by Emma Hamm
Her expression fell. Of course, magic was stronger in people whose souls were centered. Spells required concentration, and natural magic like the faeries performed required more than just knowledge. It was a powerful and beautiful thing when practiced correctly.
Aisling had never managed such magic.
The Unseelie studied her, flames dancing in his eyes again. “Have you ever tried faerie magic?”
“Many times.”
“Never succeeded, I’m assuming.”
“Why would you assume that?” She stuffed his pack in the roots behind her head, stealing the only cushion they had.
“Because you looked like I kicked a puppy in front of you when I said it.”
“I don’t even like puppies. I prefer cats.” Aisling punched the pack.
“Why are you always so abrasive?”
She frowned, chewing her lip and letting the heat of the fire warm her back. “It’s just my winning personality.”
“No, don’t try to deflect it. I’m genuinely curious, witch. Just what has made you push people away like you do?”
She didn’t want to tell him. Not because she didn’t like to talk about it; the past was in the past. It had shaped her strangely, but she was dealing with it. She didn’t want to tell him because her history felt like a weakness, and he would look down on her.
Aisling punched the pack one more time for good measure. “History. Lorcan raised me. He found me in the woods when I was little, a screaming child left to die. It’s just been him and me for a long time.”
“Lorcan raised you?” He looked at the cat. “Really? A cat?”
The subject of interest yawned, bright white teeth flashing in the light of faerie fire. “I wasn’t a cat then, nitwit.”
“So Lorcan shifted…when?”
Aisling spun around and wiggled into the tree roots. “The first time a pack of wolves, the sorry villagers, attacked me. Lorcan stepped in front of an arrow and shifted to stay alive.”
The Unseelie rubbed his chest. He said nothing, but she knew what he was thinking. They were both marked by her in some fashion. His starburst matched Lorcan’s. Each was a sign she harmed those who stayed around her. Too bad she refused to take responsibility for either of their choices. Lorcan didn’t have to save her, and the Unseelie didn’t have to stay to watch her burn. They were both responsible for their own mistakes.
“So you’ve been alone your entire life,” the Unseelie murmured.
“Hey!” Lorcan grunted from his side of the fire. “I was there.”
“As a cat.”
“Still a person.”
“But not someone who could bandage her scraped knees, provide her food, help her fix a shelter should the winds blow.”
Aisling snorted. “Even when he was a person, Lorcan made me do all that.”
“It was character building.”
“You were lazy as a human,” she corrected. “A cat was a well-chosen form.”
“It’s not a choice.” Lorcan rolled onto his back, all four feet in the air and bottom turned toward the fire. “Witches turn into cats. We have nine lives.”
Aisling touched her fingers to the eyes on her palms. Witches may have nine lives, but she did not. When she was young and the eyes were new, she had tried to skin them from her hands. The knife cut into her flesh too easily for her to hesitate. Lorcan had found her bleeding out on the floor with the eyes still burned into the meaty, exposed muscles.
She’d caught a fever and lay in bed for months while fighting the infection. She even died a few times, only to come back after Lorcan shocked her with a bolt of magic. No catlike form had saved her.
At first, she thought it was because she didn’t understand the magic. But then Lorcan had explained to her she wasn’t really a witch, and her entire world had shifted.
The Unseelie coughed, looking pointedly at her fingers, tracing the outline of the eyes in the air with his hands. “And those?”
She held her hands out, palms exposed to the fire. “These are my chains.”
“Excuse me?”
Lorcan twitched his tail and dramatically sighed. “The visible evidence of her curse.”
“Those are what make your face invisible to me?” The Unseelie stood and then quickly moved across the small hollow to kneel in front of her. He didn’t touch her hands but tilted his head from side to side as he inspected them. “I don’t recognize this kind of magic.”
“That’s because it’s entirely original magic.” She was ridiculously proud to wear proof of it, although she despised the curse. “The eyes channel my power through the spell that hides my face. The blackened tips are the shackles that prevent it from being broken.”
“All spells can be broken.”
“Which is precisely why my grandmother brought me all those faerie spell books. I’ve spent my entire life searching for a way to break this curse. From the first moment I saw a faerie, I knew I wanted to see and be seen by your kind for the rest of my life.”
He looked at her with something important in his eyes. Some unspoken promise she knew would make the wall around her heart crack.
Aisling cleared her throat. “It’s a shame I didn’t know you back then. I might not have wasted so much time.”
“Ah, there’s the reaction I expected,” he muttered. He reached forward, his hand hovering so close to her cheek she could feel his warmth. “Does the spell prevent anyone from touching your face?”
Aisling didn’t know. A faerie had never expressed interest in touching her, let alone something so intimate.
She resisted the urge to gnaw on her lip, glad to know he couldn’t see her facial expressions. He would notice how uncomfortable she was, but also how intrigued. Aisling was rarely the recipient of kindness, affection, or any kind of regard.
The mere thought of someone touching her face made her heart race. It was overwhelming, perhaps a little too much with the fire warm against her toes and the light casting the hollow in an icy glow.
“What about you?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“People can touch my face.”
