“Eliatha-Tethra de Cailleach,” she hissed in my ear. “FindPrince Ash—wherever he now may be—and cut off his sweet head.”
She shoved my head back just as Balor joined us.
I swallowed and gave a single nod. “I’ll find him.”
Because I would. But not for what she wanted me to do. I wanted to make sure he was alright. If he wasn’t on seelie land, where could he have gone? Back to his brother’s sidhe? I needed to see for myself, to make sure he was safe.
The Carlin curled her lip at me and turned to walk back to her throne. But Balor remained, and before I could turn to leave, he stepped closer.
“Isn’t this sweet?” he murmured, reaching up and touching something at my throat before I jerked back.
My blood ran cold when I realised what it was. Ash’s necklace. The acorn. I’d forgotten to take it off when I got back to the palace, too desperate to make sure he wasn’t chained up once again in my mother’s throne room.
My eyes darted to the Carlin. Had she seen it?
“Go, Lonan.” The Carlin’s eye was as hard as her voice when I glanced over and saw her watching me. Her gaze shifted to my brother only briefly before returning to me. “Balor, come here.”
Dread squeezed my stomach into a tight ball as I turned to leave, but I forced myself to calm down. She couldn’t control me. She could use my name as much as she wanted, but it wasn’t my true name anymore.
And soon, I’d use hers, and then I would kill her.
I made my way back up to my bedroom, gripping the warm acorn in a tight fist to try and comfort myself just a little. I stood in my room for long minutes, trying to work out what to do. Go and find Ash to make sure he was alright? Or stay here and wait for the right time to kill the Carlin first?
In the end, the pressing need to see Ash, to make sure he was still safe and alive, drove me to my bedroom window. I shifted into the blackbird and hopped onto its outer ledge, taking flight to head into the forest.
I heard the sharp grind of something below, the faint whistle that followed, but didn’t really register it. Not until my right wing suddenly became useless and I was falling out of the sky, twisting as I plummeted, my left wing trying desperately to keep me airborne.
It felt like every bone in this fragile body shattered as I hit the earth. My left wing flapped madly, but I couldn’t move. The edge of something short and thin jerked in my periphery as I tried to take flight, panic making me scrabble weakly over the ground.
“Silly boy.” I froze at the sound of Balor’s voice, my heart thrumming too hard in my chest. “You grew careless. You made her suspicious.”
He dropped the crossbow and bent to pick me up in his cold, pale hands, grinning widely as he brought me close to his face.
“How did you make it back without his head?” he murmured. “Did you find Ogma, my sweet little brother? Are you free?”
When I thrashed weakly, he pinned my one good wing to his palm and bared his teeth at me.
“I hope you spent your few hours of freedom well, Lonan. Let’s get you back to the palace, hmm?”
I struggled fruitlessly as he walked quickly back towards the palace and directly into the Carlin’s throne room, pain streaking through my body as my wing desperately tried to move.
I tried to shift but couldn’t. The bolt was still piercing my wing. I could only watch in horror as the Carlin grinned widely at me, snapping a thin shackle around her wrist and attaching the other tiny end to my leg. Tethering us together.
No. No. No no no no
She’d done this to me as a boy, when she deemed me to have misbehaved. When I wasn’t trying hard enough to shift into every animal she barked at me. The cuff prevented me from shifting at all. It kept me trapped in this form until it was removed.
“I’ve been suspicious of you for a while now, Lonan,” she told me softly, stroking a cold finger down my back. “I didn’t want to believe it. That my own son could truly want a seelie dog. But you do, don’t you? You’ve been trying to help him this whole time. You sicken me.”
I’d been so close. So close to killing her and protecting Ash. I’d finally freed myself from her, and now I was shackled to her wrist like a pet bird, with no hope of escape.