🔞Worth Hiding: An Enemies-to-Lovers Celtic Romantasy

"War doesn't make monsters. It only peels back the skin and grows teeth. I didn't know that yet. I only learned it the night Finlay Mackenzie came to me, blood on his hands, begging for absolution I couldn't give. However, that memory lived somewhere ahead of me like a cliff in fog.”

For now, it began in the stone belly of Clíodhna's Keep, its air damp as a grave, cauldrons scorching, and Master O'Driscoll's cheer bouncing off the walls.”

The old stone had a way of pressing secrets out of people, steam, sweat, and the sort of silence that grew teeth.

The Keep smelled of burnt nettles and scorched vellum, probably Ewan O'Connell's fault again. Broad-shouldered, ginger-haired, freckles scattered like constellations, Ewan never could keep his temper or his hands in check.

Orla Lynch wrinkled her nose as the smell hit, brown curls wild as bramble and green eyes already sweeping the room. The damp clung like sea-mist pressing in from the Atlantic, making her hair frizz and her patience thin. She half-listened until Master O'Driscoll clapped his broad hands together, the echo rattling shelves of copper kettles and jars of herbs. Round-bellied, jovial, with a reed flute shoved untidily in his belt, O'Driscoll's eyes missed nothing, even when he pretended to be all warmth.

Warmth was a tactic. Orla had learned to spot those. So was ridicule, so was silence. Today, the tactic would be "pair work."

"Don't get too cozy! Partners this quarter. Balance, my dears, balance is what we missed last time. Orla Lynch with Finlay Mackenzie. Opposites ignite innovation, and quash old feuds, eh?"

Or get them buttered in the bathroom, Orla thought cynically, lips twitching before she smoothed them. Over Fifteen years of benches and bad blood sits between me and Finlay Mackenzie, and I knew every inch of it. So did he.

She had already reached for her dried lavender before the pairing was finished being announced. Her hand moved without fumbling, without searching, and she caught herself and slowed, making a show of checking the label. Too ready. She smoothed her expression before anyone could catch it.

Finlay did not move. He'd been taught his whole life not to speak to rebel sympathizers, certainly not to her.

His uncle's orders were plain enough: the Tuath Dé were to rot in the ground. If the lists were to be believed, Orla Lynch sat near the top, an error to be corrected, not a lass to share a table with.

A memory rose unbidden: his uncle's study, the fire low, Finlay fourteen and full of questions he should have kept swallowed. Whether half-humans could truly exist. Whether the old breaches between the worlds had ever been sealed clean.

His uncle had gone very still at that. “Half of nothing,” Balor had said at last, in the voice he used for settled matters. “A body wearing borrowed magic. But hear me, boy, and hear me well , the Veil isn't a wall. It's a seam. And every year humans cut more of the green world down, lay more stone, breed more fire, and the seam strains. It moves. It frays where they crowd it. That's the true rot. Not some rumors of something we killed out years ago.”

Finlay had nodded along, the way he always nodded. But he'd never forgotten the shape of it: the Veil shifting where humans pressed against it, his own kind squeezed against the seam like marrow in a bone, over half their land in Scotland absorbed by the other side of the veil, history and land lost.

He thought of it now, looking at Orla Lynch's wild curls, and hated her more for it.

A groan rippled through the apprentices. Ewan looked ready to hex the nearest Fomóire. Old feuds didn't quash; they festered.

The Fomóire called her a Falskin when the Masters weren't within earshot, and the Tuath Dé returned the favor with words that did not cut as deep. But there was something new in it this term.

His lot were sharper than usual today, and it took Finlay a beat too long to notice that every jab seemed aimed to land where he could hear it.

The whispers always swelled when Fomóire and Tuath Dé mixed benches: clan debts, broken oaths, the last winter's border raids.

None of it belonged in the academy, and yet here it sat between the cauldrons like a third partner.

Orla was the only rumored half-human here. That made her the funnel for every drop of that old hatred, the single face the Fomóire could put to every grievance. Falskin, they called her, when they wanted her blood called cheap. Gan anam, no soul, when they wanted to be crueler.

