Chapter 48
By the time Elara stepped out into the corridor, Teinloch was glowing.
The last of the day lingered in the high windows, but the city below had moved on without waiting for the sun’s permission.
Aoife was waiting for her at the end of the hall with the unmistakable expression of a woman pleased with her own handiwork. “Well,” she said, looking Elara over from hairline to hem. “You look like trouble.”
“I feel like bait.”
Aoife’s grin widened. “Same thing, often enough.”
Aoife had finally bullied her into a dress of dark, gleaming green, the kind of color that looked almost black until the light struck it and coaxed something richer from the silk.
A long, soft neckline bared the line of her throat and collarbones, revealing far more skin than Elara had ever willingly offered to public view.
The skirt flowed from her hips like water, though the slit at one side ruined whatever modesty the rest of the gown pretended toward, exposing her leg nearly to the hip each time she walked.
“I feel one strong breeze away from a public scandal.”
Aoife lifted one shoulder. “How else is anyone meant to know you possess legs?”
Elara looked down at herself. “I had foolishly assumed the matter already settled.”
“Coward.”
“Pragmatist.”
Aoife made a face and they made their way down through the keep and into the courtyard, where the heat of the evening met them at once.
Teinloch breathed differently after dusk.
The air turned close and fragrant, heavy with spice and steam and the deep mineral warmth of the caldera, touching the skin like a hand that lingered.
Lower in the city, sweet smoke curled from meat roasting over an open flame; Elara tasted both on the wind.
The others were already waiting below.
Caelion leaned one shoulder against a pillar, dressed in dark bronze and black, his silver-pale hair messy and loose at the nape. Eamon stood beside him in ash-gray, the cut of his coat severe and elegant both, the line of him as composed as ever. Reynnar—
Elara slowed.
He had dressed simply, if one could call anything worn by him simple.
A deep wine-colored shirt lay open at the throat, its sleeves rolled to his forearms beneath a black leather vest worked with dark brass clasps and subtle ember-bright stitching.
A wide belt sat low at his waist, layered with hammered metal and dark plates that caught the firelight when he moved.
The colors warmed the amber of his eyes and deepened the darkness of his hair, while his exposed arms looked powerful and sun-bronzed by the Ellylldan sun.
He looked devastating.
Worse, he looked at her as if he had forgotten every useful skill he possessed.
Whatever Caelion had been saying to him died unfinished.
Reynnar’s attention moved to her and remained there, slow and whole and openly male in a way that made the heat of the city feel suddenly personal.
His eyes dropped and lifted again, taking in the dress, the loosened hair, the bare line of her throat, and when they came back to her face, there was a brief, dangerous pause in him—as if some instinct had started forward and had only just been checked.
He seemed to remember, belatedly, that language existed. “You look beautiful.”
Elara made herself descend the last few steps with something resembling grace. “I was told,” she said, “that I looked like trouble.”
His smile appeared, fang-tipped and dangerous. “That, too.”
Aoife clapped once. “Excellent. We’re all uncomfortable. Let’s go.”
By the time they reached the lower streets, Teinloch had already given itself over to the night.
Aoife walked before them with her chin high and her golden hair loose, her skirts flashing bronze in the lantern-light, and the city opened around her with the easy affection reserved for someone truly welcomed home.
Hands lifted. Voices called after her. A woman at a dye-stall leaned half over her table to catch Aoife’s wrist and kiss the air beside her cheek.
A pair of boys carrying garlands nearly dropped them in their hurry to bow, and Aoife, with all the imperious grace of a queen in exile returned to her own, plucked one garland from their arms and set it crookedly atop Caelion’s head before walking on.
He did not protest. The flowers suited him.
Reynnar fell into step beside Elara—too close and not nearly close enough.
The slit of her dress opened with every few steps, letting the warm air move across her skin. She was aware of it. She was aware, too, of the way Reynnar’s gaze kept slipping down and away and back again as if dragged against his will.
Fire ran in the stone channels beside the roads, casting a restless gold over the passing crowd.
No one let them pass a stall empty-handed.
A baker broke apart little honey-glazed cakes still steaming from the oven and pressed them into their palms. Elara burned her fingers, then the roof of her mouth, and accepted the injury as the fair price of pleasure.
