Chapter 15
Sleep took Elara in slips and starts, the drug loosening her grip on the world in soft collapses.
In one slip, she stood again in the Concord’s chamber.
The great hall rose before her, carved and waiting—but no Turlaith sat there.
Only their shadows remained, stretched long across the stone.
In another, she found herself standing in Talamh na Sí, the air bright and cold with that strange, living stillness the place carried.
The Aelfhenge waited beyond the trees, pulsing like the slow, steady beat of a heart buried beneath the earth.
That dream, too, unraveled.
And then there was a third, though it felt less like a dream and more like a door she had accidentally walked through.
It opened without sound. No hinge, no breath of air—just the sense of elsewhere clicking into place.
Elara stood and did not stand, had weight and did not.
The dark here was not the night’s damp velvet but a clean, lucid absence, carrying a low pressure that pressed against her skin like a held note.
She thought of the nectar humming in her veins and wondered, distantly, if this was what it meant to be thinned enough to slip between moments.
The thought skated away before it could finish.
Then, something brushed her awareness—traced the curve of her ear, then slid, soft and slow, down the knotted line of her spine.
Elara’s eyes flew open. And the world was…wrong.
Light spilled across the camp, milk-pale and shivering.
She blinked. Once. Twice. Reached for the shape of her body, counted fingers.
Toes. Breath. And found none. Her chest rose but didn’t pull.
Air touched her lips but didn’t enter. There was no frigid wind.
No birdsong. Just that yawning silence that came after something had stopped—the pause after a scream, the dead air after the snap of a neck.
Movement flickered at the peripheral of her vision—a shadow keeping low, weaving through the trees as soundlessly as mist. It moved against the rhythm of the forest, too measured to be wind, or ebbing to be an animal.
She turned toward Reynnar and reached to shake him awake, her fingers closing around—
Nothing.
She blinked. Frowned. Reached again.
Her hand passed clean through the fabric of his shirt, through the skin beneath, through bone. A rush of cold bloomed behind her ribs. She stared. Her fingers—wane, almost translucent—hovered above his shoulder. She drew her hand back slowly. Tried again. It was like pushing through fog.
Her gaze dropped.
And there—still as stone—lay her own body.
Head tucked into the crook of Reynnar’s shoulder, hair tangled over her face, one leg curled beneath the other.
A thin, sour taste rose in the back of her throat.
Elara tried to level her thoughts. Cataloged her surroundings.
Mud pressed beneath her feet, though she couldn’t feel it.
Air in her lungs, though she wasn’t breathing.
Firelight on her skin, though it didn’t burn or warm or soothe.
Everything looked real. But none of it was tethered. None of it held.
This wasn’t a dream. This was something else.
Out-of-body projection? Astral displacement? Hallucinatory detachment?
Could it be some aftereffect of the plant?
Reynnar had said it was a field narcotic.
Could it be spirit-based? Psychoactive? Her breath trembled.
She hadn’t taken enough to cause this. Had she?
She turned sharply back toward her body.
She needed to get back. Now. Whatever this was she needed to undo it.
Crouching low, she tried to sink back into herself. Concentrated on the feel of her body, the slope of her limbs, the beat of her heart she could no longer feel. She tried to match it—fit herself like a lock sliding into a well-fitted key. But her spirit passed clean through.
Fuck.
A spike of terror pierced her. If she’d had a heart in this strange, drifting form, it would be lodged in her throat, hammering against her teeth.
Think. Elara clamped down on the panic and ran through what she knew: her body was intact, sleeping beside Reynnar.
She’d been injured. Healed. High. Fell asleep. Either this was a side effect or—
Cold wind. The smell of clove and parchment.
It awakened her numbed senses with the exact familiarity of a past touch—her heart recognizing the shape of it before her mind formed a name.
A measured, thudding beat answered from somewhere close—not the mountains, nor the forest, nor her own.
Elara turned toward it, as one turns toward a voice in a crowd and finds the only face that matters.
“Ivan?” she said, very softly, eyes locked onto a figure.