Finlay Mackenzie, storm-grey eyes and aristocratic bearing, smirked like he'd orchestrated the pairing himself.

The heir meant to help rid humans from their world, but she was the only one of her supposed kind for all that anger to fall upon. His pale fingers tugged at the cuff of his coat, his Highland burr smooth and mocking.

"What luck. Babysitting duty."

Sixteen years. He'd known her sixteen years, since she was a flinching first-term with a stolen accent and a tart answer for everything, and he'd spent every one of those years noticing her exactly as much as he pretended not to.

Orla sat beside him, chin up, every inch the woman who'd out-argued him since they were both ten and didn't need to say so. “Trust me, Mackenzie, the only one in need of supervision here is you.”

Finlay sat, and the act itself felt like defiance against his own blood. He should hex her silent and be done with it, family order said so, clan law said so, his uncle's voice said so. Instead, he opened his mouth and spoke, as if conversation could replace a curse. He hated that he didn't understand why.

"Mm. Bold words for someone about to ruin my impeccable reputation." His tone was lazy, but his eyes, sharp as steel, flicked to hers with unsettling precision.

"You mean the reputation of blowing up kettles and crying to your clan-director when it goes wrong?" she shot back.

"Clan-director," he echoed, the corner of his mouth tilting. "That's what you call a Master?" His eyes flicked to O'Driscoll in distaste. "We prefer 'man who knows what he's doing.'"

"If Malachy knew what he was doing," Orla said sweetly, "he'd have taught you to read a recipe."

A flicker of amusement tugged at his mouth before he caught himself.

Damn it, she was quicker than he liked.

Finlay could have asked to be reassigned, like he did ten years ago. He did not. The last time he'd asked not to be her partner for the day, Master Malachy Rowan had asked, mild as milk, "Afraid of the girl, Mackenzie?" The memory still burned, and Malachy had switched him to Riona. Now Finlay was shackled to the cleverest, most unendurable Tuath Dé alive, with no out in sight.

They set to grinding herbs and rune-crystals. Finlay moved with exaggerated laziness, one elbow propped on the desk as if lifting a pestle were beneath him. Orla, by contrast, measured and sliced with the elegance of ritual, her every movement precise.

"You move like a haunted lass," Finlay muttered.

"That's because I actually read the instructions," she replied without looking up.

"Well, isn't that thrilling?" He leaned in, breath stirring a curl at her temple.

Then it hit, her scent. Heather moorlands and honey. Scotland itself. His gut lurched. It wasn't perfume, not some trick. It was her. The enemy, stinking of everything he loved most. It felt wrong, a mockery, as if she had stolen the very air of his childhood and wrapped it around herself while she sat there looking more displeased than him.

His mouth twisted, but he buried the grimace beneath a lazy smirk. "Tell me, Lynch, do you practice that scowl in the mirror, or is it all natural talent?" he drawled, words slick enough to mask the disgust curdling in his chest.

"Funny," she murmured. "I was just about to ask if you practice that smirk, or if it comes free with the overinflated ego."

"Comes free with the tart tongue, does it?"

"No, that you earn." She mused.

Their draught simmered to a perfect teal, steam curling upward like sea-smoke. Finlay blinked. His attempt last week had been sludge, and years before, burnt vomit. He hadn't cared then. But now? Gleaming teal, flawless. He was impressed.

"You're good at this," he admitted, grudging but real.

Her quill paused mid-letter. Startled, then composed. "Brilliance doesn't vanish just because you don't like the source."

"Brilliance," Finlay smirked, softer this time. "Careful, Lynch. Dangerous word to throw at a Scot, might start to think you fancy me."

Without her usual friends flanking her, the banter felt different. Easier. And more dangerous.

"If I fancied you," she said, "the gods would strike me down for poor taste."

"They've worse sins on the ledger," he said. "You could do penance."

"Penance," she scoffed, as if the idea that she had done wrong was absurd. "By supervising your measurements, I'm charitable, if not saintly."

"Saints aren't often burned at the stake," he shot back, and instead of getting angry, Orla rolled her eyes.

