Page 25 of The Savage Queen

Starn spoke not a word, seething silently as he kept his eyes pinned on woodland shadows.

“What does it matter to you?” Fergus countered, expression bent with frustration. “You care not for the curse breaker. Your ends are yours alone and us your pawns.”

Aisling closed her eyes, doing her best to quell her most base urges, come awake after months with the fae king now impossible to put back to sleep.

“You speak tomeofpawns?” she said, meeting Fergus’s eyes. Bloodstained fingers twitching.

Iarbonel stood from where he sat.

“Enough,” Iarbonel said. “Enough arguing. We may not survive this regardless, but we seal our death if we cannot keep from biting at one another’s throats.”

They each fell silent, weighing Iarbonel’s words. So, Aisling used this as her excuse, taking her leave to breathe outside the cave. Away from Killian’s iron, left by the fire to smoke the cave in its putrid stench.

Starn eyed her every step, ensuring she knew she was being surveyed.

Aisling climbed up the mouth of the cave and sat atop it, avoiding the ice and nestling herself amidst the frigid stone. Areprieve from what simmered beneath her flesh and, at times, drove her mad.

She rested her head, quietly listening to the moaning of mating insects, the rustling of trees, the songs of star-filled skies, or the cracking of ice in the wind. A melody Aisling had craved over the last several months, her thirst for it, at last, slaked. Allowing herself a moment to indulge in the feywild’s savage embrace.

“You never did fear anything,” Dagfin said, startling her. “Even when you should’ve. So, I’m not certain why it still surprises me you choose to taunt danger and bait yourself to the wilds. You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

“You speak as though you don’t understand what it means to be imprisoned.” He sat beside her, shoulder to shoulder. “To live a life sheltered and gray, only to taste magic and find anything else suddenly insufficient.”

Aisling didn’t care to glance at Dagfin for fear her heart would splinter at what she found. Every glance they shared pricked her lips and twisted her heart.

“I was never kept in the dark,” he said. “Never lied to, and never traded.”

Aisling smiled bitterly. “Perhaps, but you’ve always been caged by the Roktan crown and the legacy it implies.”

He shifted then, watching her in the pale light of the moon.

“It’s not mine to take.”

“If your brother could’ve chosen one person to take his place, it would’ve been you. Feradach knows this, I know this. You need not feel guilty for taking what is rightfully yours.”

He swallowed, glaring up at the constellations above, “I wish it was as easy for me as it is for you. As children you followed shadows, endured nights put to bed without dinner, and gritted your teeth through the lashings you knew would come. Doing as you liked regardless. And now, you set the world on your heels.”

“You say it as though it’s a virtue. My impulses, my rebellion is more vice. More need,” she corrected. “Lest my soul collapse like a dying fire.”

Dagfin ground his teeth. “You speak of survival at the cost of embracing this wildness inside you, whatever it is that makes you likethem, but all I see are hands burned again and again, a body thinning, anger bounding from within. There is power in you, Aisling. As children I saw it in your spirit and now it’s taken a more literal form. But it isn’t wise to let it unravel, lest you find yourself plunging toward your own destruction, falling too fast to stop.”

Aisling crossed her arms, allowing the wind to brush her cheeks. The forest coaxing her calm.

So Dagfin knew her wounds were a product of summoning thedraiocht. It was a relief to no longer hide it from him. To no longer endure the pain, endure the fear of whatever was happening to her, but to also no longer bear the burden of hiding it from the Roktan prince.

“Is it self-control you boast in the daylight, when by shadow you relish in your own form of power?”

Dagfin did a double take, staring at Aisling despite the dark.

“What do you?—”

“I know about the Ocras. Killian told me some and I connected the rest.”

Dagfin focused on the distance, still as a hunter.

“You’re addicted to it, aren’t you?” Aisling continued. “That’s how you healed from Killian’s runes so quickly. How you ripped the fear gorta’s heart from his chest. You start and you cannot stop. Why, the flask is perpetually at your lips. Why is that?”

Dagfin turned his head, unable to look her in the eyes.

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