The Leanan Sidhe crouched at the edge of the black water and watched the bog man walk past her for the third time. He did not see her. He should have. She had worn this shape for a thousand years, and mortals had drowned themselves to reach it. Tonight her hair hung wet against her wings, her mouth was painted the color mortals loved best, and the bog man walked by whistling a tune that belonged to another woman. She needed him. That was the whole of it. She fed on love the way other things fed on blood, and she had chosen him before he was pulled out of the peat. The witch had gotten to him first. The witch was teaching him earth-magic now, quiet and rooted, and every day it thickened around him like moss. If the Leanan Sidhe did not claim him before the lesson finished, she would never claim him at all. She stepped onto the path in front of him. She made her eyes the color of the sky before rain. "Stay a while," she said. He stopped. He looked at her the way he might look at a stone. "You're not her," he said, and stepped around. Her glamour slid off him like water off oiled cloth. Peat did not want silk. Peat wanted peat. She followed him at a distance, thinking. Near a small pond a white swan turned its head toward her and did not look away. Further on, a cracked ferry sat half-sunk in the reeds, its wood carved with old marks of grief. She understood then. He was already fed by sorrow and devotion. Beauty meant nothing to him. She needed a lure shaped like loss. She went to the witch's telescope, the tribute the bog had grown for the priestess no one believed. The witch was there, barefoot, yellow at the hem, adjusting the lens. The Leanan Sidhe did not hide. "Look," she said, and tipped the glass toward the witch's eye. "Every woman who was ever right and ever burned for it. That's your road." The witch looked. Her hand tightened on the wooden frame. She did not speak for a long moment. Then she said, "Get off my hill." "I only came to warn you." "Get off my hill." The Leanan Sidhe smiled, because the seed was in. She turned to go and stopped. The elk stood on the path. Antlers wide as a doorway. It did not paw or snort. Its eyes held a light that was older than her, and it looked at her the way a judge looks at a name already written down. "Move," she said. The elk did not move. She understood, cold and clean, that she had been seen. Not by the bog man. By whatever the bog answered to. Her old shape would not work here. She would have to become sorrow itself to take him. She stepped off the path and began to plan it.

The Leanan Sidhe crouched in the reeds and watched her partner pace. The Puca had worn its horse shape for two nights now, huge and black, gold burning in its eyes. It struck the peat with one hoof and steam came up. It was done waiting. It wanted the bog man dead tonight, and it did not care that she needed him alive. "Not yet," she said. "He is mine to take whole." The Puca turned its head. Its voice was low and wet. "He was mine first. I finish what I start." It bolted before she could answer. She followed on foot, wings tight against her back. The Puca thundered through the bog toward the little arbor where the bog man played his music. She saw him there, seated on the mossy bench, a fiddle in his lap. He looked up. He saw the gold eyes coming through the trees and he did not scream. He stood, tucked the fiddle under his arm, and ran. He ran toward the witch. The Leanan Sidhe cursed and cut sideways through the reeds. She knew where he was going. The witch kept a hut in a clearing ringed with salt and hung with yellow flowers, the ones that burned fae skin. The bog man reached the edge of the clearing and crossed the salt line. The Puca skidded to a stop at the ring and reared, screaming. The witch came out of the hut barefoot. She saw the horse. She saw the bog man on his knees inside her circle, breathing hard. Her face went white and then it went hard. "Get away from my house," she said. The bog man reached for her hand. "Florence." "I'm here," she said. She did not look at him. She kept her eyes on the horse. "I'm here. Stay down." The Leanan Sidhe stepped from the reeds. The witch's head turned. The two women looked at each other across the salt. Inside the ring, the bog man set his hand flat on the ground. Something in the earth answered him. The yellow flowers on the hut brightened. The witch felt it and her shoulders dropped an inch. She reached down and touched the top of his head, once, and the light around them both thickened. The Puca reared again and struck the salt line with a hoof. The line held. It burned him. He screamed a second time, higher. The Leanan Sidhe walked to him. She put her hand on his neck. "I told you," she said, quiet. "Not yet." She closed her fingers. The Puca shuddered under her grip and went to its knees in the mud. Gold drained out of its eyes until only black was left. It did not rise. Inside the circle, the bog man was already reaching for the witch's hand again. The Leanan Sidhe watched their fingers meet. She had kept him alive. She had also watched him choose.

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.