He'd meant it to land like a blade. It felt like a warning tap. Why was he tempering the strike? Mercy wasn't in the lessons he'd been given.

"You're insufferable."

"And yet," he leaned closer, voice low, "you haven't hexed me yet."

"Class isn't finished."

He huffed a laugh, the sound quick and unwilling. Something moved in his chest, uncomfortable and unnamed. He shoved it down.

But the truth for Orla was: hexing him would have been easy. Ignoring him took skill. And that was the danger of Finlay Mackenzie, he made skill feel like surrender.

She glanced sideways at his hands, the way his cuff had pulled back, the tendons in his wrist shifting as he gripped the pestle. Too careful for someone pretending laziness. She filed that away and hated that she'd noticed, how much he had filled out.

The cauldron hissed, content, and for the first time in his life, Finlay Mackenzie thought Brewcraft might actually be worth showing up to.

Across the aisle, a pair of Fomóire muttered "Falskin," clan slang that would have earned them expulsion if O'Driscoll had sharper ears. Orla didn't look over. She simply nudged the flame a hair lower, as if control could be claimed in increments.

Her shoulder tightened. Just that. One small hardening, the kind anyone else would miss.

Finlay noticed. He heard the word and expected, what? Satisfaction? That was the proper feeling. His uncle's voice said it was justice. But her shoulder tightened and his gut twisted, not with pleasure but with something that felt irritatingly like distraction.

He told himself it annoyed him because the reaction would ruin the brew. That was all. That was enough.

He didn't ask what it cost her. He didn't offer comfort. He said nothing, and the silence tasted wrong.

"You're staring," she said, not looking up.

"Cataloguing," he said. "Making a list of your faults."

"You'll need a second parchment for your own," she said. "Start with 'talks while others are counting, since they cannot.'"

"I can count," he said, affronted.

"Then you won't mind proving it: eight clockwise, six counter. Slow," she added, because he wouldn't.

He obeyed. It annoyed him that he obeyed. It annoyed him more that the color seemed to respond as if it had been waiting for his hands to listen to her voice.

"Truth is, you'd be decent at this if you had half the control you pretend to have," she whispered.

An unbidden memory flashed, first term, first failure, a cauldron hairline-cracked from too much heat. He'd laughed then, let the mess confirm what he liked to believe about Brewcraft. Useless when magic was in your blood.

Across the room, a younger Orla had made her brew without an issue. He'd called her a Falskin cheat. She'd smiled without showing teeth and said, "Did a Gan anam best you?" and when he didn't respond, she sneered. "Truth hurts, doesn't it, Mackenzie?" The words had followed him for weeks like a buzzing gnat. He'd sworn never to give her the satisfaction of being right again.

And maybe that was part of the problem with Orla, she never denied that accusation, she let them roll off, and so it became a thing that grew into a school yard plague.

"So," he said now, viciously mild, "truth-teller. What's the truth about me?"

She blew on her quill to dry the ink. "That you hate to try when there's a chance you could fail. That you use laziness like armor. That you expect your name to do the work for you."

He felt that like a hex to the chest. "And your truth?"

"That I expect no one to carry me," she said, steadily. "And that I don't forgive easily."

"Who asked you to forgive?"

"You will," she said before she could stop herself. The words hung between them, shocking as a spark. She looked back at the cauldron at once, cheeks cooling to stone. "Stir."

He stirred. The teal deepened silk-smooth, obedient.

From the front, O'Driscoll trilled a bar on his reed flute, then pretended he hadn't. "Lovely color there, pair twelve," he sang out. "Don't lose it by gossiping."

"We weren't gossiping," Finlay snapped.

"We should be establishing boundaries," Orla muttered under her breath.

"Ah! If you say so," O'Driscoll said cheerfully, and moved along like a waddling blessing.

Finlay's mouth curved despite himself. "You need boundaries?"

"Everyone knows you have wandering hands," she returned. "Keep them on the pestle."

"What if I don't?"

"Then I'll hex your fingertips together and tell O'Driscoll it's a rare case of Brewers' Bind."

"That's not a condition," he said.

