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PROLOGUE

Beginnings are born from the womb of an ending. They will scream as fate pulls their strings taut, dragging them into the light from the den of their ashes for the first time. And once they huff their first breath, lungs rattling, their ending has already been woven into the fabric of the loom. This is the collective, inescapable fate of all: one day, all will end. And only then can something new begin.

The Lady, a gory specter, rose from the cobbles of Castle Neimedh’s central tower. She moved strangely, joints popping and snapping as she propped herself up on needle-thin bones. The storm above trickled from the gaps in the steepled ceiling, washing over the Lady’s body and remaking her.

The high king of the mortals and the North stood by his son. Nemed’s dagger was still slick with red, dripping onto the stone.

Both father and son watched with terror and awe: the Lady’s torn, sinewy flesh, her eye sockets exposed and empty, her heart fluttering from an exposed chamber like a bleeding bird.

“Do not be afraid,” Nemed whispered to Starn, his tongue clicking where his mouth had run dry.

Starn looked up at his father like he was a child once more, nodding his head. His hand gripped the haft of his blade more tightly—a sword bewitched by the aberration rising before both him and his father now.

Starn was breathless, wondering how his sickly, feeble wisp of a sister was capable of this . Of breaking the Lady, this wretched bane, with the strength of undeserved power.

Starn’s knuckles burned white, digging his nails into the leather of the hilt. His anger fed off the feast of his horror, growing more swollen, larger, hungrier inside him.

“Are you certain of this?” Starn asked his father.

“Fjallnorr is red with the blood and ichor of my men and yet, despite the cost of our ambitions, I hold neither Aisling, the curse breaker she hoards inside, nor victory over the Aos Sí. My hands are empty and left wanting,” Nemed said. “And so, we’re left with little option. The Lady is going to help us.”

Reflexively, Starn’s eyes shot to his enchanted blade. Thanks to the Lady, Starn could wield the sword with nothing more than the will of his mind. A token the wretch had gifted Clann Neimedh to better defeat Aisling. Still, he’d failed.

“The Lady cannot be trusted,” Starn said.

“No,” Nemed agreed. “But there is poetry to reclaiming what is rightfully ours—magic, strength, immortality—with the hand of those who stole it.”

“It was Ina who forsook us,” Starn said.

“Aye,” Nemed said. “Yet, they are all the same. Their blood is magic and ours is not. It is us against them, and if victory requires devilry—a siding with the enemy—then so be it.”

Nemed sucked in a breath, his expression more severe at the cost of both age and exhaustion. His father’s reign was a dwindling fire Starn would soon restoke once the last ember dimmed. He, the crown prince of the mortals and the North, could almost feel the blood dripping down his forehead in anticipation of his father’s crown being laid atop his brow. He would be king, almost. A reign he intended to punctuate with the conquest of magic, of monsters, of nightmares he’d bury into history. Almost.

“She’s almost reborn,” Nemed said, ripping Starn from his reverie.

Starn’s attention turned to the Lady, snapping her neck into position. No longer was her body broken. Before them both, she stood statuesque and queenly. Her chin tipped up, her shoulders back, the obsidian of her flesh glowing softly beneath the moonlight that shot like arrows from the holes in the roof.

At her feet, lay the bloody corpse of a mortal knight, awkwardly bent at unnatural angles.

Starn resisted the sudden urge to bow. He ignored the weight of her magic or its rotten smell, leveling his glare with hers.

“I will forgive this once and once alone,” the Lady said, her voice like nails scratching till they bled. “To summon me with the blood of mortal man is sacrilege.”

“I’d forgotten the dark spells whispering between the pages of the Forbidden Lore. It is those very practices that both brought you here and remade you,” Nemed argued, not a trace of fear in either his words or posture.

“Those spells do not belong to your kind,” the Lady quipped, considering the mortal knight dead at her feet with disgust. “To let such spells crawl off your human tongue is a perversity.”

“That’s true regarding most magic,” Nemed conceded. “But there are those practices even my kind can wield.”

“The Sidhe call such practices scull draiocht , or shadow magic. It takes not from the breath but from within oneself. Power given to those desperate enough to forsake their souls in exchange,” the Lady said, as countless spiders skittered up her gown and settled in the hollows of her eye sockets. Starn shuddered.

