Chapter 40 #2
Her mouth was flat, but her eyes had gone hard as they moved over the fresh bandages at his side, the bruising beneath his ribs, the old pale lines beneath all the new. The ones Yoni had left.
“Bloody animals,” she muttered, eyes cutting across the room toward Yoni, and the expression she turned on him was potent enough to blister paint from a wall.
Ivan let out a breath.
“What?” The look swung back to him at once, keen and familiar. “Am I not allowed to hate him on your behalf?”
He tipped his head against the wall. “How sentimental of you, cousin.”
The corner of her mouth twitched in a half-smile. “Well,” she said, “it’s overdue,” but the fine lines at the corners of her eyes that hadn’t been there months ago didn’t move. She was holding her hands very still.
“What’s wrong, Syb?”
She blinked. Whatever he’d seen closed over like water. “Nothing. Just remembering.”
He nodded. He understood that well enough.
Being together like this—on the run, leaving everything behind—it had the quality of old scar tissue pulling.
It was not the first time it had happened to them.
They had been younger and considerably more stupid about it all those years ago.
He was not sure they were much wiser now.
Ivan let his gaze travel the room.
Most of them had already turned inward with exhaustion.
Yoni sat with his back to the wall, long legs stretched out before him, watching Bryn snore.
Gideon had gone still enough to pass for sleep.
Across the chamber, Dominic was the only one still tracking them at all, his dark head bowed toward Dario as they worked through the last of the provisions, though every so often his eyes lifted—quick, measuring, and gone again.
Ivan looked back to Sybil.
“What’s your plan?”
Torchlight moved over the blunt line of her pale hair and caught in the cool planes of her face. She blinked at him. Slow, innocent. “Whatever do you mean?”
“Don’t.”
One pale brow lifted.
Ivan held her gaze. “You would never come this far on a whim—you wouldn’t be here,” he said, “unless there was something you wanted.”
Her fingers tapped once against her knee and went still.
“So,” he said, “what do you want with the north?”
“Am I not allowed,” she asked, “to want a glimpse of something the rest of the realm has been barred from for decades?” Her mouth curved faintly. “Curiosity. Intellectual interest. A perfectly respectable motive.”
Ivan looked to Tristan, but he only shrugged.
Pain lanced through Ivan’s head. He closed his eyes and let out a slow breath.
“Have you seen her again?” Tristan whispered.
Every muscle in Ivan’s body drew taut. Tristan did not speak her name. None of them had. Still, the question struck true enough without it. Something in Ivan’s chest tightened, hard and mean, his lungs forgetting for half a beat how to do their work. He ignored that with the ease of long practice.
“No, I—”
The lie died before it found its footing.
He did not know how to reach her. That was the truth of it.
He had searched for her in every dark current and whisper of shadow since waking.
He had opened small rifts—mere tears in the dark, no bigger than a handspan—more times than he cared to count, waiting like a fool for an answer.
Nothing had come of it. No answering pull. No hidden current. No sign of her.
Whatever had drawn them together that day had come from her alone.
That knowledge sat sour in him.
He had even bled himself once, just to test the theory she had given him, as if a little blood and a great deal of stupidity might make the dark yield her up again.
Bryn had nearly taken his head off for it.
Sybil had been quieter, which was worse.
Both of them had spoken to him as if he were a child who could not be trusted near a kitchen knife.
Ivan let out a slow breath.
“No,” he said at last. “She must not—” His mouth flattened. “She must be busy.”
Across from him, Tristan and Sybil both nodded easily, though he could see the thought passing between them all the same. Busy was a generous word for whatever game she had told him she was now playing in Tír na nóg. Busy suggested the ordinary inconveniences of an ordinary life.
There was nothing ordinary about what she was up to.
The torch above them flickered. He looked at the ceiling.
“You needn’t fret overmuch for her,” Sybil said with a faint sniff. “She has always been resourceful. Not like this catastrophe.” She inclined her head toward Tristan, who recoiled as though slapped, one hand going to his chest.
