Chapter 43
It was as though the bond had opened a window between their souls: him in the dark of his room, one hand braced on his knee, throat working once as he sat with his eyes closed, bearing what had passed through her body and knowing, with dreadful certainty, exactly what she had just done.
Gods-dammit.
Elara slammed the wall of the Cara down so violently that her throat closed around the effort.
For a heartbeat, she could not breathe. Water surged over the rim of the copper bath as she bent forward, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes, shaking not from the release but from the full horror of what she had done.
He had felt it.
He had felt all of it.
She had, essentially, reached across the fire, taken his hand, and drawn it into the bath with her.
Elara sat with that knowledge for a long moment, stunned by it.
Then, with her heart pounding so hard it seemed to fill the whole room, she eased the Cara open again—but only by the narrowest measure, no wider than a crack.
She sent nothing through it. Not a thought. Not an apology. She only listened.
He was no longer in the inn.
The sense of him moved elsewhere, passing down a street, then through a door. The taste of him changed—in the wordless way of the Cara she had come to know—and she understood, slowly, that he had sat down and was drinking.
Drinking in the grim, determined manner of a man trying to drown something that was not interested in drowning.
Restless. Want held under brutal restraint.
Elara closed the Cara again and remained in the cooling bath with her face in her hands.
Well. That just destroyed any shred of neutrality I was pretending to hold.
Then, despite herself, she laughed—a short, helpless sound that rang against the copper and stone and did nothing whatsoever to improve the situation.
Reynnar did not return until long after she had gone to bed.
His steps sounded in the corridor, and Elara lay perfectly still beneath the red coverlet, the Cara shut tight against him.
She did not open it, though she was devastatingly curious.
She only listened to the sound of his door across the hall opening, then closing again, and stared at the ceiling for a long time after.
Eventually, sleep found her.
He came to breakfast the next morning looking like a man who had spent the night wrestling himself and could not say with confidence which side had won.
His hair was damp from washing. There were shadows beneath his eyes, and a faint crease drawn between his brows that no amount of morning light could soften. He dropped into the chair opposite her.
Aoife, already seated with both hands wrapped around a cup of something dark and steaming, took one look at him and smiled into it.
“Brother,” she said, “you look as though you were trampled by a horse.”
“A horse would have been merciful.”
Aoife hummed into her cup. “Mm. So the tavern went badly.”
“I do not wish to discuss it.”
“And what were you drinking?”
“Aoife.”
“I’m only asking.”
“You are being tedious.”
Aoife, greatly pleased with herself, took a long sip and did not press further.
Caelion slipped into the chair beside her with a small pastry procured from somewhere in the inn and contributed, as was his custom in the mornings, nothing at all.
Eamon was not at the table. He had come down earlier, taken whatever he needed from the kitchen, and gone back out into the city on whatever business occupied him.
Reynnar lifted his gaze.
He found her already looking at him.
Elara had not meant to stare. Heat rose at once, before she could school her expression into anything like calm. She reached for her tea with her right hand, and the other—without thinking—curled into a loose fist on the table between them.
The hand.
His eyes dropped to it at once and stayed there a breath too long. His gaze darkened. The line between his brows deepened. He reached for his cup, lifted it, then set it down again without drinking. A moment later, he shoved back his chair and rose.
“I’m going to find Eamon,” he said, addressing no one in particular. “Meet us at the south gate.”
“Rey—” Aoife began.
But he was gone.
Aoife looked at Elara with immediate and vulgar suspicion, but Elara kept her attention fixed very carefully on the table. After a moment, Aoife took another thoughtful sip and—by some mercy—said nothing.
They found Reynnar and Eamon waiting at the south gate, the early light still pale over the fire-licked streets and the steam runways breathing softly through the city. Eamon stood with his arms folded, while Reynnar looked at Elara once, briefly, and then away.
It was Elara who spoke first. “There is no reason we should travel another three days if I can open a rift.”