“There is no soul left in me to forsake,” Nemed said. He spoke matter-of-factly, his voice void of emotion. He was warlike, carved by the scarred hands of every high king before him. And one day soon, Starn would be etched similarly.

“There is a soul left in you yet,” the Lady said. “For it is the soul that wants.”

“You understand why I’ve summoned you then,” Nemed said.

“So long as the Forge bubbles, you will want. So long as magic exists ungovernable by humankind, you will want.”

“End my wanting, Lady,” Nemed said. “For your want and mine are the same.”

The Lady pursed her lips. She stood still for a long while—her empty, spidery glare uncanny.

“I have already shared with you that which I am forbidden to share,” the Lady said, her attention shifting to Starn’s enchanted blade sitting on his hip.

“You, too, have committed sacrilege then,” Nemed said. “Our hands are sullied equally. We’ve both measured the tails of fate and have found one to be both worse than sacrilege and worse than death.” Nemed’s eyes drifted to his knight lying face down on the cobbles in a pool of his own blood. “If Aisling and her barbarian lord are ungoverned and unbridled, we are both denied our want: order, the will of fate, and the continuation of all that currently is and will be.”

The Lady seemed to hold her breath, mulling over the high king’s words with the patience of eternity.

At last, she spoke.

“Do you wish to destroy or to rule the Forge and all its creation?” she asked, her voice bouncing off the walls of the tower.

The corners of Nemed’s lips curled and he exchanged glances with his son.

“There is no satisfaction in conquering the dead. I wish for mankind to rule,” Nemed said. “But if—to stop my daughter’s will and that of the Forge—I must destroy…then so be it.”

The Lady tilted her head back further, the spiders in her eyes squirming amongst one another.

She sucked in a ragged breath as if her lungs were still not fully remade.

“What do you know of the gateway?”

Nemed and Starn shifted.

The Lady studied him until he spoke.

“The Forbidden Lore claims it’s the entrance to the Otherworld—locked to mankind,” Starn said, his words falling off his tongue before he could think better of it.

“The Otherworld has many doors through which to slip in and out of the spirit realm. But the first created is the most powerful. Conquer it, destroy it, hide it, and all other doors will follow in kind,” the Lady said.

Nemed swallowed hard, forcing Starn to wonder if his heart was thudding as violently as his own.

“Where is this gateway?” Nemed asked, his voice suddenly thick and wet.

The Lady smiled.

“It moves,” she said. “Hunt it, find it, and Aisling will be stopped. Our wants will be fulfilled.”

“But how?” Starn asked. “Aisling destroyed nearly every northern fleet at Lofgren’s Rise. We are dwindling and crippled.”

“Aisling is weak after expending so much fury. It’s why hers and Lir’s bond hasn’t scorched the earth yet,” Nemed said. “She is useless in battle and more pitiful with a blade. But once her magic returns to her?—”

“ Wystria ,” the Lady called. In the palm of her hand, a sparkling ball of flame bloomed. It spun slowly and glowed brightly, gilding all that felt its warm gaze. Neither Nemed nor Starn blinked, transfixed by her magic. “ Wildfire ,” she translated.

The Lady lifted her palm to her lips and blew on the flame. Softly, it floated to the high king and his son but stopped a pace short. It bobbed for a moment, crackling as it burned. And then, it cleaved itself in two, one half drifting to Nemed and one to Starn.

“Eat and be filled and spit flame,” the Lady said, but it rang throughout the tower like a curse.

Starn’s stomach flipped, but he mirrored his father regardless. After Nemed, he took the flame in his hand, brought it to his mouth, and swallowed it whole.

The Lady watched, her fingers moving as if working thread on an invisible loom.

“ Hear me Forge, hear me fate,

let man and magic meet at the gate.

A curse will be a boon,

A king to knight is hewn,

And a memory returned beneath a storm moon.

Let this prayer cleave like a sword.

Let mankind spare the world .”

Her words bounced off the walls of forever, sinking into the mind of the Forge and all its creation. Magic crackled like a flame, stinging the inside of Nemed’s and Starn’s nostrils.

Scull draiocht . The heat of its enchantment scalded his tongue, his throat, and his stomach where it sat to burn, hollowing the high king and his crown prince.