Her mind fractured around recognition and denial, logic and memory crashing into each other with brutal force.
Eyes she had memorized—knew so well she could have sketched them from memory.
Not just the look of them, but the way they shifted.
Narrowed when amused. Softened when he thought she wasn’t looking.
The gold that burned like sunlight when his guard was down. But now…gone. Only shadow lived there.
“Ivan?”
Her voice cracked on the name. She rose, but not in any way that involved muscle or weight or bone.
She simply…lifted. Like breath pulled into lungs.
Her feet hovered above the mud, toes brushing nothing.
Her eyes stayed fixed on him as she stepped forward, cautious, afraid that if she blinked he would vanish again—that her mind had finally begun conjuring ghosts.
But he moved away without looking back, turning toward the narrow path between the boulders, and slipped through the jagged stones along the ridge as though the mountain itself had opened a passage for him and closed just as quickly behind.
Dread punched through her chest.
She ran.
Leaves brushed her legs without sound or resistance as she chased after him, faster and faster, Ivan’s shadow carving a straight path through the ridge.
Her limbs didn’t tire. Her feet never stumbled.
Her focus narrowed to him alone, to the glimpse of his back slipping through shifting growth.
Panic crept in. Not all at once. It slid into her chest and climbed her spine. A trickle at first. Then a flood.
Was he dead?
Was she?
Was this what it looked like—what it felt like—when the dead came to lead the dying?
Elara pushed harder, moving like light—flaring, bending, never lingering long enough to be touched by reeds, or dew, or fog.
“Ivan!” she cried. “Stop—just stop!”
She reached. Almost grazing his back—
And stumbled into a vast hall. No breath burned in her chest. No pulse answered her fear. Yet something inside her recoiled. It knew this place. It feared it.
She was in the capital—Mordenhall—with him kneeling at its center.
Not the Ivan she knew now, if she could even claim to know him at all, but the Ivan from that day.
The one preserved in memory. The day Osin had tried to force him to bind her.
The day everything changed, though she hadn’t realized it yet.
Ivan wore only a tunic and battle breeches, clothes hanging off him like they belonged to a man who hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept.
His face—bruised, battered, blood crusted along his jaw.
His shoulders were bowed. His head low. Elara walked slowly toward him, her chest tightening as if it might collapse inward.
She was staring at a moment carved out of time, held perfectly still so it could wound her all over again.
“Ivan?”
Her voice cracked, thinning to almost nothing, as though gentleness might soften the truth she already knew—that he could not hear her, that he was not truly here, that he might not even be alive.
Still, she stepped toward him.
Each step matched the ones she had taken that day, and some irrational part of her believed that if she traced the moment exactly as it had been, it might undo what had followed.
She had forgotten how broken he had looked on his knees.
How the sight of him like that had hollowed her out even then.
Gods, she would do anything—anything—to drop beside him and pull his head into her chest, press her lips to his hair.
To forgive him, even if she didn’t mean it.
Why hadn’t he told her?
About all of it—their past, the truth. Why had he let her believe they were strangers?
Was it the compulsion? Osin had twisted plenty of things inside her—had he done the same to Ivan?
Had the king wrapped chains around his tongue the same way he’d wrapped them around her mind?
Or was it his damned honor? His self-righteous, infuriating, noble restraint that always seemed to choose silence over suffering, so long as the suffering was his.
They had spent all that time circling each other like wary animals—step closer, step back, testing the air for danger. As if both of them knew, somewhere deep down, that tying themselves to another person was the surest way to destroy what little remained of them.
And yet they kept drifting back anyway. That was the cruelest part.
She hated him for it.
She loved him for it.
She wanted to strangle him.
Wanted to weep in his arms until the grief bled out.
Elara stood over him now, knees trembling, and he looked up at her—just as he had that day. But this time, she saw what she hadn’t been able to read back then. He had been dying. Not wounded or weary. Dying. A man who had nothing left.
Her fingers hovered just above his cheek, too afraid to touch him, too afraid not to.
She expected to pass through him, but her palm met warm skin—rough, stubbled.
