Chapter 17
They rode for thirteen days.
On some, they covered little more than ten miles. On others, less still.
Progress became a matter of persistence rather than speed—of enduring rather than conquering.
The land did not yield to urgency. It demanded patience, and it took its payment in cold.
Elara woke to it in her bones and in her breath.
Ice seeping through blankets and leathers and wool until even warmth felt like a memory rather than a state she could return to.
Sometimes, she did not wake at all until Reynnar’s voice and hands pulled her back—dragging her from depths she did not remember sinking into.
The first morning after the dream—after the slipping-away, the not-quite-hallucination that had left her oddly bright—Elara treated it as she did everything else that unsettled her.
Practically.
She asked for more nectar in the same absent tone someone might use to request fresh water or a clean bandage. Reynnar, already moving through his morning routines, seemed to think nothing of it.
She hid the buds against her skin, tucked carefully into the lining of her brassiere, nestled close to her breast where the warmth of her body might keep it safe. Carried them like stolen relics, like proof that what she had experienced had not dissolved with waking.
Though it turned out the hoarding was unnecessary.
As they traveled, she began to notice the flower everywhere.
Small, pale blossoms pressed up through frost-hardened soil and split stone alike—along the edges of the path, between rocks, at the roots of dead trees.
Snow thinned around its petals, reluctant to linger.
Ice fractured at its stem. The cold, which claimed everything else so mercilessly, seemed unable to reach it—as though the land offered it freely to her, answering a call she had not known she’d made.
Her thoughts returned to Ivan often, especially during the long hours on the road.
She imagined what he would make of this place—of the crystalline rivers and frost-laced cliffs.
She wondered whether he still felt her through the bloodstone—whether he still reached for her presence in the same instinctive way she reached for his.
Each night she took a careful sip of nectar, and the warmth spread through her throat and chest before fading, leaving behind a slow, heavy calm. It became a kind of ritual, and every evening she went to sleep with the same hope—that Ivan might find her there.
Sometimes he appeared indistinct as moonlight on water.
More often, the nectar simply pulled her deeper into sleep, into a darkness that felt strangely gentle.
She no longer woke screaming, no longer surfaced from dreams wrapped in fire or old terror.
Instead, she rose with a lingering stillness in her bones.
A peace she did not quite trust, though she could not decide whether she should fear it.
Once they had put enough distance between themselves and Turlaith territory, Reynnar and Aoife decided it was time for Elara to learn how to defend herself properly.
Reynnar wanted to work on her control of the strange power born from the Wound of Light—but that wasn’t enough for him.
He meant to train her in combat as well.
Elara groaned and complained as much as she could manage, but neither of them relented.
And so, she found herself sparring every gods-damned morning before they broke camp and set out on the road again.
It was the same discipline he had forced upon her in the Pit, when survival depended on movement and stillness was an invitation to disappear. There, he had made her rise in the dark hours to remind her body that it was still her own. Here, beneath open sky and frost-thinned light, he did the same.
The terrain became her instructor as much as he was.
Frozen ground bruised her feet. Thin air burned her lungs.
Muscles protested, then learned. Reynnar taught her to fight in layers.
Footing first. Breath second. Timing third.
Only then the blade. Which was not truly a blade at all, but a smooth wooden staff worn pale now by use.
Even so, winter demanded precision. A single misstep meant pain. Sometimes, it meant blood.
The Wound of Light was another matter.
Reynnar refused to let her wield it in earnest. Not yet. Instead, he drilled her through motions—angles of the shoulders, turns of the wrist, the precise line her body must follow before the power ever left her hands. Only after the form was correct would he let her release it.
When she did, the light burst from her like a wayward star.
No matter how many times she tried, she could not shape it into the barrier she had made in the Pit. There, terror had done what training could not. Here, with Reynnar’s patient voice behind her and no one dying at her feet, the power refused to hold. It lashed outward instead.
Reynnar, Aoife, and Caelion had learned to dive quickly.
