Chapter 50
Elara did not know how it began—Aoife perhaps, or Caelion with his wry look and stolen smile, or the simple fact that the night had gone golden and wild and impossible to meet at anything less than a run—but one moment they were in the clós mór with the last of the drums still beating through the stone, and the next they were tearing through the lower streets as if Teinloch itself had set them loose and meant to see what became of them.
Aoife was ahead, of course.
She ran with her skirts gathered in one hand and laughter flying out of her like sparks, golden hair streaming behind her as she half-turned every few strides to shout something insolent over her shoulder, the crowd answering with cheers and mock offense while Caelion replied in the dry tone of a man long resigned to spending his life chasing impossible women through dangerous places.
Elara ran breathless and grinning, the slit in her dress opening and closing against her thigh, gasping in the spice-thick air of the city.
Her gold-marked wrist flashed in the lantern-light.
Somewhere inside her, joy rose so clean and high it almost frightened her.
Anyone watching would have seen only a human girl, wine-flushed and laughing too freely, racing after two Sídhe through streets full of firelight.
And perhaps that was true, in part. But beneath the laughter and the rush of feet, she was following something else.
The current.
It wove through the streets like music, hidden and bright and beckoning.
She felt it in the steam, in the fire spirits wheeling above the roofs, in her own blood.
It caught beneath her soles, in her bones, at the base of her throat.
When it turned left, she turned with it.
When it slipped down a narrow lane, she followed, smiling.
Earlier, after their very public kiss, Reynnar had been pulled away along with Eamon by a knot of city elders and Ellylldan males on some matter too public to refuse.
Reynnar had looked back at her over his shoulder, all dark coat and amber eyes and a mouth still marked by hers, and said only, “I’ll find you later. ”
His promise spread from the center of her outward until her whole body seemed to hum with it.
They took the city in bursts—the narrow steam lanes, the bridges over the glowing channels, the wider market roads turning in for the night.
At some point, though Elara could not have said exactly when, the city ceased to feel like a place through which she moved and became instead a place moving with her.
People knew her now. That remained the strangest thing of all.
They smiled when they passed her. It should have embarrassed her more than it did, being known by a whole city for having kissed Reynnar Brannoc senseless in the middle of a square.
The thought ought to have made her wish for a grave and immediate burial.
And some part of her was mortified, yes.
Yet another kept returning to the same bewildering truth.
It had felt right.
She had spent most of her life feeling wrong in one fashion or another.
Wrong in the Sanct. Wrong in the capital.
Wrong in her own body. Wrong in any room where she was required to be useful rather than merely alive.
But tonight, she had the alarming sense that, perhaps, she ought not go on defying fate, if it intended to give her this.
Ahead of her, Aoife stumbled.
Elara glimpsed it over her shoulder—Aoife’s foot catching where the paving stones changed pitch, Caelion’s hand already at her elbow, then her waist, the laughter going out of Aoife’s mouth as her eyes lifted to his.
Whatever passed between them in that small arrested moment was not Elara’s to stand inside.
The current pulled lightly at her, as if amused, and she let it guide her, slipping from them without a word down a side lane where the crowd thinned and the lanterns hung lower.
The noise of celebration softened behind her into something rounder, more distant.
She slowed to a walk, though the joy of it still lived in her limbs and the rush of her blood, and somewhere between one breath and the next, she felt him.
The Cara slid awake beneath her ribs, and the world doubled.
She felt the city through herself and then, faintly, through him—a doorway she did not know, the cool brush of night in a higher place, the murmur of voices she did not recognize.
A bell rang in the lower streets, and she heard it again, a beat later, from wherever he stood.
Elara smiled.
She ought to have closed it—drawn it back the way she had been taught, the way she had managed all her life with everything that threatened to spill.
Though the kiss had softened the walls, it did not mean she was ready to take them down.
