Chapter 41
The sky above Ellylldan was a blue so deep it almost ached to look at it. It stretched on without break or mercy, vast enough that if Elara let her gaze linger too long, she had the strange sensation of falling upward into it—untethered from the long, bruising road that had brought her here.
Each morning, the sun rose like a bright white coin laid against the heavens, and beneath it, the land unfurled in great copper swells. The grasses bowed and lifted in the wind. Far to the south, a ridge of black stone cut the horizon, glass-dark and gleaming where the light struck it.
They had been walking toward it since dawn.
It had not come any nearer.
Bréanthach. Land That Burns.
Reynnar had helped her with the southern dialect, translating, and then added, “We have never minded the implication.”
By the second day, Elara had begun to suspect the Ellylldan Sídhe did not much mind what other people found frightening.
They had rifted only as far as the border—not to Carnlasair, nor to any of the smaller jewel-cities Reynnar had named for her in the hours after they stepped through.
Her calculations had been imperfect, and, worse, the crossing had taken nearly all the strength she had to give.
She had seen the glance that passed between Reynnar and Aoife once she managed to remain upright—a swift, soundless thing interpreted plainly enough: She is not doing that again anytime soon.
For once, she did not argue and accepted the hands offered to her—accepted the rest her body had been demanding. And when there was nothing left to do but walk, she walked. And ran, when the terrain allowed, and walked again when it did not. But she did not mind it.
The country unfurled around her like a dream she had wandered into without permission, and Elara, despite the ache in her bones and the lingering hollowness where the dagger had pulled too much, found herself wanting to remember every detail.
The day before, they had crossed a valley veined with pale steam, where geysers opened and closed like mouths in the earth. Reynnar had named it for her as they passed—Teine Bhreac, the Speckled Fire—but Elara stopped at the rim and refused, for a moment, to be hurried on.
The others had gone a few paces ahead before noticing she was no longer with them.
Caelion doubled back and came to stand beside her, his presence as unruffled as the valley below. “The old stories say that when Epona’s breath first shaped the Spioraid, a mote from Tine’s making fell here.”
Another plume unfurled below them, glowing red at its heart before fading into gold.
“The land remembers many things,” he said quietly, “but this, it honors.”
He never remarked upon the fact that she slowed them.
Not when she needed rest. Not when her gaze lingered too long on the strange, burning sweep of the territory.
Caelion had only appeared at her shoulder sometime on the first morning and remained there, shortening his stride so subtly that she nearly missed the courtesy.
He did not look at her when he did it. Did not make a performance of it.
That, Elara thought, was his particular kind of kindness.
In the miles that followed, she had learned things about him in the way you learned things about quiet people: indirectly, in fragments, in the unguarded spaces between words.
They shared certain habits, she discovered.
A preference for silence over conversation that served no purpose beyond filling air.
An inclination to observe first, speak second—or third—or not at all.
Caelion had a habit of cataloging the world as they walked.
The name of a bird passing overhead. The mineral properties of different stones.
The exact hour the copper grass shifted from flame to bronze beneath the lowering sun.
He offered these things as Reynnar offered food: without ceremony, without expectation, simply setting them within reach in case she wanted them.
So, Elara began to do the same.
And somewhere between one mile and the next, it became, without either of them deciding it, a kind of conversation.
He had also, she discovered on the second morning, a profound and serious relationship with a particular type of dried fig that Aoife had packed.
He had very firm opinions on the proper method of eating them, which was apparently whole, with due reverence, and not while walking, which he seemed to consider barbaric.
He explained this with such grave sincerity that Elara laughed before she could prevent it.
Caelion had only glanced at her sidelong and offered one.
Irritatingly, his way was better.
By midday, they had descended into the shelter of a long rise of black basalt, where the endless grasslands softened into a shallow basin held between two curving arms of stone.
At its lip, a small stand of pale, silver-barked trees leaned over a spring.
The water slipped from their roots in a clear ribbon, threading toward the valley below.
