Chapter 42
Elara climbed from the spring and left the others in the water behind her.
Her tunic clung damp and close to her skin, and her hair trailed cold down the length of her back.
She did not look at Reynnar as she passed him, did not look at him as she stepped onto the bank, or as she wrung out her hair with hands that would not quite stop shaking—and she was very proud of this, she decided, and she would award herself something for it later, when she felt like a person again.
The grass brushed softly at her ankles as she made her way toward the stand of silver-barked trees where they had left their packs.
Caelion was already there, barefoot in the grass, twisting water from his hair with both hands.
He glanced up at her approach—and then paused.
It was the smallest thing. A slight flare of his nostrils, quick and unthinking.
His gaze lifted again, slower this time, and came to rest on her face. One pale brow rose.
Elara scowled.
A laugh slipped out of him.
“Not a word, Caelion.”
“I’ve said nothing,” he replied, mildly as ever, reaching down for his tunic. “And I will continue to say nothing. In all matters concerning the private affairs of my friends, I am entirely deaf and quite nearly blind.”
Friends. Plural.
She felt the word settle somewhere previously untouched in her—the part of her that had, for most of her life, not quite believed that the people around her intended to stay, the part that had never taken that word for granted.
And now it came to rest there—warm, tentative, almost shy—as though it, too, was uncertain whether it would be allowed to stay.
Still, she kept smiling.
Caelion’s brow climbed a little higher.
They made camp beside the spring that night.
Reynnar saw to the fire while Aoife dug through her pack and produced a hard wedge of salted cheese, a paper twist of Caelion’s beloved dried figs, and a round of flatbread they had been given at the waypost. They ate with their cloaks about their shoulders and passed a skin of sour water between them while the fire burned low and steady.
Eamon sat at the edge of the light, half in shadow, and took what was handed to him without comment.
Then, with the inevitability of weather, Reynnar and Aoife began to quarrel.
It started over the road they meant to take come morning.
Aoife answered one question tartly, to which Reynnar returned the favor.
By the third exchange, they had strayed entirely from the matter at hand and were deep in some childhood dispute involving a stolen horse, a swarm of bees, and a cousin named Breac.
“Breac Brannoc?” Elara said, laughing.
At once, the argument gave way to story.
Their dreadful aunt, it turned out, had named every one of her children in rhyme, a fact so monstrous it seemed to have scarred them all permanently.
Caelion, who had until then confined himself to the occasional dry correction, added in a devastating correction about which of them had actually released the horse, and then all three of them were arguing at once, Reynnar about the sanctity of the Roving Circle oath, Caelion about the specific and limited scope of childhood vows, and Aoife about the fact that she had never been invited into this idiotic pledge at all.
“It was me,” Eamon said. He did not lift his gaze from the fire.
All three of them fell silent and turned to stare at him.
“You were not even there,” Aoife said.
“I was,” Eamon replied. “I released the horse. “You all thought the gate latch failed because Reynnar tied the cord around it wrong. It did not. I cut the knot from the underside then smeared the post with honeycomb so Breac’s bees would follow the horse through the yard.”
Aoife’s mouth fell open.
Reynnar stared at him in horror. “You framed us with bees?”
“I was twelve,” Eamon said. “I had limited resources.”
A short, stunned silence.
Then Reynnar began to laugh in a low, rolling way that shook his shoulders and made Aoife shove him, and then Aoife was laughing, and Caelion was wiping his eyes, and even Eamon—unreadable, reserved Eamon—let the corner of his mouth lift in the smallest grudging admission of triumph.
Elara lowered her gaze to the bread in her hands, though she was no longer hungry. Her thumb grazed it. Warmth from the fire licked across her cheek, and against her will, her eyes lifted again.
Reynnar sat with one knee drawn up, his forearm draped across it, the other leg stretched toward the flames.
His hair had begun to dry, and the loosened dark of it curled at his temples.
The Cara inside her ached toward him with all the desperate intensity of a thing long denied.
Elara pressed her hand hard to her sternum and forced it back down, then looked away.
