Chapter 56 #3
Her mouth tightened faintly, there and gone, before she turned and ascended the steps again, taking the scent of lavender and smoke with her.
Elara quirked a brow at Caelion.
Caelion was already returning the look.
By the next morning, the final delegations began to arrive.
The Naidiryn came with the slow ceremony of high tide, their sea-green and blue standards turning on silver bearings as twelve elders followed behind their Tuatha, Lady Muirenn of House Fháinne.
She rode at the head of the procession on a pale gray horse, its mane braided with shells and thin chains of pearl.
Her robes shifted between green and blue as the light touched them, deep water one instant and storm-break foam the next.
Elara watched from an upper corridor window, half-hidden behind the curtain, and understood at once why Odhrán had warned her about the Naidiryn.
Lady Muirenn noticed everything. The gate. The guards. The banners. The windows above the courtyard. Her gaze paused briefly on the curtain only seconds after Elara slipped back from it.
The Turlaith came at midday, bearing the dressed dark carriage of the eastern coast on a small wheeled bier, its surface veined white as old bone.
Their newly appointed Concord Seat, Senán, rode behind it, narrow-shouldered and thin-mouthed.
He did not embrace Eamon when he entered the courtyard, and Eamon did not move to embrace him.
They exchanged only a formal incline of the head, cold enough that even from the window, Elara felt the frost of it.
Kynra was not with them.
Elara looked twice, searching the column, the riders, the guards flanking the bier, and the archways beyond the gate.
The hard-eyed Turlaith captain who had once pointed the tip of her spear at Reynnar’s heart was nowhere among them.
Relief moved through her so cleanly she had to press her forehead to the cool stone frame.
One mercy, then.
She would take it.
The Sylph arrived in the blue hour of late afternoon beneath pale gray standards stitched with silver thread.
Their delegation was small and cautious, their riders wrapped in traveling cloaks the color of cloud-shadow, their hair wind-tossed even in the still courtyard.
Their clothing was cut for movement rather than display, and their wings folded close against their backs, half-hidden beneath the slits in their cloaks.
Some were pale as moth wings. Others shimmered faintly blue or silver when the fading light caught along the thin membranes.
The air seemed to stir differently around them, as if Teinloch itself remembered they belonged to heights its volcanic basin could not offer.
Their Tuatha rode at the center.
Lady Seraphine of House Caer.
Two males. Two females. Four Tuatha Dé Danann standing for the four houses, the four elements, the four old powers that had once held the realm in balance. It was the sort of symmetry the Sídhe chronicles treated less as symbolism than law.
But they were not of Ailltir.
That was where her eyes kept returning, despite the dignity of their procession, despite the pale elegance of their wings and the hush that followed them through the gate.
They were Sylph of the highest houses, honored enough to answer a four-house Tribunal, powerful enough to stand beneath the same banners as Reynnar, Eamon, and Lady Muirenn.
But no Ailltir rider came beneath the cliff-line colors.
No elder arrived who might have known her mother.
No wind-borne messenger carried a name she could ask after, or a history she could finally touch with both hands.
She had wanted, foolishly perhaps, to speak to one of them.
To ask what the cliffs looked like at dawn.
Whether the wind truly sang through the high hollows the way Caelion had once said.
But Raijin would know.
The thought settled inside her, sudden and aching.
If they succeeded—if they saved him and brought him home—Raijin might remember the road to their mother’s door.
The sound of Ailltir rain against the windows.
The rooms where they had slept. All the small, ordinary things that had belonged to them before Osin reached into their lives and tore them away.
And if all went as planned, perhaps within the month, she would stand there beside him.
By day’s end, the keep had changed, though Elara did not leave the family wing.
Reynnar’s private instruction, carried through Mamó, and enforced by everyone with maddening devotion, she did not pass the inner stair.
She did not take meals in any room that opened onto the public corridors.
She did not wander near the south, west, or eastern wings.
She kept to her chamber, the inner library, the small balcony above the family garden, and the upper terrace only when it was empty.
Elara read when she could. Trained alone when sitting still became unbearable. Made lists for Faolán that he never had time to read.
And Reynnar did not come to her in any unguarded hour.
He could not. Odhrán had told her as much. The keep had become a place of eyes and ears, and every door seemed to have someone listening on the other side.
It is a skill to survive in Teinloch, Reynnar had said once. To lie gracefully, deceive beautifully, and pretend all the while you are doing neither. I never had the patience for it. Nor the stomach.
He was protecting her from that, in his own way.
Elara understood it. That did not stop the loneliness from settling into her all the same, or the frustration of having her world narrowed by other people’s decisions. The family wing. The inner stair. The hours she could see him. All of it chosen for her, neatly and sensibly and without asking.
She hated how familiar that felt.
But he reached for her in the night—came in the hour before sleep, after the keep had settled into its long, watchful hush.
Elara would sit on her bed with the dagger within reach, and the wall she kept inside herself would begin to bend.
Then she would feel him: the warm, careful press of him against that inner barrier, like a hand laid to a window from the other side of winter.
She would let him in slowly, lowering the wall.
He never spoke. He simply remained there, worn-out and dimmed and tired of being the political figure he had never wanted to be, and she let him rest at the inner edge of her.
Elara lay in the dark with the Cara warm against her heart and the broken bloodstone cold at her throat, waiting for sleep that never came easily and would not come kindly now. By any reckoning of the past seven days, she had known better than to expect rest.
So she lay there until gray morning pressed against the shutters again, and the day of the Tribunal feast finally arrived.