Chapter 32 #2
“I’ve heard nothing of this,” he said at last. “But Osin was never in the habit of granting anyone the whole of a thing.” His gaze drifted briefly toward the lake, unfocused, following older habits of thought.
“He cuts truth into pieces and hands each man only enough to damn himself with.” His mouth flattened.
“That he may have allies among the Sídhe…”
He let the rest hang a moment before exhaling through his nose.
“That would explain far too much.”
Elara gave a small, grim nod. “I know.”
Ivan was quiet for a moment. “I’ll look into it,” he said. “As far as I can without drawing notice.” His gaze stayed on hers. The sunlight lay warm across her face, but she seemed colder for it. “You’ll need to move carefully.”
A flicker of impatience crossed her mouth, quick and familiar. “I am being careful.”
“Be more so.”
Her brows rose. “How reassuringly specific.”
He ignored that. “What you’ve uncovered is dangerous, Elara. More dangerous than anything you’ve put your hands to yet. If Osin has allies beyond his own court, then some of the most dangerous hands in this will belong to people clever enough never to show them.”
“You needn’t worry. I won’t be reckless.”
The answer came too quickly, and at the very end of it, something tightened in her face—a small check, a tiny flinch, gone almost at once. He did not believe her for a moment.
“And you’re with the Vredians now, aren’t you?” she asked. “Are you safe there? I hadn’t thought they were especially fond of you.”
“Safe is not the word I’d choose.”
“Then why are you with them?” Her voice softened further. “What happened?”
After that night hung between them, unsaid and no less present for it. The wind lifted a strand of hair across her cheek. She did not push it away. Neither did he. The restraint of it—the small cruelty of keeping his hand at his side—cost him more than several things he had survived that day.
“Dominic collapsed the Pit,” he said at last. “Then he took me north. To find Godfrey.”
Her eyes widened, and he felt the bloodstone leap where it lay between them, a hard bright pulse against his chest, as if it had heard the name and knew its weight. He saw her hand twitch toward it, then stop.
“You—” Her throat worked. “You went looking for him?”
Ivan held her gaze.
For you.
Yes. Always for you.
Every step I have taken of my own will and not another man’s has bent, in the end, toward you.
He cleared his throat. “I gave you my word.”
She looked at him the way she always had when she sensed there was more beneath the surface and meant to dig for it if given half the chance. He watched her search his face and find nothing he was willing to surrender. That, too, was a cruelty. But the alternative was worse.
“And did you?” she asked after a moment. “Find him?”
He dipped his head. “We pulled him out of a compound in the west. Whether he’s still alive is a more complicated question. There was a fight. Osin had laid a trap.”
“Is that why—”
“I’ve had better days,” he finished for her. “Yes.”
Elara’s gaze dropped to his chest, as if she could see through the black of his coat to the torn flesh waiting for him somewhere else.
Her face changed by fractions: the tightening at the corner of her mouth, the slight flare of her nostrils, the careful way she folded her hands together so he would not see them shake.
Then, he felt a pull.
A small, decisive tug, as if someone on the other end of a very long line had taken hold and tested the slack.
The light in the field changed. The wind shifted and thinned.
Somewhere very far away—somewhere that was also, somehow, in him—he felt the heat of a tent, and the press of bandages, and Bryn’s hands working over a wound he had been managing not to think about. Ivan set his teeth against it.
Not yet.
Elara felt it, too. Her gaze snapped to the stone at her collarbone and then to him, alarmed.
“I’m being called back,” he said. “I think.”
“Wait.”
Her throat worked. The sheen in her eyes caught the light and turned them glassy.
For one wild, useless moment, she looked as though she might reach for him.
She stopped. He let her stop, because the only alternative was to close the distance himself—to put his hands against her face and tell her every true thing he had been holding back for the better part of ten years.
That was not an option that existed in any world he could see.
“Thane,” she gasped, and the name went through him cleanly.
