Chapter 13
The corridor outside felt like a throat of stone, close and sour, the air damp against Elara’s skin.
Each breath scraped as they passed torches burning low in their niches, flames thin and restless.
Eamon’s arm stayed firm around her waist as they moved, keeping her upright.
Twice he pulled her into the ribbed darkness where living roots braced the walls, his grip tightening at her middle as boots passed near enough that she caught the scent of rain on leather. Her pulse skidded. She stayed silent.
They climbed a narrow stair carved deep into the Glade’s heartwood. At the top, he pressed his palm to a copper-banded door and murmured something old and quiet. Warmth bloomed beneath his hand. The latch released with a soft click.
Night opened around them.
Cruithneach’s dark towers rose against a sky stripped of stars. High above, bridges swayed and creaked, ropes whispering under the wind. Elara drew a careful breath and stepped forward, carrying the stain of blood, pain, and consequence with her into the dark.
They slipped through a postern gate into the hush of the forest and the city fell away behind them within a handful of yards, swallowed into its own shadows. At the edge, where the cultivated moss gave over to wild, three figures waited.
Reynnar stepped forward first.
Even cloaked, even half-swallowed by moonshadow and mist, she knew the line of him the way one knows the shape of a scar.
Aoife and Caelion flanked him, close enough to touch, but Reynnar might as well have been alone for how completely the world narrowed around him.
His eyes swept her from crown to bare feet, too quickly to be indecent, too complete to be casual.
His gaze caught on the bloom at her shoulder, where the bandage bled through the thin tunic, then flashed to Eamon’s hand around her waist.
Irritation flared, then faded, replaced by warmth. A thin, careful tendril of heat slid down her spine and pooled in her stone-cold toes, spreading upward until her breath slipped out in a slow sigh.
Aoife huffed and shoved past him, wrenching Elara from Eamon’s grasp. “How bad is it? You look like hell spat you back for being difficult.”
Elara almost laughed. “I’ll embroider that on a handkerchief,” she rasped. “Frame it over my next cell.”
Aoife leaned on one hip, a smile slicing across her mouth, biting and bright. “Save the needlework. We’ve plans.”
Elara glanced over her shoulder and saw Eamon step away from her. He and Reynnar stood a few paces apart, moonlight cutting silver along their silhouettes, the air between them taut. Eamon straightened, opened his mouth—
And Reynnar punched him squarely in the teeth.
The crack of bone echoed across the clearing. He staggered but stayed upright, only for Reynnar to hit him again, harder this time, the sound dull and wet. That explained the bruise already darkening the other side of Eamon’s face.
“All right—fuck—enough.”
But Reynnar only laughed. It was a raw, broken sound, stripped of humor. Every hair on her arms rose, and for one breath she felt the wrath coiled beneath his skin.
“I’ll decide when it’s enough, you lying bastard.”
Eamon spat, and blood struck the earth. “As I told you before,” he bit out, “everything I did was necessary.”
Aoife’s lips peeled back from her teeth. “Necessary,” she echoed. “It was necessary to drug us, Eamon? Necessary to throw our favorite little human to be circled by the wolves in your court?”
Elara wrinkled her nose. Little? She was not small—at least not where she came from. Above average, actually. But standing among Sídhe did have a way of rearranging one’s sense of scale.
Eamon’s jaw tightened. He turned to her then.
“I needed you to make your claim in that hall. All of you.” His gaze moved deliberately—from Aoife to Reynnar, then back to Elara.
“I needed the Concord to deny you. Publicly. I needed their refusal spoken aloud, witnessed, recorded. A ledger entry I did not write. Inked by their own hands and mouths.”
There was no shame in his expression.
“I knew there were absences—for years now. Easy to dismiss among the nomads. People move. Seasons turn. Time stretches for us until we forget the last time we looked at the horizon. But the absences have begun in places that do not drift—towns where the mill and the forge and the ferry count their days the same way each year, where census is ritual. Names are thinning where names do not thin.”
Reynnar’s head snapped a fraction. “Settled territories.”
“Yes,” Eamon said. “Turlaith hamlets along the old eastern roads. Quarry villages in the black carraig hills. Ash-wood villages where the same families have kept their winter stores for six hundred years and border towns with records older than half the houses that now quote them. In those places, there are empty chairs at tables that never had them before.”
His mouth tightened.
