FORTY-FIVE
SAGE
I open my eyes. The smell of smoke lingers in the air. The familiar dark canopy of my bed hangs above me, curtains a sheer red. I turn toward the king. But the bed is empty.
He was just here. Wasn’t he? I sit up, disoriented.
A trickle of unease fills my chest.
Where is he?
“Hello?” I ask the silence.
But wait. When I fell asleep, I wasn’t here; I wasn’t in the keep. I was with the king in the wood, under the rowan tree. I was . . . why can’t I remember?
Something was wrong before I closed my eyes. The king had called to me, drawing me into the wood, and I’d found him resting under the rowan tree. He said there was something we could do to hide ourselves, hide our secret. Something that would save us from her. We argued because his plan was terrible, it was horrifying what I would have to do . . . but . . .
Confusion rolls over me again. Why can’t I remember?
I rise from the bed, wandering over to the fire. The embers have faded to nearly nothing. I snap my fingers, sending out my spark into the dying blaze.
The energy slinks over my skin but goes no further. The embers stay as they were. I blink at the coals and try again.
Still nothing.
Something is very wrong.
I reach for my pouch of lavender, to call my mother—
Where is it?
I look down. What . . . what is this? Am I wearing trousers? I pat myself and realize how strange my clothing is. And I’m wearing my torque—why would that be? It was taken off me soon after the Bonding. Am I a prisoner?
My heart begins to race as I look around again. And then I spot the painting over the hearth. It’s not the painting that was there before. It’s a portrait of me now. I stand on an icy bank, Fionn perched on my arm, ready for flight.
Fionn.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” a voice says from behind me.
I turn, nearly stumbling into the fireplace.
The young man grabs me by the upper arm, tugging me away from the flames, closer to him. “Take care,” he says. “You could catch your clothes on fire, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
I gape at him, lost. “Who are you?”
He smirks, his silver eyes full of mischief. “We’re not here to be coy, little doe.” He pulls me to the chair and releases me into it.
As I watch him begin to pace, confusion fills me again. He’s familiar, he’s so like the king. But I don’t know him.
Kieran whispers in my head. The name of my king’s brother . . . but he was just a boy the last time I saw him, fourteen winters old. This is a man.
The ground tips. A memory of this young man’s face, how he broke someone’s neck. The violent moment flashes in my head, and I grip the arms of the chair, panic hitting.
Faelan!
No.
Wait . . . who’s Faelan?
Pain shoots through my head, and I groan, squeezing my eyes shut. I pinch the bridge of my nose.
“Are you well?” the silver-eyed young man asks, urgency filling his voice.
“Where is my king?” I mutter.
“Sage?” Someone shakes my shoulders. “Sage, are you all right? Look at me!”
Sage . . .
No . . . it’s wrong. It’s all wrong . . . My stomach shivers, everything swirling inside of me, bones aching, chest tingling . . . What’s happening—
My eyes fly open, and I gasp, my lungs stinging. I grip his arms as a lifeline. “Kieran!” I gulp in air like I was drowning a second ago. I was. Who was I? What just happened? “Oh my God, Kieran.”
His face comes clear in front of me, fear in his eyes. “That was her, wasn’t it?” he asks.
I nod my head, not even caring how he knows. It all totally took me over. I couldn’t even have my own thoughts. I was just . . . gone.
His hand becomes a fist at his side as tension fills his body. “It’s too soon,” he whispers. “I was sure the torque would hold this in.”
“You what?”
“It was her torque—Queen Lily’s. It should have held her spirit down. That’s what the damn monk said.”
I blink at him. He knows Lailoken? “You know what that was.” It’s not a question. I can see he’s fully aware.
He nods, his eyes going distant.
“How much do you know? About me.”
“A lot more than I like.” He moves to the fire, staring into the embers.
“Tell me. What just happened?” I look back to the bed, all the memories and emotions of Lily swirling in the background of my mind like a mist trying to press in again.
“She surfaced,” he says, his voice tense. “Her spirit took over your body.”
Dread soaks into my bones. “How’s that even possible?” Her spirit? In me? My body begins to shake. This has gotten totally out of control. “Am I possessed or something?” I nearly choke on the words.
“No,” he says, and then he adds, “And yes.” He releases a long breath as my lungs stop working. “The truth is,” he continues, “I’ve known for a long time that Queen Lily pulled all of her power—her spirit—from her blood, leaving her body an empty vessel, before the Cast came to drag her into the Pit. It was her way of escape. I kept her secret. Because all of this time I assumed she’d simply had her essence placed into her owl, that she’d remained in the wood. But when I went to the old monk, he said that the owl had died centuries ago.”
