Leanan Sidhe's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

The Puca lay still in the mud where she had drained him. The Leanan Sidhe stepped over the horse and left the salt ring behind. She needed something the witch could not give the bog man, and something the bog man would not give her. She needed the grief he carried before Florence sang him up. To weaponize sorrow, she had to know the man he was buried as. She followed the sound of a bass string across the reeds. Alex sat outside a stone cottage wrapped in cherry blossoms. He was Hozier's friend, a raven-feathered man who kept the bog man steady with low notes. He plucked one string, then another. He did not look up when she stopped in the grass. "You know I'm here," she said. "I know." She folded her wings tight. "I want to know who he was. Before the peat." Alex kept playing. "No." "You gave up your own skin to walk with him. Feathers instead of a life. You know what he lost on that road." He stopped the string with his palm. He looked at her then. His eyes were tired and kind and closed to her. "You want to use it," he said. "Yes." "Then no." She stepped closer. She reached for the calm in him the way she had reached for the Puca's throat. Nothing gave. The bass in his hands hummed a single low note and her fingers went numb to the wrist. She pulled her hand back. He had made himself a door she could not open. She turned away before he could see her face. That was when she felt it. Low in her own belly, a pulling. A shape forming somewhere in the deep peat, in a stone cradle full of green water. Danu was making her heir down there, and the making was rooted in the Leanan Sidhe's own body like a second heart. She pressed her hand flat under her ribs. It beat with her. She sat down hard in the wet grass. She had thought herself the last mean scrap of the old gods. A hungry thing that fed and moved on. Now something older called to her from below the water, and it called her kin. Danu. Mother. Sister. The word would not settle. And under that, deeper, another voice. Fomorian. Cold. It named her ally. It said the witch's man was still soft enough to break and offered to help her break him. She listened to both. Her hand stayed on her belly. Behind her, the bass note faded. Alex had not moved. He would not tell her anything about the bog man. That door was shut. She stood. She did not know yet whose side she was on. She only knew she had come for a taste of grief and left carrying two claims on her blood, and neither of them Hozier's.