Bran stepped through the portal Elva had made and shuddered as the lingering effects of her magic stuck to his shoulders. It didn’t feel right anymore, using anyone but Aisling’s magic to move between the realms.

“Remind me why we had to go to the human realm?” he asked, shaking his shoulders to free himself from the feeling of Elva’s magic. “It seems like we should be able to get everything we need in Underhill, or the Otherworld at the very least.”

“Because Tlachtga was not born, nor lived, in our world.”

“And the map she gave us said we had to come here?”

“Yes.” Elva clutched the paper close to her chest. “Although I haven’t been entirely truthful with you on where she’s sending us.”

He rolled his eyes and held out his hand. “Is she making us fight a dead thing again? I don’t want to kill any more necromancers. The last time I tried to do that I had nightmares about the living dead for almost a century.”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with a necromancer.” She opened the map in front of her and tilted it. “Although, it might. I’m honestly not sure. We do have to dig up Tlachtga’s grave.”

He let his head roll back on his shoulders and stared up at the sky. “I hate digging graves. It’s just messy work.”

“When have you been afraid of a little mess?”

Without moving his head, he gestured up and down his body. “King now. Clothes are much nicer.”

“Gods, I forgot how much I hated your arrogance.”

“Low blow,” he replied with a slight growl then dropped his head to look at her. “I’d forgotten how rude you were. You should be nicer now that I have a throne. Wasn’t that what you wanted all those years ago?”

Elva let the map fall and leveled him with a gaze that might have burned him if she had shown more interest in magic. “You made my sister your queen.”

Well, she did have him there. She could be as rude as she wanted, but that wouldn’t change the fact that he went home to Aisling every night. Or would have if the curse wasn’t keeping them apart. Regardless, he still knew what her sister looked like when the stars rained down on her head because he had touched her the way she liked to be touched.

Bran cleared his throat. “Fine then. Where are we going?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Are you trying to distract the conversation, or are you actually interested in helping?”

“Why don’t you give me the map, and then you can do all the digging.”

Elva folded the vellum and tucked it into her waistband. “I think I’m going to enjoy this, Unseelie. All those clothes you think are so fancy will be ruined by the time I remember where you need to dig for this.”

He narrowed his eyes. “We don’t have time for this.”

“Then I suggest you start digging sooner rather than later.”

“Elva,” he growled.

Their gazes caught in a bid for power before she finally caved. “There’s a grave around here marked with a single leaf.”

“The Green Man?” Bran asked. “What does he have to do with any of this?”

“Maybe Tlachtga made a deal with him for immortality. I don’t know, Bran. You’re asking questions that I don’t have time to answer. Why don’t you look around that half of the graveyard”—she waved away from her—“and I’ll take this side.”

“You want to get away from me already? My, my, I didn’t think I could still get under your skin this easily now that you’ve been trained by a legendary warrior.”

“Some things don’t change,” she snarled through gritted teeth, then stomped away from him.

Bran wondered what Tlachtga’s son had said. Elva had been managing quite well before the burly man had taken time to “talk” with her. Though Bran doubted the man would ever lay a finger on Elva—not because he didn’t want to but because Elva wouldn’t let him—he also wondered what words had transpired.

There was a lot he wanted to say to her. Men weren’t the devil, although she seemed certain they were. She didn’t have to earn Aisling’s trust back by saving her from Carman; she could do that just by coming to the castle every now and then to visit. And she didn’t have to be so afraid of living just because she’d made a poor choice once in her life.

Bran didn’t know her story. He didn’t know the history that had led her to this place in her life. He found, even after all this time, he wanted to know.

Elva would forever remain a special person in his mind. She had been his first love, his first taste of what life would be like if he had been something more than just the spider queen’s son. In some small way, she’d led him to this place where he stood now.

Scrubbing a hand over his face, he looked out over the misty graveyard. Even the sun couldn’t burn through the clouds. Stone markers cast long shadows on the ground that wavered as the mist obscured the light around them. Each was different, names that blurred until he couldn’t really make them out.

Did he want to waste his time searching for the right grave? Or did he want to get to the bottom of Elva’s story so he could sleep at night?

There was no contest. The tempting call of a story made his mouth salivate.

