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“ I didn’t realize you meant tonight ,” Aisling said through gritted teeth.

“I didn’t realize he did, either.” Rodney shot Aisling an apologetic look as he set two takeaway bags on the kitchen table.

Lyre stepped into the trailer just behind him, nose wrinkled at the smell of greasy burgers and fries and the empty pizza box still on the counter from lunch.

Aisling remained on the couch with Briar.

She hadn’t moved since Rodney left to pick up dinner, and Lyre’s arrival certainly wouldn’t make her do so now.

“I’ve looked for you in your home,” Lyre said, “twice. You are a difficult woman to find.”

“Not if you know where to look,” Rodney interjected smugly.

Lyre acknowledged Rodney’s comment with pursed lips and a cocked brow.

He shed his outer cloak, damp from the rain that had been falling on and off all evening.

Beneath, he still wore the Prelates’ all-black attire: plain, rough fabric that must have chafed maddeningly against his skin.

Aisling recalled how soft all of Kael’s clothes were, save for a similar set of ritual robes he’d worn in The Cut when she’d been his captive.

And the set they’d dressed his body in to lie those three days in the cavern, before…

“What do you want, Lyre?” Aisling asked bluntly.

He feigned disappointment. “After all this time, and after all we’ve been through, this is not quite the reception I’d hoped for.”

Aisling curled her fingers into fists in Briar’s fur. How long had it been? Almost a month in the human realm—far, far longer in the Wild. How long must that month have felt to Kael in Elowas?

Begrudgingly, Rodney pulled a chair from the table into to the living room for Lyre.

The Prelate sank down gracefully. Though he was perched on the very edge of the wooden seat, he somehow still appeared to be at ease—just as he always seemed to when he knew that he had the upper hand. Rodney stood by with his arms crossed.

“Why are you here?” she demanded again.

“I am here, my dear Red Woman, to discuss your prophecy.”

Aisling balked. The sudden movement roused Briar and he scrambled off the couch to bare his teeth in Lyre’s direction. She made no attempt to call him off.

“The prophecy was fulfilled,” Rodney argued, and at the same time Aisling said, “I’ve done everything it asked of me.”

“I ended the war,” she continued, then repeated, “I’ve done everything it asked of me.

I’ve…I’ve destroyed the Unseelie Court. I’ve faced darkness unnamed ; I’ve sacrificed for dormant magic.

” She ran through the lines in her head, though it made her dizzy to do so now.

It was over. It was supposed to be over.

“What more could there possibly be?” Rodney sounded almost more desperate than Aisling.

Lyre examined his nails. Picked at a loose thread on his tunic. He was enjoying this: holding court over a captive audience. The newest High Prelate was never one to shy away from theatrics. Rodney looked about ready to throttle him.

“Fae prophecies are funny things, you know. There are so many ways they can be interpreted—and misinterpreted . So many ways one might go about reaching the end state without ever fully understanding their true objective,” Lyre intoned.

“The objective was to destroy the Unseelie Court and end the war,” Aisling pushed back again. She felt like a broken record, but she would repeat it as many times as she needed to until it started sounding more like the truth and less like a wish.

“That was an objective, certainly. But the objective?” Lyre shook his head slowly. “Not so. Tell me again the line that led you to believe the fall of the Unseelie Court, and the rule of the Seelie Fae, would bring an end to your story?”

But Aisling couldn’t—couldn’t say those words out loud. So Rodney jumped in. “ Amidst bloodshed and darkness and winter’s bitter sting, the Red Woman will rise to bring revenant spring. Winter, spring. Unseelie, Seelie. Plain as day.”

Lyre hummed, twisting a ring round and round his finger, a silver band mounted with a large cut of obsidian.

The High Prelate’s ring—Aisling had seen it on Werryn’s hand before.

“And tell me, if your prophecy had truly been fulfilled, then why hasn’t another been Told?

The Fae have ten prophecies—always ten. It has been more than enough time passed since our king and queen gave their lives for another to have been revealed. ”

“Please,” Aisling said urgently. “Please, Lyre. Just tell me what you know.”

“There is one very important piece that we have long misinterpreted.” Lyre was focused now, done toying with them.

He leaned forward, yellow eyes dancing over Aisling.

