Chapter 35
The raven on the fountain rim cocked its head at Elara, decided she was not the sort of thing it cared to share a basin with, and flew off. She watched it go and thought, dimly, that even the wildlife in Luirigh had standards she could not quite meet.
“Drink it all, halfling. Every drop. You’ve had a difficult night and your color is wrong.”
Odhrán had said it when she was on her way out, with the absolute conviction of a male who had read about restorative draughts and concluded that the recipe with the most ingredients must be the most thorough.
He had pressed the cup into her hands, and she had not the heart to tell him her color was perfectly fine, and that the tea was, if anything, the active cause of any pallor she might now possess.
Elara sat in the garden and drank it like a punishment.
She had only herself to blame. She’d sat through the entire morning’s planning, nursing a headache she would not admit to, and Odhrán—who missed nothing—had been waiting at the foot of the stairs with the cup. Fairly caught, then. There was nothing for it but to drink.
The strategizing had ended an hour ago. They had gathered around Odhrán’s table, spread the Luirigh records across it, and moved Tieran of House Caelith’s name to the center.
From there, they had mapped out the next two days.
By every pattern they could read, Tieran would be taken on the third night.
Reynnar and Eamon were heading out that afternoon to find him—to pass by his work, mark the route he took home, and learn his days well enough to recognize him later at a distance and in the dark.
Elara had been quiet through the meeting, volunteering nothing. She answered when asked, offered her observations when the moment required it, and otherwise sat with her hands folded in her lap and tried very hard not to look at Reynnar.
He had not looked at her either.
Not once. Not as he laid out the plan. Not as Aoife corrected him on a route. Not when he pushed back from the table and said, in that maddeningly even voice of his, “Eamon. With me,” before gathering his cloak and walking out the front door without so much as a glance in her direction.
She was trying not to take it personally.
She was, she conceded grudgingly to herself, failing.
Elara rubbed the heel of her palm against one eye.
Beneath the fatigue, beneath the run of logic that kept her upright, was still that terrible tenderness from the night before.
The memory of Reynnar’s fingertips at her throat, of the words he’d breathed against her skin—mo chuisle.
She pushed it back into the recesses of her mind. She needed her head clear.
But the things he had said to her…
She shivered at the memory; she did not know what to do with his confession.
She had handled it, on the whole, by being terribly busy and useful and unavailable for any further such confessions, which was, she suspected, both unhelpful and rather cowardly, and she did not propose to examine that either, thank you very much.
She did not know how to handle this with the care it deserved.
Her own feelings were so convoluted, and unfair, and badly timed; she ought not to be worrying about any of it when there were a hundred more pressing matters at hand.
But this did not stop her from feeling pulled in two opposite directions.
And Reynnar Brannoc, having said the things he had said to her earlier that morning, had clearly decided he was going to give her the simple human courtesy of space.
Elara drank another swallow of the tea. Cold, it had achieved an entirely new dimension of dreadfulness.
A small, involuntary sound escaped the back of her throat—one she would have been mortified to make in company—and she set the cup down on the bench beside her.
Then her face dropped into her hands. For a moment, she stayed there, palms pressed to her eyes, the stone warm beneath her skirts and the whole of her feeling too raw for skin.
Then something cool slipped across the back of her neck.
Her hair lifted all at once—just enough for the air to comb beneath it in one smooth pass, loosening the thick strands at her nape before letting them fall again.
Her breath caught and held.
The afternoon was overcast and still. Not a leaf on the trellis had stirred in an hour. Yet, a second gust caught the loose end of her braid and whisked it across her cheek. A third lifted the corner of her shawl from her knee and set it down again, neatly, like a person tidying.
A soft snort of laughter came from the doorway.
Aoife was leaning there, golden mane over one shoulder, arms folded, grin already in place. Half a step behind her stood Caelion, quiet as moonlight. He lifted one hand, fingers loose, and the wind that had been playing at Elara’s hair gathered itself into a small, polite eddy and dispersed.
“Word through the household is that you’re a Sylph,” Caelion said, the corner of his mouth curving with mischief. “Aoife and I thought we ought to come see for ourselves.”