He had not once met her eyes with the look she had given him through the water, and she was almost grateful for the mercy of it.
Because she was feeling.
In the midst of all this, she was feeling.
The thought was so absurd it bordered on offensive.
There were still missing Sídhe. Blood on her sleeve from what she had coughed up in Luirigh.
A girl drowned in a well. Another girl, horned and weeping, dragged beneath a dead sea in a realm Elara had never been to.
Her brother, alive somewhere and being moved like a piece on a board she could not see.
And still, beneath and between all of it, she was feeling.
For him.
For a man who was waiting for her with the patience of someone who had, by his own admission, already decided. And somewhere in another realm, another man sat in a prison of his own making. A man she had bled for. A man who had pushed her through the Veil because he loved her too much to keep her.
Reynnar knew of Ivan. Knew enough, at least, to think him dead. And because of that, he had been handling her grief with the care one gave a widow.
But she was not a widow.
She was a coward.
Elara had not spoken of her strange spirit-walks in all their weeks in Tír na nóg because she had not yet been certain of what it was herself, and she had not wanted to lay so wild a thing between them until she could say it without doubt.
Now she could. Whether he believed her or looked at her as though she had finally slipped her mind, he deserved the truth.
He deserved to hear it from her before she sat across one more fire from him, pretending that keeping it from him was anything but a lie.
She would tell him, Elara decided.
Soon.
The laughter lingered around the fire, warming the dark in a way Elara had not realized she needed, but since crossing into Ellylldan, she had begun finding the flowers again.
Not in clusters, only one at a time: a pale bloom hidden in the grass, another tucked beneath a rise of stone.
She gathered each one without mentioning it, slipping them into her satchel until their faint sweetness lingered there.
And all the while, she listened for a current, for some stirring in the air that might mean Ivan was reaching from the dark between worlds.
But Ellylldan offered nothing except wind and open sky.
Tonight was the first night they had camped near enough to water, and far enough from roads and watchposts, that she thought she might manage a little privacy.
As the conversation softened around the fire, Elara set down her cup and rose.
Reynnar looked up at once and lifted one brow, the question plain enough in it.
Are you well?
She dipped her chin once, and his gaze lingered as she walked beyond the firelight and down toward the spring, where the grass silvered beneath the moon and the pale trunks of the trees rose like ghosts around the water.
The night was colder away from the flames.
It touched her damp hair and the bare skin of her throat and made her draw her cloak tighter as she moved.
Behind her, the camp sounds softened until they were no more than a murmur.
At the spring’s edge, she drew Epona’s dagger and opened a rift. Ozone curled from the darkness beyond as she widened the opening and searched for a current, reaching as far as she could, but there was nothing.
A small frustration moved through her, though it was laced with worry more than anger.
Had he tried and failed? Was he all right?
Elara let the rift diminish and turned her attention outward, to the world around her—the night air, the spring, the grasses bending in the dark—but the night gave her only itself.
When she looked down at the water, moonlight trembled across its surface.
She had hoped for news, some warning or scrap of knowledge from Ivan before they reached Lasairín, but she had only the flowers in her satchel and the uneasy sense of time narrowing around them all.
Slowly, she let the rift close.
The city of Lasairín rose out of the volcanic rock, its lower tiers carved straight into the living basalt, polished so dark they caught the firelight and kept it, each building gleaming as though a flame burned somewhere inside its walls.
Through the streets ran not water but pale blue steam, the valley’s old hot springs guided into long stone troughs that curled between the houses like ribbons.
Spice perfumed the air—pepper and cardamom and something woody and unfamiliar—mingling with the scent of roasting meat, orange peel, smoke, and, beneath it all, the deep mineral breath of the earth, as though somewhere below the city a forge had been banked low and left to smolder.
Elara stopped beside Reynnar at the crest of the road.
“I—” The words failed her. “It looks as though it’s on fire.”
“A little,” he said. “Yes.”
“Do your people not burn?” Elara asked faintly.
“Of course we burn,” Aoife said, drawing up at her other side. “We merely burn on purpose. It is a point of pride.”
They began down the road.
No one stared at her.