Chapter 14 #2
The words landed like a misstep on loose stone.
Her next breath caught halfway in, the cold air scraping down her throat when it finally came.
Her first instinct was the old one—to catalog the feeling, to break it apart into manageable pieces.
Shock or anger, or grief. And beneath it all, that familiar, corrosive shame that surfaced whenever someone saw too much.
She had opened up, yes. But Aoife had seen the damage she had long since learned to live beside.
The ache she had folded neatly into the corners of herself instead of ever daring to confront.
Perhaps it was easier this way—to remain the anomaly. The human variable. The misfit in a world that ran on different laws. Easier to hover at the edge of belonging and call it independence.
Even here.
Especially here.
Because stepping fully into the circle meant admitting she wanted to stay in it. Wanted their trust. Their strength. Their shelter. Wanted to stop calculating survival as a solitary equation.
She swallowed past a lump and tasted salt.
Something inside her loosened then. Not the fear or grief.
Those were stubborn things. But the certainty that she must carry them by herself.
She had mistaken pain for proof of failure.
Had confused dependence with deficiency.
Had convinced herself that strength meant not needing.
All it had ever done was hollow her out.
Aoife wasn’t asking her to be fearless. She was asking her to choose. To refuse to let Osin win.
Elara drew a slow breath. Then another, deeper one. “I don’t want to feel small anymore. I don’t want to keep apologizing for being here.”
Aoife’s mouth curved, fierce and approving. “Then don’t.”
Leaves rustled at the rim of the clearing as the two held each other’s gaze. Then—
“Stop flirting with my patient,” Reynnar called as he emerged, carrying a short-stemmed plant with a thick green bud at its crown, its pale-veined petals glinting like frost.
“What is that?” Elara asked warily.
“A field remedy, when we cannot stop long enough for proper mending,” he said, crouching. “It’s for the pain and internal bleeding.”
She studied the bud in his hand and wrinkled her nose. Her mind flipped through years of petal structures, root systems, poisons disguised as cures. Life in the Sanct had trained her to catalog every plant on sight.
But this one…
This one didn’t belong in her world.
Her stomach twisted uneasily as Reynnar snapped the stem and pressed his thumb to the base of the bud until a bead of slick, pale liquid welled at its surface. He handed it to her. “Don’t drink it all at once.”
Elara didn’t trust anything she couldn’t name—but she trusted him more than anyone had a right to ask for. And maybe that was foolish. But it didn’t feel that way. Not with him. She took a cautious sip. “How long ’til it kicks in?”
“Any second now,” Aoife said, her smile turning foxlike. “Also, you might hallucinate a little.”
Elara sighed. “Makes sense. Why stop at agony when we can add delirium too?” But warmth was already spreading through her limbs, easing the throe in her shoulder. She let her head rest against Aoife, lashes fluttering shut, and breathed out.
“Feel anything?” Reynnar asked.
“Mmm.”
His mouth curved faintly. “Come here.”
She obeyed, slow but compliant, and sat forward. The scent of crushed greens clung to him. In his hands lay a bundle of broad, veined leaves still damp from the frost.
“Found these lower down,” he said. “They’ll pull the poison.”
He tore the leaves apart with rough fingers, crushing them against the pommel of his dagger. The sharp, bitter scent of them rose at once, clean and biting in the cold air. Sap slicked his skin as the leaves broke beneath his hand. He gathered the pulped mash into his palm and leaned closer.
“Hold still.”
Her spine locked as she braced for the sting—for the burn—but neither came. Instead, Reynnar’s Draoth flared, familiar now, a low hum tightening around the poison beneath her skin and drawing it out as the crushed herbs worked beside it.
His Draoth felt stronger—noticeably so—and relief flickered through her. At least he wouldn’t have to suffer the loss of something so vital, not after everything Osin had taken. He’d made it out of that nightmare relatively intact. Physically, at least. Mentally was another matter entirely.
Her breath slowed without instruction, the rigid line of her shoulders loosening little by little as the tension bled from her frame. Reynnar tore a strip from the hem of his own shirt and bound it snugly over the mash, sealing the bitter scent beneath the cloth.
“There,” he said, tying the knot. “That should help.”
She blinked—somehow, the others had already started setting up camp.
