Chapter 35 #3
Her fingers worried at the fold of her skirt.
“After that he was always there. At drills. At meals. Carrying things I had not asked him to carry. Handing me the better knife before I had realized the one I held was dull. Seeing me angry before I opened my mouth. Seeing me tired before I felt it myself.” She rubbed a hand lightly over her sternum.
“It is intolerable to be known in that manner.”
A small, humorless smile touched her mouth.
“The more I knew him, the less the bond felt like fate and the more it felt like a joke being played at my expense.”
Elara frowned. “Why?”
Aoife looked down. “Because he is good,” she said simply. “And I am not.”
“That is ridiculous.”
“Is it?” Aoife lifted her gaze. “He is… good in ways I have never been. Clean where I am not. Kind where I have had to learn cruelty in order to survive the day. There are things I have done, Eilíara. Things I would do again if it meant getting my people free.” Her mouth flattened.
“I know what I am. I know what the war made room for in me. And when I look at him, all I can think is that if we bound ourselves fully—if I let him all the way in—he would have to carry the whole of it with me. Every ugly piece.”
Elara stared. This whole time she had thought Aoife was rejecting him. But she had not been rejecting Caelion at all.
She had been rejecting herself.
“He is still waiting for you.”
At that, Aoife’s shoulders lowered by a fraction. She sat very still, hands folded in her skirts, and when she answered, her voice had gone so quiet Elara nearly missed it.
“I know.”
“Then why torture yourselves?”
Aoife let out a breath and tipped her head back, looking up at the gray sky as though the answer might be written somewhere among the clouds.
“Because if I say yes, if I let the bond settle fully and choose him in the way that means… he cannot unchoose it later. There is no careful retreat from that. No pretending we may yet go separate ways if it all becomes too much for him to bear. It would be the whole of me, tied to the whole of him.” Her mouth curved, but sorrow had got there first. “And that is the most frightening thing I can imagine. His regret.”
Elara sat with that for a moment, letting the words settle between them. The fountain whispered behind her. Somewhere beyond the garden wall, the city moved on in its strange, cloud-soft rhythm, careless of the small griefs taking root beneath Odhrán’s trellis.
Then she reached across the bench and covered Aoife’s hand with her own.
“I don’t think he would regret knowing you,” she said quietly. “Not the whole of you. Not even the pieces you think are too ugly to be loved.”
Aoife looked down at their joined hands. For once, no clever answer came quickly enough to save her. Her fingers remained very still beneath Elara’s, but her throat moved once, and when she finally turned her hand over, she squeezed Elara’s fingers hard enough to ache.
“Careful, Eilíara,” she said, though her voice had gone rough. “Keep speaking like that and I shall be forced to become emotionally attached to you.”
Elara laughed. “A terrible fate.”
Aoife looked down at their joined hands, squeezing once over before she let go. When she spoke again, the teasing had gentled into something warmer. “No,” she said softly. “I think it may be one of the better things to happen to me.”
From the open kitchen windows, Odhrán’s voice carried across the garden in a distracted grumble, followed by the unmistakable clang of a pot lid.
Elara let out a breath through her nose. “I should help him with supper,” she said, pushing herself to her feet. “He has been hopeless in the kitchen since we arrived. I don’t know how the Sídhe has managed to keep himself alive all these years.”
Aoife rose with her, though her expression had not quite recovered its usual wickedness. “Spite,” she said. “And, I suspect, the occasional intervention of kinder people.”
Elara’s gaze lingered on her. She found she did not, in fact, wish to leave.
The garden had loosened something in her chest that had been held very tight all morning.
Aoife had given her a word for what she had only ever formed a half-shape of.
Windsinger. The breath of a goddess in a fragment in her chest. A city of glass and cloudstone whose towers grazed the thunderheads. A kingdom on the edge of the storms.
A place she might, once, have called home.
And then Aoife had opened another door, one she did not open often. Elara felt it now, the strange privilege of having been trusted with something precious and breakable.
“Thank you,” Elara said.
The words came out smaller than she intended.
Aoife caught her hand and squeezed it once before letting go. “Come on, then,” she said, her voice lighter by force rather than ease. “Before Odhrán discovers a new and innovative way to poison us all.”
Elara huffed a laugh despite herself, and Aoife slung an arm over her shoulder as they started toward the kitchen with the easy certainty of someone long accustomed to deciding where people belonged.