Page 3 of The Savage Queen

“Aisling,” Lir whispered, smiling down at her. His voice echoed throughout the glen as if spoken directly into her mind.

His breath slipped between her lips. The cord between them knotted fiercely. But never did his mouth meet hers. Instead, the pain of an “almost touch” jolted her awake. It wrenched her from her dreams as it always did—Lir’s voice dissolving into another’s.

CHAPTER II

AISLING

“Aisling!” Dagfin shouted.

Aisling woke swathed in vines of emerald. Dagfin tore them off her body, bloodying his hands on thorns like teeth.

Aisling lurched forward, summoning thedraiocht,her magic,without another thought. Her hands flickered with violet fire, withering the lianas to dust as she clawed them away, as well as, unfortunately, her feathered bed and the embroidered canopy now black with her influence.

Dagfin lunged for a nearby tapestry, ripping it from its mantle and pinning Aisling to the ash-ridden bed. Her fire bristled, suffocated by the throw’s threads and the weight of Dagfin atop her.

He held her down, waiting for the last glimmers of thedraiochtto vanish from her violet eyes.

“Is it gone?” Dagfin asked, meeting her gaze for the first time. His heart was hammering against her own. The sensation of his body pressed against her was strange. As firm as she’d imagined: the sharpness of his form, the muscles he’d developed in adulthood. The smell of him steeped in ocean air and starry nights.

“It’s gone,” she replied, more breathless than she’d realized.

Indeed, thedraiochthad sunk back into its primeval cavern, awaiting its next summons.

Dagfin lingered atop her, eventually straightening and settling his boots on the creaking floors. The abrupt absence of him leaving her cold.

He wore Roktan blue today, the Roktan crest embroidered onto the front of his jacket in bronze thread: a fist holding a gleaming star. A riff off the symbol of mortal man. His shirt beneath was neatly pressed, the laces unwoven and left to dangle down his chest where a belt was strapped horizontally. Knives and sharp things buckled to its front. The only non-obviously destructive element was a flask of worn use.

“He’s found me,” Aisling said. “Even here, Lir’s found me.”

Dagfin cringed at the sound of the fae king’s name on her lips, surveying the destruction. Vines, branches, the forest that slithered through Roktling, into his castle, the port inside Castle Roktling’s monolith, and onto his father’s ship, theStarling. All for her. Finding her private cabin and cradling her in the way only Lir’s power could, even despite distance.

And at the briefest of shudders from a remaining vine, Dagfin flicked his wrist. Like a sparrow, his throwing knife cut across the cabin, stabbing the forest’s thread till its sap bled atop the creaking floorboards.

“It won’t happen again.”

“It willalwayshappen again. It will never stop, Fin. And I won’t run from him for the rest of my life.” Aisling gathered a fistful of ash. “Lir will stop at nothing till he gets what he wants. Running or hiding will do nothing but encourage a beast who enjoys a chase.”

“It’s a good thing then that I hunt such beasts.”

“You cannot win this fight, Fin. A fae king isn’t another Unseelie you can bring back on your shoulders.”

Dagfin scowled. “Give me a reason.”

Because there was an invisible cord knotting, snapping, angrily tearing at her core to return to the fae king. Because she and Lir would spiral into eternity before they never saw one another again. Because the Forge fated them.

But she could never say those words aloud.

Dagfin took her silence as answer enough, shaking his head in disbelief. “So that’s it? We’ve run this far only for you to surrender to him once more?”

“We continue as we have,” Aisling said. “Until I find what it is I want.”

Dagfin fell silent, electricity brewing in his stormy eyes, muddled and shadowed—the ghost of how she once remembered them.

“And what is it you want, Aisling?”

Aisling opened her mouth to reply, but no words left her lips. The answer evaded her, swarmed amid her mind in a hive of everything left unanswered. Who she was. Why she was. What she was.

But before Aisling could make sense of her thoughts, Fergus burst through the door. His expression slackened at the destruction left in Aisling’s wake, and the tension was still thick between his sister and the Roktan prince. But this was far from the first time they’d discovered Aisling lit with feral flame or cloaked in soot.

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