Chapter 21
Elara adjusted the belt of Odhrán’s robe for the third time and still could not coax it into sitting properly.
The wool rasped against her throat, smelling faintly of cedar and the dry dust of things stored away too long.
Steam curled from the bathing chamber behind her, brushing warm fingers against her cheek.
Outside, the quarter ward dimmed. Lamplight bloomed in windows one by one, and the canals swallowed the last of the sun until the water held only long, trembling veins of gold.
Even now, with the bathhouse grime washed from her skin and the worst of the aqueduct’s cold eased from her bones, she did not feel safe.
She felt…suspended. Like a page pressed between heavier ones, protected only by the weight of what surrounded it.
The moment Odhrán accepted their account as truth—and, more than that, began setting careful plans in motion to prove it to the Concords across Tír na nóg—the tension that had wound itself through the room seemed to loosen all at once.
They were believed. At last, someone believed them, and relief moved through the group like warmth returning to cold limbs.
But Elara couldn’t share in it. She was lying—not outright, but by omission, and it weighed on her just the same.
She was keeping something from Reynnar, and the knowledge pressed against her thoughts like a stone in her shoe.
Would he believe her if she told him her hallucination had taken her elsewhere—some place between life and death—and found Ivan inside of it?
He’d think her mad. He believed Ivan was dead; he’d said as much and given her space to grieve when they first arrived.
But she wanted to be certain of what she’d seen, of what she could return to, before she told him.
That would take more flowers, and her supply was dwindling.
Each blossom mattered, and she’d found no sign of them anywhere within Luirigh’s gates.
She braced her palms on the washstand and bowed her head.
But it wasn’t only the problem of reaching Ivan again that kept her drawn tight with that low, constant panic.
The face in the water.
A water spirit—Uisce, Eamon had called it.
Was it the same kind that haunted Latheria’s rivers and coves? Those creatures had shape to them: coils moving under dark water, eyes like polished stone. What she’d seen was different.
It had been a girl—or something that looked like one. Could it have been another soul, pressing its final memory into her mind? Another death that didn’t belong to her, and yet somehow did.
It almost felt as though Uisce had chosen her to bear witness. But what was she meant to do with it? Her grip tightened on the washstand until the wood bit into her palms.
If someone in Tír na nóg was working with Osin and Aine—quietly moving Sídhe across the veil to be harvested, erasing them—then perhaps the spirit was doing the opposite. Perhaps it was refusing to forget what had been taken.
And for some reason, it had chosen her to carry that memory.
Elara lifted her head slowly and met her own reflection in the small, warped mirror above the basin.
Damp hair. Hollowed eyes. A girl who had been stripped of memory and returned in fragments.
Perhaps that was the answer. She knew what it was to be erased.
She knew what it was to fight for breath no one intended to give back.
If Uisce was showing her the dead, then it was not merely mourning.
It was asking.
And Elara had never been particularly good at ignoring questions.
She dried herself fully and got dressed.
Maistir Odhrán’s spare clothing—scratchy wool trousers and a shirt cut too broadly at the shoulder—swallowed her frame.
She rolled the cuffs twice and ventured out.
The kitchen fire had been coaxed back to life.
Odhrán had produced a modest but edible meal: stale bread revived in broth, a wedge of hard cheese, a handful of dried plums that tasted faintly of salt.
Before her bath, Eamon and Caelion had gone back into the city to procure proper clothes—the kind that did not scream grumpy scholar or escaped bathhouse.
The house was quiet now.
Elara lingered in the doorway for a moment, listening. No voices drifted through the halls. No footsteps above her. Only the low crackle of the fire and the distant murmur of water somewhere beyond the walls.
She moved past the library shelves without pausing and stepped into the sunroom.
The map covered nearly the entire far wall, pinned taut across a wooden frame. Brass pins marked settlements and routes, some joined by thin cords, while Odhrán’s cramped notes crowded the margins with trade roads, shipping lanes, and mountain passes.
Tír na nóg stretched before her.
Elara stood a few paces back, hands clasped tight behind her, and studied it the way she had once studied constellations.
Luirigh curved along the western sea, all tidal walls and mist-heavy valleys.
The Turlaith lands sprawled eastward in groves and barrows, their long green valleys gathered around a single, immense symbol near the island’s heart.
