Adaira clenched her teeth as she felt herself slipping. The wind was about to pick her up and hurl her away. Desperately, she dug her fingers into the loam.
Help me! she wanted to cry to the earth. To the grass and the heather and the hills. Help me find him.
She held fast to a rock, unable to stand or move forward. Clinging to it, suspended in time, she worried that she would never reach Jack. That she would die alone. A prisoner to the wind.
But then she opened her eyes, saw the deer trail in the bracken, and realized that this place looked familiar. Adaira began to follow the winding path, which led her to a hill. Her breath caught when she recognized it.
This was the burrow Innes had once shown her. A place to shelter her when she was in need.
Adaira stumbled forward and found the rock in the hillside. The lintel came to life, and the door appeared, hidden beneath tussocks of grass. Adaira opened it, eager to escape the storm.
She slipped inside. Even here there was no fire, and no sparking one with an enchanted blade. She left the door open so she could have a small vestige of light.
She sat on the floor, ears and cheeks burning from the gusts. She drew her knees to her chest, trying to ease her tremors.
Eventually, she closed her eyes, at an utter loss as to what to do.
Adaira didn’t know how long she sat there, frozen and forlorn, when she felt a shadow drape over her. Someone was standing just beneath the burrow’s lintel. With her eyes still closed and her heart becoming wild and frantic, she reached for the dirk at her belt, preparing to open her eyes and strike, when she felt a hand grip her forearm. A hand with long, sharp-nailed fingers.
Adaira startled and glanced up. It was Kae. The spirit’s eyes were wide with concern, but her face expressed determination, and it suddenly occurred to Adaira that Kae could stand against the storm. Her remaining wings were like a shield, dividing the wind with a hiss.
She hauled Adaira to her feet. Together, they moved through the desolate valley, pressing east. They felt trapped in a dreamscape, Adaira taking shelter beneath Kae’s wings. Then Adaira saw something luminous and mesmerizing in the distance. At first, she had no idea what it was, but then she stopped upright, tucked close to Kae’s side.
“Kae,” Adaira breathed, stricken.
Kae shuddered in response.
The Aithwood was burning.
Jack knew Bane was using the fire against its will. He knew Ash was held captive and beholden somewhere within its wild burning.
Jack opened the front door.
He walked through the kail yard, past his father’s gate. He didn’t want this place to burn. And yet the fire was coming, creeping closer, destroying tree after tree and the spirits that dwelled within them.
Jack stared into the flames. He thought he saw Ash, etched in blue and gold, crawling along the forest floor, weeping.
He began to play his harp and sing for the fire, taking the notes Iagan had once sung and undoing them, but soon the heat from the blaze was too much for him. As Jack walked toward the river, he continued to sing and play, the wildfire following as if it were still under Bane’s control, but it spared Niall’s cottage and yard.
The river’s rapids ran cold and clear. Jack stood in them and began to sing to the spirits of the water—the lochs, the streams, the rivers, the sea. Again he unraveled Iagan’s ballad and sang instead for the good of the folk, remembering how it once had been in the days long ago. As his voice and notes rose and fell, a contrast to the malevolence of Iagan’s music, he looked down and saw the bloodthirsty river spirit lurking in the currents. She had blue-tinted skin, milky eyes, and a grimace made of needle-like teeth, and she was listening, entranced by his music. And yet the fire was still burning. It crossed the riverbed, and Jack could feel the temperature of the water gradually increasing.
“Keep going,” the river spirit hissed at him, just before he was forced by the boiling water to step onto the opposite bank.
Keep going, even though he was entirely uncertain if his music was accomplishing anything. Bane’s hierarchy seemed unchanged, remaining intact as a web, but Jack persisted, weaving through the trees, heading to the clan line, still singing and playing. He walked along the edge of the territory and beheld both east and west as he sang for the spirits of the earth, the trees and the hills, the heather and the rocks, the wildflowers and the weeds, the mountains and the vales.
Jack began to feel it then—the power gathering beneath his feet. The streams of gold, the rivulets of magic. His music was drawing it up and into his blood like a tree draws water from its roots. Suddenly he felt as if he could sing for a hundred days, a hundred years. His voice was deep and strong, cutting through the storm, and the notes fell like sparks from his nails as he plucked the strings faster and faster.