“For the last time, I believed all my friends were dead.”
“You believed—”
Tristan sat up straighter, dark hair falling untidily over his brow.
“That everyone had died in the Pit collapse, and then someone I had every reason to believe dead for years appeared in my room in the middle of the night,” he said, “and had the nerve to be insufferably composed about it.” He flung up a hand.
“I maintain I behaved with remarkable restraint.”
“You threw a boot at me.”
“I thought you were a ghost.”
“You missed.”
“I’d been drinking.”
Something flickered behind Tristan's eyes at that—gone as quick as it came, but Ivan caught it.
Calista had been the one who always knew how much he'd had before he did.
There was no boot-throwing story that didn't run through her first, and for the space of a breath Tristan looked like a man who'd forgotten that, then remembered.
Ivan pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes.
But this. This was precisely why he had kept Sybil and Tristan on opposite sides of a city for the better part of a decade.
They loved each other with the kind of vicious, airless devotion that only ever seemed to grow between people who had met too young and lodged too deeply in one another to ever come free cleanly.
And they quarreled out of that same closeness—circling, prodding, striking every tender place with the ease of those who knew exactly where the old wounds were buried.
He had spent the better part of his childhood bracing for the day the two of them might finally collide.
But somewhere along the line, he had understood the truth of it: they were too alike.
Made of the same troublesome material—cursed with the same restless mind, the same refusal to yield, the same habit of reaching first for wit and wounded pride before ever admitting to softer things.
It would never have worked between them—not that they had ever truly put it to the test.
There was love there, certainly.
Too much of it, perhaps.
Enough that on their first night in the tunnels, when the company had at last stopped to rest, Ivan had endured a thorough reckoning from both sides.
Tristan had gone for him first, furious that Sybil still lived and that Ivan had let him grieve her all those years.
Then he had turned that same fury on Sybil for being alive in such an inconveniently secretive fashion.
Sybil, with all the grace of a woman wrongly accused by a fool, had thrown up her hands and pointed the whole matter back at Ivan.
And when they had finished attacking each other, they joined forces and turned on him again.
It had been, all in all, a touching reunion.
Sybil turned her back on him and stretched out on her pallet with the kind of finality that suggested kingdoms might sooner change course than she would.
Tristan rolled his eyes and eased himself down as well, dragging the blanket up to his chin.
He stared at the stone above him in the same way Ivan had been staring at it for the past five days, which meant he wasn’t going to sleep, either.
Perhaps he sensed Ivan looking, because he turned then. “We’ll try again tomorrow, yes?” he said softly. One hand emerged from beneath the blanket to wave, vague and admonishing. “And no more with the knife.”
“Tristan, I’m not a fucking idiot.”
That won him a small smile. Not mocking—worse. Fond.
“Love makes fools of better men than us.”
Ivan huffed once through his nose and glanced away. “Go to sleep.”
“Yes, sir,” Tristan said, lifting two fingers in a lazy salute, then cast one last wounded glare at Sybil’s back before rolling over.
The torches had burned low enough to hollow the room out in amber and shadow.
Resin hissed softly in the brackets. One flame guttered, recovered, then bent sideways in a draft Ivan could not feel from where he lay.
Across the room, someone had begun to snore—a rough, intermittent sound that caught once in the throat before settling into rhythm.
Bedrolls shifted. A boot scraped faintly against stone.
Then the room drew quiet again, thin and brittle.
When Sybil spoke, she scarcely disturbed it.
“We need to be here.”
Ivan turned his head on the blanket and watched her profile in the dying light. Beside him, Tristan stilled and rolled his head toward her too, the last of his restlessness falling away.
Sybil lay on her back, looking up at the ceiling as though the answer were written somewhere in the seams between the stones. Her hands were folded over her stomach, fingers laced.
“What did you see?”
“The north is where it begins,” she whispered. “All of it. What comes next. What she still has to do.” Only then did she turn her face toward them. Torchlight caught in her eyes and failed to warm them. “If we aren’t here for it,” she said, “she will have no road through what comes next.”