Caelion crouched by a thin thread of meltwater winding through the rocks, his Draoth stirring the air in short, uneven bursts that guided the stream into each flask.
Nearby, Aoife knelt behind a boulder, coaxing a small fire to life.
The wind fought her, snuffing out sparks until her own Draoth met it head-on, twisting the gusts into submission. The flame flared, wavering but steady.
A chill deeper than the mountain air ran through Elara.
Their Draoth had returned, yes—but sluggishly.
Because part of it is still trapped, she realized, enslaved in those rings…
still alive somewhere in Latheria, still screaming.
The horror of it hit with such force she almost retched.
How must it feel—to have pieces of your soul shackled worlds away?
She pushed herself upright—and nearly fell.
“Steady there.”
Reynnar caught her by the elbow before she could protest and steered her toward the fire.
The warmth brushed faintly across her face as he lowered her beside the coals.
He crouched next to her, one hand firm on her shoulder while the other reached for a bedroll.
With a quick shake, he spread it out and folded part of it beneath her head, tugging it into a makeshift pillow with more care than she expected.
Only once she was settled did he release her, though he lingered a moment longer, watching with the wary patience of someone who suspected she might still find a way to injure herself.
If anyone could manage it, she imagined him saying drily, it would be you, ealaín.
Elara rolled onto her back and let her gaze climb the dark vault of sky above them.
She tried to follow their patterns, searching for constellations she might recognize from home, but the effort was made difficult by the slow, disorienting spin of the world beneath her.
Still, she persisted. The habit of observation had been drilled into her too deeply to abandon it simply because her head refused to cooperate.
So far, she had deduced that Tír na nóg shared nearly the same constellations as Latheria.
The great shapes were there—the same clusters of stars forming familiar outlines across the sky—but something about them was not quite right.
A point where a star should have been brighter sat dim instead.
A line bent slightly farther east than it ought to.
Small inconsistencies, subtle enough that another traveler might never notice them at all.
Elara noticed—she tracked the differences carefully in her mind, trying to map them against memory.
If she had possessed the instruments the Astromancers used to chart the heavens—the polished lenses, the calibrated rings, the measuring rods—she could have confirmed it properly.
She could have tested whether the sky itself had shifted, or whether Tír na nóg simply sat beneath a slightly altered face of the same firmament.
She sighed softly, irritation curling through her chest. Unanswered questions had always been a particular kind of torment.
Her eyes drifted away from the sky at last, sliding down the dark slope of the mountainside toward the valley below.
Evening had begun to swallow the land. The lowlands were dissolving into shadow, the forms of trees and ridges melting into a single dark mass as the last strips of light faded from the horizon.
Her thoughts followed the dimming valley without much resistance.
She felt…good.
Not completely painless—her shoulder still throbbed—but the pain had retreated to a polite distance, as though it had packed up its grievances and wandered a few paces away to sulk on its own. A laugh slipped out of her before she could stop it. An actual giggle. Mother.
Reynnar glanced down from where he stood, his shadow stretching across the stones. “What’s so funny?”
“You have a very serious face,” Elara replied, a crooked grin tugging at her mouth.
“I am a very serious male.”
She made a thoughtful sound and tilted her head. “I’m not entirely convinced. I’ve seen you laugh before. Once, perhaps twice, if we’re being generous.”
“That’s slander,” he muttered, though the corner of his mouth betrayed him.
She pushed herself up on one elbow and regretted it instantly. The world tilted in a queasy lurch, pain throbbing dully behind her eyes. She squeezed them shut, breathing through the spin, then sank back into the rough blanket with a low, irritated groan.
Reynnar settled beside her, arms resting loosely on his knees, shoulders turned toward the wind. His gaze made a slow sweep across the land beyond their fire—the frost-stiff grass, the jagged ridges of stone, the pale valleys where fog still clung. Even at rest, there was nothing idle about him.
She nudged the toe of his boot with her own, and his brows lifted as he looked down at her. “You realize,” she said after a moment, “we haven’t actually talked about it.”
A faint line appeared between his brows. “Talked about what?”
She gave him a long, pointed look—the sort that suggested he was being deliberately obtuse. The Draoth Cara. Being…mates. She did not say the words aloud, though they lingered between them anyway.