That pulled a thin, helpless laugh from Elara before she could stop it. She tipped her chin up, and then—because the afternoon had already slid so far into absurdity that dignity seemed a wasted effort—blew a kiss toward them both. “There. You’ve seen the full extent of my hidden power.”
Aoife smirked and dropped onto the bench beside Elara hard enough to jolt the stone, while Caelion settled onto her other side with considerably more grace.
“I’m telling Reynnar you blew kisses at Caelion,” Aoife said. “He’ll weep with envy.”
“You will do no such thing.”
“No,” Aoife agreed solemnly. “I shan’t.” She leaned back and tipped her face up to the overcast sky, hair slipping down her back like liquid metal.
For a moment, her eyes narrowed, as though the low, brooding clouds had offered up some private answer the rest of them had not been invited to hear. “May I tell you a story?” she asked.
Elara looked at her sidelong. “Will it be a long one?”
Aoife considered. “Medium.”
Despite herself, she felt her mouth twitch. “Go on, then.”
“In Ailltir,” Aoife began, “they train the gifted from the moment they draw breath. The kingdom stands at the edge of the northern storms—the City of Spires—carved from glass and cloudstone, its towers tall enough to touch the thunderheads. There, the Sylph learn to move with the wind until there is no difference between muscle and current, will and weather. A child is given to the air almost from birth. Before she walks, she has felt a current beneath her feet. Before she speaks, she has felt one move in her throat.”
“I don’t—”
“Patience. I’m building.”
Caelion let out the smallest of amused breaths through his nose.
Unbothered, Aoife went on. “A child raised in Ailltir moves like nothing else in this world. By five, she steps where the wind asks her to step, without thinking. By twelve, her gift has declared itself—the particular way the air listens to her—and the masters of the Cloud Keeps measure it and give it a name. Most, now, are Aelirae. Skyborne. Storm hunters born with wings, meant to ride the high currents. They can still the air in a man’s throat or send a message a hundred leagues on the same wind.
The others—” she paused, “—are Windsingers.”
Elara’s hands had gone still in her lap.
“Windsingers don’t need wings to fly,” Aoife said, more quietly.
“They speak the air into movement. They carry storms with their voices, turn the tides, shape the songs that bind our world together. Most are gone now—lost in the Great Divide, when the sky was closed to us. Some say the first Windsinger was the breath Epona exhaled when the world was young, and that every Windsinger born after carries a fragment of that breath inside her. The most skilled once lived in Ailltir.”
Aoife turned and looked at Elara properly.
“A Sylph child raised in Ailltir takes twenty years to learn what the air wants of her. Twenty years of training, in halls of cloud and wind, before her own kind will call her proficient. And here you are. A girl with mortal ears and mortal hands who understood the call of the Spioraid and heeded it. You folded yourself into its will effortlessly, and an arrow that should have killed you took a thread of your shoulder and nothing else. That is not luck. That is Ghaoithe, answered by a body that knew the answer before the mind did.”
Elara opened her mouth. Closed it.
Had she truly heeded Ghaoithe?
But how—
She racked her brain, reaching back through the soft, drugged blur of one of her early nights in Tír na nóg, until she found it: her own voice slow and slurred, telling him about the arrow, about how the wind had told her to dance.
“Oh yeah, ealaín,” he had murmured. “And will you?”
“Reynnar told you.”
Aoife dipped her head.
“What you described is what the masters of Ailltir call the first listening.” Caelion’s voice was gentle.
“It is the moment when the air begins to speak to a Sylph who has not yet learned to speak to it. Most Sylph are taught to listen for it from infancy. In a child raised among her own, it is welcomed and trained the moment it is heard. In those untrained, or out of practice, it surfaces only in extremity. When the body is in danger. When Ghaoithe has something it must, urgently, communicate.”
Elara nodded slowly and worried the rim of her cup between her fingers.
“Can Sylph read currents?” she asked. She meant the question to sound idle, almost passing, but her pulse had already climbed into her throat. “On purpose, I mean. Not warnings. Where it has been. Where it is going.”
Aoife’s brows rose. “Yes,” she said. “Cuir-anáil—the parsing of breath. It is one of the oldest disciplines we have, older than the courts. On the isles, it is how we survive. The drifting cities move on the high currents as ships move on the sea. Without cuir-anáil, we would lose whole isles to cloud and fog.”
“How does it work?”