Chapter 19
“There are checkpoints we won’t cross with the contraband we carry.” Eamon’s gaze shifted to Elara. “There’s a price on your head—rich enough to tempt half this city. The other half would do it for free.”
His eyes swept the group. “This building used to be a weighing house for the old salt trade. Ships unloaded nearby, and the first builders ran water channels beneath the floor to wash and drain the goods. Those channels are part of the original aqueduct system. Most people forgot they were ever here.” A brief pause. “They are not, however, empty.”
Elara swallowed. Darkness and water. More tunnels.
“Where,” she asked evenly, “and how deep?”
“Through there.” Eamon pointed to the far door.
“They run two stories beneath the city, then drop farther where the main channels carry water toward the cisterns. We’ll be below the foundations of the upper ward before we surface again.
” He adjusted the bandolier at his shoulder.
“I’ve used them before to enter the city without being seen. ”
“You never thought to tell me?” Reynnar said, his voice tightening.
Eamon’s mouth curved faintly. “You’ve never had reason to sneak into Luirigh.”
“And you have?”
A shrug. “Once or twice. For reason of my own.” His gaze returned to the door. “There’s a sluice wheel not far in. Once we pass it, we’ll know we’re beneath the upper quarter. You’ll smell sweet bark and soap—they still dump their bathwater into the old cistern.”
Aoife made a face. “Charming.”
They went through the back, brushing past a bead curtain browned with age and into a tight corridor—a long swallow into darkness. The trapdoor lifted with a sticky pull, old paint tearing from itself. Elara tasted salt before she saw water.
The sea ran through a shallow trough at the base, dark as tea and flecked with bits of shell carried in from the sea.
Sound moved strangely in the tunnel; their footsteps slipped ahead of them and then returned in softened reverberations, caught and turned by the arch overhead.
Somewhere deeper in the dark, a dull knocking repeated at uneven intervals.
Elara stopped, listening past the echoes until the rhythm resolved itself.
It wasn’t random at all, but pressure—water forcing itself again and again against something that refused to give.
“The wheel,” she said. “It’s under pressure.”
Reynnar’s mouth curved with faint amusement. “Well, far be it from us to ignore something in distress. After you.” He helped her down the remaining steps. The others followed in short order, Aoife already ahead while Eamon fell in behind.
Elara still didn’t know what to make of him.
His nearness unsettled her more than the dark.
It wasn’t fear, exactly—more like the itch of a puzzle she couldn’t solve.
She had spent most of her life among dangerous people, and surviving them had taught her how to read others.
It was a kind of knowing carved deep, honed by years of waiting for the worst and being proven right.
She could hear warning in the weight of a footstep, in the tone that meant she’d best not breathe too loudly.
Fear and subjugation had given her that fluency, and the years since had only refined it.
Yet every time she looked at Eamon, the rules failed her.
He didn’t fit the patterns she relied on. He could be cruel with the truth and gentle with his hands. He had threatened her. Let her take an arrow to prove his point. Then saved her. Believed her. Chosen to help them.
The contradiction made her uneasy.
And yet Reynnar trusted him. So did Aoife and Caelion. That should have been enough to quiet her mind. But each time she glanced at Eamon, her pulse still stumbled. He was neither threat nor safety. Not a friend, not an enemy.
Something in between.
Her thoughts broke off as the floor dipped without warning and water surged around her legs.
It climbed to her shins, cold as meltwater, soaking through the fabric of her trousers until it clung to her skin and dragged at her knees.
She sucked in a breath as the chill bit deep enough to make her teeth ache.
Aoife moved ahead of them, unwavering even in the knee-deep water, her knife loose in one hand. “Step on the stones with the greenest sheen,” she said quietly, mindful of how sound carried. “Those have held under the current. The ones between crumble.”
They followed in a tight line. Water dripped from the ceiling, sending a faint tremor through the tunnel.
A rat darted along the opposite ledge, its claws ticking softly, its eyes catching the dim light before vanishing into shadow.
The tunnel gradually narrowed and dipped until Reynnar had to bend to clear the low arch.
Ahead, part of the wall had collapsed, spilling stone into the channel and leaving the footing along the left side broken away.