Bran waved a hand and sent out the long shadows of the sluagh to meld with the gravestones. “Find the one marked by the Green Man,” he murmured. “It’s around here somewhere. Then let me know.”

The dark mass undulated in agreement, pausing only when he clicked his tongue.

“And don’t get yourselves in trouble.” The addition seemed important. He forgot so easily that the sluagh always wanted to add more souls to their collection. They desired nothing more than to make something bleed then steal its soul away to “save” it. Although it didn’t feel like saving if the human soul was brought back to Underhill when it didn’t want to be.

The form sagged, then sluggishly made its way over the ground, hovering over each stone for a moment before moving on.

Who had taught the sluagh to sulk? Aisling, most likely. The ridiculous woman was giving them far too many human qualities.

“Faster,” he told them, trying to hide the smile on his face. “We have to find Aisling, remember? This will help us.”

That sped them up. The sluagh loved Aisling almost as much as they needed to add people to their own collective. They would do anything for his queen. He felt the same.

Bran spared a moment to make sure the sluagh were doing what he’d told them to. Once he confirmed they were looking at each grave with a speed that satisfied him, he turned on his heel and strode back to Elva.

She was bending over a grave, carefully running her fingers over each corner as if the leaf might be hidden somewhere. It didn’t seem like a high possibility that Tlachtga would need to hide her own grave. The humans here worshiped her already. They weren’t going to dig up her final resting place.

Humans were strangely attached to graves. They seemed to think that the physical body stayed attached to the soul, or perhaps they just wanted a symbol of where their loved ones lay.

Faeries knew that wasn’t the case. The physical body could be set to nourish the land where the faerie had most loved it, but their magic wouldn’t remain for long, if even a few moments after the final death. Faeries drifted back to their favorite places, their favorite people, continuing their life in a different way than before.

He stepped closer to Elva and tucked his hands into his pant pockets. “Are you going to tell me what happened to you?”

“We don’t have time for stories. We have to find Aisling.” She ran her fingers along the edge of the nearest stone, knocking ancient moss and dirt from its top.

“The sluagh are searching the graves for us. They’ll do it much faster and much more thoroughly than you or I could. So we have a few moments to speak.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Bran.”

“Seems to me that you might need to. You’ve been flinching away from everyone who comes close enough to touch you, and then when you have a few moments away with a dead druid’s son, you act far touchier than I’ve ever seen you act. So, yes, I think we do need to talk.”

Elva huffed out an angry breath, abruptly stood, and placed her hands on her hips. A strand of hair fell in front of her eyes, the golden curl swinging every time she breathed. “Bran, there isn’t much to say.”

“Of course, there is. You aren’t the same girl I remember, and something sent you running off to an isle where they breed warrior women. Out with it.”

“I told you, there isn’t anything to tell. I never married him, I stayed a concubine, and then he was banished. I’ve always been interested in fighting—”

A laugh erupted from his chest. “No, you weren’t! You were interested in courtly intrigue, how to bat your eyelashes at the right man, and what dress made your form look particularly lovely depending on the light. You didn’t give a wit about fighting.”

“People change.”

“You keep saying that, and I keep having a hard time believing they change this much.”

She moved away from him, wrapping her arms around her waist. For the first time since he’d seen her again, she looked more like the little girl he remembered. “Stop pushing, Bran.”

“I’m not going to stop pushing. You need someone to push you, Elva. Hiding away on that isle isn’t going to help, you know that? Because now you’re trying to connect back with family. Aisling doesn’t like weaklings. I’ve never thought of you as weak before, but now I see that maybe you have changed. The Elva I knew would have never hesitated to tell someone a story about her life, regardless of how embarrassing it was, because you loved the attention. Now open your mouth and—”

“I don’t trust myself anymore!” she shouted. Her words rang through the graveyard, bouncing off stones and mist until it reverberated between them.

He froze, muscles locking in place as he tried to understand what she meant. Trust herself? That was easy enough; she hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Pardon?” he asked. “You’re going to have to explain that to me, sweetheart. The way I see it, you had a decent enough life even if it was spent with a selfish prick.”

She brushed the strand of hair behind her ear, shifted, and then leaned against the nearest gravestone. One of the sluagh moved past her. Bran watched as it touched a gentle strand of mist to her ankle, then continued on its way.