The world seemed to pause as Ivan exhaled, eyelids fluttering shut beneath the soft press of her hand, lashes dark against bruised skin.
And then his hand rose and caught hers, fingers wrapping around her wrist.
Elara’s other hand flew to his face, her fingers trembling.
She hated that they trembled. She needed them steady.
“Ivan?” He blinked again, dazed, eyes flicking to the corners of the room, to the throne, to the ceiling, like he was waking up mid-dream.
She grabbed him harder, fingers digging into his jaw. “Look at me.”
He did.
And when he lifted his hand, she found she could not move.
His fingers brushed a strand of hair back from her cheek, then slipped through it with almost reverent slowness, catching lightly at the ends before he drew in a breath that trembled.
“I must have imagined you crueler,” he said softly, his gaze mapping every contour of her face.
“If this is mercy, it is a strange sort of it.” His fingers lingered in her hair a moment longer before sliding to her cheek, the touch so careful it felt almost like apology.
“I've spent half my life trying not to look for you, and here you are. Waiting for me at the end of it.”
“You're not dead,” she said, though the words came out broken.
Her hand shot up and caught his wrist, pressing it hard against her cheek.
“Do you feel that?” she whispered. There was a strange peace in his expression—the hollow, tender calm of a man who believed the fight was finally over.
She could not decide what hurt more: that he believed himself lost, or that he seemed almost glad of it.
Her grief went hot so quickly it turned at once to anger.
Or perhaps there had never been much distinction between the two where he was concerned.
“You're warm. You're alive, you bloody fool.”
Even as she spoke, she felt it—the bloodstone at her throat beating in time with his pulse, the two of them keeping count together. And then—he smiled. That crooked, exasperating smile that seemed reserved solely for her.
“Always so bossy.”
She choked on a laugh that felt far too close to a sob. Her mouth found his in the same breath, like she hadn’t made the decision at all—like her body had done it for her. And when he kissed her back, she almost forgot to be afraid.
His hand curled at the back of her nape.
He tasted like blood and ash and tea, and she pressed into him harder.
Desperate. Greedy. His tongue swept against hers once, and it was him, all of him, and she couldn’t breathe for the relief of it.
She closed her eyes, drowning in warmth and breath and the dizzying, reckless pull of him.
But then—he faltered.
His lips first, then his breath, then his hands—and still she clung, as if sheer will might defy whatever force was taking him.
But his form thinned beneath her grip, mist-soft, smoke-slipping.
His tongue brushed hers one last time—a quiet farewell—and then he was gone.
The space where he’d been collapsed in on itself, and suddenly there was nothing in front of her but empty stones and cold air.
Her body lurched.
She was being hauled backward, reeled in like a fish on a line, her soul whipped through dark and distance and slammed back into flesh.
Elara’s back arched, and her eyes flew open—to the night sky yawning overhead, stars scattered and bright, the mountain rising around her in slick silhouettes.
She felt the bedroll under her palms. Breath ripping into her lungs.
Reynnar’s warmth at her side, the slow shift of his body as he stirred, waking.
Cold air burned her throat. She was back.
She sat up too fast. The world rocked, then steadied.
Her thoughts skittered in every direction.
Aoife had warned her she might hallucinate.
Well. That certainly qualified. And the Mother knew she had seen enough of Draoth and poison and panic to understand what the mind could do under strain.
She tried to make sense of it anyway. In her mind, she spread the memory out like loose pages across a table, turning each one over, searching the margins for a seam that might let the whole thing come apart.
It should have unraveled under that kind of scrutiny. But it didn’t.
Beneath the reasoning, beneath the doubt, beneath every careful argument she built against it, something remained.
A stubborn, unshakable knowing.
Ivan was alive.
The certainty struck her so suddenly she had to brace for it. Somewhere beyond the ridge, beyond the veil, beyond whatever had torn the world thin enough for their souls to brush against each other again, he was breathing. Her fingers tightened on the blanket until her knuckles ached.
Alive.
She knew it. She knew.
She mouthed it again. Thought it again.
He’s alive he’s alive he’s alive.
And she would find him.