Steam curled faintly from the far side, where the channel ran deep and hot, but the nearer edge lay in shade, its surface cool and glass-bright.
Reynnar halted at the crest and turned, waiting for her.
He had stripped bare to the waist sometime late that first morning, when the heat had risen high enough to urge them to shed all but what little they could bear—Aoife to her under-tunic and breeches, Caelion to a thin sleeveless shirt, Eamon much the same.
Elara had tugged Odhrán’s borrowed wool sweater over her head and left it where it fell, the linen beneath already damp along her spine.
She had shoved her sleeves past her elbows and stood there, letting the air pass over her skin, though it did little to ease the heat.
“Breathe slow,” Reynnar had murmured at her shoulder. “The air’s thinner here. It takes a minute.”
Now, days later, they were all marked by the road—skin salted with sweat, clothes clinging, the journey written plainly across them.
When she reached Reynnar’s side and looked down at the spring, she nearly wept.
Aoife’s whoop broke the air behind her, pulling a smile from Elara, while the others were already moving, shedding what remained of their clothes.
She followed, fingers clumsy for a moment at the fastening of her trousers before they loosened and fell away.
The brush of air against her skin was so blessedly cool that it caught at her breath.
She did not linger. Before Eamon could offer any snark about her “delicate human sensibilities,” she stepped past them and into the water, her tunic still clinging to her.
The spring rose to meet her in a slow climb—over her ankles, her knees, her hips—until it gathered her fully in its cool hold. She sank deeper, letting it close over her shoulders, then her throat, until only her face remained above the surface, the heat drawn from it at last.
Across the pool, Aoife and Reynnar were arguing.
Again.
They had been quarreling in quick, low bursts for the last three hours of travel.
At the waypost. At the crossroads where they had paused to send a herald south.
Every time Elara drifted within earshot, their voices dropped.
Every time she pretended not to listen, they stopped outright and went conspicuously quiet.
She had decided not to ask, though she had a good idea what it was about.
There was a sudden splash at her feet.
Elara startled, the ripples licking at her ankles as Reynnar slipped into the water.
He was stripped down to a pair of thin linen underthings, pale and clinging, and for a moment she forgot the concept of air.
She looked once. Then very intently at the canopy overhead.
And then—because she was not, in fact, a saint—once more.
He dove beneath the surface without warning, a flash of white limbs and silvered motion. When he surfaced, he was only a few feet away, hair slicked back in a shining arc that ended with a splash straight across her face.
She sat upright with a strangled gasp, blinking it away.
“Was that necessary,” she asked, dripping and deeply affronted.
“You looked too serious.”
“I was being peaceful.”
“Well, there’s your first mistake.” He drifted closer, treading water. “This spring has a reputation to uphold. It doesn’t tolerate peace of mind.”
She wiped the water from her eyes, unimpressed. “Is that so.”
His grin only deepened, droplets beading in his lashes. “My mother used to bring us here when we were children. Aoife nearly drowned one of our cousins in it.”
Elara turned her head to look at him fully now. “Why does that not surprise me?”
“She was three.”
“That is not the defense you think it is.”
He laughed, and the sound skimmed over the water.
Elara floated on her back in the pale blue-green spring and, for the first time in three days, looked at him without looking away.
Properly looked. His hair had grown longer than it had been in Latheria.
She did not know why she had not noticed it sooner.
Damp, it curled at the nape of his neck and brushed his shoulders when he tipped his head back.
The hollows in his face had gentled. He no longer held his shoulders as though braced for some unseen blow.
Even the shadows beneath his eyes, which had followed him here like a second life, had begun at last to loosen their hold.
When he ducked beneath the water again and came up smiling, something in her caught. For one fleeting breath, he looked like a male she had never been allowed to know. He’d been nervous to return. I imagine I’ll have to. Whether I wish to or not. And sooner than I’d like.
But this land was already undoing him in the gentlest of ways.
He looked happy—like he was returning to something that loved him, even if he had not yet decided to love it back. The sight of it filled her chest with a warmth so sudden and so uncomplicated that her throat ached.