Chapter 47 #2
A dry note crossed his face. “He broke an instructor’s nose on the fifth day.
Said the man deserved it. He was probably right.
Unfortunately, the Circles were not in the habit of rewarding honesty.
They dragged him to the runoff channel beneath the yard and chained him waist-deep in the water.
It was his first winter in Turlaith territory.
The runoff came down from the northern face cold enough to steal thought from the body.
Reynnar was heat-bred. Fire-fed. He had no practice with that kind of cold.
At first, he fought the chains. Then he cursed the instructor.
The Triad. The water. The entire eastern province and every earth-blooded creature in it.
” Eamon’s lips twitched. “For the first hour, I stood on the bank and thought him an idiot.”
“A fair assessment.”
The corner of his mouth ticked up before he turned his gaze back to the city below.
“You can tell when a person is losing their head in cold water, if you know what to watch for. The body goes first. The mind follows after it. Panic makes a man reckless, and recklessness in water kills faster than the cold itself. So I stepped in beside him.”
Elara raised a brow.
“They told me to get out.” Eamon smirked. “I did not. I stood on the bank and told him if he wasted what little sense he had left on fury, he would drown standing up.”
“Did he appreciate that?”
“He told me to go fuck myself.”
A laugh escaped before she could stop herself.
“The instructors let me stand there for perhaps a minute before they chained me beside him for my insubordination, and once I was beside Reynnar, he started cursing me instead of the Goddess. Called me a sanctimonious Turlaith bastard. A miserable, interfering prick who clearly had no sense of self-preservation—said if I wanted to freeze, I might have chosen a less crowded stretch of water.”
“How gracious of him. I see hypothermia brought out his manners.”
“It was survival. He needed something to fight. I was better than the cold. When they finally unchained us the next day, neither of us could stand properly. Reynnar fell first. I laughed at him, which was unwise, because he still had enough strength to trip me into the mud.” Eamon paused.
“After that, he was simply there. At meals.
At drills. In the dark after lights-out.
He never said why. Never thanked me. But if someone came too close, Reynnar was suddenly there, looking bored and dangerous.
He had learned I would stand beside him when it cost me, and after that, he decided I was his problem, too.
“Unfortunately,” he added, looking pointedly at her. “Reynnar Brannoc has always been rather possessive of his problems.”
Elara rolled her eyes, her fingers easing from the railing. “You stood beside him first,” she said despite his jab. “Perhaps he only spent the years afterward returning the favor.”
A pause followed. Eamon did not look at her, but something in him stilled.
“He would hate that interpretation,” he said.
“Yes,” Elara said. “Which does make it considerably more likely to be true.”
That drew the nearest thing to a smile she had yet seen from him.
Elara let the quiet settle between them and did not trouble it further.
She stood beside him and looked out over the city, thinking of a boy who had spent fifteen years being fashioned into hardness, only to step into the cold for another—and of Reynnar, who had answered that mercy in the only way he knew how: by remaining. And she thought: that, too, must stay.
Not only the wounds. Not only what was done to you before you knew to resist it. The good things stayed as well. The mercies that found their way in despite everything in you that had been built to mistrust them. Those lived on, too.
She did not know how much time had passed before the tread of heavier boots sounded behind them.
Reynnar stood in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, firelight catching in the loosened dark of his hair and along his cheek.
His gaze went first to Elara, then to Eamon beside her, and whatever he found there seemed to ease something in him.
Slowly, a smile broke across his face, warm and almost boyish with relief.
“Odhrán sent word,” he said.
Elara straightened at once, and Reynnar’s smile deepened into something brighter, harder won.
“The Concord has agreed. Odhrán stirred the maistirs of the realm into action, and they have put their weight behind us. They carried the truth by word of mouth, hearth to hearth and hall to hall before the Concord could bury it.” His eyes burned in the dusk, fierce with victory.
“Enough houses have demanded an answer that the Concord can no longer look away without showing every court where its loyalties lie. The Tribunal will convene.”
Her breath went out of her.
She had not realized how much effort she had been putting toward holding herself upright until that moment.
Her shoulders gave a little. Her mouth parted, but nothing came.
Heat rushed sudden and blinding behind her eyes.
She pressed her hand hard against her lips, as if that might contain whatever was breaking loose in her, and bent at the waist for one sharp, shaking breath.
For weeks, she had carried the records, the names, the old reports and careful evasions, all of it weighted by the private dread that when the truth was finally laid before those with authority to act, they would do what powerful people had always done with suffering they had profited from: weigh the dead against their own comfort and find the dead wanting.
But Odhrán had done it. Against all odds, he had taken what they had given him and forced their hand.
She would kiss him if he were here.
Elara crossed the balcony with no thought for grace and went straight into Reynnar’s arms.
He caught her at once, a startled sound leaving him before it broke into laughter.
Then her feet were off the ground, her arms locked around his shoulders, the city and the firelit dark wheeling beyond him as he turned with her.
Elara laughed into the open air, bright and breathless, overcome by a wild disbelief she could not have swallowed down if she tried.
That sound drew Aoife to the balcony doors.
She took one look at them and stopped. For half a second, her face changed—relief first, then understanding, then something bright enough to hurt.
She crossed the balcony and threw herself at them with all the restraint of a storm breaking over the cliffs.
Reynnar caught the brunt of her with a curse, staggering back a step as Aoife wrapped herself around them both, half laughing, half clinging, her face pressed against his shoulder.
“Gods damn it—Fi!”
“Mind my ribs,” Elara gasped, laughing too hard to sound properly wounded.
“You have no ribs left to mind,” Aoife informed her, entirely unrepentant.
Reynnar swore again, more earnestly this time, and tightened his hold on Elara as the ridiculous tangle of them listed sideways.
Across from them, Eamon laughed.
The sound stilled them more effectively than any command could have done.
They all turned toward him. He seemed, for the span of a breath, almost surprised by himself.
But the moment passed. He pushed away from the railing, the ghost of that warmth not yet gone from his face, and said, “Enough. We are going out.”