Chapter 38
They hid beneath the eastern bridge. It was Eamon who chose it—a low span where the stone arched close to the water and the shadow ran deep enough to swallow five bodies whole.
The wardlights on its rail had not yet returned to full strength, still thin and flickering from the maintenance, and the cobbled walk along the canal was empty of all but a lamplighter working his way south.
They waited as the city settled back into its ordinary evening rhythms, indifferent to what had almost happened inside its skin.
Caelion returned a quarter-hour later, dropping down the stone steps to the waterline without sound. “Odhrán will watch Tieran,” he said, crouching beside Reynnar. “The old wards on that house are strong. Hopefully he’ll sleep until morning and wake remembering nothing past his midday bread.”
Elara leaned back against the cold curve of the arch and tried to master her breathing.
Blood had dried beneath her nose. Her hands had not yet remembered how to be still.
The dagger rested at her hip, heavier now than when she had first drawn it, as though what it had severed still clung to the metal in some invisible way.
“We cannot go in at all without a plan,” Aoife said.
She crouched at the canal’s lip and trailed her fingers through the water.
“The pull is strong. The old workings run south beneath the quarter, all the way toward the sea-mouth. If the gate lies beneath the canal itself, we’ll have to enter where it deepens. ”
Her hand stilled in the water. “And once it deepens, we’ll be swimming blind.”
“Blind and with a long way to go,” Caelion said.
He stepped to the water and stretched one hand over it.
His Draoth slipped free in a cool hush, and the canal answered.
The surface quivered beneath his palm. Then a small bubble of air rose from the dark and lifted into his hand, slow and silver as a pearl drawn from silt.
He closed his fingers around it. Another followed.
Then another. One by one, they gathered there, until a pale globe, softly humming, rested in his cupped palm.
Aoife knelt beside him. Where Caelion drew slowly, with patience, she worked quickly, gathering more with deft little motions of her fingers. Their powers moved together in a strange and lovely accord, until the pale globe swelled brighter between their hands.
With two fingers, Aoife drew up another shimmering pocket and fed it into the globe.
“Press it to your mouth when you need it and breathe, and don’t wait until your lungs are screaming. By then you’ll drag in water instead.” Her glance flicked up. “One each.”
Elara looked from the pale sphere to the dark canal below it. “You can breathe under there?”
“For a span,” Caelion said, a note of amusement in his voice. “Then we surface, or I keep drawing. It has limits. We are borrowing, not belonging as a Naidiryn might.”
“It’s an old trick,” Aoife said.
“A trick,” Elara said faintly. “So the two of you can breathe underwater. How has no one ever thought to mention—”
“Eilíara.”
Her name came tenderly with amusement.
Reynnar stood beside her, close enough for her to catch the glint of one fang when he smiled, his expression fond and far too aware of how thoroughly she had been sidetracked.
“File it away,” he said quietly. “There’s time to be astonished later.”
Heat rose faintly in her cheeks. She tore her eyes from Caelion’s impossible little sphere and nodded quickly. “Yes. Fine. I’m here. What’s the plan?”
“Caelion takes point,” Aoife said, all business again. “He breaks the current and draws air. I hold the rear with a second pocket in reserve. We move in a chain: Reynnar in the middle with Eilíara, Eamon between us.”
“We follow what fled,” Reynnar said. “Find where it returned. Mark the gate. Then we come back up.” His gaze moved over them. “We do not engage. Not tonight.”
“Not tonight,” Caelion repeated, and this time his eyes rested on Elara.
She nodded. She understood him. You have given enough of yourself already.
Then she turned to the canal, where ten feet of water lay dark as oil, the wardlights along the far rail breaking into soft, shifting coins across its surface.Her pulse had already begun to climb.
The swim through the aqueduct raced through her mind—the hand of the girl reaching, her pulse screaming in the moment before submersion—and she pressed it down, pressed it flat, told her body it knew how to do this.
Elara crouched at the edge and leaned forward to set her hand in the water—
and the channel stilled.
A drawn breath that refused to let go.