“I couldn’t save him.” Her eyes pleaded with him to understand.
“I found him. I went into the Void and I found him, and he—” Her voice caught.
She swallowed hard enough that he saw the pain of it in her throat.
“He’s stuck, Ivan. His soul. They all are.
He said áine holds the Void in her grip.
That she keeps Rhiannon in her thrall. Without Rhiannon, no soul can pass to the Otherworld.
They’re trapped there. He’s trapped there. ”
The world narrowed.
There was no field then. No wind. No bloodstone dragging at his chest. Only Thane’s name, still ringing somewhere in his mind, and the memory of a boy’s laughter in a house that no longer existed.
A hand shoving his shoulder. Mud on polished floors.
Their mother calling from another room. Thane grinning.
Ivan’s breath entered him wrong.
He felt it catch beneath his sternum, felt his body try to reject it, as if grief were a thing physical enough to be expelled before it reached the bloodstream. His fingers curled once at his side and then went still. The nails bit into his palm. Pain bloomed there, small and useful.
He held on to it.
The pull came again—stronger now, less an asking than a hand at the back of his neck. The tent rose up before him for one disorienting beat: the heat, the slick of his own blood, Bryn’s voice somewhere above him saying his name in that flat, furious way she used when she was afraid.
Ivan pushed it down.
“I’m so sorry.”
Ivan shook his head. “You have nothing to apologize for.” He had thought he was prepared for it. He had thought a great many things. A slow breath left him, and with it came some measure of control. “I suspected,” he said quietly. “About áine.”
She blinked. “You—”
“Osin bound my tongue. I couldn’t tell you—not about áine, not about a lot of things. I learned to work around it where I could, to choose certain words, certain phrasings, to make an oath bend without breaking it. But her name…” He swallowed. “Hers, I could never speak.”
His throat tightened around the absence of the old command.
“I wondered about the other goddesses,” he said. “Why they had not intervened. Why nothing had come of it. It makes sense now—if Rhiannon is bound.”
Elara worried her lower lip. “Do you think áine betrayed Epona, too?”
Ivan shook his head. “I don’t know. I only saw her once—when I was a boy. That first Luminalia, when she presented you to the realm. After that, everything I knew of her came secondhand, through Osin.” A pause. “I never got the sense she visited the realm often.”
Her nose scrunched, thinking, and the light and the cottage beyond them wavered—bright, then pale, then gone again. His pulse stumbled in answer.
“How can I reach you again?”
Gods-damned fool.
He had not meant to ask it. The question slipped its leash before he could call it back.
She did not seem to mind. “I don’t know,” she said softly.
“Try searching for a current, perhaps, if you are traveling. If we’re in the Void at the same time, perhaps it will pull at us both.
” Her hand pressed lightly to the stone at her chest as though to hold the song of it still.
“Think of me. Hold to the oath. I will do the same. Perhaps one of us catches the other.”
Think of me.
Ivan almost laughed. Self-deprecating and pathetic.
“Very well,” was all he said.
The grass dimmed beneath his boots, the green door wavering as though seen through water. He had a breath left here, perhaps two.
A flush bloomed along her cheekbones, betraying what Ivan knew she was trying hard to master. It had always been that way with her. Even as a girl, she had carried herself as though feeling too much were some private failing she meant to conquer.
He gathered what he could of her in that final breath and held it close, the way a dying man might hoard a last swallow of water.
“Stay alive,” she said, the words coming quickly.
The corner of his lips faltered, and for one brief, ruined second, all the discipline went out of his face. “That was my line.”
Her mouth softened by some unbearable degree. “I remember,” she said. “I’m calling the debt.”
She took one step toward him, and the grass blurred beneath her feet. Her mouth shaped another word, but the sound never reached him. The lake vanished first. Then the cottage. Then the green door, folding into darkness as if the world had closed its hand around them.
Ivan reached for her—and found only night.