Beyond the fallen section, the aqueduct continued—but they would have to move deeper into the water and swim a short stretch before the stones began again.
Caelion crouched and drew on his Draoth.
The air responded at once, cooling and drawing taut, as if the space around them had pulled in a measured breath.
He guided that tension downward into the channel, letting the current press against it.
“The pull’s strongest in the middle,” he said.
“Aim straight for the far ledge and it’ll slide you down. ”
Eamon nodded. “We go together, then. As one.”
They entered the deeper run, Aoife going first. She bit down on the handle of her knife and slipped into the current, arms slicing cleanly through the water.
Once Elara slipped from the last dry stones into the deeper channel, the current seized her legs.
Ahead, the river narrowed into darker water; only a few strong strokes remained before the tunnel dipped again.
The ceiling sloped downward into a low stone lip slick with algae and old lime, forcing the channel to run beneath it.
Aoife vanished underwater first; Caelion followed without hesitation, his Draoth tightening as he went, the water briefly dimpling where he disappeared.
Elara drew a slow breath, but her chest still tightened, a reflex she hated.
The moment before submersion always did this to her—some old memory rising like silt stirred loose, her body remembering other waters, other losses.
The ceiling dropped lower, forcing the sparse light to fracture in long ribbons across her face.
Her pulse jumped. And then Reynnar’s hand found her waist.
His grip was firm—alive in a way the water wasn’t—and breath slowed around it. Her panic ebbed as she let the feel of him reorient her in the dark.
When he dipped beneath the surface, she went with him. The water closed overhead, and she followed his shadow, her world narrowing to cold and drag and the muted thunder of blood in her ears as they slipped beneath the stone brace and through.
Caelion’s form moved through the dim water angling upward, his body tilting toward light, and relief rushed through her. The distance wasn’t far. Elara pushed off the rock and swam toward him, following the pull of his Draoth through the current.
Then it changed.
At first, it was only a subtle wrongness in the way it moved.
The current no longer slid cleanly past her skin.
It lingered. Thickened. The water seemed to gather around her limbs, reluctant to let her pass.
A faint drag curled at her calf—too slight to halt her, yet deliberate enough to set her nerves on edge.
She kicked harder, and something moved in the corner of her vision. Darker than the surrounding dark. It unspooled beside her like a stain spreading through the water, drawing nearer with slow, patient purpose. Elara turned her head—
—and saw a face.
She jerked back as the features gathered from the current itself, pale contours forming where none should be, hair unspooling in the water like torn ribbons. A girl’s face stared up at her. Young. Wide-eyed. Mouth parted around a scream the river would not let out.
Elara’s stroke faltered.
Hands slammed onto her shoulders.
She was driven down hard. Water punched into her mouth, scraped down her throat, filled every hollow place until her body seized against it.
She kicked, clawed, twisted, but fingers closed around her ankles and dragged.
Deeper. Colder. The world narrowed to bubbles, black water, and the animal need to breathe.
Elara tore at her own throat—
And stopped.
Air.
She had air.
Her lungs were empty of river water, her body still above the current.
The terror was not hers.
It belonged to the girl.
The face hovered inches from her own, the wildness gone from its eyes, leaving only a hollow, unbearable sorrow. A pale hand drifted upward, fingers reaching, then hesitating just short of her cheek—
The current fractured as light burst beneath the surface, streaking through the water like lightning tearing through fog.
The glare scattered off the suspended silt, gold threading through green water until the dark itself seemed to breathe.
Eamon moved toward her, cutting through the current with powerful strokes.
The mark at the hollow of his throat blazed like molten metal, its glow spilling outward through the channel.
The grip around her loosened. The girl’s eyes dimmed, her features blurring as her reaching hand dissolved into the flow—fingers scattering like strands of smoke.
Then another touch—real, living skin—closed around her arm. Eamon’s hands were rough from the road and burning warm even through the cold. He pulled her hard and fast toward the light above.
Elara broke the surface in a violent rush, gulping for air. The world reeled around her, sound returning all at once—the crash of water against rock, the rasp of her own breath, Eamon’s ragged voice calling her name.