“No, I mean your life. You know how I grew up, and I blame my personality entirely on that. Now, it’s your turn.”
He blew out a breath and dropped his hand. Aisling mourned the loss of opportunity, but also relaxed. Her anxiety disappeared when the subject shifted to the strange man who wanted to touch her.
“I am the youngest son of the Unseelie king and queen. As such, I am the least important child they have. I was allowed to do whatever I wished and had the ideal Unseelie childhood.”
“Is that so?” she mused. “Seems to me if you were so happy with your life, you would have stayed in your castle rather than spending your time kidnapping a witch.”
“I didn’t kidnap you. You cursed me.”
“You still brought me here.”
“Because I want to break the curse! Do you think I brought you here for another reason?” He snorted. “You give yourself too much credit.”
“I’m right. That’s why you’re getting so upset, isn’t it? You weren’t happy here.”
She leaned forward, peering into his eyes for any hint of emotion. The raven eye rotated back and forth, refusing to meet her gaze. A thought formed in Aisling’s mind, and she gasped.
“Your eye…” she began.
“I don’t talk about it.”
“It can see me, can’t it?”
He stared at her, his jaw open and both eyes wide. “It’s still my eye. I would have mentioned it if I could see you.”
“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to that”—she pointed to his eye—“because it can see me. I didn’t realize it until now, but it reacts. It won’t meet my gaze, and you’ve been able to discern my emotions too easily. In some way, you can actually see me.”
He hesitated then admitted, “In a sense. The other eye is better at predicting than seeing through curses. I still can’t see your face. It’s more I can see a sembla
nce of something. Emotion, thought, what makes you you rather than just reading an expression.”
“Have you always been able to do that?”
“Since I was a child. It was the imperfection my parents were most proud of, considering I turned out a little too normal for their liking.”
For the first time, she didn’t want to insult him. Aisling knew what it was like to be different and the pain it could cause. But in her eyes, he was plenty strange and entirely abnormal.
She tried to lighten the mood by snorting. “What would be their perfect child then? A small furry creature that races through the halls of the castle while setting things on fire with its feet?”
“That is an amusing image, but no. My family is…” He ran a hand over the feathered side of his head and sighed. “Strange is perhaps the best way to say it. Intimidating, frightening to humans…I’ve even heard them described as nightmares.”
She furrowed her brows. “Why is that something to be proud of? Or to aspire to?”
“The Unseelie pride themselves on the absence of beauty. Where the Seelie prefer to adhere to strict rules, we enjoy living our lives as we wish. With both choices comes the temptations of cruelty, pride, and self-righteousness. Neither court has shaken the chains of the old ways from their shoulders.” He leaned away from her but sat himself in a furrow much closer to her. “Although the courts are constantly shifting. Change might happen now.”
She stared into the flames with this new knowledge dancing in her mind. She’d never known the courts were quite so volatile. The legends made them seem pristine, led by faeries who had learned the art of politics long ago.
From what he said, they weren’t quite like that. He condemned faeries for their flaws and actions. What would he say if she told him more about her own people? About the small skirmishes, the battles, the wars?
Considering his opinion of humans, he probably knew all the stories already.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Politics. I’ve never been able to understand them.”
“You and me both.”
Aisling turned onto her side, away from the fire and the confusing faerie who made her senses come alive. She didn’t want to give him layers. He was an annoyance, nothing more, nothing less.
He thought of her as a witch, as a creature that was a means to an end. The binding curse was why he was sticking around, and she didn’t have any reason to believe otherwise.
She tucked a hand underneath her head and closed her eyes. There was more to the faerie than she wanted to admit, and that made her thoroughly uncomfortable.
They walked for another three days before the Unseelie held up his hand and stopped them. Aisling watched his face with rapt attention as he cleared his throat.
“Not much farther now. We should leave the pack here. We’ll return for it later.”
“Why?” she asked. But she still removed it without hesitation.
“I haven’t been entirely truthful with you, witch. This is a very dangerous place, and I cannot promise either of us will make it out alive.”
Something in her cheered. Aisling could feel he was hiding something, and the sensation of being right was one worthy of celebrating. Somehow, it felt wrong to rub it in his face since he tried so hard to be secretive.
So, she pondered the words and shrugged. “If one of us dies, so does the other. It means we’ll be all the more careful in taking care of ourselves. Sounds like a good deal to me.”
His gaze cut toward her, fierce and piercing. “You aren’t afraid of dying?”
“I’ve never been afraid of death. We’re old friends, he and I.” Aisling placed the pack underneath a pile of leaves at the base of a silver tree. “Shall we?”
“Witch—”
“Save it for when we return.” She gave him a smile she hoped wasn’t as shaky as she felt.
“You are the strangest person I’ve ever met,” he said. He opened his mouth as more words hung at the edge of his tongue, then shook his head and changed the subject. “We walk through a portal in the trunk of a tree. This god is sacred, unnamed, and ancient. He should be alone and unarmed.”
“I thought you said he was dead.”
The Unseelie licked his lips. “In a sense.”
