every variation of color in her irises. He wanted all of it—he needed all of it. He looked every bit that fearsome warrior who she’d trembled before atNyctara. Who’d marked her for death not once, but twice. But there was no hint of that cruelty when he looked at her now, no fear or anger in his expression. Only acceptance and love, overwhelming and powerful. In his hand, he held his own dagger. And a cold sort of realization hit Aisling like a punch in the gut.

“How long have you known?” she demanded.

Kael’s shadows were but thin filaments now, swirling around him gently. Caressing him. “Awhile.”

Aisling fell back a step, shaking her head fervently. “No. I’m not doing this.”

“You have no choice. This is the prophecy, Aisling.” He was so calm, so sure when he spoke. He’d come to terms with this on his own, without her.

“Fuck your prophecy!” Her voice broke on the word. “I didn’t ask for this!”

Kael reached out and took Aisling’s hand in his. He held it firmly, calluses scraping across her freezing palm. “Our fates are immutable. We never ask for these things. The futures we are destined for find us, no matter what we do. You cannot escape yours any more than I can mine.”

“I won’t kill you.” She tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let her.

“I don’t regret this. Us. I never could, not in a hundred lifetimes. Even while I knew this would be our ending, I would not trade the time we had for anything. And someday, in some other form, we will find our way back to each other. I’m sure of it. But this was never our story—yours and mine—it was only ever yours.” He smiled at her softly, sadly, as he slid the hilt of the blade into her hand thengripped it tight under his own and moved it to rest against his throat. “I will do all the hard work. Just close your eyes.”

She wanted to. She wanted to clench them shut and picture herself anywhere else, with him, safe. But she couldn’t. Instead, Aisling kept her eyes locked on Kael’s as he slowly drew the blade from left to right across his throat. Hot blood splattered across her face, shooting from the wound they created together. The spray coated her neck. Her stomach, as his head dropped forward. Her legs, as he fell to the ground. The deep crimson pooled around her feet. But she remained stuck in place, rooted to the ground where she stood. Her vision tunneled around that creeping, expanding puddle.

Besides the movement of the blood, those first few moments after his death felt so unbearably still. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even remember how. Like she had to hold her breath as he drew in his last.

She looked then at the dagger still clutched in her hand. Blood flowed in slow motion from its tip, dripping down into the growing puddle that was spreading past her feet now. She could see it there—see her fingers wrapped around its handle, the hilt resting on the first knuckle of her thumb and her forefinger—but she couldn’t feel it. She couldn’t feel anything at first.

When the pain finally hit a full minute later, it washed over her as an avalanche: suffocating, all-encompassing. Her entire world was reduced in an instant to the searing, ripping, breathless pain of her heart cleaving in two.

Despite being only a few paces behind her, Lyre’s voice seemed infinitely distant as it crescendoed through the rite’s final litany. He’d known, too. They all had.

Aisling only vaguely heard Rodney call her name from someplace to her left. As she turned in his direction, unsteady on her feet, he stood still for a moment to take her in.

From the soft rounds of her cheeks to the soles of her shoes, Aisling was stained red with the blood of the Unseelie King. A twisted sort of laugh bubbled up her throat. She understood it now: her title. She thought she could shape the prophecy on her own, to rewrite her fate. Kael’s fate. In the end, it was exactly as it had been foretold.

In the end, it was Kael’s death that made Aisling the Red Woman.

Ahush seized The Cut as Lyre uttered the last words of the ritual. There was no breeze, no birdsong. Even the distant clashing and shouting ceased, as though the battle had halted altogether. The atmosphere, once heavy with the presence of the Low One, took on a different sort of feel: electric, pulsating, like pins and needles pressed against cold skin.

A downdraft dropped into the clearing then, harsh and violent enough that it sent several large branches crashing to the ground. Aisling was the only one to remain on her feet, so numb to her surroundings that she was barely swayed. Lyre reeled backwards into the altar, destroying it on his way down. Rodney narrowly avoided being pinned beneath a falling limb.

Bright enough to blind, a bolt of white light followed the downdraft. It shot straight into the center of the circle, almost as wide as the trunks of the trees surrounding them. Instead of striking and retracting as lightning, it remained a steady, unbroken stream like a lifeline tethering the vast night sky to the earth below. All around the bright shard, swirling waves of energy surged, rushing upward. A reverse waterfall. The heaviness that magic imbued in the air around them built and built and built, at once both searing hot and ice cold, until finally it exploded in a glaring blast of unharnessed power. The entire clearing was washed with that brilliant white. Aisling had to shield her eyes behind her forearm.

When she looked up, the light had faded to a soft glow. Where the bolt had struck, three figures now stood still as statues. They were nearly identical, save for their stature: the figure in the center stood slightly taller than the other two. The one on the left had arms that seemed almost disproportionately long, and the one on the right was a touch too thin. Their faces were featureless, blank masks without eyes or nostrils or mouths.Like mannequins,Aisling thought dully, but they were no less radiant for it. Their luminous, silver-toned skin seemed to glow from within, the embodiment of starlight.

“Child of prophecy, you have given much to bring peace to a world that is not yours.” The words emanated from all three figures, echoing ethereally through the clearing. They spoke in a strange sort of harmony, three voices merged as one, projecting the sounds somehow without mouths to move. When the taller of the three stepped forward, their movement was fluid and deliberate. Delicatewhite gems and incandescent robes blended almost seamlessly with their shimmering complexion.

“You’re the Silver Saints,” Aisling breathed. She wondered whether she should bow, or curtsy, or avert her gaze. Still in the grip of shock, she did none of those things. Instead, she stood still before the figures, looking into what might have been the eyes of the one closest to her.

“We are Merak,” they said, again together.

“You can end this war?” she asked. They nodded serenely, movements in sync.

“The Unseelie King shall be the final victim of this needless conflict. The bloodshed ends with him.” All three began to move then, gliding across The Cut in the direction of the battle. The plants on the forest floor parted as they passed, the long trains of their gowns sweeping over the snow and dirt but leaving no trace of their passage. Aisling followed behind numbly on leaden legs. Rodney and Lyre joined her wordlessly, but she was oblivious to anything except the light guiding her out of the forest.

The battlefield was littered with bodies, the snow muddied and stained all shades of crimson. On the frontline, where the two armies had met in fierce and violent combat, the fighting had ceased. Those that were pledged to either court stood entranced, eyes clouded over as the magic of the Silver Saints invaded their minds. Some fell to their knees, others merely halted mid-motion. Most had dropped their weapons. Interspersed amongst them, a handful of Solitary Fae looked around, confused, until they saw the approaching light. Then they, too, lowered themselves down on bendedknee. Though their minds remained their own, their reverence was no less profound. Whether or not they believed the Silver Saints to be legend, or lost to bygone history, the entities were here now, walking amidst the dead and wounded.

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