Chapter 42 #2
That morning, Aoife had braided her hair close and tight, tucking it back so the curve of her mortal ears disappeared beneath the plaits, and Elara had dressed with the grim certainty that it was a hopeless disguise.
Even with the mark. Yet no one in the lower market paused for a second look.
No one at the gate stopped them. Now and then, a pair of eyes lifted to their company, but when they lingered, they slid not to her but to Eamon.
It happened once. Then again. A subtle change in the air around him.
A small tightening in posture. The instinctive way a crowd altered itself around power when it recognized it in the body before the mind had named it.
Only then, watching the market part ever so slightly to make room for him without meaning to, did Elara begin to understand what Reynnar had meant when he’d told her Eamon was the strongest of the living Tuatha Dé Danann.
At a spice stall, a merchant looked up from weighing out a vivid orange powder into paper. His eyes found Reynnar at once and widened.
“My lord Brannoc.” The bow was already half-made before he remembered the spice still in his hands. “You are—you are home. We had not heard—”
“Peder.” Reynnar reached across the counter and clasped the man’s forearm, preventing him from fully bowing. “No parade.”
The merchant laughed, surprised and a little breathless. “No parade. Of course.” His gaze passed to Aoife. “My lady. It has been too quiet without you.”
“Has it?” Aoife said. “What a pity.”
He laughed again, then pressed the packet of spice into Reynnar’s hand and refused, with much waving, the coin Reynnar tried to give him.
And so it went.
At the next stall, a weaver thrust three lengths of fine cloth into Caelion’s arms—deep red, black as midnight, pale gold—and would hear nothing of payment.
At the one after that, a woman pressed small glazed pastries into Aoife’s palm, and another into Elara’s when Aoife introduced her.
Eamon accepted his in silence. The woman held his gaze a beat longer than she had held anyone else’s and inclined her head with a gravity that hovered somewhere between courtesy and reverence.
Overhead, against the great white sweep of sky, things flew.
Elara tipped back her head and nearly stopped in the middle of the street.
At first, she took them for birds. Then they wheeled lower, and she saw that they were made of flame.
Long-necked, long-tailed creatures of molten fire, their bodies streamed with light.
They drifted on the valley thermals lazily, vanishing behind rooftops and appearing again in flashes of gold and scarlet.
One dipped low enough that she saw the strange delicacy of it—not feather, not scale, but a finer substance, a net of light held in the likeness of a creature.
“Spioraid Tine,” Caelion said beside her. “Fire spirits. Small ones. They roost in the volcanic caves above the city and come down to feed on the heat of the streets.”
“Small ones,” Elara repeated.
“Yes.”
“There are larger ones.”
“Considerably.”
“Dragons?” she asked before she could stop herself.
Aoife laughed aloud. “What did you think the mountains were warming themselves against?”
“I—Aoife, I’ve been informed of perhaps seven mind-shattering things since crossing this border. I’ve not had time to construct proper theories.”
“Draguin are private creatures,” Reynnar said, and his voice had changed, gentled by an old kind of reverence.
“They dwell in the deepest calderas to the south, in the ancient cones that still burn below. They do not come down. It has been a thousand years since one of the great draguin was seen above a living city.” His eyes drifted briefly to the volcanic ridge beyond the town.
“On the clearest days, if you are lucky, you may glimpse one above the southern peaks. No more than a passing darkness in the haze.”
“A thousand years.”
“The last was Mor Cathaoir,” Aoife said. “Crimson Throne. She circled Teinloch for three days and nights before flying south and vanishing for good. They say she was mourning a hatchling. Draguin breed rarely.”
Elara fell quiet. Above them, the fire spirits caught the sun and trailed light through the sky.
“I didn’t know,” she said at last, very softly. “I didn’t know the world still held such things.”
Reynnar turned toward her, smiling. “Lasairín is only a market town. You have scarcely begun to see what this world holds.”
They stopped at a shop with a green door, where a woman with hair the color of banked embers met them at the counter. She greeted Reynnar, Aoife, and Caelion by name and clasped each of their wrists in turn. To Elara and Eamon, she offered only a thin smile.
“There is no message for you, my lord.”
“None?”
“None.” Her expression did not change. “I checked the log twice this morning when your bird came ahead. I sent word back to Teinloch at once confirming your arrival. Nothing has come from the keep. Nothing from your lord father. Nothing from your lady mother.”
A stillness settled over the little shop.
“Strange,” Reynnar said lightly.
“Very.”
“Hm.”
Beside him, Aoife’s face had gone utterly blank, which was itself a sign. Caelion’s gaze flicked once toward her and away. Even Eamon, standing at the back, shifted his weight.
Reynnar thanked the woman, then touched Elara lightly at the elbow and guided them back into the street.
“A delay, nothing more,” he said too quickly as they stepped into the steam-lit bustle.
“Teinloch runs on its own time. My father may be out hunting, or the courier delayed at a border post, or the bird eaten by something ambitious. We’ll rest here tonight and continue in the morning. ”
The inn he chose stood on the third tier, its windows overlooking the steaming runways below.
He paid for four rooms with a coin the innkeeper at first refused, then accepted, then seemed instantly to regret accepting before insisting, with almost anxious generosity, that they take the four finest chambers instead.
Elara’s room held a fireplace laid ready for lighting, a bed spread with a deep red coverlet, and, behind a curtain, a copper bath large enough to drown in.
When she drew the curtain back, steam curled softly into the room.
The bath had already been filled, its water rich with heat and the faint scent of minerals, as though some hidden pipe carried the hot spring itself straight up through the bones of the inn.
She shut the door behind her.
Then she turned the bolt.
Only when it slid into place did some small, taut part of her begin, at last, to ease.
She stripped out of her road-stiff clothes and let them fall where they would.
Then she stepped into the bath. The heat caught her first at the calves, then climbed slowly until she sank to her chin with a breath that shook on its way out.
The water held her with almost punishing warmth, working its way into every place the journey had made sore.
Her eyes slipped shut.
Her hand rose to her neck before she knew she’d meant it to.
The mark was still there.
She could feel it beneath her fingertips—the faintest lift in the skin. Aoife had smirked and said there was little to see: no more than a crescent, something that would fade within a day or two if left unrenewed.
Her fingers traced it, and at once, her breath faltered. The Cara, which she had held in check all through the day, rose inside her like a tide in a narrow passage, and with it came the phantom of his teeth against her skin so vividly that her whole body folded around the sensation.
His mouth. His hand at the back of her neck. The moment before he shifted to the other side. The low sound he had made when she trembled under him.
Her other hand slipped beneath the water.
Her legs ached from the road. Spice still lingered on her tongue from the market. Steam rose around her in long, lazy veils. And the mark at her throat pulsed in time with her blood, as if it had only been waiting for her to stop pretending.
She touched herself. Slowly.
She did not use his name, even in her own head.
She used the memory of his mouth at her throat, his hand buried in her hair, the rough sound he had made when she trembled beneath him—that was enough.
Her back arched against the copper of the bath.
Her fingers pressed hard as the pleasure coiled tighter and tighter through her until her thighs trembled and her breath came in ragged bursts and the world around her went white and she shattered.
For one drifting instant, she thought she might truly have blacked out.
Then the world returned in pieces: steam rising around her, water trickling from the pipe in the wall, the heavy, wet thunder of her own heartbeat.
And at the far end of the Cara she had, in her abandon, flung wide open—
Him.