A few moments passed before Elva managed to speak. Her words were halting, hesitant, as if she hadn’t told anyone her thoughts before. “I loved him, you know. More than anything else in this world. He was everything I wanted and more. A king. A throne. A golden man who outshone the sun when he smiled.

“Then, everything changed. He became king, and the Seelie courts were not what he expected. They didn’t want to listen to him, and when they did, it was with ridicule. Fionn didn’t take that well.” She paused on his name, as if saying it hurt. “I watched him go from the kind, dedicated man that I knew to someone who was a stranger.

“He didn’t want to make me his queen because he was afraid they would attack me like they attacked him. They thought him foolish, holding tight to the old ways because that was all he knew. And then he became addicted to opium and…worse.”

Her fingers tangled in the hem of her white shirt. “I didn’t know how to help him other than to partake myself. And then things just deteriorated from there. We became strangers, trying to learn each other but not knowing how, and we didn’t like the new versions of ourselves, let alone each other.

“I shouldn’t have stayed. But I did. I stayed, and I worked to try and make him see that I could be a good queen because that was what my mother wanted.

“We made monsters out of each other. We hated the world we lived in, and that hatred bled out into each other and then… Where could we go from there? How did we piece together something that had once been so great without even knowing who we were anymore?”

She looked up at him then, and Bran drowned in the deep blue ocean of her eyes. Her sorrow nearly swallowed her up, and he now realized just how bad it had been for her.

He cleared his throat. “Not trusting yourself? I still don’t know where that came from.”

“I stayed,” Elva said, her words thick with emotion. “I stayed for centuries because I thought that was the right thing to do. And it wasn’t. I should have left so many times, and I never did. I don’t know why I stayed. And that frightens me.”

Gods, that was so much larger than he expected. He’d thought maybe this was about Fionn not appreciating her, hitting her, or doing whatever it was Seelie king’s did to punish their concubines. He hadn’t thought it would be this. That she had forgotten her own way because she’d loved him.

Sighing, he walked over to the nearest gravestone and took a seat. Running his fingers through his hair, he took a deep breath and prepared himself to say something she might not like.

She needed to hear it. Anyone in this situation would need to hear it.

“You stayed because you thought you loved him. Hell, I thought I loved you. The mind tells us what we want to hear, and it’s not because that’s how we thought our future should go or something foolish like hat. He was what you wanted, and you convinced yourself you’d take it in any way possible.

“This wasn’t your fault, Elva. It sounds like it might not have been his fault either. We do horrible things in our lives, but we can’t focus on them and forget to live for the future. You’ll find someone else, someone better who will treat you the way you deserve to be treated.”

When she opened her mouth to interrupt, he held up a hand, silencing her. “Not yet, I’m not done. I can’t tell you what is the right way to be treated. It’s not what Aisling and I have. That’s ours and no one else’s. You have to find what makes you happy. What you want from another person and what they can give you that will make your life better.

“That might be no one. You might be destined to live your life on your own two feet, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you don’t want another man in your life, no one can judge you for that. It’s a choice that you alone can make and should make. Happiness is not something you find in the arms of another person. Happiness comes from within, and that is not dependent on another body helping you find self-worth. You have to do that yourself.”

Finally, he looked up and met her gaze. Tears welled in her eyes, staying put by the sheer force of her will alone. He’d never seen her cry, only on show, and even then she’d turned around once she got what she wanted with a bright smile on her face. That was the Elva he knew. Not this woman who didn’t know how to be sure of herself.

He leaned forward and took one of her hands in his. “You’ll find yourself again. I’m certain of that. I don’t know if it’s the spoiled brat I knew as a child, the warrior you’ve become, or something new and far greater than both of them. That’s up to you, and I can’t tell you where your path will go. I hope that I will be included in it. Watching you grow and turn into this magnificent, intimidating woman that you have the capability to be would be a gift.”

She bared her teeth, pretending to grin. “Intimidating? What about that will draw a man to my side? However will I convince someone to marry me?”

“Those are your mother’s words. If you don’t marry, then I will make you the most incredible aunt the world has ever seen.” He cleared his throat and released her hand. “Who cares if you marry, Elva? If that’s not what you want, then dust off the opinions of others and continue on.”

