Chapter 14 #3
His shoulders tightened—barely more than a shift of muscle beneath leather and wool. “I’m aware,” he said. “But this isn’t the time for that conversation.”
Her mouth curved faintly. “Because I’m high?”
Reynnar pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek. “Precisely.”
She rolled onto her side, settling into the bedroll as she studied him with lazy interest. “Are you afraid I’ll say something honest?”
That finally drew a real laugh from him.
“No,” he said. “I’m only concerned I’d have to endure the same conversation twice.”
Elara’s smirk deepened. “Then you’d better make the next one worth remembering.”
“You’re fortunate I didn’t let you fall off your horse.”
“You wouldn’t have,” she said easily. “You’re far too noble for that.”
“Noble?” He pulled a face. “Don’t insult me.”
Elara smiled faintly into the folds of her bedroll, the expression lingering there a moment before she lifted her head. When she looked up, she found him already watching her. The hard lines of his face had softened in the firelight, his expression almost relaxed.
“Reynnar?”
“Yes, Eilíara.”
“You know, I could get us there in a fraction of the time.” Her hand drifted to the dagger at her hip before he could reply.
She drew it free with a rasp of steel on leather, the blade glinting faintly as she turned it between her fingers.
Her frost-numb grip slipped—the weapon shifting, edge angling toward the soft web of her thumb.
Reynnar moved before she could blink. His hand closed over hers, wrenching the dagger away before it could draw blood.
“Bleeding hell, a bhean.”
A bhean. Woman.
The absurdity of it pulled a laugh from her.
Reynnar did not share the amusement. He fixed her with a long, level look, one that carried more than a little exasperation.
Then his gaze dropped to the dagger resting in his hand.
He turned it slightly, studying the gold metal as though it might reveal some new danger under closer inspection.
In his broad grip, the blade looked small—almost harmless.
He set it carefully beside her on the ground.
“I’ve seen what that thing can do,” he said quietly. “And I’ve no desire to open a door that might invite something worse through it.”
Elara blew out a breath and leaned back on her hands.
She understood.
Truly, she did.
But the road ahead of them stretched long and miserable in her mind—weeks of mud, cold camps, and slow miles to look forward to.
Her hand lifted before she had quite decided to move it.
Just a small shift for balance, she might have said, her fingers grazing the rough wool of his sleeve as she leaned nearer to the warmth of him.
Reynnar didn’t pull away.
Instead, the moment seemed to gather itself around the place where she touched him. He went very still, the way one does when a blade kisses their throat—careful not to startle the moment, careful not to breathe too deeply and lose it.
She tipped her face up toward him. Up close, she could see the faint crease between his brows, the one that appeared whenever he was holding something back.
“You’re different here,” she murmured after a moment. “Among your own.”
One dark brow arched, the look on his face halfway between a smirk and an unspoken well, no shit.
Elara huffed a breath. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“I know what you meant,” he said, though his voice had softened. His gaze drifted briefly toward the fire, its light shifting across his features. “And you’re right. I am different.” He drew a slow breath before his gaze lowered to her again. “You’re different, too.”
Her brows lifted. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
His eyes held hers a beat longer than was comfortable, the fire snapping softly between them.
“What did it mean?” she asked at last, and a faint crease formed at the corner of his eyes. “That thing.” She gestured vaguely. “Back there with the Turlaith. When you said you’d invoke your right. The sovereignty—whatever it was. That was a rather large declaration, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” he said.
“And what does it actually do?”
Reynnar shifted, easing back against the earth beside her until he lay stretched along the stones, his head resting on his folded hands as he looked up into the dark sky above the ridge.
“It would have placed you under House Ellylldan’s protection,” he said.
“Their laws. Their courts. Their authority.”
Her nose wrinkled faintly at that. “So I would have had to behave.”
The tip of a fang flashed. “In theory.”
“And I would answer to you.”
“To my house,” he corrected. “Not to me.”
She nodded, filing that away. Then her eyes sharpened, unexpectedly lucid. “You could’ve done it sooner.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Reynnar didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he shifted onto his side beside her, propping himself up on one elbow so he could look at her properly.