The Leanan Sidhe left Alex's cottage with two claims on her blood and no clean path between them. The Fomorian voice had not gone quiet. It pulled at her the way a hook pulls at a fish. It wanted a gift. Something dead and useful. She knew what she had to give. She went back to the salt ring where the black horse lay. The Puca was still and cold. Its gold eyes had gone dull. She lifted the body by the mane. It was lighter than a horse should be, because she had already taken what made it heavy. An emptied skin. A husk. She dragged it across the peat toward the low ground where the Fomorian voice was strongest. The warlord met her at a broken stand of reeds. He was taller than any tree there. His armor was welded from old broken shields. A red eye burned in the center of his chest and threw pink light across the water. He did not bow. He did not speak first. He waited. She dropped the horse at his feet. "Proof," she said. "I brought you the Puca. Now help me take the bog man from the witch." The warlord looked down at the body. He nudged it with one clawed foot. The head rolled. He laughed once, low, like stones grinding. "Empty," he said. "You drank it dry before you thought of us. You bring us a bag. Not a life." "It is a Puca. It is old blood." "It is your leftovers." His red eye flared. "We do not follow your plan, little corrupted thing. You do not command here. You bring us a full kill or you bring us the witch's throat. Choose." She opened her mouth to bargain. The peat shook under her. At the low place, water pushed up through the moss and filled the stone cradle set deep in the earth. Green light rose from it. Danu stepped out of the light, small and barefoot, a crown of flowers on her white hair. She did not look at the Leanan Sidhe. She looked past her, into the reeds, where three bog hags had gathered to watch. "Old rules," Danu said to the hags. Her voice was low and level. "No Fomorian takes ground here while I am birthing. You know the agreement. You witnessed it before her mother was named." The hags nodded, slow, wet grins fixed. Danu turned her green eyes on the warlord. "This one is my lost child," she said, and touched the Leanan Sidhe's belly through the air between them. "Twisted, but mine. You do not buy her with promises." The warlord spat. The red light in his chest went out like a snuffed lamp. He stepped back into the reeds and was gone. The Leanan Sidhe stood over the empty horse with no ally left. Danu was already turning away toward the cradle. The bog man was still Florence's, and now she would have to take him alone.

The Leanan Sidhe left the empty horse in the reeds and turned toward the star-tower. Danu did not stop her. The goddess had claimed her blood but not her hunt. She still meant to take the bog man tonight. She spread her wings and rose over the peat, and the child inside her pulled at her ribs like a stone tied to a bird. She felt it with every wingbeat. The glamour she wore, the beauty she had carried for a thousand years, ran out through her belly and into the thing growing there. By the time she saw the star-tower's lamp, her arms shook. She landed hard in the wet grass. She could barely hold her face together. She reached for the old shape anyway, the pale skin, the long throat, the mouth men wrote poems about. It flickered like a wet candle. A yellow light moved between the reeds. Florence came down the path alone, barefoot, a clay cup in her hands. Bright flowers were braided into her red hair, the same flowers that grew in her drying garden behind the hut. The Leanan Sidhe knew the smell. Yellow wort. The thing that broke fae spells. "Drink," Florence said. She held out the cup. Her voice was flat. "You look thirsty." The Leanan Sidhe laughed, or tried to. "Child, I do not drink from witches." "You will." Florence stepped inside her reach, quick as a bird, and pressed the cup to her mouth. The Leanan Sidhe's arms would not lift to stop her. The child pulled again. She swallowed to keep from choking. It tasted of honey and bitter sun. The glamour tore off her like a wet sheet. She felt her real face for the first time in a hundred lifetimes. Not beautiful. Not ugly. Something older. Her hands, when she looked at them, were long and brown and steady. The ache in her belly was not a wound. It was a heartbeat. Two heartbeats. Hers, and the small one, and a third that was neither. Life ran through her the way water runs through a root. It had always been there. The glamour had been a mask laid over it so she could hunt. She sat down in the grass. She began to cry, which she had not done in a thousand years. "I do not want him," she said. Her voice was her own. "I do not want any of them." Florence lowered the cup. She did not smile. She did not touch her. She only nodded once. Down at the low place, Danu stood by the stone cradle in the green light. She looked up the slope at the Leanan Sidhe and raised one small hand. Come. The Leanan Sidhe stood. Her legs held. She walked past Florence toward her mother, and the child inside her stopped pulling and began, at last, to grow.

The Leanan Sidhe walked past her mother toward the low green light, and heard the hags before she saw them. Three shapes crouched at the edge of the reeds, wet hair, mossy teeth. They had been watching the whole thing. One of them cupped a hand to her mouth and whispered into the air. The whisper lifted like a moth and flew east, where the bad listeners kept their open doors. She stopped. She knew that sound. She had used it herself a hundred times to ruin a rival. Soft has gone into her. Soft, soft. By dawn every hungry thing in the peat would know she had wept, and one of them would come for her belly before she reached the stone cradle. She turned toward the hags. Her old face was gone. Her voice was not. "Say it louder," she said. The middle hag grinned. "Say what, lovely?" "That I am soft." She stepped closer. The child pulled at her ribs and she let it. "Say it so the whole bog hears. I am not soft. I am changed. There is a difference." She threw her head back and shouted it at the low sky. The word came out of her chest like a struck bell. Reeds bent. The hags flinched. Up the slope, three figures came down from the cottage path. Hozier walked in front, small and pale, mud on his boots. Behind him, the raven-shouldered man carried his yew bass across his back. The red-haired woman in the wine coat carried a small brass pipe under her arm, the kind that fit an organ. They had heard her shout. Hozier stopped in front of her. He looked at her belly, then at her face. "Sing it," he said. "Not shout." "I do not sing." "You will tonight." Alex swung the bass around and set his hand on the low string. Isa knelt in the wet grass, wedged the brass pipe into the peat like a stake, and pressed her ear to it. She nodded once at Alex. He plucked. The note went down through the pipe into the ground and came back up under the Leanan Sidhe's feet. Hozier opened his mouth. What came out was not a song she knew. It was earth-love, plain as bread, warm as a hand on a fever. It struck her where the child lived. She did not drain it. It filled her. The dark thing that had ridden her thousand years lifted off the child inside her and burned away in the sound. The peat under her feet grew wet with readiness, and something far off in the muck flinched, a great cold thing that had been counting on her rot. She opened her mouth and sang back. The hags scattered. The whisper died in the air. Her mother, down at the cradle, smiled for the first time.