Chapter 49 #3
“Yes.” Algernon’s gaze remained on the stars.
“Every Sídhe line descends, however distantly, from one of those first currents. Fire, water, wind, earth. But above the elemental inheritance sits something older still—the patron mark. The divine pattern from which a house first came to be. It was said the relics would recognize the hand it was made for. Or refuse the hand it was not.”
Ivan thought of Elara’s dagger.
Of the way it had answered only to her.
Of how Osin could not take it from her unless given.
Algernon’s mouth curved faintly, as if he had followed the thought.
“Recognition is a troublesome thing,” he said.
“Men like to imagine it as reward. A crown lowered upon the worthy head. A blade placed in the righteous hand. But old Draoth is seldom so sentimental. It does not ask whether one deserves the burden. Only whether one can bear it.”
Ivan’s fingers curled into fists. “Elara has borne enough.”
“Enough is a human measure,” Algernon said softly. “Fate has never been especially fluent in mercy.” The old Druid’s expression remained mild, almost sorrowful, his pale eyes bright behind his spectacles.
For a time, only the sea spoke below them.
Ivan looked once more at the three stars. “If you can continue looking without placing another clerk in a grave, I would be grateful.”
Algernon’s eyes glinted.
“My dear boy,” he said softly, “I have never stopped.”
They rifted back to Eldham well after midnight.
By day, the village was all wheat fields and mill dust, carts groaning beneath barley sacks and smoke drifting lazily above low stone cottages. At this hour, though, it lay silent beneath the moon.
Algernon’s house stood at the northern lip of the village behind ash trees and ancient hedgerows, larger than it first appeared and warded far beyond what any country scholar ought to possess.
The rift opened behind the rear garden, where a hard-packed path ran between the outbuildings and kitchen smoke lingered damp and low in the air.
Ivan started up the path.
“You were gone four hours,” Dario said, coming up from behind him as the trail curved toward the garden.
Ivan did not turn. “Was I?”
Dario exhaled hard through his nose and fell into step beside him, grim as a curse. “Algernon’s cook is furious.”
Ivan dragged a hand over the back of his neck. His head ached faintly. His side pulled where Bryn’s stitching had not yet forgiven him his continued existence. “I am shattered to hear it.”
“She prepared supper for you and your collection of traitors. None of you appeared.”
Ivan glanced over then. Dario’s figure was cut by moonlight—broad-shouldered, fair hair gone dark where the damp had touched it, jaw set. “You seem oddly invested in this.”
“I had to stand in that kitchen while she described, in detail, what she hoped would happen to your organs if you failed to present yourself.”
“Yes, yes. Your martyrdom is noted.”
Dario’s mouth flattened. They passed beneath the first ash tree at the edge of the garden. Its leaves whispered overhead in the wind coming off the ridge.
“Well?” Dario asked. “Did it work?”
“No.”
Dario absorbed that in silence, which Ivan would have found encouraging had he not known better. “You had better not be trying to make fools of us. If I find out that you are wasting time while the rest of us—”
Ivan let the rest slide past him. He had grown surprisingly good at that, one of the few advantages of prolonged exposure to Dario Voland: half a sentence in, Ivan’s attention could wander off in perfect peace.
The corner of his mouth twitched as he noted instead the smell of roasted meat caught in the hedges, the faint clatter of crockery from the kitchen entrance around the far side of the house, and the reasonable conclusion that his supper had either gone cold or become actively vindictive.
“You are looking unusually pleased with yourself,” Dario said, narrowing his eyes.
“I was just thinking,” Ivan replied, “about the time you thanked me.”
Dario’s whole face shut like a gate barred for siege. “I was delirious.”
“It was trembling, heartfelt confession.”
Dario closed his eyes briefly. “I hate you.”
Ivan nodded. “And yet you guard me with such devotion.”
Dario cut him a look fit to curdle milk, and Ivan felt, against his better judgment, some small corner of himself brighten.
It was not often these days that amusement arrived cleanly enough to be enjoyed.
More often, it came barbed with something else—fatigue, dread, memory.
But Dario’s resentment was steady as a northern lighthouse. A man could warm his hands by it.
Ivan cut down the path between the outbuildings, hands in his pockets, and was half-listening to Dario start in on something else when he saw it.
He slowed.
A space had warped above the path, tall as a man and perhaps three feet across.
It moved the way heat altered the line of a horizon, or water in a glass bent the light passing through it.
The air there held a faint inward shimmer, moving to no wind he could feel, answering instead to some private rhythm within itself.
Ivan knew it at once.
“What are you—” Dario started.
But Ivan stepped straight into it, and the garden disappeared.