Aisling groaned and stomped forward. “Blasted faeries and their twisting of the truth. If you’d just told me, I might have been able to help.”
“I couldn’t tell you the entire truth of it.”
“Couldn’t, wouldn’t, or shouldn’t?” she tossed the words over her shoulder. “All of it’s the same. You endanger this entire mission by not telling me the whole of it.”
“Even if I had told you, you wouldn’t be prepared for what we’re about to face.”
“You underestimate me.”
Blasted man and his ridiculous ideals. He should have told her everything there was to know about this entire ordeal. The binding curse affected her too, no matter that he felt it was a curse on him alone.
She didn’t want to be tied to someone else. She wanted to be free, as she was used to. Untethered, Aisling could travel wherever she wished, disappear into the world whenever she chose. And now?
Now she was stuck with a foolish man who hid the truth so she wasn’t frightened.
She slapped a branch out of her way. Trees groaned around her, tentatively tucking their branches closer to their bodies.
The path merged into a rolling hill with a single tree on the highest peak. She stalked toward it, all while grumbling about men and their flaws. Neither the Unseelie nor Lorcan stood in her way.
Perhaps the men were more intelligent than she gave them credit for. She likely would have chewed on them if they dared to step in front of her.
Aisling found herself lost in her thoughts until she paused in front of the tree. It wavered around the edges as though it wasn’t really there. Narrowing her eyes, she stepped closer. “Well,” she muttered, “that’s a bad omen.”
She heard the soft steps of padded feet, followed by the faerie’s careless steps. They stopped just behind her and stared up at the tree as well.
Lorcan audibly swallowed. “Is that what I think it is?”
Aisling nodded. “Looks like.”
The Unseelie stepped forward, his hand hovering over her shoulder as if he wanted to touch her. “What is it?”
“A hanging tree.”
For a moment, she saw hundreds of bodies swaying in the breeze. Tied at their necks, they all stared at her with hollowed expressions. They screamed she wasn’t one of them, that she would never be accepted within their coven, that she was little more than an unwanted mistake.
Aisling shivered. “Trees like this only form when dark deeds are performed over and over again. They’re a rift, in a sense. They appear in every dimension in the same place.”
They were a sign of bad tidings for any who walked by their dark branches. Wind whistled through them, rattling dead limbs as the lingering magic reached out for her. The tree desired more death, for that was what nourished its roots and helped it grow.
“We don’t have witches here,” the Unseelie said.
She gulped. “It doesn’t matter. Dark magic like this always finds someone to hang.”
With fear settling on her shoulders like a well-worn cloak, she rounded the thick trunk. A shimmering curtain of darkness split the trunk open on the other side. It looked like a woman parting her skirts for a lover, but Aisling knew better.
Smooth wood framed the portal, the bark split open by water-worn pieces that drifted into ash where the portal touched it. Dark webs of power blanketed the beyond from view.
“Just walk through it?” she asked.
“That should do.”
“Lorcan? Stay here.”
The cat spluttered. “How dare you! I might be of assistance. You have no idea what a cat can do that humans are incapable of—”
“Lorcan,” Aisling interrupted. “I know you don’t want to go. Stay here and patch either of us up if we ma
ke it back.”
Her constant companion was anything other than brave. He had never lived a life of danger, never wanted to even though he practiced magic. Quiet happiness and a warm fire was the only thing he’d ever asked for. She wouldn’t drag him into the Unseelie’s half-brained plan because of her mistakes.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “But be careful. I’m partial to your head.”
The Unseelie’s attention whipped toward the cat. “You can see her?”
“It stands to reason that he’d be able to,” she replied with a quiet cough. “He’s not Fae.”
His brows drew down severely, and he jabbed the air in front of her with a curved finger. “When we return, we’re talking about this curse of yours in more detail.”
“No, we aren’t.”
“Don’t argue with me, witch. We’re stuck together until this binding curse is broken. Your curse is just as bad.”
“It isn’t.” She snorted. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.” She stared pointedly at his raven eye until he gave in and looked away. The golden gaze did not stray from hers, however, and she met its intensity with her own. “To our death then?” she quipped.
“Don’t say it like that.”
Rolling her eyes, Aisling stalked toward the portal, shook off the tingling feelings in her fingers, and stepped through.
She had expected a tunnel or a gateway, but she hadn’t expected to find herself in a cave so large she couldn’t see the top. Bats whispered through the air, and small creatures skittered away from her feet.
Her lungs filled with ancient air. Only a few had breathed it before her, but she knew what they smelled like. Every person who walked these steps had left a perfume in their absence. Sandalwood, lavender, and the faintest scent of moss.
Her eyes adjusted to the dark and drank in the thick fog rolling through the sudden silence. She’d only experienced such stillness once in her life. Aisling had wandered deep into the belly of a crypt. Thirty feet of earth piled above her, and the silence was thicker than water. The same as before, all she could hear now was her own heartbeat.
For a witch who practiced black magic, Aisling hated the dark.
The portal tightened behind her, its drum-like surface emitting a faint thrum as the Unseelie stepped through. The raven eye wildly rotated to take in every detail in the dim lighting.
