Chapter 23 #2
Elara rubbed her eyes discreetly and leaned back, studying the growing cluster of marks they had made across the open volumes. Perhaps a dozen irregularities so far, scattered across three ledgers. At this rate, she calculated grimly, they would finish sometime in the next decade.
She opened her mouth—
The stairs creaked.
All three of them paused, and Aoife appeared a moment later, hair in full rebellion and her expression dark enough to sour milk. She did not look at them. She did not greet them. She grunted something that might have been a word, seized a cup of tea, and took a long swallow.
“Tea,” Odhrán began brightly, “does wonders for—”
Aoife angled her head down just enough to deliver a look that stopped him mid-sentence. Then, without a word, she turned on her heel and disappeared into the adjoining room.
Silence followed. Elara cleared her throat.
“As I’ve told you these past few mornings,” she said patiently, still studying the ledger in front of her, “we do not speak to Aoife until she has been awake for at least an hour. It’s…unwise.”
Odhrán blinked behind his spectacles. “Oh. Yes. Quite right,” he said, “A delayed sentience with that one.”
Caelion sniffed a laugh, though he kept his gaze fixed firmly on the page.
Elara tapped the ledger in front of her. “This work is too slow. Even if we locate every discrepancy, we’ll spend months just cataloging.”
Odhrán did not look up. “Only if we continue alone. I have already sent word to every Maistir I trust across the territories. Quietly. Each is reviewing their own ledgers for irregularities. We are not searching one archive.”
Now he did look at her.
“We are searching them all at once.”
That was why the kettle was always boiling by the time she came down. Why the ink on the ledgers often still gleamed wet in the morning light. After several days of watching the same pattern repeat, Elara had begun to suspect he slept very little, if at all.
“And you expect answers—”
“Within the week.”
She leaned back in her chair, wood creaking beneath her.
A week felt both merciful and intolerable.
Her gaze lifted without her consent and traced the towering shelves that lined the walls.
Histories bound in dark leather. Treatises on law and lineage.
Volumes dedicated entirely to Sídhe custom and cultural precedent.
She had snuck a peek last night before going to bed.
She wanted to open them. All of them. To understand the scaffolding beneath this realm.
Odhrán followed her gaze. “You wish to know how we think,” he observed.
She met his eyes and didn’t look away. “I wish to understand what I’ve walked into.”
His expression sobered. “As do I.” He adjusted his spectacles and leaned back in his chair. “Tell me,” he said. “How does someone of half-Sídhe blood come about in this day and age?”
Caelion’s soft page-ruffling came to an abrupt halt.
She straightened in her seat, mentally going through the answers she had rehearsed for this exact scenario.
Defensive ones. Deflective ones. Clever ones that revealed nothing at all.
At the time, it had seemed like a sensible precaution.
Now, sitting here with the moment actually upon her, none of those answers seemed particularly useful. She hesitated.
“I…do not believe I am half-Sídhe,” she said at last.
Odhrán’s brows rose slightly.
“I believe something was done to me,” she continued. “I simply do not yet understand what.”
Odhrán regarded her, his gaze moving over her features, thoughtful rather than intrusive. “Were it mere glamour,” he said after a moment, “our eyes would pierce such veils.”
“Then what do you see?”
Caelion looked up at that, and the firelight caught in his eyes, making them seem too old for his young face.
“I see,” Odhrán said slowly, “that something in you lies out of tune. Sídhe, yet not of the Sídhe; mortal, yet set apart from mortality. A chord struck wrong in its making.”
The cup slipped in her hand, porcelain clinking against the table.
“Wrong?”
“Not wrong,” he corrected gently. “Unsettled. The Turlaith’s fear does not surprise me. In you dwells a contradiction. There is a…displacement in you, as if part of you was meant to be elsewhere.”
Elara turned to Caelion, seeking either confirmation or denial. His eyes held neither.
“And you?” she asked. “Do you sense this…wrongness?”
He hesitated—though not from uncertainty, Elara realized, but from care in choosing the right words. “Among my people,” he said, “we speak of those whom the wind has brushed against in ways it should not. The air moves differently around them. You carry that same disturbance. You feel… unsettled.”
Unsettled?
“Why has no one ever told me this?”
Odhrán’s expression softened, though it brought no comfort.