“I don’t know what I want anymore,” she replied quietly. “ I’d like to find out.”

“You will, and I’ll help. Your sister, too.” He stood, brushed the dirt off his clothing, and held out a hand for her to take. “First, we have to find her.”

Elva reached up and let him draw her to standing. She stepped back immediately, and he didn’t miss that she wiped her hand on her pants. Even the feeling of his touch made her shiver in disgust, but he hoped someday that would stop.

He didn’t want to touch her, now or any other time. Hell, he didn’t want to touch her at all if she didn’t like it. He hoped that someday she would accept someone. Physical healing could go so much farther than she likely wanted to admit.

He cleared his throat again and rocked back on his heels. “Four graves to the right and five up.”

“What?”

“The sluagh found Tlachtga’s grave,” he said. “There’s only one in the entire graveyard that has the symbol of the Green Man. Rather easy to find.”

She drew the mantle of composure around her, her emotions disappearing from her expression and wiped clean until he might have sworn they’d never had a difficult conversation at all. “Then you need to find a shovel, Unseelie.”

“Shovel?” He lifted a brow. “Who needs a shovel when you’re the Raven King?”

“I’m not digging this hole for you.”

He rolled his eyes and strode down the rows. “Oh, ye of little faith! How many times did I tell you learning how to use magic would be helpful someday in your life?”

“I like to work for the things I want.”

“Well, I don’t. I’d rather have them handed to me on a golden platter.” He reached the grave and lifted his hand. Muttering a spell under his breath, he encouraged the earth to shift apart from the coffin deep within its grip.

It wasn’t particularly easy. For some reason, the ground here wanted to keep Tlachtga deep within its belly. Like the humans of this realm, it was feeding off her power. Perhaps she wasn’t just encouraging the crops to grow, but the land itself.

“Come on, now,” he grumbled. “I’m not removing her entirely. She’s left something in the coffin for me, and then you can have her back.”

With a deep, rocky groan, the ground shifted and moved for him. Nine feet down, deeper than most graves, a plain wooden coffin nestled in the dirt. Again, unexpected. He’d thought the humans would have buried her with much more fanfare than a simple wooden coffin. Marble at the very least, or a stone that wouldn’t have rotted away. A few of the boards were already softened by worms.

He glanced up to Elva and gestured down. “Go on then.”

“I’m not hopping into that grave.”

“Well, I’m not doing it.”

“Then have your magic lift it out. I heard the sound the ground made.” She pointed at the mounds of earth on either side. “It doesn’t want us to be anywhere near that coffin. Besides, that’s far too deep for me to climb out of, and you’re the one with the magic. You can hop right back out without any trouble.”

“Damn it.” He stared down at the earth and hoped to hell it didn’t close over his head. The last thing he needed was to be buried alive.

This was a nice suit.

He pressed a hand to his chest and dramatically looked up at the sky. “I wish there were more women around me who wanted to take care of me. I heard that’s what women were supposed to do. Instead, all they’ve done is made my life more difficult.”

“You’re so dramatic,” she said with a chuckle. “And acting far more like yourself than I remember seeing you at the beginning of this journey. For a second there, I thought you might have grown up.”

“Please, put an arrow through my skull if that ever happens.” He looked back into the grave and hesitated for a brief moment. She’d bared her soul to him and, strangely, he felt like he owed her. Bran licked his lips nervously then said, “I feel more like myself out here. Thrones do strange things to people, but the wilderness has a different feel to it.”

“I remember that. You know, you don’t have to change just because you’re a king now. I don’t think Aisling would want you to.”

Maybe that’s what she was saying. He wasn’t trying to break her curse because he was overwhelmed. And yet, now, he could see that wasn’t all she’d wanted. She wanted him, even though they had a kingdom and people.

Maybe, just maybe, his people wanted him to be the same as he always had been.

He wouldn’t find out if he never jumped into this grave and pulled the boards off a dead woman’s coffin. He forced his body to move and leapt into the darkness.

His booted feet hit the ground on either side of the coffin, and he took care not to land directly into Tlachtga’s lap. He had a feeling her soul would feel that if he did. And the last thing he needed was an angry, undead druid coming after him. He already had an undead witch doing exactly that.

