Chapter 53
Winter had settled hard over Latheria, the air beyond the rift carrying no Draoth, no living breath beneath the skin of the world, while snow crusted the ground and the stone beneath Elara’s boots sat dead and silent beneath the ice.
Her first breath cut all the way down.
Cold entered her lungs, and Elara understood at once how long she had been starving without knowing it.
For ten years, she had lived inside this realm without recognizing the slow erosion of it, the constant draining away of something vital and unseen.
Only now, after Tír na nóg, could she feel the absence properly.
Beside her, Reynnar had gone very still.
The Aelfhenge assembled itself around them as her vision adjusted: gray standing stones rising from the dark beneath the moon, their surfaces silvered with frost. Beyond them, frozen grass stretched brittle across the borderlands, whispering and crackling beneath the wind.
And between two of the stones, no more than twenty feet away, stood a sentry.
He only stared at them at first. Young. Human. Wide-eyed enough that she watched understanding strike him in real time. Then the color left his face.
He shouted.
Somewhere beyond the henge, a bell began ringing sharp and frantic through the dark.
Shit.
The sentry faced them again, sunstone flaring at his hand. Stolen Draoth kindled beneath his skin, brightening in that unnatural, borrowed way Elara knew too well—an Ellylldan trapped inside him and taught to obey.
Reynnar exploded.
One heartbeat, he stood beside her, heat and breath and his hand still near enough to catch.
The next, the sentry was off his feet, Reynnar’s hand locked around his throat.
Bone cracked beneath his grip. The man clawed at him, boots kicking uselessly through the frozen grass, but Reynnar’s attention remained fixed on the ring.
He ripped the sunstone free in a burst of light that Elara felt in her back teeth.
The Draoth inside it flared. Recognition—that was the only word for it. Some caged, ruined fragment of his people turning toward fire, toward kin.
Reynnar’s mercy left his face between one breath and the next.
Flame erupted over his hand. White at the center. Gold at the edges. It curled around his fingers the way water does, unhurried, intimate—sliding over his wrist, licking along his cloak without leaving so much as a char mark. Then it found the sentry.
Slowly.
The screams split the dark open.
Reynnar smiled. Fire moved in his eyes, and the smile was worse than the flames, reaching some old, animal place in Elara and making it go still.
He held it. Let the smell climb—scorched wool and flesh—then the sound of boots crashing through the trees beyond the Aelfhenge, guards spilling into the open with blades drawn and sunstones blazing at their fists like stolen pieces of the sky.
He let them come.
Reynnar threw out a hand, and flames swept from him in a golden arc, striking the first rank head-on.
They were there, and then they were not.
Their screams rose all at once—horrible, brief—swallowed whole by the roar before the sound could finish leaving their throats.
Fire rushed the frozen grass, climbed the black trunks beyond, and the cold fled Elara’s skin so fast it stole her breath.
He snarled.
Not a Sídhe sound. Something older, dragged up from beneath language entirely—the voice of Tine forced through a Tuatha’s throat, primordial and furious enough that the stones shook under Elara’s boots.
She felt it in her sternum. Felt it in her molars.
He sent another wave into the trees, and the forest answered in red.
Everything burned.
The fortified wall caught in sections—one watch platform, then the next, flame racing along tarred ropes and dry timber with a sound like tearing cloth.
Men shouted. Horses screamed. Bells rang and rang and meant nothing against the roar.
Osin’s soldiers ran through the blaze as shadows run, formless, frantic, swallowed by their own light.
Elara stood in the center of the Aelfhenge and did not move as Reynnar stalked back to her side.
He held out his hand. “Let’s go,” he said.
There was nothing in his gaze but rage, and beneath it something far more terrible—a flash of savage delight as the humans who had worn his people like jewels burned to death.
She took his hand. Fire still moved at his fingertips, and she did not flinch from it, only held on, her heart hammering against her ribs as she reached for the rift and pulled—
The world came apart and put itself back together wrong.
Northern province—or as close as she was able to get to it.
Snow drove into her lungs. Pine and mountain-cold and wind, all of it at once, and she had barely found her feet before her gaze snagged on something at the treeline and stopped.
