Page 24 of The Savage Queen

Killian unloaded his quiver of bolts on the fear gorta, he and Aisling watching with horror as the fear gorta ripped them from its body and extinguished Aisling’s flames. Frost splintering from its mouth, its sockets bleeding ice and smothering everylick of fire till it trudged forward in smoke and ice. But it wasn’t the cold that snuffed Aisling’s fire: it was something that tasted like magic. Like plums and shadows and bubbling cauldrons. Some sorcery this Unseelie wielded to dampen Aisling’s might or that of any other for that matter.

It towered over Aisling, glaring down at her with an unholy grin. Aisling hesitated, too afraid to feel the pain of her burnt and blistered palms dripping on the snow below her boots.

Dagfin lunged for her, pushing her out of the fear gorta’s path. It dove for the earth, pinning Sigewulf standing behind Aisling instead.

It crouched atop the chieftain, maw opened wide as it delved into his flesh and tore him apart piece by piece. The sound of tearing skin horrific enough to make Aisling’s ears bleed.

The mighty chieftain of Fjallnorr felled by a single Unseelie.

A second passed and his life was gone.

Aisling’s stomach churned, nausea inspired by sheer horror.

After months in the feywilds with Lir and his knights, she’d not garnered an understanding of what it meant to be mortal in the woods. To be vulnerable. A candle-lit flame snuffed without a passing thought. The wilderness was no place for man. Even the mightiest among them.

But there was no time to dwell on his death lest more be dealt. Aisling called upon thedraiochtagain, spilling violet across the beast. At last, it turned from its meal, hunched and cackling, fixing its absent gaze on Aisling. Winter’s glass spider-webbed over her flames with ease. Powerful, arcane magic, resisting Aisling’s own.

Aisling hissed; herdraiochtsnuffed by another.

It lifted its greataxe from the ground, readying it to strike as four more men swung their blades. Iron bouncing off its impenetrable bones. The clinking of its metal a death decree toall who stood before it. For indeed, it swiped at them with ease, harvesting their lives for its forest of ice.

At last, it found Dagfin amidst the chaos, picking up its feet to race toward him.

Why Dagfin? Aisling thought to herself, starting toward the Roktan prince. But she wasn’t quick enough. The fear gorta moved like a shadow, here one moment and gone the next, whipping through the camp with unmatched speed.

Aisling braced herself for Dagfin and the Unseelie’s collision, but it never came.

Instead, Aisling beheld in horror as Dagfin not only punched through the demon’s chest but pulled out its heart. A rotted, slimy, black coal tangled in maggots, beetles, and thorns.

The fiend exhaled one last breath. Its body shriveling to a pile of ash atop the snow. Bones, age-old, prepared to return to the soil from whence they came.

Dagfin watched as the ashen heart slipped through his fingers like the sands of time. Joining its grave beneath the ice for the final time.

They ripped through the pines, scraping their faces on blade birches, howling aspens, and poison pines, all clawing for Aisling as they fled. Popping roots from the earth to caress their Fjallnorrian mares, stolen from dead men.

“We’ll never survive this,” Fergus said, voice veiled by the frozen waterfall outside the cave. A shallow hollow of refuge from the winter winds, the Unseelie, and the forest. Their mares restlessly snorting just inside the cave’s threshold.

“It’s only the beginning,” Aisling said, and all knew it to be truth. The Unseelie wouldn’t stop for common man, much less for the sons of the fire hand, for Aisling, and for some reason, Dagfin. The Unseelie would stalk their mortal party, hunt them,and in the same breath a beast was vanquished, another would rise.

Aisling’s brothers, even Dagfin and Killian, weren’t accustomed to voyages such as this. And in many ways, neither was Aisling. She bore experience traversing the wilds, yet then, she hadn’t run from the demons, rather hunted them alongside Lir. Her place in the food chain lowered several ranks without him. Made vulnerable to beasts of prey. At least, Aisling thought to herself, for now.

“We’ll find safe haven here for the next several days,” Starn said, glaring out at the forest lying in wait. Anxiously anticipating their return to its embrace. “We’ll regain our energy.”

“There’s no time,” Aisling interjected, binding her burnt hands with strips of her wool dress. Dagfin watching every loop of fabric as she worked. Bringing his flask to his lips as though it offered mortal absolution.

Iarbonel shook his head. “Ash, we can only move so quickly and survive. Annind can scarcely ride a horse in his condition.”

Annind reclined against the cave wall, his fear gorta wounds bound by linen and leather. The bleeding was, at last, trickling to a stop. Still, Annind was pale and soaked in sweat, a wisp of his usual self.

“I’ve done it before,” Aisling said.

“With the Aos Sí,” Killian conjectured, crossing his arms and leaning against the cave wall. “We aren’t like the Aos Sí, faerie. The Unseelie don’t cower at our feet, the wilderness doesn’t mind us, and our wounds don’t heal by the light of tomorrow.”

All eyes drifted to Aisling’s hands, burned again and again by her fires. Already healing as all fae healed.

“Do you believe the Sidhe will slow their pace for us? That the other mortal sovereigns—those still alive and not tending to their destroyed kingdoms—will wait for us?” They each staredat her, mortal features either dancing in shadow or gilded by firelight.

She’d seen how effortlessly the chieftain of Fjallnorr had been slaughtered. How humankind was outmatched in a race against everything Other, a competition where a loss was met with death. Death, who nipped at their human heels. And if the same happened to Dagfin—if Dagfin, as strong as he was with hisFaerakOcras, was snuffed as swiftly and abruptly as Sigewulf…Aisling burned the end of her thought. “We will lose this race if we don’t continue on.”

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