How many undead things was he going to have to deal with in his lifetime?

Grimacing, he sank his hands into the rotten wood and began to pull them away. “This is disgusting, you know.”

“Oh, I thought maybe you’d died,” Elva called back. “A shame. Maybe something down there will sew your mouth shut and spare us all the misery.”

He grinned. “Doubtful. If my mother hasn’t sewn it shut, then a druid certainly won’t manage it.”

Although, his mother had certainly threatened to more times than he could count. When he was little, she would even start pulling threads out of her abdomen and start advancing on him.

Bran paused for a moment, wondering if other Unseelie had childhood memories like that. He’d never ask another, quite certain they wouldn’t have. That would have made him feel as though he’d missed out on something.

The board he was tugging came loose and revealed the skeletal body carefully laid to rest within. They hadn’t placed her as he might have expected. Laying on her back with her arms over her chest, that would have been the normal way for humans to place their dead.

Instead, they had laid her curled on her side, as if she had fallen asleep that way, one hand tucked underneath her head, the other carefully placed at her belly. Her hair was still intact, red curls spread out around her skeletal head and decorated with the ancient remains of white flowers.

They had loved her, very much so it seemed.

“Your grave is significantly nicer than the last dead god I saw,” he murmured, gently placing a hand atop her head. He wondered for a moment if Tlachtga could hear him. He’d thought they taught that in school. Small gods were still connected to their physical form, at least slightly. That was why the humans took care of their corpses so well.

A flare of magic responded to him. Deep within the sockets of her missing eyes, light glowed. Her hand on her abdomen uncurled, then stilled once more.

He shivered. There was nothing worse than seeing a corpse move, and it didn’t matter he knew she wasn’t precisely dead. “Well, you are much prettier than the last one as well. Pretty graves for pretty women, that’s what I always say.”

Bran leaned back to find the artifact Tlachtga’d mentioned. A knife, there had to be a knife in here somewhere, and he hoped like hell it wasn’t inside her. He’d met the woman. Plunging his hand into her chest cavity seemed wrong somehow.

Scooting back, he pulled a few more boards loose until the entire top of her coffin was free. “Sorry, Tlachtga. I’m sure the top of this coffin had a purpose, but you don’t mind going back to the earth entirely, do you? I’m sure it would like to consume the rest of your body. The earthworms in particular will love it.”

Elva called out from above, “Are you talking to the corpse?”

“Don’t say it like that. She doesn’t look a day over three hundred.” He leaned up and patted a hand to her bones. “Don’t listen to her. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Always had a jealous streak, that one. Did you know I’m marrying her sister? Or married already, really. She’s my queen. I should talk to her about making that official. Aisling, not Elva.”

“Would you stop trying to get advice from a dead woman and actually look for the knife?”

“I’ll take good advice wherever I can get it!” he called back, running his hands along the edges of the coffin where the human’s had folded white fabric underneath straw. “It’s not exactly easy to find something that was hidden in here. Do you want me to pick up the skeleton?”

“Gods no.” The horror in Elva’s voice made him chuckle. “Do you want her to hunt you down? That’s what she’ll do. Don’t touch her body.”

He looked down at the sunken skull. “Tlachtga, my love, should we tell her it’s already too late for that? You don’t mind a little touch, I’m guessing, but you’re probably going to need to move for me.”

Perhaps Tlachtga had finally had enough of his antics because her corpse let out a long sigh and then shifted slightly to the side, just enough so he could see the glimmering handle of a knife that protruded from beneath her body.

“There you are.” He leaned over, balancing on either edge of the coffin with both hands. “That wasn’t too hard, now was it? Thank goodness you had a father who knew magic well. That faerie up there thinks magic has no place in this world, and we’re going to prove her wrong together.”

He leaned his weight to the side, crouched over her body, and drew the knife out from underneath her.

It wasn’t precisely what he had expected. Faeries like to make cursed and powerful objects easily recognizable. If someone picked up a golden piece encrusted with jewels, they knew it was a powerful, magical object.

He turned it in his hands, seeing the wickedly sharp edge as something far more than an instrument to cut with. Black magic was forged into the very metal of the blade. It was a dangerous weapon, far more because it wanted blood. It thirsted for pain and anguish so much that it called out to the powers inside him.