By the third week of their flight, the scent of sap gave way to something new riding the wind—salt, distant and warm, carried from the sea.
Elara tasted it at the back of her throat and felt a flicker of relief.
Proof of distance. Of ground safely put behind them.
The trees began to change as well. The old oaks were the first to thin out, their thick trunks giving way to stands of tall, straight poplars. Then came the willows.
Beyond the fringe of trees, a river whispered over stone, carrying the clean, brine-laced breath of the Naidiryn coast. No insects stirred yet.
Only distant birds marked the sky with thin, brittle notes.
They had made camp there for the night, tucked between the leaning trunks where the damp earth softened underfoot and the sea-wind moved gently through the branches.
This morning, Reynnar carved a rough circle into the ground with the tip of his sword—barefoot, the leather straps of his bracers loose, the hem of his shirt untucked as though he hadn’t bothered to pull himself fully together.
The mark was nothing ceremonial—just a scuffed boundary scratched into the trampled grass. Still, he stood within it, bare forearms corded with strength, a practice blade resting loosely over his shoulder, hair pushed back from his face in a way that made him look both younger and more dangerous.
He had the look of a man who thought a fine way to greet the morning was by being struck repeatedly with a stick.
Elara rolled her shoulders, felt the tug of scar tissue pull taut across her back.
She set her boots at the ring’s lip, lifted the wooden practice blade, and tried to ignore how quickly the grip warmed against her damp palms. Reynnar sauntered closer, circling her once, twice, hawk-calm, faintly amused.
She had been nervous to accept his help at first. Nervous to fail.
But Reynnar had always stirred something restless inside her, a hunger she had never felt with anyone else.
“Ready?”
“No,” Elara said, lifting her stick. “But go on.”
He stepped in, testing. The first touch of wood on wood was a hollow clap; the shock traveled up her arms to the places that still remembered pain.
She breathed through it, like he’d taught her.
“Eyes here.” He tapped his shoulder with the flat of his practice blade.
“Not the weapon. The weapon lies. The body doesn’t. ”
“So I should stare at your shoulders?” she asked, tone dry.
“Careful,” he said, flexing. “People do tend to get distracted.”
Elara made a face, and he lunged—quick, not cruel. Her body reacted before her mind did; she met the strike on instinct, teeth bared. The blow jarred her, but she held her ground.
“Good,” Reynnar said, and there was something like pride threaded through the word. “Again.”
They fell into a rhythm that felt like argument and dance at once: cut, parry, reset; advance, retreat, pivot.
Reynnar’s teaching was a thousand quiet corrections.
“Not from the arm—from the back. Breathe on the strike. Don’t go where you want to hit; go where I’ll be when your blade arrives.
” His humor slipped in sideways, a soft lift at the corner of his mouth, a line tossed like a rope when her frustration swelled too high.
“Your stance is improving,” he said. “Now you only look like you might drop your sword and run screaming every other minute.”
“I wasn’t screaming,” she said, then muttered, “much.”
His mouth curved, though there was truth beneath the levity. She was improving quickly—more quickly than she should have. Her body responded with a kind of obedience that had startled her at first, as though it had been waiting for someone to show it what to do.
It remembered, she realized. Just as her mind had taken to Tírrísh with an ease that defied reason, her body absorbed each movement with the certainty of long-buried muscle memory.
The knowledge arrived fully formed and instinctive, offering no explanation for its presence.
It was strange—her body and mind clinging to fragments of a past she could not access.
At times, she felt like a stranger inhabiting her own skin—as though some newer version of herself had stepped forward, easing the old one aside.
She felt a brief, unexpected guilt for that other self—the one who had already known these things—who could only watch as she struggled back toward truths that had once been effortless.
From a fallen log a ways away, Aoife’s voice floated over.
“Her guard’s still open. I could’ve put an arrow through her throat three times.
” She was sharpening a knife that did not need it, the small blade bright as a cat’s eye.
The sun had begun to work a change in her hair, turning strands of white-blonde to pale gold.