“You were always meant to kill Kael, because you were always meant to bring him back. Revenant spring —we all thought that represented a return to peace with the Seelie Court in power, but we were wrong.”

Aisling finished the assumption he left unsaid at the end of his thought: “You think it’s Kael.”

Lyre nodded confidently. “I know it’s Kael. You are tied to him in a way none of us predicted.”

“Affined to another.” Rodney breathed the line, sinking onto the couch beside her. The pieces were coming together quicker for him than they were for Aisling.

She shook her head once, then again a bit harder. Her thoughts were swirling, a destructive gale ripping through her head, and she couldn’t settle them enough to concentrate and make sense of what Lyre was saying. “I thought that was referring to my affinity to the White Bear, to Briar.”

“It’s how you gave Kael control over his magic. To quell tempest’s surge, if you will. You pulled away his negative energy, settled his unrest, and you gave him something to replace it with,” the Prelate explained.

With the heels of her hands pressed to her eyes, Aisling recalled the times she’d sat with Kael, willing her calm into him to fill in all those cracks and voids his rage left gaping.

The Diviner had known—she’d seen it. She’d pointed it out right there in that crystalline cavern, and still neither of them had made the connection to those three throwaway words in Aisling’s prophecy.

“How could no one have realized this?” Rodney gave voice to her thoughts.

Lyre chuckled darkly. “In all fairness, nothing about the late Unseelie King evokes anything even remotely spring-like.”

Dropping her hands to grip her thighs, Aisling looked from Lyre to Rodney, and back again. “So it isn’t over.”

“It is far, far from over.” Lyre stood then, bowing at the waist just as he had the first time he’d revealed his knowledge of Aisling’s true identity. When he straightened back up, he said reverently, “The Red Woman was made. Now, she must rise.”

Aisling’s lungs seized; the trailer was small, and getting smaller. Where before she’d sought out noise to dampen her thoughts, now she needed the comfort of quiet. Rodney’s breathing was too loud, and so was the rattling radiator, and the dripping faucet, and the wind outside, and the…and the…

“Ash?” Rodney’s hand was on her shoulder.

Quickly, Aisling stood. She lunged for her coat where she’d draped it over the arm of the couch. “I need to go.”

“Let me drive you.” Rodney began searching for his keys beneath the takeaway bags still sitting untouched on the table. The burgers would be cold and the fries stale by now.

Aisling shook her head again, already moving toward the door. The thought of being trapped in the car for any amount of time made her chest tighten further. “I’ll walk.”

“Come on Ash, it’s freezing,” he insisted.

“I said, I’ll walk,” she snapped. Her tone was biting. She meant it to be.

Rodney looked at her, eyes narrowed. Aisling crossed her arms to shield herself from his studying glare. “I’m going to drop by Ben’s sometime later tonight,” he said low.

A ripple of tension raised her shoulders slightly. “When?”

He shrugged, all false nonchalance. “Maybe in a few hours, maybe less. Who knows.”

“Then why are you telling me?” Aisling challenged. She was only vaguely aware of the amused expression on Lyre’s face as he watched their exchange.

Rodney took a step towards her. “So you can’t avoid me. Because if I find you there, it’s going to be ugly.”

“You can’t—” she started. He cut her off mid-protest.

“Yes, I can. If you can’t be responsible for yourself right now, then I’ll be responsible for you.” He paused, and his glare lifted a fraction when he added, “You’re my best friend, Ash.”

“Watch Briar.” A kinder response than that waited on her tongue, but she tamped it down and hurried out of the trailer. If she’d given it—and given in—she almost certainly would have broken down. Kindness wasn’t something Aisling could handle right now.

When she reached the road outside the trailer park, Aisling abruptly turned in the direction of the forest. It was so much more ominous now, filled with a rasping murmur that sounded closer to whispers than wind moving through the trees.

She ignored the way the sound seemed to slither towards her out of the shadows and kept up a brisk pace.

Even in the dark, even with the mask of gray slush camouflaging the trailhead, she knew the way.

Each random flash of lightning illuminated a landmark that told her as much.

She needed to speak with someone that wasn’t Rodney or Lyre or Raif. Someone who didn’t care about her or about Kael. She needed an impartial perspective, regardless of how much it might hurt to hear.