This wasn’t something he wanted to handle for very long. Not right now, at least.

Wincing, he called out, “Elva, tell me you have something I can put this in?”

No one responded to him.

He looked up but didn’t see her face peering down at him anymore. Frowning, he stood up. “Elva?”

Nothing.

“Damn it,” he cursed, then looked down at the corpse. “Was this you? Really? Some kind of protection spell for your own body? I thought you would play a little more fair than that, considering you were the one who gave us the map to get here.”

He was tempted to kick a little dirt onto her body for good measure, but didn’t want to get cursed from afar. This was her land, and the earth itself was filled with her magic. The last thing he needed was to be buried.

Muttering about meddling women and their ridiculous grudges, he launched himself out of the grave. Leaping high into the air, he landed in a crouch with shadows billowing from his fingertips.

The sluagh were prepared for a fight. They tasted it in the air, in the anger that surged through his veins, and longed for nothing more than to be set free so they, too, might find their own blood. The blade hummed in his hand, pommel nearly shaking with anticipation.

It was not the undead army he expected. No corpses were digging themselves out of graves to protect their small goddess.

Instead, Elva was bowed low to two women who stood at the edge of the graveyard.

Impossibly tall, nearly too perfect to look at, they were the first of the ancient Tuatha de Danann that he’d ever seen in his life. He’d met old faeries before. Hell, he lived with them in the Unseelie Castle.

But the originals? The first who created their bloodlines and passed down their lineage throughout all the creatures he now knew?

The breath was pulled from his lungs at their presence. He quickly snuffed his magic, then tucked the blade in the waist of his pants for good measure. The courtly bow he gave them would have made even the Seelie King proud.

“Ladies of magic,” he said reverently.

The nearest woman, so tall she looked down on him, smiled. Freckles dotted her face, wild red hair tumbling down her back like a river of fire. She didn’t wear a traditional dress, but men’s leggings and a soft green, dappled tunic. As if the sun never stopped filtering through leaves, even when she wasn’t near the trees.

“Bran,” she replied. “It’s an honor to meet the new Raven King.”

His voice shuddered as he replied, “Macha, the honor is all mine.”

The other woman, speckled like the egg of a robin, chuckled. “And yet it is me whom you should be thanking.”

“Lady Badb?” he questioned, ducking his eyes low to the ground. “Please, tell me what I should thank you for, and I will lay my sacrifices at your feet.”

“Your queen is my granddaughter, and I helped you both arrive at the Duchess of Dusk. Although, I will admit, I didn’t want her to be your queen.”

He shook at the anger in her voice. How had he managed to piss off a Tuatha de Danann this powerful? “My lady?”

“If I asked you to give her up so that I might train her to become the woman she could have been, would you?” Badb asked.

“No,” he said, then looked up to meet her gaze. “My apologies, but no. I would never give her up unless it’s what she wanted. With all due respect, she chose me. I think that says more than anything else.”

He stared into Badb’s eyes and thought for a moment that the speckled being would destroy him where he stood. The rage in those depths rivaled his own at her asking the question. Was this creature angered that Aisling wasn’t doing as she wished? Or was she simply angry because the world didn’t agree with her? That times had changed so much that even the faeries didn’t see her as a goddess anymore?

Macha chuckled. “My dear sister, it seems as though you have lost your flock. I’m surprised the faeries aren’t listening to you anymore. The druids have begun listening to me.”

“I have not lost anything. And I find I did not miss working with you, Macha.”

“Oh, don’t say that. We’re so much more powerful when we’re together.”

Bran listened intently. So the stories were true. Macha, Badb, and Morrighan were three sisters of the Tuatha de Danann. When they were together, they were unstoppable. Long ago, they used to wander the battlefields and absorb all the emotion and magic that drained out through death and bloodshed.

This was Aisling’s grandmother? No wonder Aisling was capable of so many great things.

Elva shifted at his side, reaching out and placing a hand against his leg. “Bran? Perhaps we should ask the maidens of magic why they are here.”

“Maidens?” he repeated. “They made us. Their blood runs through our veins. I don’t think we can call them maidens anymore.”