“To name a thing,” he said with terrible gentleness, “is to call it forth from shadow into substance. Once given voice, it cannot be silenced. Words carry power beyond their sound—they shape the world, bend reality to their will. Some truths are better left unexcavated, particularly those that transgress the natural order. Particularly something so…atypical.”
His words settled inside her with a slow, sinking weight, as though something heavy had been placed in her chest and left there. The silence stretched long enough that another voice rose unbidden from memory, clear as if it had spoken beside her ear. Dangerous. Eamon’s word.
And then, uninvited but just as clear, another voice followed. I know what she is. I know what she’s not. I choose her anyway.
Reynnar’s.
A dull rush filled her head.
But she had the memory of áineand Osin changing her appearance, reshaping something in her body.
It had been a cruel spell. A manipulation of flesh.
But a spell could be undone. A spell meant there had been something underneath it.
Something she had once been. Odhrán’s words left very little room for that comfort.
Our eyes would pierce such veils.
Her teeth caught her lower lip. If she was not Sídhe—and not mortal either—then what, exactly, was she?
The question lodged behind her eyes, a slow pressure that built until it throbbed like pain.
She pressed her palms to her temples, as if she could force it out, but it only deepened, spreading through her like poison.
She had been different in Latheria, too—set apart, defined by what her blood could offer people. For years, she’d told herself that difference meant purpose, that it pointed toward something larger. Something justified.
It hadn’t been true then.
And here, in the world that was meant to hold the answer, the answer was the same.
You do not belong here either.
The air in the room felt suddenly thin. Smothering. She pushed to her feet.
“I need air.”
Odhrán nearly choked. “You cannot.”
Caelion rose fluidly beside her as if he’d been waiting for her to move. “Your gardens offer plenty of coverage. The overgrowth along the hedges and the perimeter wall will conceal her well enough.”
Odhrán let out a sound that was half sigh, half strangled complaint, and pulled off his spectacles to rub at his eyes. “Three days into this arrangement,” he muttered, “three, and I’m already rewriting the plan we agreed upon.”
Then he turned to Elara. His mouth twisted. “Very well. But have your Cara mark you to dull your scent. That is a reasonable precaution.”
Elara went rigid. Every muscle locked. “I—what?”
Caelion swore under his breath and stepped closer, his hand closing around her elbow. “Come on,” he murmured, already steering her toward the door.
Behind them, Odhrán called, almost cheerfully, “Do be quick about it!”
Elara felt her soul leave her body.
“Ignore him,” Caelion said, but even he sounded strained.
She let him guide her, though her thoughts splintered in a dozen directions at once.
He knew. Did they all? And to mark her—was that what Aoife had meant?
Before they’d crossed into Luirigh, Aoife had looked at Reynnar with that knowing tilt of her mouth.
He’d answered with a low growl that left no room for argument.
A growl that had ended the conversation immediately.
Elara’s stomach twisted. The hallway air was cooler, but it did little to steady her. Her pulse thundered in her ears, her skin alive with a restless, prickling energy. “Caelion,” she whispered, not trusting her voice to remain level. “What did he—why would he—”
He pushed open the back kitchen door, and cool air slipped in around them as they stepped onto the patio.
The garden beyond was small, hemmed in by overgrown hedges that climbed over one another like they’d long since stopped listening to pruning shears.
Dozens of pots sat scattered across the stone—most holding dead plants slumped in their soil, some stubbornly sprouting a leaf or two.
Messy. Crowded. But somehow charming, the same way Odhrán’s house was charming.
Elara rounded on him the moment the door shut behind them. “Tell me what he meant.”
Caelion let out a long breath, the brightness in his eyes dimming like someone had cupped a hand around a flame. His mouth opened, closed, and then he straightened his spine as if bracing himself. “You and Reynnar truly have not discussed any of this?”
She threw her hands up. “When exactly were we supposed to?”
“You were alone for days in the Turlaith wilds.”
“Yes, but—”
“And you shared a room in Eamon’s court. Then there were the nights traveling. Sleeping beside each other. Sparring. Foraging together. When you—”
“All right!” Heat rushed up her neck. “Fine. We’ve had…plenty of opportunities. But we didn’t. We can’t, Caelion.” Her voice faltered. “What did Odhrán mean by mark? It sounds…”
Intimate.
Caelion studied her for a long, stretching heartbeat.
“What does it mean,” she whispered, “to be a Cara?”