Aoife’s brows lifted. Caelion’s head turned toward her at once. Even Eamon’s gaze sharpened, if only by a fraction. Relief passed over all three of them before they could quite hide it—the relief of not having to continue to travel at a mortal pace.
All but Reynnar.
“Are you certain?” he asked.
“Elara,” Aoife said, more cautiously now, “you were coughing blood only days ago.”
“I know.” She glanced down at the little packet of dried herbs in her hand, then tucked it back into her satchel.
“Odhrán’s medicine truly has helped. I feel better.
” And because Reynnar still looked as though he might object, she added, more gently, “I would not offer if I thought I could not manage it.”
He held her gaze for another moment, weighing her, measuring perhaps the color in her face, the steadiness of her breath. Then he nodded. “All right.”
“I need a map,” she said.
That sent them into the lower market, where a bookseller and stationer operated out of a long, narrow shop tucked between a spice merchant and a maker of glass lamps.
The woman behind the counter looked up from her ledger when they entered and seemed to know Reynnar at once, though she had the tact not to remark on it.
From a shelf behind her, she produced three rolled maps of the southern territories, each more detailed than the last.
Elara chose the finest of them and spread it over the counter. Her finger found Lasairín first, then tracked northward through the volcanic ridges and the old roads until at last it came to rest on Teinloch. She stood bent over the parchment while the others waited around her.
Distance. Elevation. The memory of the land she had already crossed on foot. She did the calculations twice, then once more for fear.
Elara lifted her head. “I’ve got it.”
They left the shop and did not open the rift within the city proper.
Reynnar led them instead up a long side street and through a disused courtyard behind an abandoned bathhouse, its stone basin cracked and dry, its walls high enough to shelter them from any casual eye.
Steam rose faintly from some hidden seam in the rock below, but otherwise the place stood empty.
“This will do,” Eamon said.
Elara set the map on the lip of the dry fountain and looked at it one last time.
Then she closed her eyes and held the path in her mind—not only the distance between where they stood and where they meant to arrive, but the lie of the land, the volcanic basin, the drop of the caldera, the city gathered around fire.
When she opened her eyes, she lifted the dagger and tore the air.
Darkness split the courtyard wall like a seam undone, its interior depthless and waiting. Relief came to her first not because she had opened it, but because she knew at once that she had judged the distance rightly. The pull of Teinloch answered through the dark where she had meant it to.
“I got it right,” she said, half to herself.
Aoife grinned. “Glowing praise from our rift-maker.”
They stepped through, and heat rose at once from the ground beneath their feet, brighter and more open than the banked swelter of Lasairín.
Teinloch had been built along the rim of a caldera, its streets following the great sweep of the crater in long, flowing lines that seemed to honor the land rather than master it.
The stone was red here—rich as opened fruit, streaked through with gold that caught the sinking light and held it fast. Above the upper roofs, fire spirits turned upon the rising heat, larger than any she had seen before, their burning bodies trailing through the sky like living banners.
And highest of all, beyond a wide court of stone and a long ascent of shallow steps worn smooth by centuries of feet, stood a single hall of the same red-veined rock, its copper roof dark as a forest after rain.
The Brannoc keep.
Breath left her.
When Reynnar came to stand beside her, his gaze did not go at once to the city.
It went first to her face, as though he wished to witness the moment of seeing more than the place itself.
There was pride in him, plain enough—a quiet, deep-rooted pride, like that of a man watching something beloved be recognized for what it had always been.
But there was another thing there too, something weightier, carrying a bruise she could not yet read.
“This,” she said softly, “is where you were born?”
His mouth twitched. “Aye,” he said. The word held brightness, but something wounded moved beneath it. “This is where I was born.” His eyes lifted, at last, to the keep. “They will have seen us by now,” he said. “We should go before my father sends riders to ask why his son lingers at the gate.”
And as if his words had summoned it, the first horn sounded from the wall.