The redheaded Tuatha de Danann burst into laughter. The infectious sound eased his mind, although he was still uneasy being in their presence. “The term is respectful, Raven King. Your companion seems to understand the old ways far better than you.”

“I renounced the old ways when I discovered they no longer were useful for the world I choose to live in. I find I am just as intrigued as she is. Why are you here?”

The sisters paused and looked at each other. A thread of magic tied them together, so faint he almost couldn’t see it. It was there, a magical link that intertwined powerful creatures who shared blood.

The glowing thread suggested they used magic to talk so no one else could listen. And try as he might, he couldn’t snoop no matter how much the Raven King’s power looped around the thread. They were far stronger than he was, and far more capable.

Sometimes, he would admit, the old magic proved itself to be more useful than the new.

Finally, Badb turned back to him. “Regardless of your claim on my progeny, I must admit I do not want to see her die. Carman is a threat to us all. We banished her long ago, and it was our mistake that she still lives. We would like to rectify that.”

“You’re here to help?” he said, startled they would even think to offer such a thing. “I thought the ancients no longer wished to meddle in the current affairs of our kind?”

“No one can know that we helped you,” Macha replied. “This is outside of our realm, and no other Tuatha de Danann can discover we’ve assisted you. If they do, then we will personally take your kingdom and all that you love away from you.”

He recognized the threat. He could care less about the kingdom, although he would be sad to say goodbye to his people. The love he felt for them burned in his veins now; it was as much a part of him as the magic he called his own. But there were others in this world who would treat them better, who would be a far better king than he could ever hope to be.

Still, he inclined his head. “I have no interest in angering the Tuatha de Danann who helped create me. If you wish to help, I will accept it gladly.”

Macha gestured with a hand, and the mist suddenly parted. Behind them, Bran saw a small garden and a fountain where a stone woman poured water out of a vase. It was a quaint little place, and Bran had seen this before.

“The fountain of Hy-Brasil?” he asked, stepping forward and walking into the garden where he’d been before. Every time he used to visit Eamonn, now the Seelie King, he’d come to this place because it felt like peace had sunk into the earth. “Why here?”

“This is my sanctuary,” Macha said quietly, walking around to the other side of the fountain. “It is here where those who search for kindness will come. Sorcha came here when she was working to free Eamonn from his self-imposed chains. You came here when you missed your family.”

He had and whispered secrets to the stone woman. Cheeks flaming, he nodded at Macha. “I said a lot of things here that I didn’t want anyone else to hear.”

“There’s always someone listening. That’s why I knew, even when my sister didn’t, that you would make a wonderful Raven King.”

Badb snorted behind him before joining her sister and dipping her fingers into the cool water. “I think we’re still finding out whether or not he will make a good king. For the time being, I will agree he’s done more for his people than any other king.”

He sat on the edge of the fountain and stared up at the women. “What help will you offer me? Guidance on how to find her?”

“We will open a portal that will bring you to her side. But first, let us add our power to the spell that will assist Aisling in her journey.”

Somehow, Bran knew what they were talking about. He reached out his arm and let Macha and Badb both finger the rope wrapped around his wrist.

“What can you offer her?” he asked.

Warm, speckled hands surrounded his arm. “Our knowledge of what the future could be and our hopes for her.”

Both sisters quietly murmured in unison, “By knot of six, this spell I fix. By knot of seven, events I’ll leaven.”

The rope twisted underneath their grip, coiling against his skin and knotting two more times. This felt far more powerful than he could have ever imagined.

Then Badb sighed, released her hold on his arm, and set her hand palm up on the fountain stone. “I offer you now your history. These memories are ones I have personally held for many years. I give them back to you and all the remains of Raven Kings of old. Perhaps you will understand why we’ve worked so hard to keep the queen away.”

He stared down at her hand and wondered just how much he wanted to know. Was it worth it? He could deny this knowledge, knowing it had the power to change their fate.

And yet…he was so curious. There were so many souls in his head, so many sluagh and ancient Raven Kings, who wanted to know why their lives were cursed. Why they were forced to devour souls and hate.

Magic danced on Badb’s fingertips, memories that were his and not his. Suddenly, it wasn’t a question of whether or not he wanted to know.

He needed to.

Bran reached out and took her hand.