Chapter 47
The kitchens were warm and low-ceilinged, thick with the smell of spice and simmering broth.
Elara was still full from the late breakfast they had eaten hours earlier, but Breagha treated that fact as wholly irrelevant.
A bowl of stew appeared at her elbow. Then bread.
Then a small roast bird, already carved.
Honeyed figs followed, set down before she could think to protest. Breagha moved around the table with a serving fork in hand and the air of a Sídhe settling a grievance decades in the making.
“You.”
Eamon startled hard enough that the chair scraped faintly beneath him.
“Eat more.”
“I have eaten a great deal.”
“You have eaten nothing.” Breagha eyed him with open irritation. “You are nearly transparent. If I held you to the light, I could see my dining room through you. Eat.”
Eamon wisely did not argue.
Breagha kept moving around the table, laying food onto every plate within reach, and Elara had to look down at her hands.
She had seen this before. The extra heel of bread in the Pit.
The last strip of meat shared beneath the ash trees on the road to Luirigh.
The bowl Reynnar had wordlessly nudged across Odhrán’s table when she had not yet been comfortable enough to ask for it herself.
She had thought it courtesy; it was not. It was love in its oldest dialect: food ladled, hunger eased, need wordlessly noticed. Breagha spoke it as she moved, her tenderness folded into every offering.
And Reynnar had inherited that same tongue.
He had been speaking it to Elara all along—with his hands, with his watchfulness, with every small act of care—until she understood she had been fed love before she had even known how starved she was for it.
Elara set her spoon down softly, but the metal still rang against the bowl. She blinked hard and kept her face composed, willing nothing to slip free. But the room had gone too tender all at once. “Forgive me,” she said. “I think—I need some air.”
Breagha turned, the serving fork still in her hand. Her ember-dark gaze flicked to Elara’s throat, then rose again to her face. “The balcony above the west hall,” she said. “End of the corridor. Short stair, arched door.”
Elara dipped her head in thanks and slipped from the warmth of the dining room to the balcony beyond the hall.
Teinloch burned below her.
Lanterns lined the streets, their glow threading in long gilded strands through the tiers of the city.
At its base, the fire-lake smoldered a deep cherry red, while the cooled stone along its outer rim carried a dim wash of gold, like metal not yet finished surrendering its heat.
Above, small spirits wheeled through the violet dusk, their bodies trailing brief ribbons of fire against the darkening sky.
Elara gripped the railing and drew in a slow breath.
She did not weep. She did not trust herself to begin.
Instead, she stood there looking out over a city more beautiful than any she had ever known, and let the tightly wound thing within her loosen little by little, until she could almost believe it might someday open.
Elara heard him coming and did not look away from the city.
Eamon reached the railing and rested his hands against the warm stone, leaving a careful stretch of space between them. For a while, he said nothing. Then, after a time, “They can be…overwhelming.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“I think you do.”
The wind moved. The small spirits at the upper roosts wheeled and turned. Elara was aware, very faintly, that the line of his shoulders beside hers seemed composed, careful—as though he were managing the act of standing this near her.
“They love as if no one ever taught them restraint,” he said, and there was something almost gentle in the words. “They quarrel and make peace and embrace again all within the same hour. It can be disarming if you have spent most of your life being given less.”
Elara’s spine went very straight. “Why are you telling me this?”
He kept his gaze on the city below. “I came up here the first time I stayed in this house. Many times.”
She looked at him then. His face remained angled toward the city, the poised line of him arranged as it always was, but his hands betrayed him. One thumb dragged slowly across the stone rail, again and again, wearing at the same place as if he could smooth some answer from it.
“My father’s estate stands at Carraig na héisc,” he said.
“On the eastern coast. There is no warmth there. Not in the walls, and not in the people who built them. When I was a boy, I thought that was simply what a family was. That warmth belonged…elsewhere. My father believed, as many of the old Turlaith lines do, that a household is a forge. That a bloodline is not nurtured but tempered. A child, to his mind, was only raw material—too soft, too uncertain, too easily bent the wrong way—and the work of raising one was to burn and hammer and pare away until something harder remained.” He paused.
“He did not think himself cruel. I do not believe the thought would have occurred to him.”
Below them, the fire-lake gave off its slow red glow.
“He had rules,” Eamon said. “More than anyone could remember, and whether they made sense was never the point. They were to be obeyed.” His voice lowered.
“He kept a whip of black willow in his study. Wrapped around the handle. Sometimes he soaked it in spring-brine from the mineral pools below the cliffs, when he had the patience for it. Said it gave the wood more bite without splitting the skin too quickly.”
Elara’s hands had gone taut around the railing.
“He said one thing to me often, from the time I was small. ‘A son of this house does not flinch.’ He said it as greeting, as warning, as benediction. Before meals. Before lessons. Before leaving a room. ‘A son of this house does not flinch.’ I heard it so often it ceased to feel like language at all and became instead how I regarded myself, even within my own mind. A thing as fixed as the cold in the stone. One did not argue with either.”
Elara’s fingers tightened on the railing until they ached.
She forced them to ease and found, a breath later, that they had only closed again.
What moved through her was not sorrow—not only that.
It burned too hot for sorrow. It came nearer fury, though even that seemed too blunt a word for the thing she felt.
She looked at Eamon and saw what she had only just begun to name in herself: the held quality of a person who had learned young that need was dangerous, that softness was costly, that the safest thing was to make oneself useful and ask for nothing.
And now here they both stood in a house where love was loud and warm and offered without bargaining, where food was pressed into hands and grief was met with touch.
He was right.
Such tenderness did not come to her easily. It arrived first as bewilderment, then as suspicion, and only after that as hunger so deep it was almost unbearable.
“It never really leaves you, does it?” she said quietly. “Whatever they made of you when you were small. It goes on living beneath everything that comes after. Some days it lies so still you think it may finally be gone, and some days it is the loudest thing in the room.”
His eyes were on her—deep green, fathomless in the fire-lit dark, holding some depth she had not seen there before.
Her fingers found a seam in the stone and pressed there until the heat of it bit into her skin. “Where did you first learn that families could be different?”
The line of his shoulders eased, almost imperceptibly.
“I was sent to the Roving Circles in my fifteenth year,” he said.
“It is the custom among the Tuatha houses, and among the highborn families of all four territories.
When their children come of age, they are sent north first, and from there they travel through the great house territories in turn—learning war, politics, law, the temper of the realm, and the fault lines beneath it.
You are meant to learn where alliances hold and where they have worn thin.
The bonds that hold the Sídhe together—between houses, between territories, between Tuatha and Seat—are made there, mostly, or they are not made at all.
Every great alliance of the last five centuries was forged somewhere in those years.
“In my father’s house, forging was something done to you. In the Circles, it was done with you, and you learned very quickly who could survive it beside you.”
His body shifted toward hers, slight enough to be courteous, close enough to make every instinct in her take inventory of the space between them.
“The first month was called open ground. No houses. No rank. No name worth hiding behind. They stripped us down to our boots, our tempers, and whatever pride we were stupid enough to bring with us, then left us on the lower terraces with thin blankets and barely enough wood to keep the frost from taking fingers.”
His hand shifted on the rail. “The theory was that the dark would sort us. Before the lessons and politics and courtly rot began, we were meant to find the Sídhe who might one day hold the line when our own strength failed. Reynnar was in my year. Loud then, if you can believe it. Arrogant. Restless. All that Ellylldan fire with nowhere sensible to go.”