Chapter 41 #2
Oh, you are a beautiful thing, she thought, with that effortless, dangerous affection that kept surprising her in its simplicity. And this country suits you. I am glad of it. So glad I could—
Reynnar went still. His smile faded, eyes settling on her with a thoughtfulness that was too attentive by half. “What are you thinking about?”
Shit.
“I was considering,” she said, with a carefully bright tone, “that if Aoife was like that at three, I shudder to imagine what she was like at ten.”
A dark brow arched. “Hm,” he said.
But he let the question drift away.
He swept his hair back from his face, moving toward her, and water ran down the planes of him—along his temples, over the line of his jaw, down the strong column of his throat before gathering in the hollow at its base.
The sight of it sent a hot, reckless thought through her, swift as lightning: her tongue there, following every shining path of it. Tasting salt and spring and skin.
Before he could read a single treacherous thing in her face, she ducked fully beneath the water.
Upon her surfacing, he neared to a pace away, the water reaching his chest. His gaze moved over her in no great haste—the wet strands of hair plastered to her cheeks and throat, the thin tunic nearly sheer where it clung to her skin, the outline of her beneath it, and then, at last, her mouth.
The air between them seemed to narrow. Elara could feel every inch of water against her body, every place the spring touched and every place he did not, and suddenly that felt like too little.
“Are you going to scent-mark me, then?”
Reynnar’s pupils blew wide, his mouth opening and closing with the faintest audible click. “You know about that,” he said at last, very carefully.
Elara nearly laughed. It was the most flustered she had ever seen him.
“Odhrán,” she said, beginning to tread water again.
“Of course,” Reynnar murmured. He tipped his head back for a moment, as if appealing to the sky above. “I should have assumed.”
“He was very invasive. He asked about my human anatomy at length.”
Reynnar shut his eyes. “Gods.” He lifted his hand and passed it over his face. “I will kill him.”
“I believe he took notes.”
His hand stayed where it was for a beat. “Then I will kill him slowly.”
“He drew a diagram at one point.”
“Eilíara.”
She grinned despite herself. But the grin began to fade when she saw that something in him had shifted behind the cover of his hand—something deeper than embarrassment, harder to read. He lowered it at last. His eyes were still closed.
Then he opened them. “Aoife thinks we should discuss it.”
Elara’s mouth softened at the corner. She was quite certain those had not been Aoife’s exact words, but she chose, generously, to allow it.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s discuss.”
A flicker of uncertainty crossed his face—the look of a man who had braced himself for resistance and, finding none, did not quite know how to step into the space it left behind. It was, she thought, terribly endearing.
He cleared his throat. “Every Sídhe in Carnlasair would know it at once. On a single breath.” His gaze held hers. “That we are tethered.”
“And that is a bad thing?”
“It would complicate matters.”
“How?”
He was silent for a moment, weighing his answer.
When he spoke again, his voice had gone lower.
“It would place a pressure on you I do not want wish for you to have.” Elara only tilted her head and waited.
Reynnar drew in a breath. “After I gave my Fuil-Chroí to Eamon, there was an imbalance among the Tuatha Dé Danann. I told you that much already.” He stopped, as though the next words required more care than the others had.
“Finding my…” He broke off and began again.
“Finding you would restore some measure of it.”
“If we link our Draoth.”
“Yes.”
She looked down at the water between them, sunlight scattering across it in broken silver. “But I haven’t been able to reach my Draoth at all. What I feel is…” She searched for the truth of it. “You. Your fire.”
He nodded once, slowly. “Even so. The bond would strengthen us both.”
“And your people would want that.”
A faint, rueful light passed over his face. “Very much.”
The unease came so quietly she did not at first recognize it for what it was. By the time she did, her shoulders had already tautened and her fingers had curled against her palms hard enough to mark them. She did want to speak of it. She reminded herself of that with stubborn insistence.
And yet.
Elara pressed her lips together.
No one in this world—or any other—stood nearer to her than Reynnar.
The truth of him had settled deep enough in her that arguing with it now felt foolish.
So why did the thought of linking with him still give her pause?