The realization of what he’s implying begins to sink in. “She needed a vessel,” I say under my breath.
“When I read your spirit that night in the alley, it didn’t make sense,” he says, still caught up in his thoughts. He starts to pace again. “Something was wrong. You were merely supposed to be a second daughter, lesser, not a being to be reckoned with, not carrying the power I felt inside you as I looked deeper. It was as if you were something . . . more. Extra. I assumed that I wasn’t sensing right, especially when you didn’t defend yourself, then bled out so swiftly. But . . .” He pauses, looking oddly unsure, not like himself at all. “Then I learned more of the truth of what Queen Lily did to my brother, what they had both done to force the hand of fate, and I knew with sudden clarity that it was Lily’s spirit hidden inside you that I was sensing.”
The stone floor seems to shift under my feet. And the truth looms like a specter, clouding my vision. All I can see is the painting of her above the mantle. Of a woman dressed in pure white, cloaked in furs, wild copper hair a stark contrast to the icy surroundings.
It’s nuts. It’s crazy. These visions, these dreams, they aren’t just memories. They’re actually her. Queen Lily.
Her spirit is inside me.
A shiver runs through me. That’s why it’s been so overwhelming, why I’ve felt like someone else at times. And just a minute ago she was able to take me over so completely.
God help me. It’s getting worse.
And now I’m with Kieran. Who I’m not even sure I can trust.
“How do you know all of this?” I ask.
His voice drops so that I can barely hear him. “My brother.” I open my mouth to ask what he could possibly mean—the king is dead—but he cuts me off, saying, “I’ll explain, I swear, but first we need to hide you from the creature trying to poison you.”
I thought that was him.
“Faelan is being brought up momentarily,” he adds. Then he tips his head, giving me a curious look. “But you don’t seem to be terribly worried about him.”
“Oh, God. Faelan!” I can’t believe I forgot for even a second.
“I assumed you’d accost me the moment I came into the room. I should have known something was amiss when you didn’t.”
I shake my head, overwhelmed, confused by his shift to semicongeniality. This isn’t a side of Kieran I’ve seen before; I have to wonder if it’s real. I’d be stupid to buy into anything he says. But right now my mind is exhausted from the shock of what just happened. All my guards are down.
“I know you don’t trust me,” he says, like he can see the turmoil on my face. “That’s fair. I’m not known for my subtlety.”
“You slit my throat,” I say to remind myself yet again. But my voice is weak, so I add, “And broke Faelan’s neck.”
“Whatever you think of me,” he says, a defensive bite in his tone, “the moment in the alley was necessary. I needed to see why your energy was off—any weakness in you could have been exploited by others. It was better you die than become a weapon. So I had to be sure you were truly a second Daughter of Fire. We have seen that you are.” He motions to me, like my presence proves his point. “I was hoping you’d come to trust me in time.”
“So you made sure that you controlled my ability to use my own power?” I say, reaching up to touch my torque. “How is that supposed to make me trust you?”
“It needed to be me to place the torque—so that no one could manipulate you.”
“You mean, like you have? Killing me, taking my free will, and kidnapping me.”
“I kidnapped you to help you.”
“Said every serial killer ever.”
“There are eyes watching,” he says, his tone getting tense, “creatures listening. I needed to speak with you away from all the spies—are you telling me you’d have come willingly?”
“You didn’t have to break Faelan’s neck!”
He pauses and then smirks as he says, “Snapping that plant-eating bastard’s spine was just a bonus.”
I rise from the chair in a rush. “You’re a snake and a liar!”
He tsks at me. “Manners, princess. I may be a snake but I’ve never lied to you. I’ve only been completely honest.” He pauses as a knock sounds on the door, then adds, “Unlike others in your life.” He holds my gaze as he waves his hand, opening the door from across the room. “Speaking of the hunter . . .”
A tall man drags Faelan in and drops his limp body in the middle of the floor before walking back out, slamming the door behind him.
I rush to Faelan’s side and roll him onto his back. His face is swollen, nearly unrecognizable. A giant torque is around his neck, like the one he put on me that first night, and I know that’s what’s kept him from healing completely. He’s breathing, though. He’s alive.
“Can you hear me, Faelan?” I reach out to pull the torque off. A burst of pain runs through my arm as it sizzles against my skin.