"It will be when I'm finished," she said, and this time his laugh wasn't unwilling at all, just brief, and almost painful.

“My hands don’t wander to sympathizers, nor those with inferior linage,” he sneered to get back the ground he lost.

“I do hope that is true,” she laughed, and his smiled tugged again, unbidden.

Silence pooled for a moment, not hostile, merely alert. He opened his mouth and closed it again, because his uncle would have called that insolence and demanded blood for it, and because something in him didn't want to hear her apologies for speaking plain.

Across the room, Ardan's bench sputtered; someone swore; O'Driscoll's reed trilled again, a scolding bird. Their draught, by contrast, held its line like a well-trained horse.

"You'll get yourself in trouble working this well with me," Orla said finally. "Your friends will report you for treason. Teague had a big mouth."

"My friends know the cost of passing," he said arrogantly. "And they know what I've paid."

"We won't always be paired," she said, almost to reassure him.

"No," he said. "We won't." He told himself relief should come. It didn't.

Relief belonged to men who obeyed. Hate was supposed to make action easy, clean, final. He felt only the sick weight of inaction and the worse knowledge that he wanted to understand her before he destroyed her.

Across the aisle, a Fomóire muttered something unkind again when they noticed Orla and Finlay's name on the board as a successful brew. Orla did not wince this time. She marked the potion with a neat tick, as if to say: another one mastered.

"You can tell your clan-director," she said softly, "that I didn't poison you."

"He'd call that wasted opportunity," Finlay said, just as soft.

"Then we finally agree on something," she said. "You're not worth the poison."

He wanted to laugh at that, but that would be treason.

Outside the slit windows, gulls shrieked and wheeled, white knives against the slate sky. Inside, the pair at bench twelve did as told, and the potion held its color, and the old feuds simmered down to a bearable heat that felt dangerously like a temporary armistice.

Dinner in the great hall was a rowdy affair, benches packed, trenchers steamy, the ceiling lost in smoke and shadow. Orla sat with Saoirse and Fiona near the Tuath Dé end, cold mutton and warm bread between them, her quill still scratching notes even as she ate.

Saoirse, never one to let a bad day go unwasted, was performing the Fomóire bench's reaction to the pairing announcement, the synchronized groan, Ciarán Ó Catháin clutching his heart like a bodkin through it, one lad sliding clean off the bench in theatrical despair, and Orla laughed, deep and real, nearly choking on her bread before she could swallow it down.

The sound carried. It always carried.

Across the hall, Finlay Mackenzie looked up from his untouched ale.

There she was. Quill in hand, curls catching the firelight, laughing at something her friend said. He told himself he looked because the laugh was too loud, because it was infuriating, because a Falskin had no business being so pleased with herself.

But another memory rose anyway, unbidden and unwelcome: Orla at fifteen, wild-haired and ink-stained, turning to face him across a cauldron he'd just destroyed once again. She'd asked if she scared him. She'd smiled when he couldn't answer. And something in his chest had cracked then, a hairline fracture he'd spent ten years pretending didn't exist.

He'd noticed her. He'd always noticed her. He'd just called it hatred because that was the only word his uncle had given him.

He looked away first. Made himself look away. The ale was bitter and he drank it like punishment.

Riona MacLeod leaned against the table beside him, silver-ash nail paste glinting. She followed his gaze and her lip curled. "That Falskin's loud tonight. Someone should teach her when to keep quiet."

Teague Naughton sprawled in the chair across, rune-cards flickering between his fingers, sly grin ready. "Give it time. This experiment will sort itself out. War always does."

Finlay said nothing. He stared at his ale and felt the crack in his chest widen, and he hated her for it, and he did not defend her, and the silence tasted like cowardice dressed as loyalty.

And near the Tuath Dé benches, Ardan Byrne caught his eye at last, the dark-haired man with prophecy scars along his jaw gave Orla a long, unreadable look, then one to Finlay, like he was counting something up and saving it for later.

Finlay looked away first.

When he finally looked up again, Orla was gone. Just an empty bench and a scorch mark where her quill had scratched too hard.

He told himself he was glad.