Chapter 1 The Heart That Would Not Die
They thought they could silence the prophecy by feeding me my sister’s heart, but all they did was awaken the monster they feared I’d become.
They buried me at dawn beneath the roots of the Cairngorm mountains, my sister’s stolen heart still pulsing in my chest. By dusk, I rose with blood-soaked wings, bone-forged teeth, and a name that makes even the old god’s tremble. But before I became this creature of vengeance and shadow, before the Unseelie Court carved me into something that haunts their nightmares, I was simply Moira Blackthorn, a girl who loved her sister more than she feared the dark.
Six Months Earlier
The cottage at the edge of Rothiemurchus
Forest had belonged to our grandmother, and her grandmother before her, and so on back through generations of Blackthorn women who had learned to read the whispers between worlds. It sat crooked against the hillside as though the earth itself had tried to swallow it and failed, its stone walls thick with moss and memories, its windows like tired eyes watching the ancient Caledonian pines sway in their eternal dance with the Highland wind.
The roof was a patchwork of slate and heather thatch, repaired so many times over the centuries that no two sections matched. Smoke rose perpetually from the crooked chimney, carrying with it the scent of burning rowan wood and whatever herbs hung drying from the rafters within. The garden that sprawled in untamed abundance around the cottage’s foundations was part cultivation, part-controlled chaos. Wolfsbane grew alongside lavender, deadly nightshade neighboured healing comfrey, and everywhere the silvery leaves of mugwort caught the light like scattered coins. Our mother had taught us the names of every plant before we could properly walk. “This is your inheritance,” she would say, guiding our small fingers to touch but never pluck without permission. “The earth remembers the Blackthorn women. She gives to us because we know how to ask, not demand.”
Isla and I were born in the small bedroom at the back of that cottage, delivered by our mother’s own hands during a storm that had turned the sky the colour of bruised plums. We came into this world tangled together, my fingers wrapped around her ankle, her tiny fist clutching a lock of my dark hair. The midwife, old Mhairi from the village who had seen three kings crowned and buried, said she’d never witnessed anything like it. Two souls so intertwined that even birth couldn’t fully separate them.
“Mark my words,” Mhairi had whispered to our mother, her weathered face pale in the candlelight, “these girls share more than blood. They share a thread of fate so thick even the Fae couldn’t cut it.”
She was wrong about that last part. But she couldn’t have known. None of us could.
Isla was the elder by seven minutes, seven minutes that she never let me forget, wielding them like a sword whenever we argued over who would read our grandmother’s grimoire first or who got the last of the honey cakes. She was summer to my winter, all golden curls and sky-blue eyes that crinkled at the corners when she laughed, which was often. Where I had midnight black hair, violet eyes and sharp angles and suspicious glances, Isla was soft curves and open arms. Where I saw shadows lurking in every corner, she saw only adventures waiting to be had.
“You’re too serious, Moira,” she would say, draping herself across my bed while I studied the old texts by candlelight. “Not everything is a threat. Not everyone is an enemy.”
“And you’re too trusting,” I would counter, not looking up from the faded pages. “The world is full of things that smile before they strike.”
She would laugh then, that bright, bell-like sound that seemed to make the very air shimmer. “Perhaps. But I’d rather live with an open heart and be hurt than live with a closed one and never feel anything at all.”
That was the difference between us, the fundamental divide that ran beneath our shared blood and tangled fate. Isla believed in the goodness of things. I believed in their teeth. Our childhood unfolded in the liminal space between the mortal village and the ancient forest, between the everyday magic of herb lore and bread-making and the deeper, darker sorcery that lived in our bloodline like a sleeping serpent. Mother taught us both worlds with equal care, understanding that we would need to navigate them with grace if we were to survive.
In the mornings, she would wake us before dawn to gather dew from spider webs, only those spun in perfect spirals, only those that caught the first light. “The morning dew holds the dreams of the night,” she explained, her breath misting in the cold air as she demonstrated the proper way to collect it in vials of dark glass. “It can be used for clarity of vision, for seeing past deception, for calling truth from liars.”
Isla’s fingers were always defter from mine at this task. She could harvest three vials to my one, never breaking the delicate threads, moving with an intuitive grace that seemed to come from somewhere beyond conscious thought. Even then, before her Sight fully manifested, she could sense which webs held the most potent magic, which spiders had woven their silk under auspicious stars.
I was better at the darker work. The harvesting of fungi that grew only on graves. The collecting of crow feathers, never taken from live birds, always found, always freely given by the corvids who seemed to watch our cottage with unusual interest. The preparation of flying ointment from henbane and belladonna, measured with precision because the difference between a visionary dose and a fatal one was smaller than a grain of wheat.
“You have steady hands and a steadier heart,” Mother told me once, watching as I ground aconite root with a mortar and pestle, careful not to let any of the powder touch my skin “Magic respects those who respect its danger. Never forget that every gift we’ve been given has teeth, Moira. Even love.”
Especially love, I would think much later, cradling my sister’s body as her blood turned the earth beneath us to mud.
The village of Rothiemurchus lay two miles down the winding path from our cottage, a collection of stone houses and shops clustered around a small square where a market convened every Saturday. It was close enough to walk but far enough that we were always slightly apart from it, never quite belonging to the rhythm of ordinary life that governed the folk there. Mother took us down for supplies every fortnight, and even as small children, Isla and I understood that these trips required a particular kind of performance. We would wash in rainwater collected during the new moon, scrubbing away any trace of the pungent herbs and stranger substances that perfumed our daily lives. Mother would dress us in our plainest clothes, braid our hair severely back from our faces, and lecture us on the way down about keeping our eyes down and our mouths shut.
“They tolerate us because they remember when their grandmothers came to ours for help,” she said, her hand tight around mine as we navigated the root-twisted path. “Because sometimes, in the dark of winter, when a child burns with fever, or a wound turns septic, they need what we can provide. But tolerance is not acceptance, my darlings. Never mistake it for that.”