Why did it leave her feeling as though the ground beneath her had shifted?
She turned the question over in her mind, carefully, as she had once turned the bloodstone in her hand—searching for the hidden catch.
And then she understood.
If she linked with him—if the Cara settled fully between them, if her Draoth opened at last, if she stepped into the whole of what she was—then afterward she would have to decide who she was.
She had been afraid for so long that fear had ceased to feel like a passing thing and became, instead, part of her making.
It had grown into her, through her, the way a tree might grow around a buried nail.
Whatever pieces she was made of, she would have to name herself.
Not as others had written her, not as they had tried to define her, but as she truly was. Sídhe or mortal or both or neither.
She did not know who she was without the fear.
But she wanted to find out.
Reynnar drew in a slow breath and stepped nearer still.
“I understand,” he said, and his voice had gentled into something careful.
“How it must feel. As if nothing in you is wholly yours. As if your own instincts have been crowded by too many other hands—blood, bond, another man’s claim, a fate you never asked to inherit.
” His gaze did not leave her face. “I would never have you feel that way with me.”
The spring moved softly around them.
“The Cara is not a life sentence, ealaín,” he said. “It can be softened. Dimmed. Even severed, if that is what you choose. You have nearly done so already.”
A laugh broke from her then—one small, frayed sound. Because if she had not laughed, she would have cried.
“It’s not that I don’t want this connection with you, Reynnar. It’s that I don’t know if I want a forced connection with anyone.”
His eyes were steady on her face. “And that,” he said gently, “is your right.”
Warmth went through her so suddenly that it hurt.
Her vision blurred at once, and she blinked hard against it.
She had known—some part of her had always known—that this would be his answer.
But hearing it aloud, hearing it given so plainly and without the least shadow of injury or demand, loosened something she had held clenched for weeks.
She was a fool, she thought, for not having said any of this aloud before. Of course he would answer this way. Of course he would.
“I only—” She stopped and tried again. “I can’t trust a thing in me that I cannot govern.
It muddles everything. How am I meant to know what is mine?
What is honestly my own? And what is only instinct—something built into me long before I met you—teaching my body to reach for yours, to hunger for yours, and making me question whether even my heart is my own where you are concerned? ”
He looked as though she had struck some undefended place in him. His breath faltered. When his eyes found hers again, they held none of their earlier ease.
Her heart stuttered.
What—
Then her own words returned to her.
Hunger.
Heart.
A strange nakedness wound through her. She had said it—if not in plain terms, then near enough. That she wanted him. That her body did. That her heart…
Gods. The admission left her feeling skinned alive. Her stomach gave a painful turn.
“Do not say a thing like that to me,” he said, “and expect me to behave as though I did not hear it.”
“Reynnar—”
“No.” He shook his head, the movement abrupt, almost pained. “No. Let me answer.” His eyes found hers again, bright and intent and far too awake. “Let me answer you properly. Because I won’t have you doubting a single word of this.”
He came nearer.
The water shifted around him, soft ripples brushing against her body until the spring no longer felt wide enough to hold the space between them. His eyes, bright as amber in the light, deepened—heavy-lidded, unguarded, full of a want so plain it made her breath catch.
“It is your choice,” he said. “It will always be your choice. I need you to hear that before anything else. But do not mistake what I feel for the Cara. Do not give the bond credit for what has become of me. Blood may carry instinct. It may bind Draoth to Draoth. But it does not make a male. It does not choose his thoughts for him, nor his heart. It only lays one soul beside another. No more than that.”
He moved another half-step closer, and the water lapped warmer against her skin.
“What I feel for you began long before I understood there was any bond between us,” he continued.
“It began in the first hour I was near you—your light in a darkness that had nearly stripped me hollow. And it has only grown since. Not because some old power whispered that it should, but because of you.” His gaze held hers, unwavering.
“Because of your bravery. Because you are the most selfless creature I have ever known, and somehow the most obstinate besides. Because you stood in a canal and stepped toward something that might have unmade you, and asked it—”
A brief, helpless note of wonder touched his face.
“—politely, for the favor of its help.”
He shook his head again, as though even now she remained beyond him.