An Tor Glas.
The world-tree, Odhrán had written beside it.
Elara frowned.
Everything on the map seemed to bend around that point.
Roads curved toward it. Rivers branched outward from it.
Even the territories themselves appeared arranged with it as their center.
She scanned the surrounding margins for explanation, expecting one of Odhrán’s tidy annotations—trade notes, or some scholarly aside about its history. But there was nothing.
Elara studied the symbol for another moment, committing its placement firmly to memory. Whatever An Tor Glas was, it clearly mattered enough to anchor the entire island around it.
North and east of the world tree, the Sylph lands broke into storm-cut cliffs and wind-scoured heights. Southward, the Ellylldan territory burned across the parchment in volcanic ridges and ember-lit valleys, with Teinloch marked near a cluster of geothermal springs.
She leaned closer, fixing the patterns in memory. Storm cliffs to the northeast. Misted shores to the west. Volcanic valleys to the south. Sacred groves to the east. She traced rivers with her eyes, followed mountain chains, noted where each territory bled into the next.
Remember.
She closed her eyes, searching—but she was wiped clean.
Violated. Osin had taken it all, stripping away any sense of home and replacing it with pain, obedience, and loss.
It was the deepest intrusion she had ever known.
Deeper than any wound, any loss, anything she’d survived thus far.
What could possibly be more defiling than having herself rewritten?
Yet when she lingered in the dark, an image rose: a boy dancing in shifting light—Raijin. The brother the Collective had shown her. The thought of him pulled at something deep inside her. Was he out there, searching for her? Did she still have family?
Her throat tightened, but she drew a slow breath just as a floorboard creaked behind her. She didn’t startle. The Draoth Cara between them didn’t flare as it often did when he drew close, though she sensed the faintest shift within it—a subtle loosening, like a door opening a fraction.
It would be so simple to let it slip wide. So easy.
But Elara knew the cost of surrendering herself too freely. Autonomy was not something she’d ever been given; it was something she’d carved out of her own stubborn will. She would not yield it now—not to the bond, not to instinct, not even to Reynnar.
She reached inside herself and closed it.
Reynnar stood in the doorway. Lamplight slid along the damp strands of his hair, his expression holding that familiar stillness—quiet, but never empty. It settled on her, heavy, and without meaning to, she dropped her gaze under its force.
Then she noticed what he was wearing.
A laugh slipped out before she could contain it.
Reynnar had somehow been talked into one of Odhrán’s spare shirts and trousers—and the result was disastrous. The sleeves ended well above his wrists, the trousers stopped at mid-calf, and the fabric across his shoulders looked one deep breath away from surrender.
“I see you find this very amusing.”
“You look,” she managed between breaths, “like a very large schoolboy who’s stolen his teacher’s clothes.”
Something in his expression darkened. “Better than a cake topper.”
“Is it, though?”
His mouth twitched, a ghost of amusement flickering before it faded. “Are you all right?” he asked, stepping further into the room.
The question stripped away what remained of her laughter. She must have let something show on her face—grief, perhaps. She weighed his question carefully. “I am,” she said at last. “Considering.”
He nodded once, accepting the answer for what it was, and crossed the room to stand beside her. His gaze lifted to the map, tracing the lines of coast and mountain as though searching for something hidden there. Elara turned back to it as well, though her own focus had already begun to drift.
He’d been quiet since they arrived—though not with the ease that sometimes passed between them when words weren’t needed. This quiet was heavier. Reynnar was rarely still for long; there was usually a restlessness to him.
Now, that brightness seemed to have folded in on itself.
“How are you?” she asked softly. “Truly.”
He tilted his head, as if the question surprised him. For a long moment, he said nothing. Then his gaze drifted back to the map. “Strange thing. To stand near home and feel no closer to it.”
Elara’s brow furrowed.
“Teinloch,” he went on. “My home. Just south of here—another week’s ride, if the roads are kind.”
She leaned closer to the parchment, tracing the coastline until she found it—the kingdom pressed between Naidiryn’s sea-swept borders and the volcanic ridges of Ellylldan. “So close… You must want to return. Ten years is a long time.”
“Ten?” A breath left him. “No. Much longer.”
“How long?”
“Fifty years. Near enough.”