Chapter 34 #2
The room was small—four walls, a low doorway, a hole in the ceiling that wasn’t doing enough to vent the smoke.
Bedrolls laid out along the far wall. A few packs, a crate of provisions.
Functional. Nothing wasted. And against the wall to his right, laid out on a bedroll with a folded cloak beneath his head, was the Sídhe.
He was tall—even lying down, it was apparent, the lean, too-long proportions of a Sídhe at rest. Bald, his skull smooth and unmarked, his skin the pale gray-brown of birch bark in winter.
His features were drawn in the way of his kind, all severity and bone, but there was something wrong with them that Ivan couldn’t name immediately.
Bryn had been over him, presumably—but there were no dressings, no sign of anything that needed binding.
He was simply diminishing.
Ivan had seen dead men who looked more present.
His attention broke from the Sídhe when Bryn came back through the doorway. She had her satchel slung over one shoulder, her sleeves rolled past the elbow despite the cold, and her expression—when she found him upright—landed somewhere between relief and annoyance.
“You shouldn’t be sitting,” she said.
“No,” he agreed, but didn’t lie back down.
She rolled her eyes, apparently deciding the matter was not worth the argument, then crossed to the Sídhe and crouched beside him, pressing two fingers to his throat.
“Still the same,” she said, mostly to herself.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know. There’s nothing to treat. No wound, no fever, no infection I can find. His draoth is—” She paused, searching. “Quiet. Not depleted. Quiet. Like something turned it down very low.” She lifted her hand and sat back on her heels. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Ivan looked at him again. “Has he woken at all?”
“No.”
The doorway darkened.
Bryn was on her feet before Ivan had fully registered the figure stepping inside.
She crossed the room at once and caught the man by both wrists, turning his hands palms-up.
Godfrey let her. He stood in silence while she peeled back a bandage and examined the skin beneath, pressing carefully along the edges.
Whatever she found seemed to satisfy her; she gave a small nod and began wrapping it again.
“Raijin’s still not responding to touch.”
Ivan bolted upright so fast the room pitched. Pain bit deep into his side, hot and savage, but it was nothing compared to the shock of hearing that name.
“Did you say Raijin?”
Bryn rounded on him with murder in her face. “You tore a stitch, you great fool. Lie back down.”
She shoved him flat, and Ivan hissed as fresh warmth spread along his ribs beneath the bandaging, but his thoughts were already galloping ahead of pain. Raijin. The name from Elara’s journal. Could this be him? Could this be the person she and Thane had been searching for?
Bryn pressed her hand over the wound and drove her power through him like a needle through cloth. It mended what it could, or tried to. Ivan scarcely noticed.
“Your heart is pounding like a war drum,” she snapped. “Be still.”
He might have bit out a retort, but Godfrey was staring at him now, and there was too much in that look for comfort. Suspicion, yes. Weariness, too. But something else lived beneath it, some faint and unwilling regard that had not been there before.
“How long has Osin had this Sídhe caged?” Ivan asked.
Bryn clicked her tongue, but Ivan ignored her and watched Godfrey tilt his head, thinking.
Firelight caught in the lenses of his spectacles and turned his eyes to pale blurs for half a breath.
“I cannot say for certain. The papers I saw claimed he was held in a prison in the south for years before they brought him to Fenreach.” His mouth tightened, as though the words tasted foul.
“He was never assigned to my division. I only saw the records after he arrived.”
A pause.
“But I heard him.”
Godfrey looked down at his hands. “He fought very hard.”
Ivan gave a slow nod, though it brought him no comfort. Years in the south. A month in Fenreach. It was something, and nowhere near enough.
The doorway darkened again.
Dominic had to duck beneath the lintel to enter. He came through sideways, one hand brushing the stone, then straightened to his full height and let his gaze sweep the room. It stopped when it found Godfrey.
Something in his face eased.
“Good to see you on your feet, my lord,” Godfrey said.
“Don’t call me that.” But there was no bite in it. His hand came up to grip Godfrey’s shoulder and stayed there. “How are you feeling?”
“Better than I was.” Godfrey’s mouth bent into something faint and tired. “Bryn has been thorough.”
“She usually is.” Dominic let him go and moved further into the room, and Ivan took the measure of him then.
There was a cut along his jaw, crusted dark where the blood had dried.
He favored his left side by a fraction—not enough for most men to mark, but Ivan had spent too long reading damage in bodies not to see it. No grave wounds, then.
But his eyes—
Dominic’s eyes were flat in that particular way that had nothing to do with lack of sleep.
Ivan knew the look. Draoth depletion wore differently on different men—different for men who cast through rings—when the stone cracked or the charge ran dry, they sent in their petitions to the High Council like obedient little supplicants and waited to be granted more, or else they bought another charge through darker channels if patience failed them. This was not that.
Dominic had burned himself down to the dregs keeping him alive.
The thought sat in Ivan without comfort.