Chapter 1 #2
“This place is not safe for you,” Reynnar said softly.
His gaze dropped—not to her face, but to her hip.
To the dagger. “I want your word,” he said.
“If we run into trouble, you will defend yourself. The Turlaith are an unrelenting people. They bend for no one and forgive nothing.” His jaw set.
“They are not as understanding as the Ellylldan.”
“Ellylldan?”
A faint smile touched his mouth. “The Sídhe of my territory. Fire-bred and restless. We’re…more inclined toward change.”
Elara lifted a brow. “Even toward a human in your midst?”
“Only just,” he said, the smile sharpening before it faded.
She rested her hand on the hilt of her blade. Memory flared—white light bursting from it, Osin’s shadows shriveling into nothing beneath it.
“You have my word,” she said.
Reynnar studied her for a long moment, then nodded once, satisfied. “Come on,” he said. “This way.”
He turned downslope, angling into thicker growth. Elara frowned and caught his arm.
“Wait.”
He stilled but didn’t look back.
“There’s nothing there,” she said, stepping past him. “The trail—”
She scanned the ground, nudging aside a fern with the tip of her boot, searching for the faintest break in the mud. But the earth lay smooth and unmarked.
She looked up at him. “We’ve lost it.”
Only then did he turn. His gaze moved—not to the ground, but to the trees. To the air. “Breathe in,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“Breathe in,” he repeated, patient.
Elara stared at him, certain fatigue had finally frayed something loose inside him. Days without proper rest did strange things to a person. But there was no fracture in him. No wavering. Only that same resolve that had carried him through ruined paths and false trails.
She drew a breath.
Cool air filled her lungs. Wet earth. Crushed leaves. The green bite of pine and lichen. And beneath it—
Her fingers flew to her mouth.
Something else threaded through the scent of the forest. Not a scent, not exactly. More like pressure. Like standing too close to a fire you couldn’t see, only feel.
Her eyes snapped back to Reynnar. “What is that?”
A flicker of something crossed his face—approval, perhaps. Or relief.
“Draoth,” he said.
Draoth.
The word rippled through her, sliding down her spine and sinking deep, power stirring restlessly beneath the skin. She squeezed her eyes shut and forced a long breath through her nose, willing it back down—
And then Reynnar’s meaning sank in.
He could sense their Draoth.
Elara’s eyes flew open, finding his. “Does that mean their power is returning?”
His amber eyes sparked. “Aye, I believe it does.” Reynnar paused as though he were following the threads of his own stores, measuring their strength.
“Even with my Draoth restored, I’ve felt it growing stronger since we arrived.
Settling deeper in my bones as if stretching itself awake after a long sleep.
Whatever was stolen from us—this land is giving it back. ”
His words hung between them, heavy and full of promise, and Elara let herself breathe them in, felt the truth of them sink deep into her bones.
She studied him in the fading light and searched once more for that familiar thread.
Her fingers twitched as if to summon it back—but the air between them stayed still.
There was nothing. Not even a tremor beneath her ribs.
Nothing to suggest the tether had ever been there at all.
Elara had not felt it since he held her beneath the Aelfhenge.
Not since she’d collapsed in his arms, sobbing and soaked and so far beyond shame she hadn’t even tried to hide it, and the bond had snapped wide.
The connection had been overwhelming. She hadn’t just felt Reynnar’s heartbeat—she had sensed the exact stretch of each branch in his lungs, felt air pass through membranes thinner than thought, traced it into bloodstreams aching for relief, followed it down into the hungry engine of his body.
His pulse wasn’t just rhythm—it was math, logic, architecture. Precision.
An entire cathedral of biology working to keep him alive.
Yet when their bond had burst open, she hadn’t waited for Reynnar to recoil or retreat.
She raised the wall herself—fortified her mind with the discipline the Druids had drilled into her—sealing the connection with surgical precision.
And the bond—the Cara—she locked it away.
Not out of cruelty, but mercy. She could not bear the hum of his power alongside hers.
All that training with the Druids—every hour of meditation… Had they known? Had they always known she would need it not just to survive, but to contain the Draoth? To keep her body and mind her own?
Reynnar had pulled away as soon as she’d quieted. Sat back, met her eyes for half a second, and then his own wall went up.
Elara hadn’t blamed him for the silence that followed.
If anything, she was grateful for it. Even if she wanted to reach for the Cara again, she couldn’t.
It was too painful—and, worse, it felt wrong.
So she did the only thing left to do: shoved the pull of the Cara into the farthest corner of herself, shut the door, bolted it, pretended not to hear it scratching to be let out.
“Come on,” Reynnar said gently, reading the emotion on her face. “We should make camp.”
He moved on without another word, and Elara fell into step beside him. “I thought you said we were close. Why not push until we find them?”
He paused, gaze lifting toward the horizon where the sun hung low, dripping gold into the thickening twilight.
“The sun will set soon, and we don’t know what awaits us.
I’ve walked these woods before, but never this deep.
” A brief pause. “I’ve no wish to blunder into Turlaith territory in darkness.
” His eyes met hers again. “When we find the others, I want the sun at our backs.”
The Turlaith were the eldest of the Sídhe, their skin threaded with bark-veined markings, guardians of forests older than memory. Reynnar shared their stories with her on that first night—how they awoke alongside the first trees, their souls shaped from soil and leaf and whispered song.
They were traditional, Reynnar had warned her.
Guarded. Starting a fire within their wooded lands would be viewed as an act of aggression, and so their nights had passed beneath canopies thick with frost-laced breath.
Yet as Elara leaned back, shoulder brushing his arm, warmth bled through her skin anyway.
He had always been fire—steadfast, unwavering—heat emanating not from flames but from the unyielding strength that defined him.
She shifted fractionally closer, allowing herself this small indulgence.
It felt dangerously close to comfort, as though phantom arms had wrapped protectively around her.
In the stillness that followed, Elara let herself believe they actually had.