Chapter 35 #2
Aoife shifted on the bench, one knee drawing up slightly.
“At its simplest, you read the structure of the air around you. The masters divide it into three planes.” She ticked them off on her fingers.
“Anáil-throm—the low breath, nearest the ground. Anáil-mheán—the middle breath, which carries weather. Anáil-árd—the high breath, which binds the isles. Each has its own pressure, temperature, and grain. A trained reader can hold all three in mind at once and tell you where each has been in the last hour, what has passed through it, what is coming.” She shrugged one shoulder.
“In practice, you learn where the air has thickened and where it has thinned.
“A good reader,” Aoife continued, “can pick up the wake of a thing that passed an hour before her, much as a hound catches scent.” Her mouth curved slightly.
“And the Windsingers—the true ones, the ones the old songs bother to remember—could do more than that. They could trace a person through the breath left behind. Not merely the wake. The person. The masters say a Windsinger could follow a thread of someone across a continent—across a lifetime.” Her voice dropped a fraction.
“Some say even after the breath had stopped. Of all the Sylph—of all the Sídhe, in truth—the Windsingers have always stood closest to the Spioraid. They were not made to use the spirits, the way a Tuatha might. They shared a single breath between them, and could send it out beyond their bodies—into the wind itself, into a hawk, into a horse, into any creature that moved through the air—and ride along in it for leagues at a time. Some could walk, for a time, in the spirit-shape only. Anáil-roinnte, they called it. The shared breath. It is a thing very few Sylph have ever been able to do. Most who tried did not return.”
Elara’s mouth went dry. She glanced at Aoife. At Caelion. At the cup in her hands. The cup was very interesting, she decided. She studied it with great concentration.
Was what Aoife spoke of not what she had been doing? In the in-between place, in the current she had only just learned how to reach.
Windsinger.
“And—the Void,” Elara said carefully. “Can a Sylph read the air there?”
Aoife stilled. A small thing—the smallest—but Elara caught it. Caelion’s eyes flicked to Aoife, then back to Elara. A leaf turned over on the trellis in the wind and righted itself again.
“I have never heard of such a thing,” Aoife said slowly.
“Nor have I,” Caelion said.
“From what little I gathered in my brief time inside the Void, I felt no anáil—or none I could sense. It felt more like the absence of it. Like death.” Aoife’s eyes sharpened, watchful, in a way Elara did not much like.
“Our whole discipline is shaped around anáil. When breath ends, so do we. I have never heard of a Sylph reaching into the Void at all, let alone reading it.” She held Elara’s gaze. “Why do you ask?”
Elara looked down at her cup. The thing she could have said sat just under her tongue.
Because I have a hand in the Void already.
Because there is a current there, and I have been following it, and at the end of it there is a man who pushed me through a veil to save my life, and he is not as dead as Reynnar believes he is.
She had not told Aoife about Ivan. She had not told Caelion.
She had not, in any meaningful sense, finished telling herself.
She thought of Ivan in an alley. Of three men dropping silently to the cobblestones, choking on breath that was no longer there to be drawn. They can still the air in a man’s throat.
Elara set the cup down. “Curiosity,” she said, with a pinched smile.
Caelion’s eyes did not leave her face, though he did not, this time, call her on it. Whatever he had felt—and she was fairly certain he had felt something—he held it, and looked back at the fountain, and let her keep it.
The silence stretched half a breath too long.
Then Odhrán’s voice carried from somewhere inside the house. “Caelion? A moment, if you please. This courtyard door has decided it would rather part ways with the wall.”
Caelion’s mouth curved. He rose with considerably more grace than the situation deserved and gave them both a small, elegant bow. “Ladies.”
Then he vanished into the house.
For several moments, Aoife said nothing. She only watched the doorway after him, her wry mouth gone softer at the corners, as though some part of her had followed him inside and not quite returned.
Elara noticed before she meant to. She had seen that look before, though never on Aoife’s face—tenderness disguised so quickly it might have passed for irritation, if one had not already learned where to look.
Aoife caught her staring and arched a brow. “What?”
