Ghost Grid

City of Cuimhne, Tir na nOg

The door hit the wall.

Elowynn didn't stop to close it behind her. She shed her basket in the entryway and shoved the long fall of ebon hair from her face with both hands, and Ciarán — who had lived long enough that almost nothing startled him anymore — came to his feet immediately.

On the floor between them, their daughter looked up from the game she'd been playing with a collection of river stones, arranging and rearranging them in patterns only she understood. She was three years old and already the stones moved sometimes without her touching them.

Réiltín. His little star.

She looked between her parents with her jewel-dark, solemn eyes and said nothing.

"Beloved." He crossed to Elowynn and took her face in his hands, tilting it up toward him. Her cheeks were cold from running. Her eyes held something he had not seen in them in a very long time — not worry, not caution, but the specific and terrible clarity of a person who has already calculated the odds and found them wanting. "Tell me."

"They know about her." Her voice was steady. She had always been steadier than him when it mattered. "We need to go. Now."

The word now landed in his chest like a stone in still water.

He should have been too old for panic. For all his endless years he had mastered most of the things that unmade younger Fae — grief, loss, the long grinding weight of centuries. But he had not known, until three years ago, what it meant to have a piece of himself exist outside of his own body. To have made something. To be responsible for the continuation of something irreplaceable.

He had not known how that changed the landscape of fear.

"How do you know?" He was already moving, already thinking about what could be carried and what would have to be left. "Were you able to get word to the Huntsman?"

"I sent word. He won't get here in time." She caught his arm, stilling him. "Ciarán. Listen to me. Even if we run — I don't know how far we'd get. When the Mark of Danu manifested, every elder Fae in Tir na nOg felt it. The oldest of them will be able to track it. Track her."

The Mark. Three years old, barely able to speak in full sentences, and Danu had already reached down and touched their daughter and lit her up like a beacon in the dark.

He suppressed the spark of resentment that thought brought.

He looked at Réiltín. She had stopped playing with the stones. She was watching him with his own eyes — too much understanding in them for her age, as if some part of her already knew the shape of this moment even if she couldn't name it.

He looked back at Elowynn and saw the tears she was holding back by will alone, her hands fisted in the front of his tunic.

"The Old Paths." He said it before she could. "I can get us to a threshold. If we make it into the Paths they won't be able to follow — not easily, and not me." He had walked those paths since before Creation learned its own name. Let them try. "If we can reach the Hollow Hill, the Aes Sídhe will shelter us. Whatever else they are, they won't answer to any Fae Court or House."

Elowynn searched his face. Something moved behind her eyes — a question she didn't ask, or an answer she'd already found and didn't want to give him.

She nodded. She picked up their daughter, who went to her without a sound and pressed her small face against her mother's neck.

Ciarán shouldered open the back door and led his family into the dark.

He would come to regret that certainty later — the easy confidence of a man who had never lost a race he chose to run. He would replay this moment ten thousand times in the seventeen years that followed: the weight of Elowynn's hand in his, the sound of Réiltín's breathing, the cold night air of Cuimhne, the last ordinary moment before the assassins came.

Before the screaming started.

Before his world ended and something else, something harder and colder and infinite in its patience, rose up to fill the space she left.