She was not sure she ever would be. But the bond was warm and the wine was warm and she was warm, and she let it stay open a little longer than was wise, the way one lets a window stay cracked on a summer night.
Through it, she felt him notice.
A shift. A turning of his attention. Then—almost lazy—a thread of him reached back through the bond and found her.
Elara stopped walking.
The lane lay hushed around her. Somewhere above, a lantern fluttered in its bracket.
Her own breath sounded close and uneven in her ears.
There you are, the Cara seemed to say, though no words had passed through it.
Only the warmth of him. Only the unmistakable sense of being seen. Then she felt him move.
The bond quickened, alive now with the impression of his body in motion: the reach of a long stride, the brief lift of his coat in the night air, the force and purpose of him turning fully toward her.
He was running. She felt the rise and drop of steps beneath him somewhere above the lower city, the brush of his hand against stone as he cut a corner, the Cara drawing tauter with every breath.
He was coming for her.
Elara’s mouth parted. Her pulse, which had only just begun to settle, shifted into an entirely different rhythm.
Almost by reflex, she tried to close the bond and felt the effort slip uselessly off her, like silk from a shoulder.
She had left it open too long. He had her scent in it now, the way a hound had a trail, and she could feel how much that pleased him.
She ran.
The gold on her wrist flashed. Her mouth had fallen open on a breath that might have become laughter.
Whether she fled him or lured him on, she could not have said, and the uncertainty of it sent a bright, dangerous thrill through her—finer than wine, finer even than the kiss in the square.
That had been a question laid bare before a city.
This was the answer racing after her through an empty lane.
His amusement moved through the bond first, warm and low. Beneath it lay something slower, darker, long banked and no longer wholly hidden. His attention narrowing and narrowing until it found only her.
Closer.
She turned a corner blind and the lane spilled her into a colonnade—the columns thick and pale and wound through with some dark flowering vine that smelled faintly of honey. A fountain ran somewhere out of sight. No one was there.
Her feet struck the worn stone as she ran its length, breath coming hard, the Cara answering in quick, bright pulses now—closer, closer, closer. She had just turned her head to look behind her when an arm closed around her waist.
The world wheeled—vine, lantern, column—and then her back met the cool pale stone of a pillar, and his body was there, pinning her to it all at once.
The breath left her in a sound that was hardly a word.
Reynnar’s hair had fallen forward, and the amber of his eyes had gone nearly black. His breath came as hard as hers, warm against her mouth, and Elara knew the exact instant he chose not to kiss her.
Not yet.
One hand was braced flat against the pillar beside her head.
The other remained at her waist, low, his thumb pressing into the silk just above her hip in a way that neither held her fast nor set her free.
His chest pressed to hers. One of his thighs had come between hers, only just, only enough to pull the silk of her dress taut where it had flowed loose a moment ago.
Her own hands had lifted without permission and now lay flat against the front of his coat.
Beneath her palm, his heart beat hard and ungoverned.
His mouth dipped to the place just below her ear, close enough that the words brushed her skin without touching it. “Found you,” he said.
She shivered, and it went through her in one long, helpless wave, from the place his breath had touched all the way down into the soles of her feet, and her body arched into his.
Her hands fisted in the front of his coat.
A small sound came out of her—and she felt him answer it through the Cara before he answered it with his body, a low pulse of hunger that made her knees go uncertain beneath her.
His mouth moved slowly at first, brushing just beneath her jaw, then lower to the soft place where her pulse beat too hard against her skin.
Elara tipped her head back without thinking and gave him her throat.
His mouth was warm. In the hush of the colonnade, she heard her own breathing turn ragged as he settled his lips over the strongest beat of her pulse.
Then he sucked, hard.
Her vision went white.
The sensation tore through her in one long, bright line, beginning at her throat and traveling the full length of her body.
Her hips moved against him before she could stop them.
The bond between them blew wide, the heat in it no longer banked or bridled.
At some point, her fingers had found his hair. She did not remember lifting her hands.