Elara looked down at the abandoned cup, then back toward the door Caelion had disappeared through. The question rose before she could think better of it.
“Why did you and Caelion never secure the Cara bond?”
Aoife’s eyes flashed. The small wind Caelion had left behind faded from the trellis. Somewhere inside the house, the hinge gave a protesting shriek, followed by Odhrán’s deeply offended mutter.
Aoife’s mouth curved, but it did not reach her eyes. “Gods,” she said. “Straight to the throat, then. You really have been spending too much time with my brother.”
“You don’t have to answer.”
“No,” Aoife said, plucking a leaf from the hem of her skirt and turning it between her fingers. “But you asked well enough.”
The leaf spun once between her thumb and forefinger. Her gaze stayed on it, as though the veins branching through its green surface required all her concentration.
“We knew during the Circles.”
“That early?”
“Of course it was early. The Cara likes to make a spectacle of itself when one is young and already ill-equipped for dignity. He was in the year beneath mine. Still lanky then. All eyes and bones and that grave little mouth of his, as if he had been born already burdened by the stupidity of everyone around him. Pretty enough to make one suspicious. You know the kind.”
Elara smiled despite herself.
“The older Circles liked to test the younger ones in those first weeks,” Aoife said.
“Not openly enough to be punished for it, of course. Just enough to remind them where they stood.” The leaf bent beneath her fingers.
“There was one in particular. A vicious little ass from the eastern courts with rich parents and a face I still occasionally imagine stepping on. He’d taken to waiting until the younger years came back from weapons drill and then picking one to torment.
Usually someone too tired to fight properly, or too proud to complain. ”
Her mouth flattened.
“One evening I came round the lower terraces and found him with Caelion backed against the old training wall. Three of them, actually. And one of them—that one I remember very well—kept goading him to beg for help. Beg, he said, and we’ll stop.
” Aoife’s laugh was all teeth. “Caelion would sooner have swallowed his own tongue.”
A faint smile touched her mouth.
“That was the first thing I noticed about him. Not that he was pretty—though he was. Or that his lip was split and his eye was swelling. Not that he was younger, or outnumbered, or in trouble. It was the look on his face. Complete disdain. A sort of exhausted, frostbitten contempt. As if they had interrupted him in the middle of something more interesting than being beaten.”
The leaf tore down the center. Aoife looked at the two halves in her hand and let them fall into the grass.
“I might tell you that I intervened out of some noble sense of justice. I did not. I intervened because one of them had his hand at Caelion’s throat and Caelion was trying very hard not to make a sound, and something in me went feral at the sight.
So I broke the nose of the one holding him, dislocated the shoulder of the one laughing, and told the third that if he ever looked in Caelion’s direction again, I would remove his teeth one by one and hand them back to him in a silk pouch.
” She glanced over. “I was very charming at seventeen.”
“I am sure he was dazzled.”
“When it was over,” Aoife said, softer now, “he picked up his own boots. He was bleeding from the mouth. I asked whether he could walk, and he said yes in the tone of a man informing me that the sky was generally overhead. Then he looked at me…”
Her fingers went still in her lap.
Elara’s heart gave a strange little turn.
“That was when I knew.”
“The Cara?”
Aoife nodded, her gaze dropping to the grass between her feet.
“I kept wanting to know whether he had eaten. Whether his shoulder still pained him where the older boys had thrown him into the wall that first week. Whether he was sleeping enough. Whether anyone had looked at him too long in the corridors. It was absurd. Entirely intolerable. I told myself it was temporary insanity.”
“And then?”
“And then I got to know him.” Aoife leaned back against the bench, but there was no ease in the movement.
The garden light gentled the irreverent angles of her face.
Up close, the bravado had worn thin. “He was kinder than anyone had a right to be after what the Circles did to boys like him. Careful with weaker hands. Patient with frightened horses. Incapable of speaking to children as though they were lesser creatures. He listened when people spoke, even when they bored him half to death. He remembered everything anyone said to him. Not for advantage. Simply because it mattered to him that it had been said.”