At the next, a woman caught Elara’s wrist and drew a line of gold pigment with her thumb.
“For fortune,” she said, and let her go.
Caelion pressed a steaming cup into her hands. The drink inside was dark, biting, and sweet. Elara drank, and the city grew soft. When a second cup was offered, she took that one as well.
“You are going to sleep upright if you keep that up,” Aoife informed her.
“It is too late for caution,” Elara said.
“That,” Caelion murmured, reaching around Aoife to steal half her cake, “may be the most Ellylldan thing you’ve said all week.”
Elara smiled and lifted the cup again.
Music had begun somewhere farther into the city: strings and drums and something bright and metal-struck. They followed the sound to the clós mór, the great lower courtyard, to a bonfire nearly the size of the square. The kind of blaze only a people intimate with fire would think to build.
Elara stopped at the outer ring of the crowd and watched. “What is this?” she asked.
“An Damhsa Tine,” Reynnar said. He was close behind her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him even through the dense, living heat of the square.
“The Fire Dance,” he said. “Old Ellylldan. We do it on festival nights, and whenever there is something worth giving to the flame.” He paused, and in the pause she heard the smile in him before she saw it. “Tonight, there is.”
Aoife appeared at her side, cheeks bright. “Come on,” she said, setting her cup aside and taking Elara by the wrist.
“I don’t know it.”
Aoife gave her a look. “There is nothing to know,” she said, already pulling her forward. “Only stop thinking for once and let your body remember how to be alive.”
Elara had been wrong to resist.
The dance asked very little of thought. It wanted only that she feel the drumbeat beneath her feet and let her body answer it.
The people before her lifted their hands, and she lifted hers in turn.
The spiral drew inward, and she followed.
Heat brushed one side of her face, the cool night the other, and somewhere within the turning rhythm she stopped dividing herself into watcher and watched.
She passed Reynnar on the second turn.
He stood near one of the outer pillars with Eamon beside him, both of them apart from the dance. As the spiral carried Elara by, her face lifted toward him, and through the high golden blaze of the fire, she found his gaze already waiting.
Firelight burnished his eyes to a deep topaz, and whatever composure he had worn through the streets had gone from him completely.
The wine in his hand sat forgotten. He watched her with the same expression she had only ever caught in fragments before—hidden in pauses, in near touches, in the fleeting moments before he remembered to pull himself back behind all that careful restraint.
Only there was no restraint now.
The spiral carried her onward, and Elara gave herself back to the dance.
The city blurred around her, heat rising over her skin. Wine and spice, music and the sticky sweetness of Teinloch’s night air gathered close, until the world narrowed.
When the spiral swept her past Reynnar again, his hand lifted. His fingers brushed the turning fall of her skirts, scarcely more than a touch, only silk streaming over his knuckles before the dance carried her beyond him.
It was nothing.
And yet the place where he had touched her seemed to bloom with light.
The dance continued, the spiral drawing inward and outward and Elara could not have said when the square began to change.
The drums still sounded, but their pulse softened.
The voices woven above them lowered, as if the whole clós mór had bent toward a gentler register.
One dancer slowed, then another. Faces lifted. Steps faltered and fell away.
Elara followed their gaze and stilled at the center of the spiral.
The spirits were descending.
The first of them broke from the wider spiral and swept once around her.
Warmth passed over her shoulders, so close it lifted the loose strands of hair at her neck.
Another followed. Then another. Soon they were circling her in widening rings, old gold and copper and the pale white heart of flame, their heat moving over her skin in long, slow currents that did not burn and did not threaten, only touched and passed on, until her breath had nowhere to settle.
More came.
Aoife said her name from somewhere beyond the dancers, but the sound reached Elara as if from a great distance.
There was order in the spirits’ movement, something deeper than circling, a hidden paradigm in the way they turned and rose and returned, and as she watched it, a strange tightness gathered inside her.
The currents.
They were creating currents.
It came so suddenly that it nearly made her sway. Her hands opened at her sides, and every fine hair along her arms lifted. The night air felt changed against her skin, alive in a way she had no language for.