Elara froze, her fingers hanging a hair above the surface. Behind her, Reynnar’s Draoth gathered tight. Aoife rose in one soundless motion. In Caelion’s hand, the pale globe of gathered air trembled.
Then the water swelled.
A great, rounded mass rose from the center of the canal, lifting higher and higher until it climbed the stone walls and struck the underside of the bridge with a wet, echoing slap before it split.
Na Spioraid Uisce.
The spirit came out of the water in a long unfurling, a serpent made of current and cold depth, her body the silver-blue of glacier ice where the light struck it and the color of the deep trench where it did not.
Scales like wet obsidian armored her sides in overlapping plates, each one larger than a shield and sheened with a wet, argent glow.
From the crown of her head streamed a mane of fine, floating filaments that moved as though she had brought the water up with her, trailing kelp and silkweed and the pale glow of things that had never known the sun.
Her horns curved back, branching coral-white along a skull as broad as a cart.
But it was her eyes that held Elara still.
They shone like lanterns, long-pupiled and fathomless, old in the way of mountains and patient in the way of tides.
She was massive.
And still she rose.
Her head climbed above the bridge rail, above the canal quarter itself, until she looked down upon the city from a height no living creature ought to command.
Across the city, a bell tolled.
On the bridge, the lamplighter dropped his pole and sank to one knee.
Along the rail, a woman with a market basket followed, then a dockhand, then a boy who flattened himself against the stone.
In the windows along the canal, shutters opened and faces appeared and then disappeared as, one by one, the people of Luirigh who had looked up and seen lowered themselves to the ground in the old posture.
Beside Elara, Aoife knelt. Caelion followed, hand over his heart, and even Eamon lowered himself to the cobblestones. Reynnar was last, his eyes never leaving hers as his fingers brushed the back of her calf in warning.
Step back.
Elara did not step back.
The filaments drifted toward her on a current she could not feel, the same way they always had—and she went very still.
Understanding arrived, quiet and complete, as it sometimes did when the body had known a truth long before the mind caught up: a trace of this presence, again and again, at the bottom of rivers she should not have survived.
“I know you,” she whispered. “I have seen you—in Latheria.” Her eyes did not leave the great creature’s face. “You were smaller then. Less…yourself.”
Behind her, Reynnar drew in a breath.
The serpent lowered its massive head until it hovered only a few paces away, its enormous eyes fixed on her face. Cool mist drifted across Elara’s skin, delicate as rain.
Then it made a sound.
The note rolled through the air, deep and resonant, felt more than heard. It traveled through her bones and into the bridge beneath her feet, stirring something ancient inside her, some hidden place that had never belonged entirely to the mortal world.
Elara remained where she was, unable to say whether what held her there was courage or surrender.
Uisce touched her nose to Elara’s brow with impossible care, and the world fell away.
She stood in a stone chamber she did not know.
A well sat at its center, its walls dark with damp and moss.
There was a girl in the well. Human. Fifteen, perhaps sixteen.
Her hair hung long and dark, plastered to her cheeks and throat.
She was trying to climb out, clumsy with terror, her fingers searching for purchase on the slick inner wall.
Stone scraped skin from her hands. She slipped. Caught herself. Slipped again.
Above, on the rim, shadows moved.
The shifting, faceless silhouettes of bodies gathered there, looking down.
A hand reached over the lip of the well.
It closed in the girl’s hair and forced her beneath the water.
She thrashed at once, legs striking stone, hands breaking the surface only to vanish again as water slapped the well in frantic bursts. The hand held her down until her struggling turned wild, then weak, then terribly slow.
Far below, something green began to glow.
The room tore away.
Water again, though stranger now: a different sea in a world Elara had never seen, beneath a low, colorless sky where the light seemed strained thin before it reached the surface. It stretched flat and endless, dark as iron.
A girl stood submerged to her chin, sinking even as she remained upright.
She was not human. Small horns curled from her temples, pale and delicate against wet hair plastered to her face, and silver eyes shone through the dimness, bright with grief, terror, and the helpless understanding of someone already being taken.
Tears slipped down her cheeks and disappeared as something hidden below drew her under.
