Aisling Úllmhara's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

Aisling stood in the crooked mansion with the threshold pages safe in her coat. Tonight the revel would begin. The band was tuning up outside. A skeleton rock group cracked their knuckles and struck their first chords by the bonfire. Guests filled the field. But Aisling saw the horned lord watching from the dark tree line. He had called her court ragged. The music was borrowed. The house was borrowed. None of it was her own magic. If the lord saw only guests and no power of her own, he would crown a rival. She needed to show him something only she could do. Deirdre pulled her aside. "The other courts have wonders," she said. "A witch flies a burning broom. A kraken raises waves. You have apples." It was true. Apples were Aisling's only magic, and her grove was ash. She had nothing left to grow a door. Then she remembered the shell on Grizzella's shelf. Grizzella had said a cursed mermaid lived inside it, too big for the space, trapped for years. Aisling carried the shell out to the fire. She set it on a stump where every guest could see. Marina Shellborne looked out at the crowd through the shell's gap. "You want a show," Marina said. Flat. No thanks in it. "I want out of this shell. Make it worth my while." "I can move things between spaces," Aisling said. "A thing that fits nowhere. That is what I do." Marina did not smile. "Then do it," she said. "The shell smells of dead fish. The last witch made it worse." Aisling knelt by the fire. Threshold magic linked a thing to a place. But a thing could be linked to a between-place too, the space her grove had once held. Marina belonged to neither shell nor field. That made her an in-between thing, like Aisling's lost apples. Aisling spoke the old words from the recovered pages. She pressed her palm to the shell and named the open air as Marina's threshold. The shell cracked. Not with force. It simply parted, as a door parts. Marina rose out of it. Her tail unfolded and became legs, then folded back to a tail when she chose, shifting as she pleased in the firelight. She stood free for the first time in years, floating a hand above the grass, held by nothing. The field went quiet. The skeleton band stopped mid-note. The horned lord stepped forward from the trees. Even the rival witches stared. Marina looked down at her freed tail. "Good," she said. "Now I find the witch who cursed me." She turned to Aisling. "You kept your word. I owe you one." She did not soften it. The horned lord crossed the field. His hooves pressed the wet grass. He stopped before Aisling and looked at the broken shell, then at the freed mermaid drifting on air. "The others borrowed their wonders," he said. "Hired witches. Summoned tides. You opened a door no one else could open. That is your own craft." He studied her. "A court that frees the trapped is a court worth a crown." He lifted a circle of hawthorn and iron from his cloak. He set it on Aisling's brow. The weight was cold and real. Deirdre gasped. Moira let out a cry that was almost joy. The rival courts bowed their heads, stiff and unwilling. Aisling touched the crown. She had won. But she had not forgotten why she came. She spoke to the lord plainly. "I claimed this for one thing. My grove was cut and burned. I cannot cross home. The crown holds the power to grow a crossing back. I mean to use it." The horned lord inclined his horns. "A queen may command the roads between worlds," he said. "Yours is yours to rebuild." The band struck up again. Marina slipped toward the dark water to hunt her witch. Grizzella clapped her wrinkled hands. Aisling stood crowned at her own fire, her small court beside her. In the morning she would walk to the burned ground where her apple grove had stood. She would plant a seed and speak a threshold over it, and this time the door would open because she was its queen. The road home was hers to make.