Page 100 of The Savage Queen

And at Danu’s smile, Lir screamed. The poison growing teeth and slithering around his heart.

Aisling reached for him. Without hesitation, Galad grabbed her arm and held her back. Danu hissed something Lir couldn’t understand. His ears ringing, stomach twisting as Danu moved again and Lir felt her intentions before the hemlock and nettle obeyed.

She forced Lir’s wings from his back. Wrenching them one by one from their hiding place in somedraiocht-made cavern till they draped over his shoulders in a cloak of silver. Resplendent, shimmering, and capturing whatever light it reflected.

The forest stilled, his knights cursed, and the world beheld his Iod ancestry sparkling across his shoulders. Opalescent and dug from his body without his consent. Among the most gruesome, dishonorable crimes committed against any winged Sidhe.

Danu’s dryads lifted Lir with their branches and hung him by his wings mid-air. Aisling screamed; Galad held her in place while Filverel, Peitho, Gilrel, and even Dagfin swiveled, searching for an escape. A solution. But so long as Danu’s poison coursed through Lir, she was his to do with as she liked, lest it be a quick death.

“Rise, greenwood and the feywilds! Come and see your king in all his glory!”

Lir felt the edges of his wings pull and scrape against the dryad’s branches. Tears, punctures, rips, capable of being remedied slowly, if at all.

Wings to the fae were a vulnerability. A weakness and rarely, if ever, brandished lest they needed to take flight. But Danu knew this well. Savored the spectacle she’d created of Lir’s pain, his humiliation, finding his weakness and using it against him. A symbol of all the vices he’d inherited from Ina, considering only those Sidhe with blood from Iod bore wings.

Lir’s knights, Aisling, and Dagfin backed into a circle below him. For in Lir’s periphery, he knew who’d come.

Bipedal bears, foxes, rabbits, wolves, and badgers appeared from the hollows, their dens, their nests. Pixies, phantoms, ghouls, goblins, hounds, changelings, bánánach, among others, crept around the dryads to glean their king hung by his wings, frozen by pain. All those creatures who’d sided with Danu after his union with Aisling, now aligned with the empress’s efforts to usurp Lir, too frightened to show their faces until she’d proved her supremacy. Until Lir hung prone and unable to punish their treason. An audience of traitors come to scavenge their victory.

And had Lir bore the health, he would’ve disemboweled them each, nailing their skulls to pikes around Annwyn. The pain only rivaled by his wrath. Hisdraiochtshredding the walls of its abyss, clawing to be set free so it might make blood and bones of Danu and her legions.

“Let it be known that the lineage of the original twelve Sidhe sovereigns will end, first with Lir, then his brother. The Unseelie need not be ruled by the fae lest our needs, our hungers be sacrificed in exchange for mortal acquiescence once more. A revolution that drips here but ripples throughout the realm,” Danu shouted,Samhaindissolving her words till they bled from the forest to the Other. “From this day onward, the feywilds belong to the Unseelie, the beasts beneath oak’s shadow, and none other!”

The beasts, the fiends, the creatures of midnight hours and woodland secrets, banged their fists against the earth, hollered, howled, barked, and squealed, growing more frenzied by the heartbeat.

Danu grinned and the trees obeyed.

They pulled Lir’s wings and ripped them from his back.

AISLING

Aisling screamed, Lir’s agony her own, coursing through the intangible thread between them and sinking its teeth into her soul.

Galad tightened his grip, arms wrapped around her waist as she struggled against him.

“He will rot, slowly dying as the poison seeps more deeply,” Danu said, voice bubbling with glee as dirt spilled from the corners of her lips. Salivating over her conquest. “And let the forest witness his death. Bury his body beneath its soil and return his corpse to the Forge, ashamed of his betrayal—his alliance with those who felled us, hunted us, burned us. Let the Other mock him as he enters their shadows broken. His only salvation, the fire, the fae rebuke.”

Lir lay in the snow, fangs bared as he desperately battled the misery. Left to collapse, his wings discarded at either side of him. Muscles taut and runed fingers gripping the earth. The pain pulsing through, shadowing the sorrow of Danu’s dismemberment. The grief, the anguish, smoking his periphery as he fought to remain alive.

Aisling turned to face Danu. Their eyes met and the hordes of beasts and Unseelie hushed.

“And his last memory of the mortal realm? His bride, the fire hand’s daughter, the bane of our realm, dethroned with violence.”

Lir struggled to fight, reaching for Aisling despite the pain.

Galad, at last, released Aisling, raising his blade the moment Danu’s dryads swung for the not-so-mortal queen. His swordsplit their wood in half, sap spewing. Yet it wasn’t enough. Not for Aisling.

Aisling summoned thedraiocht. Violet fire roared awake, seizing their branches, both severed and intact, and bled their limbs to ash.

More drove toward her, wielding their twigs, their vines, their roots like whips.

Aisling, swiftly, focused thedraiocht, allowing it to slip from its abyss and rise through her, lurching and casting its fire till Aisling was forced to hold her breath a heartbeat longer than the last. Fires taking hold of the dryads and burning them alive. Their screams bloodying the air they each breathed.

Danu fumed, slamming her fists into the earth and tilting the axis on which they each stood.

“You know not the way the forest lives, little beast!” she screamed, swarms of beetles, of flies, of ants, pouring from her pale white eyes. “No matter how hard you try, your iron bones, your mortal flesh, will never fully burn. You do not belong and never shall you. You will rot having served your purpose and brought theDamh Bánto his knees.”

Aisling’s fists blazed, her gut lit with wildfire when she glanced at Lir, the suffering worsening. All because he’d sheltered her, protected her from Danu’s dryads. Taken the onslaught upon himself.

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