Elara could not see what held her, only the way the girl’s shoulders jerked as she fought it and the sea climbed over her mouth, her nose, the curve of one horn, then both.
A pale green spell rose from the place where she vanished.
Uisce lifted her nose from her brow and Elara swayed, her body returning in pieces: the cold bridge beneath her boots, damp air on her face, the ache in her nose, blood stiff above her lip. Her breath came ragged and late, as though she had been too far away to remember needing it.
Uisce was already turning from her, the great length of her body folding back on itself, scales catching the wardlight in rivered flashes as she bent toward the canal.
“Wait.”
The word rang beneath the bridge, struck stone, skimmed over water, and vanished into the dark.
Slowly, her great head turned back.
Behind Elara, Reynnar’s Draoth gathered tight.
It strained toward her and held—his restraint a second heartbeat in her chest. Further back, the others were still kneeling, and she could feel Eamon’s stare on her shoulder blades—the strange doubled awareness of him, through Reynnar, through the Cara.
She did not turn.
She stepped closer to Uisce.
“There is a gate in your waters.” Her voice shook and steadied and shook again. “Beneath this canal. I think…” She swallowed. “I think you have been trying to show me.” Her hands curled at her sides. “I need to close it. Do you know of it?”
The serpent’s long pupils narrowed. For a moment, Elara was not sure Uisce understood her—this was a being older than language, older than her people, older than the floor of the sea—then she lowered her great head toward her chest, her eye holding Elara’s.
A bow.
Yes.
“Eilíara.”
Reynnar’s voice came low and rough behind her. He was standing now, one hand lifted toward her as if instinct had carried it there and discipline alone had kept it from going farther.
“Whatever is down there,” he said, “it does not get to keep you.”
Elara pressed her lips together and nodded once, hard, unwilling to trust whatever might escape if she gave it leave.
Behind Reynnar, Eamon’s face offered her nothing.
His attention passed from the serpent to her, then to Reynnar, and back again, blank as stone.
She let it pass over her. Whatever lay in him, she had no desire to read it.
She faced the canal again as the serpent lowered farther, her long body gliding through the dark water until her great head hovered just above the surface, level with where Elara stood. One vast eye remained fixed upon her, ancient and patient.
The meaning of it was plain.
Come.
Elara stepped to the brink, fear closing her throat as the canal gleamed black below.
Then she jumped.
Cold closed over her head, and instinct seized every muscle at once.
Her lungs clenched, her hands flying out as the dark swallowed the bridge, the lights, the watching faces above.
It should have dragged the breath from her body.
Instead, the water gathered around her like a hand closing, and beneath her, the serpent turned in the water and rose.
Uisce’s back broke the surface first, broad and gleaming, a dark curve of scale and silver light.
The canal, which should have churned and fought around something so vast, instead seemed to lift and cradle her, as if the whole body of water had bent itself in reverence.
Uisce came to Elara slowly, until that great shining back waited just beneath her hand.
An invitation.
Elara stared for half a heartbeat, wet to the bone and breathing hard, before she set one palm against the serpent’s scales. They were smooth and cold and alive beneath her touch. Then, she climbed.
Uisce waited until Elara was seated before she moved.
The serpent rose beneath her, unfolding from the canal in one long, glittering line as she lifted higher and higher above the water. Shining sheets poured from her flanks, spilling back into the canal below, where the entire quarter had gone utterly still.
Sídhe were everywhere.
They had gathered along the bridges, in the windows, on the canal steps and balconies and walkways, drawn from taverns and shops and doorways by the spectacle. Faces lifted toward her in wonder, in fear, in open disbelief. The whole of Luirigh, it seemed, had come out to watch.
Water dripped from the hem of Elara’s clothes. Her hair clung in dark ropes down her back. Perched atop a divine water serpent in the center of the canal, she supposed she was no longer in any danger of passing unnoticed through Luirigh.
Uisce shifted beneath Elara, then angled her great head toward the dark run of canal ahead and descended. Water closed over them both, but only for an instant. Then the canal opened around them like a veil drawn aside, and Uisce carried her down into the dark.