Read Chapter 24: The Rescuer's Riddle

The stone corridors of the Unseelie dungeons smelled of salt and old blood. Maeve pressed herself against the damp wall, the healer’s charm warm against her chest beneath her shirt—a tiny twist of rowan and iron that hummed faintly, pointing her forward like a lodestone. The grown man in the cell was not the child she had come to save. But he was *something*, and the charm had pulled her here for a reason.

She reached the final door. Rust-eaten bars, a lock crusted with age. Beyond them, the man sat motionless on a shelf of rock, his hair long and grey-streaked, his face lined like a riverbed dried by centuries. He did not look up.

“Who are you?” Maeve whispered.

The man’s head lifted slowly. His eyes—green, the exact green of her father’s—found her through the gloom. Recognition flickered there, raw and ancient, and his mouth opened as if to speak a name he had not used in decades.

Then the alarm rang.

Iron bells split the air, a sound that drove needles into Maeve’s skull. The guard appeared at the far end of the corridor—not a man, but a thing of slick black skin and too many joints, moving with the terrible grace of a spider. Its voice scraped the walls.

“The queen wants the little mortal who smells of stolen magic.”

Maeve spun. The whistle halves hung on a cord around her neck, cold and heavy. The charm blazed hot against her ribs. She had no weapon, no Ciarán, no father. Just herself and a locked door and a prisoner who stared at her like she was a ghost.

The guard lunged.

She ducked, rolled, came up against the bars. The guard’s clawed hand closed around her ankle and wrenched her backward. She screamed, kicked, felt its grip tighten until bone ground against bone. It dragged her across the stone, her fingers scrabbling for purchase, for anything—

The whistle halves clinked together against her chest.

The pulse she had felt before, the one Ciarán could not sense, exploded outward like a struck bell. The guard recoiled, hissing. The prisoner surged to his feet, hands wrapped around the bars, and his voice—raw, cracked, but unmistakably familiar—shouted her name.

“*Maeve!*”

She went still.

The guard’s grip loosened. The man’s face—her father’s face, younger by a lifetime but shaped by the same blood—pressed against the rusted iron. Tears cut tracks through the grime on his cheeks.

“You’re supposed to be gone,” she breathed. “You died. Mam said you died before I was born.”

“I was taken,” he said. “Before you were born. They took me, not your mother—I was the first. Your mam came looking for me and they took her too.” His voice broke. “She traded herself for my life. And they kept me anyway.”

The guard recovered. It lunged again, and Maeve did not think. She ripped the whistle from her neck, jammed both halves together, and blew.

No sound came out. But the charm against her chest shattered with a crack like lightning, and the lock on the cell door fell away as if struck by a key forged in a different world.

The door swung open.

Her brother—Art, a name surfacing from some deep well of grandmother’s stories—stumbled out. He was taller than her, gaunt, older-looking than her father. He grabbed her arm with a strength that belied his wasted frame.

“The way home,” he said. “You know it?”

“I know it,” she lied.

They ran.

The corridor twisted. The guard’s shriek chased them, joined by others—more voices, more things, closing in from every direction. Maeve’s lungs burned. Art pulled her through a side passage she had not seen before, one that opened onto a narrow stair descending into absolute dark.

“No,” she gasped. “The exit’s up.”

“There is no exit up,” Art said. “I’ve been here long enough to know. Down is the only way out—the sea caves feed the bay. But the passage exacts a price.”

They reached the bottom. Water lapped at their ankles. A black tunnel stretched ahead, and she could see a pinprick of grey light at its far end. Freedom.

Behind them, the guards’ shrieks grew louder.

“What price?” Maeve demanded.

Art’s green eyes met hers. In the dark, he looked young again—the brother she had never known, the son her father had mourned without understanding why.

“It takes a memory,” he said. “The most precious one you carry. To find your way back, you must surrender it.”

Maeve thought of her father’s hands in the dirt of the churchyard, planting rowan. Of Ciarán’s smile when he thought she was not looking. Of her grandmother’s voice, singing songs with words no one alive remembered.

She thought of the way home.

“Take it,” she said. “Take all of it. Just get me out.”

Art’s hand closed around hers. The tunnel swallowed them. The grey light swelled—

And when it broke over her, she was kneeling on wet sand, salt spray in her face, the sea before her and Inishbofin behind her. Art knelt beside her, shaking.

“Maeve,” he said. “Do you know where we are?”

She opened her mouth.

Nothing came. The map in her head was blank water. The way back to the churchyard, to the pub, to her father—gone, wiped clean as if it had never existed.

She knew her name. She knew his. She knew the weight of the whistle against her chest.

But she did not know the way home.