It was freezing, and the light rain was quickly turning into sleet. But despite the cold, everything in Aisling was burning. Her mind, her marrow, every single harsh breath that sliced in and out noisily between her clenched teeth: all aflame with the fury she’d been trying so hard to keep at bay.

Once again—or rather, still—Aisling was trapped on a path not of her own choosing and unable to do anything but continue forging on ahead.

The direction was determined for her: she could no more turn and go back than she could find a way off of it.

Even in those moments when she had tried—when she’d been so sure that she was taking back control, blazing a new way forward—every branching trail she explored led her back to the same destination she’d always been headed towards.

One way or another, in any permutation of choices she could have made, Aisling would have killed Kael. She would have become the Red Woman.

Aisling shoved roughly through the underbrush, tearing and thrashing at the bracken. The raspy, whispers sound grew sharper, more insistent as she went. She might have stopped to listen if she hadn’t been so single-mindedly bent on reaching her destination.

After everything, it wasn’t Kael’s unspoken feelings for her that lingered—the way it had filled her heart and warmed the blood in her veins when he brushed his lips across her own—but anger and an insidious, aching hurt.

A part of her hated him. It was the same part of her that hated Rodney for his betrayal, and had once hated her mother for choosing the Fae over her own family.

The same part that hated herself for being the one left alive after failing to protect those she loved.

All that hatred expanded in her ribcage until she scarcely had room to breathe around it; this time, she was unable to force her anger back down into submission.

Finally, finally, she tumbled out into the clearing. Eyes wild, searching.

But the glade felt the same as the rest of the forest, and the thicket was just a thicket.

It didn’t breathe, didn’t beckon. The Shadowwood Mother was gone.

There was no magic here. Still, Aisling dropped to her hands and knees and crawled through the tangle of twisted, grasping vines, uncaring of the thorns that caught in her hair and tore at her clothes.

Where the brambles opened up, where the Shadowwood Mother had once crouched amongst books and scattered pages, there was nothing.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Tears welled there, burned there, but refused to fall.

A whole ocean of them, waiting, but as much as she tried to break down that wretched dam, they wouldn’t come.

So unable to cry, Aisling dug her fingers into the mud, chest heaving, and let out a vicious scream.

It was so loud it hurt her ears and scorched her throat, but the sound just kept coming and coming out of her.

Pouring into the lifeless thicket and spilling into the glade and spreading further, into the tree line beyond.

The release was as blissful as it was agonizing.

The thunder rumbled louder and louder as Aisling screamed, the lightning striking at a frantic pace. But the sky could have been falling around her and she wouldn’t have paid it any mind. She might have welcomed its collapse if she could have gone with it.

And then: silence. The absolute stillness that followed the last roar of thunder and the final flash of lightning was stifling—almost unbearably so.

There was no breeze to rustle the stubborn clumps of ice and snow from sodden branches, no sound to break the quiet.

Aisling could hear only her own thudding heartbeat, her own labored breaths.

Her noisy, graceless footfall as she clambered out of the thicket and made to trudge back across the clearing on leaden feet.

Just as the storm overhead, the one that had been raging inside her had ebbed, that fire in her chest eddying away into smoldering embers.

More than anything, now, Aisling was tired.

It was a strange sort of calm that she felt fall over Brook Isle, as if the island was simultaneously sighing a breath of relief while bracing in anticipation for one more flash to light up the sky, or one more roll of thunder to shake the earth.

Neither came, and yet the quiet tension remained.

Idly, Aisling wondered whether she was imbuing that tension into the atmosphere herself.

It felt similar—too similar—to how it had felt in The Cut, just before the Silver Saints appeared in a blinding blast of energy.

She’d worked so hard to avoid that night, but she hadn’t the energy to battle the memory anymore.

As she walked, she let the hurt wash over her, fresh as it felt when she’d been left standing in the center of the ritual circle.

Kael, on his knees and gazing up at her. Kael, her hand beneath his, guiding the blade across his neck. The confession stuck in her chest that she’d been unable to give voice to: I love you. I’m yours. I love you.

When she whispered those words over his body, finally, she’d been the only one able to hear them.