Chapter 32
Ivan stood in a field he did not remember walking into, and for a long moment, he could not name what was wrong with it. The light was soft. The grass moved. Somewhere behind him, water shifted against a shore he could hear but not see. And nothing hurt.
Nothing at all.
There was no ache in his ribs. No knife-twist in his shoulder. No blood drying on his skin.
He turned slowly to find a cottage some paces off, low and whitewashed, its slate roof furred with moss along the eaves.
Smoke climbed from the chimney in a thin, patient line.
Herbs crowded the wall on the southern side, leggy and wild with the season.
The door had once been painted green, though time and weather had gnawed most of the color from it.
Familiar.
The thought came too quickly, and Ivan stilled beneath it.
He had never seen this place before. Of that, he was near certain. Yet some buried part of him knew the slope of that roof, knew how the smoke would smell if he stood close enough, knew the stubborn catch in that door when rain had swelled the wood.
A place I have been.
A place I have wanted to be.
Ivan stepped toward it, and the knowing began to thin. Another step, and it slipped further away, shy as a dream at waking.
He let the matter rest. He had become practiced at letting things go.
The wind shifted and brought him the smell of the lake—mineral, cold, sun-warmed—and underneath it, faint, the green of crushed grass.
So.
This, then, was what it was to die.
The thought came without much heat. He had been promised a great many endings over the years, and none of them had ever quite arrived; perhaps this one finally had, and had done so dressed in sunlight and the smell of a lake. Stranger kindnesses had graced worse men.
Ivan faced the cottage again. He meant to go to it—meant to put a hand to that green door and see if it gave—when a prickle at the back of his neck told him he was no longer alone.
Slowly, he looked back.
And the bottom of the world fell out.
She stood three paces from him in the grass, wind threading through her hair.
For one long moment, Ivan could do nothing but look.
The light of this place lay soft upon her, too clean to be real, and still she was more tangible than anything in it.
Her hair was loose—he had so seldom seen it loose.
Dark and unruly, it lifted with the wind and fell against her shoulders as if it belonged more to the field than to her.
The small, straight nose, with its faint upward tilt at the end—the one he had teased her for, once, a lifetime ago, in some warmer life that did not to belong to either of them.
The freckles scattered across the bridge of it, like seeds someone had cast there in passing.
Only then did he understand how thoroughly he had hidden her from himself.
Not forgotten. Never that.
Kept, rather. Folded away like a small and necessary thing against the cold. Returned to only in the worst hours. Looked at in the dark and nowhere else. The day he pushed her through the Veil, he had taught himself not to expect this—to live, if he must, without the hope of ever seeing her again.
And yet she was here.
Close enough to touch.
Her storm-gray eyes were on him.
His heart struck once against the cage of his ribs, hard enough to leave him breathless.
“Elara?”
Something in her gave way at the sound of her name on his tongue.
Whatever fragile thing had been holding her together broke cleanly, and then she was running toward him too quickly for thought.
Ivan reached for her on instinct, arms closing around her before he had any leave to stop them.
He pressed his face into the crown of her head, breathed her in, and let himself—gods help him, he let himself—remember.
The taste of her that night. Lamplight honey-dim in his drawing room, her hair in his hands and her tongue against his, and he had thought—
Take what is left of me. I will make no better use of it than this.
“Are you—” His voice cracked as he drew back. “Are you well? Are you hurt? Where—”
“I’m not hurt. I’m—” Her fingers tightened in the back of his shirt. “I’m not hurt, Ivan. I’m all right.”
The relief of it moved through him so sharply it left him weak. He took her in again, slower now, with the old ruthless care he had once brought to every threat and every map and every lie. “Where are we?” he asked, and heard how quiet the question had become.
She wet her lips. “We’re not dead,” she said, glancing past him toward the cottage.
“From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s some kind of in-between place.
Not unlike dreams—but different.” She shook her head, irritated by her own uncertainty.
“I haven’t been able to make proper sense of it. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
Up close, he could see what the light had tried and failed to hide.
Weariness had hollowed her. Strain lingered at the corners of her mouth and in the set of her eyes, and no softness in that strange, bright place could smooth it away.
Whatever the months had done to her after he let her go, they had not done it gently.
