Page 26 of The Savage Queen

“Because you crave it as much as I do. Power gives us some semblance of control, Dagfin. And without control we become controlled by another. Someone brave and ruthless enough totake what’s theirs. So, it isn’t virtue, Dagfin. It’s need. As much my own as yours.”

He shut his eyes, leaning his head against the rock. Aisling wasn’t certain if he didn’t know what to say or didn’t care to say anything at all. Only that he never spoke again, taking her hand and lacing his fingers through Aisling’s before kissing her cheek. As soft as a coastal breeze, laced with the roar of crashing waves beyond. Aisling’s cheeks bled crimson. She wasn’t certain what to think of it. But before she could decide, he fell asleep by her side.

Now, Aisling was alone with the wilderness. Hour by hour, waiting, listening, at long last speaking to the forest as it’d longed to speak with her. Finding in herself the voice Lir had coaxed to life.

CHAPTER XI

AISLING

Aisling crashed against stone, washed ashore by her dream’s black sea. She dragged herself to her feet, at once searching for Lir through the veil of thunderhead tears. But where he usually appeared without warning, without word, without summons, he was nowhere to be found.

Against her own volition, Aisling’s spirits fell. She found herself searching the forest, twirling in a shifting kingdom, calling his name with no response. Aisling couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t visited her dreams, forcing her to wonder if they’d always been just that. Dreams. Or, if this were an ill omen. The beginning of something strange afoot.

The woodland chuckled, amused by her search, so Aisling ignored it, traveling deeper into the forest. But even after hours, after peering behind every maple, yew, and cypress, after speaking his name like a spell, he was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly endlessly far. Gone and alive only in her memory.

After several days, their mares refused to run, eating snow and licking ice whenever their riders would allow it.

Annind grew weaker by the hour, forced to share a horse with Iarbonel. His wounds fought infection but refused to close entirely. And every day spent on horseback, traversing the ice-ridden landscape, trees sheathed in glass, he spoke a little less. Kept to himself beside their brittle fires and braced against the cold.

This deep in the forest, the branches knotted their fingers overhead like fae interlace, shielding them from the brunt of both snowstorms and highland winds. Aisling found logs, wrapped their ends in linen and spare furs, burning fire after fire to give them a beacon in the shadows. To warm them when teeth began to chatter, and eyelashes sharpened with frost. And while Aisling found she could go days without food, what little she managed, the others struggled to keep their appetite at bay.

Dagfin and Killian scoured the periphery of their camp, but were only fortunate to find a single hare to split between the six of them. Hunger carving their features till they scarcely bore any resemblance to the day they’d first set foot in the Fjallnorrian wilds.

So, Aisling bid the wolves that visited her in the dead of night, when everyone else slept, to hunt hares, foxes, pheasant, deer, and any other creature with a beating heart for their party. To sustain them. Yet Starn refused every offering and so, the others did as well.

“Where are you going?” Starn asked, unable to mask the venom in his voice. He caught Aisling’s arm just before she was able to slip between the trees, her mare beside her.

“The horses are hungry,” she said. “There’s a creek not far from here so I was hoping to find some sort of vegetation by its shore.” Indeed, the wolves and the owls whispered this to Aisling when they believed none others listening.

Starn considered her, weighing her words as though she spoke in riddles.

At last, he nodded his head.

“Killian,” Starn ordered, and theFaerakat once stood from where he sat beside the camp.

Aisling’s brow furrowed. “Scared I’ll set the wood aflame?” And by the expression on Starn’s face, he might’ve been. She despised his suspicion. His watchful glares, his paranoid glances. Loathed the self-righteous tilt of his head each time she spoke until Aisling wondered if it was just his gestures she despised or him as well. The prospect of burning his tongue from his mouth, more reasonable by the day.

“I’ll go with her,” Dagfin piped, flipping his dagger into his belt.

Aisling ground her teeth but said nothing, preferring Dagfin to Killian and recognizing this wasn’t a battle she cared to fight. Nor that she found it worth her while. So, she conceded to Dagfin’s company as she ventured further into the forest.

“His distrust for me grows by the hour,” she said, aware that Starn eyed her from their camp as both she and Dagfin faded between the trees.

“He feels responsible for all of us.” Dagfin unstoppered his flask and gulped several mouthfuls.

“So why has he come? Why risk his own life and those of our brothers––yours––to help a sister he hardly tolerates much less trusts?”

Dagfin’s expression narrowed in thought.

“Starn always has his own agenda. One he’d rather take to his grave than share with anyone other than himself, Fergus, Iarbonel, or Annind.”

“He hardly needs to share it, for his motivations to be clear. His actions make it obvious.”

Dagfin turned to her. “What do you mean?”

“He’s in pursuit of the curse breaker for our father.”

And Aisling knew the moment she spoke the words aloud and Dagfin didn’t immediately deny them that she was right. That Dagfin knew as well.

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