The movement pulled the muscle of his arm tight beneath the fabric of his sleeve.
“Because it would’ve kept you alive,” he said. “And taken something from you.”
Elara studied him. “You didn’t want me under anyone’s thumb.”
“No.”
“Even yours.”
“Especially not mine.”
The truth settled in her chest, warm and heavy, like a brand pressed to skin and left there to smolder. “You’re always doing that. Trying to keep me from things. Bad things. Pointy things. Political things. All the things. I don’t want you to think I’m…fragile. Like a teacup. Or a sad little bird.”
“I have never thought you fragile.” He shifted closer as he spoke. “From the moment I met you, I believed you possessed a strength most souls spend a lifetime searching for.”
Her heart pinched uncomfortably, but she held his gaze.
“Why did you help me that day?” She saw again the dark stone of the cell, felt the grit beneath her cheek where she had collapsed after Osin’s attentions had finally pushed her body past its limits.
Even now, the memory raised a chill across her skin. She had been so close to death.
You’re killing her.
Ivan had said it carefully, almost casually as he held her, as though the words were nothing more than an observation offered to his lord.
But she knew now what he had been doing in that moment—how he had tried to stop Osin without appearing to defy him.
It had been protection, the only kind he could risk giving.
And then there had been Reynnar. Another prisoner.
Another broken body in the dark. He had seen her dying and reached out anyway, offering a hand when he had every reason not to. And she had never quite understood why.
“I’ve no words to make sense of it. When I saw you in that cell—shaking in the dirt, the human king’s shadows eating their way through you—I didn’t see only a mortal.
I saw someone drowning in the same nightmare I was.
” His gaze drifted to the fire, watching the flames gnaw at the wood before lifting again.
“Your heart was faltering. I—I admit I considered leaving you there.”
She watched his throat work, felt the ache rolling off him—shame, so much of it.
“I almost let you die,” he said, the whisper rough with self-loathing, “as so many of your kind have let mine die. That moment—” his breath shuddered, “—that hesitation will follow me to the grave.”
Elara shook her head. “You didn’t—”
“I might have ended your suffering sooner.” His mouth twisted with the words.
“Instead, I waited. Long enough to prove that even my mercy came reluctantly.” He exhaled slowly, as if pushing the memory away.
“But in the end, I made my choice. I helped you. It was meant to be a single kindness—nothing more. I am no sadist. Watching you suffer held no pleasure for me. Then I watched the way your own people looked at you. I saw the fear in your eyes.” His voice softened.
“And I understood that you did not belong to them any more than I did.”
A pause.
“So I made you ours.”
Reynnar’s hand rose slowly, the movement almost reluctant, as though the decision to reach for her had come before he had fully considered it.
His fingers hovered near the stray lock of hair that had fallen across her brow, the dark strand stirring faintly in the cold mountain air caught against the rough calluses along his knuckles.
She braced for his touch—wanted it, feared it—her chest tight with the waiting.
But the touch never came.
His hand lowered, and he turned away from her, gaze returning to the dark stretch of land beyond the fire as though the moment had never existed. Only then did she realize how hard her heart had been pounding.
She released a slow breath, the tension leaving her shoulders by degrees as the cold night air filled her lungs again.
Her gaze drifted back to the sky above them, to the scatter of distant stars burning cold and bright against the dark.
She watched them in silence, though her thoughts were no longer tracing their patterns the way they had before.
“Before the arrow,” she said, brushing her hand through the air beside her ear, “the wind folded there. It whispered to me.”
She felt Reynnar go very still beside her. “What did it say?”
A faint smile touched her lips. “It told me to dance.”
Elara turned to look at him and found his gaze already on her. He studied her for a long moment, the firelight shifting across the hard lines of his face. When he finally smiled, it was brief, touched with something like sorrow.
“Oh yeah, ealaín,” he murmured. “And will you?”
Elara tipped her head, considering. The fire cracked. Above them, the stars wheeled slowly through their ancient paths, patient as the turning of the world.
“Someday,” she said at last.
Her gaze drifted back from the dark horizon.
“But not yet.”