I stumble back, cradling my hand to my chest.
“It’s locked,” Kieran says behind me. “Only I can take it off, since I placed it there.”
“Then get it off him,” I say through my teeth.
“Very well,” Kieran says, sounding disappointed but giving up far more easily than I thought he would.
He kneels behind Faelan and draws a dagger from his boot, then pricks his thumb with it.
Blood pearls at the tip of his finger, and he slides it over the edge of the torque, smearing red on the metal with a hiss. It unlatches with a clink and falls to the side.
Faelan’s features immediately begin to return to normal as the swelling goes down. Several bruises remain, though, and a cut on his cheek doesn’t fully heal. He must need to feed. He probably used most of his energy to heal his spine before Kieran put the torque on him.
He opens his eyes. “Sage?”
“Are you okay?” I ask, brushing the hair from his forehead.
He begins to sit up, his features clenched in pain. And then he spots Kieran only a foot away from me. He goes still. “Get back, Sage,” he says, his voice deadly.
“Now, now,” Kieran says, his haughty tone returning in full force. “Can’t we be civil?”
“Civility went out the window when you kidnapped us,” I say.
He gives me a tired look. “Haven’t we been over this? I’ve told you why I brought you here.”
I help Faelan to the chair, and then I turn on Kieran, sick of his games. “What the hell do you really want from me, Kieran?”
His head pulls back. “I’m protecting you, obviously.”
I release a derisive laugh.
“Or did you miss the dead pixie in your cottage?” he asks.
I gape at him.
“How do you know about Niamh?” Faelan asks, his voice thick with warning.
But I don’t care how he knows. “You know who did it,” I say, suddenly very sure. “Spit it out.”
He goes over to the hearth, pulling out the poker and nudging the embers with it. He turns and swings the poker as if it were a sword. “I’m fairly sure it was my sister,” he says.
Wait, what?
“I thought Princess Mara wanted Sage for your House,” Faelan says, echoing my confusion. “Why would she hurt her?”
“Mara is . . . shall we say, a complex creature,” Kieran says. “She’s insecure and has always been jealous of anything her brothers aren’t cruel to.” He looks at me. “She does want the power you can bring, Sage. She was going to draw you in, control you, in order to get it. But she grew impatient when she saw how attached you were to this hunter. She sees you the same way she saw Queen Lily: as a threat. So she sent the poison, wanting you to be as pliable as possible when the Emergence came around.”
“Does she know about Lily and me?” I ask, my nerves turning raw as I realize what I’m up against.
Kieran shakes his head. “And she can never discover it.”
“Know what?” Faelan asks.
But I’m not ready to explain it all to him yet. I can’t even imagine how he’d look at me if he knew that I’m a ticking time bomb. So I stay focused on Kieran. “She killed Aelia’s friend, Kieran. Why didn’t you stop her? You had to have known she was going to try something.”
“Mara is a force, Sage,” he says. “You need to understand, she may not be more powerful than I am, but she’s far more insane, which makes her dangerous. There’s nothing she wouldn’t do.” He looks over to Faelan. “That party you brought Sage to the other night? That was meant to be a bloodworking to manipulate Sage into killing you.”
I lower myself into the chair opposite Faelan, feeling sick at the thought.
“She assumed that she could drive you mad, Sage. She thought it would be easy, that you were weak from living in the human world for too long. It’s why I made sure to put the torque on you right away, why I warned Faelan to get you out of the party.”
“That was a fucked-up warning,” Faelan says, his voice angry.
I add, “You could’ve just called and told us your sister was a homicidal maniac.”
“Every Otherborn left on earth is aware of that,” Kieran says. “And if I had contacted you, she would have known I was working against her. She watches me like a hawk. It’s why I had to slip away. I told her I was going off to lick my wounds from your rejection of me, and she said she’d take care of it, that she’d be sure you became hers. So I watched.”
A thought comes to me, a memory of the dream I had a few minutes ago, just before I woke up, how Lily was thinking of her, and how this unnamed woman in Lily’s mind wouldn’t relent until the power was hers. “Kieran, did your sister do something to my sister?”
He nods, unsaid things in his eyes.
“What did she do?” It suddenly seems very important.
“You’ll have to ask Lily,” he says.
But that’s the last thing I want to do. There’s one other source I could ask, though. Even if it terrifies me. I know that I can call to her—I’ve felt myself do it several times. And if a connection is made, it could answer everything.