Between them, the bloodstone rested small and bright, beating with its own quiet rhythm—neither wholly his nor wholly hers, but born of something that had once belonged to both.
Her pulse lived there, swift and warm and undeniably real, alive in a world far from his own. In Tír na nóg.
Where the Ellylldan waited.
Where he had sent her.
And then the thought came fully at last, no longer circling the outskirts of him, no longer merciful enough to remain unnamed.
He was a man who had once taken the woman he loved into his arms in the darkest hour of his life, and laid her into another man’s keeping.
He had done it with his own hands. With his own breath.
With his own voice, saying take care of her, and meaning not only the words themselves, but all that lay beneath them.
Because I cannot.
His hold on her loosened.
She was looking up at him, her lips parted. He watched her feel the change in him before he ever spoke it. Watched the slight alteration in her face, the quick gathering of herself—and then she stepped back.
“Are you…” Her eyes moved over him, quick and searching. “Are you all right?”
A laugh slipped out of him before he could stop it, small and dry. “I’ve been better.”
Her face tightened. “I saw,” she said at once.
“Before this. I was somewhere else first—a tent.” Her breath caught.
“You were on the ground. There was so much blood. I tried to get to you and I couldn’t.
I went through a woman, I think, and I was—I don’t know what I was.
” She shook her head, and a curl slipped loose against her cheek. “But I saw you. And then I was here.”
Elara’s hand went to the bloodstone, closing around it. “It’s still connecting us,” she said. “I think. It’s stronger now—with you in front of me.”
She wet her lips. He watched her do it and looked away.
“This place showed me—your body, Bryn and Dario working on you. You were barely holding on.”
“Dario was helping? That must’ve been…harrowing for him.”
She tipped her head, a brief spark lighting in her eyes. For a moment, she looked as though she might ask what lay beneath that—between her old friend and her…
Whatever Ivan was to her now.
But she let the question die. Her gaze had already dropped, tracing the line of his chest, his side. “You’re bleeding now,” she said. “While you’re standing here.”
Ivan looked down at his hands and flexed them once. They were clean. No blood marked them. And yet he could almost sense it elsewhere all the same, hot and slow beneath skin that was not wholly with him in this place.
“Highly likely,” he said.
She took a step toward him, then checked herself with a small, catching breath. The distance between them was little. Barely any space at all. And yet it held everything that had come between them.
“When I first traveled here,” she said, “I was hurt as well. But I don’t think it was the blood.” Her hand stayed closed around the stone. “I think there was a current. The bloodstone answered it somehow. Or strengthened it. Something did.”
He fixed his eyes on her. “A current?”
“Possibly through the oath,” she said, thinking aloud now, the way she always did when she was close to some answer she couldn’t prove. “I think the bloodstone is still carrying some part of it. And your current in the Void may have given the vow something to cling to.”
She hesitated.
“And possibly the drug.”
“The drug?”
She winced. “A field narcotic.”
“That sounds healthy.”
Ivan saw it then—her pupils. The faint flush along her cheeks. The way she was standing, as if she did not trust her own balance.
“It is very mild,” she said. “Broadly safe, and—”
“And you are on it now.”
The corner of her mouth betrayed her. “A little.”
“Elara.”
Her eyes dropped at the sound of her name. “I’ve been well outside my element lately.”
“How unlike you.”
It was dry enough to be almost gentle, and her eyes lifted at once.
“How has it been?” he asked, and was mildly surprised to hear how even his voice sounded. “In Tír na nóg. Are you—” He stopped. He had been about to say happy. He could not, when it came to it, quite manage the word. “Are you well?” he finished instead.
Her gaze dropped again. The wind moved through the reeds behind her. Somewhere near the cottage, something wooden knocked softly in the breeze.
“I’m managing,” she said at last.
The answer went through him cold.
“How do you mean?”
She told him then, in a rush—as though she were still arranging her days even as she handed them over: the Concord trial, the whispers of conspiracy within the Sídhe government, the hints that Osin’s hand reached even there. How the pieces were starting—barely—to fit together.
Ivan listened without interrupting. The sunlight blanketed the field warmly, but the ease of the place had gone out of it. By the time she finished, his thoughts had turned dark and intricate as knotwork.