Page 78 of The Mortal Queen

Aisling could grow accustomed to a life like this. Riding endlessly, venturing the wilderness, bathing in springs and rivers. It was a dream, a life she’d longed for. A wild fantasy her body craved, needed more than breath itself. Yet such a life, Aisling hadn’t realized, belonged to her enemy.

At the thought, the mortal queen met Lir’s eyes. His lashes beaded with moisture.

“Are you ready?” Lir said, his voice more rough than usual.

“For what?” Aisling eyed Lir as he washed the blood from his hands, his neck, his face, and the length of his arms. Aisling looked away, forcing herself to concentrate. Perhaps he really would kill her out here.

“Whatever it is you did to that Fomori, I want you to repeat it.” Fomorian blood and dirt clouded in the waters around him.

Aisling flinched at the memory of Gnoll igniting like a torch.

“The water will keep you from burning any trees should you make a mistake,” he said.

So that’s why he’d brought her here. For a moment, Aisling believed it to be a kindness, a moment for the mortal queen to bathe away the past several weeks, or however long it’d been. Instead, this was a plot, the Aos Sí’s premeditated attempt to control whatever abilities they believed Aisling could perform.

Lir stepped towards her, encouraging the wild thrashing of her heart.

“You’re going to show me how you summoned that fire,” he continued, his voice low.

Aisling straightened lest she expose the flock taking flightwithin her stomach.

“I don’t know how.”

But Lir already knew this. Had already witnessed her failed attempts to light a fire by the lake.

Lir moved closer still, a wolf padding towards its prey.

“I’ll teach you,” he said.

“Hold out your hands,” the fae king ordered. Reluctantly, Aisling obeyed, cupping her palms above the surface of the water. Lir craned his neck to the forest, as though waiting for someone or something to emerge. And emerge it did.

A familiar snake slithered through the branches of glass littering the forest floor, hissing excitedly as it dragged its sinuous form down the rocks and into the waters. Nervously, Aisling eyed it but the fae king was unbothered. So, Aisling allowed the creature to approach her.

The snake coiled between her hands, tickling her fingertips with its forked tongue.

“You spoke to it?” Aisling asked, resisting the urge to smile.

“Aye,” he said, studying her, “and so can you, can’t you?”

Aisling met his eyes. Emerald pools brimming with the life-breath of the forest, the rage of the wolf, and the serenity of the stag. Filled with winds and shadows and hollows, tempered by the sunlit canopies, budding flowers, and sweet frosted earth. Aisling tore her eyes from the fae king, cursing the ache in her chest.

“I can, at times, sense something, a feeling that is not my own,” Aisling confessed, “a sensation separate from myself: the pangs of hunger from a fox hunting nearby, the anxiety of the doe caught mid-stride, but I cannot speak to them as I would with my voice.”

“That’s how it begins,” Lir said, stroking the snake with his knuckle. And with every supple glide of his fingers against its scales, Aisling could nearly feel the warmth of his skin on her own.

“Once the ability matures, they’ll communicate with you and you them. Unknowingly. Effortlessly,” he said. “In time, you’ll be capable of many things.”

“How do you know?”

“When I was a child, my abilities were the same. I could only feel their most base urges as they brushed past. But as thedraiochtmatured, I learned to communicate with the wilderness. To summon the earth. To call upon the wind.”

Is that what Yddra had told him? What the trees whispered and sang to the fae king throughout the day and night alike?

“You remind me of this serpent,” he continued, allowing the snake to knot their hands together. “Scales as black as the crow, bedizened with rare shades of violet.” His eyes grazed her undone hair. Sable tresses that rivered down her back, glossy with spring water. “The most venomous creature in all the Isles of Rinn Dúin despite its size.” As if boasting, the serpent widened its maw and flashed two ivory, needle-like fangs.

Aisling held her breath, turning to the fae king. And once their eyes met, she wondered when he’d come so close, his breath brushing her lips.

Aisling didn’t know how long they looked at one another before the snake hissed, severing their line of sight.

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