“And the accountings have been tidy. Too tidy. Names amended. Entries re-inked. Ledger lines skipped over as if ink could make a body vanish. I wanted to believe it was incompetence.”
His gaze lifted.
“I no longer do.”
Aoife’s voice went quiet and dangerous, the way a storm does before it chooses a tree to bend. “And today proved it.”
Eamon inclined his head, throat working once as if swallowing something bitter.
“Today proved it. This is not blindness. It is a cover.” His eyes settled on Elara again.
“I needed to see who smiled when you were sentenced. They were not all the ones who shouted.” His jaw ticked.
“I am sorry for the price I asked you to pay, yet I cannot be sorry for taking it.”
Elara felt the words settle into her bones like frost. For a fleeting moment, anger flared—hot, righteous—and then ebbed, leaving only the ache beneath it.
Understanding slid in as she followed the line of his reasoning until she felt hollow—numbness creeping over everything that might have burned.
Silence stretched, thin and trembling. A horse shifted in the dark, leather creaking, breath ghosting white in the cold.
A bat stitched across the night and vanished.
Reynnar’s hands curled at his sides. “Who profits?”
“Follow the coin,” Aoife said. “Or the fear. Either will point to the door.”
Caelion’s shadowed gaze touched Eamon, then Elara. “Or the power. Who stays seated if no one stands to challenge them?”
Eamon’s jaw tightened. “Precisely.”
The cold pressed closer, a clean weight on skin and breath.
Elara could feel the moment tipping—their anger finding shape, their grief choosing direction.
“They think they can starve it of air,” she said, surprised at the composure in her own voice.
“If there’s no record, there’s no reckoning. If there’s no tally, there’s no debt.”
Reynnar watched her speak, which was as intimate a thing as touch when done with that much attention.
“So we make a record they can’t erase,” he said without looking away from her.
“One that cannot be burned because it lives in mouths. House to house before hall to hall. And we carry it across every territory—loud enough that every person, lord, and Concord Seat cannot pretend not to hear.”
Aoife’s half-smile sharpened. “A parade of facts. I can be very loud.”
Eamon agreed. “We can speak more of it when we are not within leafshot of a listening tree. For now, you need to understand this: our law will not help us. Our customs will not help us. Our habit of believing we are the civilized party will least of all.” His gaze moved to each of them in turn.
It lingered, just a fraction longer, on Reynnar.
“We have taken what they claim was theirs,” Eamon continued. “And we will be hunted for it. We will be named traitors. Criminals. Heretics. And some of them will be right.” His voice hardened. “But better to betray a rotten law than to obey it to death.”
Aoife smiled. “So, what’s the plan?”
Eamon’s gaze swept over the group. “You’ll ride for Naidiryn territory. Riverland.” He paused. “I’ll remain behind.”
Aoife’s brow lifted.
“I can keep my name clean longer than any of you,” he continued calmly.
“Long enough to redirect the hounds and feed them a trail. When they realize you’re gone, they’ll look where I point them.
” His attention returned to Elara. “When it’s safe, I’ll meet you across the border.
I know a scholar there—Maistir Odhrán of House Danu.
He keeps the kind of records the Concord doesn’t like because they can’t curate them.
We compile every report, every witness, every pattern of disappearance, and we take it to the Sídhe people themselves. ”
Caelion’s mouth thinned. “You’re taking us to a librarian to start a war?”
“I’m taking you to the man who counts grain and boats and births. A man who is too dull to threaten and too stubborn to bribe.”
Reynnar’s gaze cut to Elara. “Can you ride?”
The single horse was for her, then, because everyone else could vanish into the forest as if physics were a courtesy and exhaustion a rumor. Elara lifted her chin and said, “I can manage,” hoping very much that it was true.
Eamon passed her the reins of a white mare, steam rising from her hide.
Elara gathered them in one hand, caught a fistful of mane with the other, and hauled herself onto the mare’s bare back before anyone could think to help her.
Pain lanced through her shoulder as she settled her balance, but she bit it back.
The others readied themselves. Eamon stayed. He reached into his cloak and drew out a cloth-wrapped bundle, offering it without hesitation. Inside lay Epona’s dagger. Even in the gloom, the metal held a faint, wavering light.
Elara looked down at him—eyes cold with anger and distrust—and dipped her chin.
For a moment, he held her gaze. “You’ll need someone to look properly at that shoulder. I only managed a crude wrapping before I was pulled away.”
She blinked.