Ivan stood not ten feet away, so still that for one strange, suspended moment he seemed less a man than a part of the dark itself—something the forest had grown and forgotten.
A heavy coat hung from his shoulders, black wool gone pale with snow.
More had gathered in his hair, soft against the dark strands, and the tracks around his boots had already begun to fill, smoothed over by a fall that had been coming down for some time.
His gaze found her face.
The wind kept moving through the pines. Snow kept falling. The mountain had no interest in what passed between them, and she hated it for that, hated that the world could continue being itself while he looked at her like that.
Then his eyes moved to Reynnar, and the moment passed.
“Ellylldan.”
Reynnar inclined his head ever so slightly, a vein in his temple jumping. “Hunter.”
Their stare held in the snowbound dark, wordless and narrow as a drawn blade: an agreement to stand in the same place and not make war of it. For her sake, perhaps. Or for the larger horror waiting beyond. Elara did not look too closely at which.
Ivan led them through Eldham without a lamp, cutting across the village with the certainty of someone who had learned its turns well enough to walk them half-blind.
He must have been there for some time, long enough to know which stones tipped underfoot, which alleys narrowed, which corners gathered ice where the wind came down from the ridge.
At the end of the second street, Ivan stopped in front of a low stone building with no sign above the door. Warmth seeped from beneath it, carrying boiled herbs, tallow smoke, and clean linen into the winter air.
An infirmary, then.
He opened the door without knocking, and inside a woman slept in a chair beside the inner room, her long red hair braided over one shoulder, her coat still buttoned to her throat as if she had never meant to rest at all.
One hand lay near the blade at her hip, fingers loose but ready even in sleep.
It was the posture of a soldier, though exhaustion had dragged her down at last.
Bryn.
Elara knew her at once.
She woke the instant the door creaked, her eyes opening clear and alert before the hinges had finished their complaint, one hand already moving toward the knife at her side.
Then she saw Ivan, and the motion stilled.
Her gaze shifted to Elara, lingering there as the sleep left her face, then moved to Reynnar standing beside her.
Slowly, Bryn pushed herself out of the chair, her red braid slipping over the front of her buttoned coat as she inclined her head.
“It is good to see you again, Hallowed.”
Elara smiled. “It’s good to see you, too.”
Bryn’s mouth twitched. Then her eyes slid to Reynnar, and one red brow lifted. “And another Sídhe in Eldham,” she said, voice dry enough to scrape frost from the windows. “Brilliant. The other provinces will never shut up about this if word gets out.”
Elara’s smile threatened to widen as Reynnar looked from Bryn to her, the faint crease between his brows betraying his confusion.
“She’s pleased to see us,” Elara said.
Bryn gave a soft, humorless laugh and reached for her coat.
Ivan gave her the smallest nod, the kind shared by those who had survived too many nights to waste words on courtesy.
Bryn answered it with a tilt of her chin before looking once more at Elara.
The wryness dimmed, leaving something strained beneath it, something Elara could not place, before Bryn stepped past them, silent as she had woken, and drew the door nearly closed behind her.
The bed stood near the shuttered window, its white linens drawn high over the male beneath them.
He was smaller than Elara had imagined.
That was the first thing to register. Not the silence of the room, nor the hollowness of his cheeks, nor the faint rise and fall beneath the blanket, but the narrowness of him.
Months had made him vast in her mind. She had built him from scraps: a name pressed into an old journal, a missing brother, an emptiness her life had grown around.
Raijin. Raijin. Raijin. She had written it until the letters became something nearer to prayer.
He had been taken with her. Somewhere in the buried dark of her childhood, some broken piece of her had understood that she needed him.
But the male beneath the linens was pale and slight, his face angled toward the shutters as though sleep had found him listening for a voice on the other side.
His hair had been shorn close to his skull.
His hands lay atop the blanket, long-fingered and unmoving, the skin so thin that the veins beneath seemed drawn there in blue thread.
There was Sídhe grace in the fine architecture of his face, in the slant of his bones, a likeness she knew from genealogy charts, from the memory pulled from the Collective, and, with a small, sickening ache, from her own reflection.
Her throat tightened until the room seemed to lose air.