Chapter 51
For one suspended beat, Elara’s mind refused him.
Her body still belonged wholly to this moment—pulse hammering, breath broken, the Cara wide and molten—and so the sight of him seemed impossible, some cruel overlap of one life with another.
Dark hair. Lean face. That winter-held stillness of his.
He looked as though he had stepped out of another world and carried its cold in with him.
He was watching.
Watching Reynnar kneeling before her.
Her heart gave one violent, sickening lurch as something shifted at the corner of Ivan’s mouth. Not a smile. Something thinner. Bitter enough to cut and pass straight through her.
Her fingers tightened in Reynnar’s shirt, and at once, he stilled.
Ivan turned to leave.
“Wait!”
The Latherian escaped her before she could stop it—the language she had spoken with Ivan a hundred times, but never here, never in this realm.
Air refused to settle properly in her lungs as panic climbed fast and cold through her body.
Her throat still burned where Reynnar had marked her, her mouth still tasted of him, and suddenly every hidden piece became unbearable at once: too intimate, too exposed, too late.
All the careful postponing, all the not-yets she had wrapped around the truth, had been ripped open in a single instant, with Reynnar on his knees before her and Ivan standing there to witness it.
“I need you to wait,” she said, in Tírrísh this time, though she could not have said which of them she meant it for.
Slowly, Reynnar straightened.
His hand slid from her leg to her waist as he rose, confusion flickering across his features. Then his gaze narrowed faintly as he followed hers, and Ivan let himself be seen beneath the climbing vine, silent as judgment.
For one suspended moment, none of them moved. Elara’s lungs refused to work. She only clutched harder at Reynnar’s shirt.
Ivan had not come closer, but neither had he left.
Lantern-light caught the hard line of his cheekbone and the dark sweep of his hair.
His face had hardened, unreadable in that familiar, infuriating way of his, every real thing buried beneath composure so precise it made her want to shake him.
Only his eyes betrayed him. They had brightened with conflict, as though hurt and self-command were fighting for the same narrow ground.
At her waist, Reynnar’s hand remained where it was, but the heat of him had changed. The stillness that came over him was not surprise and not temper. It was colder than either. Absolute. He looked, suddenly, like something wrathful and ancient and given breath only for the purpose of violence.
Ivan met his gaze across the colonnade, one hand loose at his side while the other curled and stilled. His eyes swept over Reynnar in a single, measured sweep.
Reynnar snarled. “Why are you here?”
“I wasn’t aware I required your permission.”
Elara shut her eyes for one wretched beat.
Ivan’s Tírrísh was nearly fluent. There was a formal cast in his phrasing—in the old verb form that belonged more to texts than to tongues.
Reynnar’s arm left her waist, and the loss of it was immediate. “How,” he asked through his teeth, “did you come here?”
Ivan’s gaze shifted to Elara then. It did not soften, but it changed all the same. “There was a current,” he said. “It opened in front of me, and I followed it.” A fractional pause. “It brought me straight to you.”
Elara’s thoughts broke apart and scattered.
Had she done this? Summoned him without knowing?
She had been running through Teinloch, half laughing, half breathless, turning where the spirits’ secret music turned, letting it pull her onward through the city.
Perhaps, without meaning to, she had cast something of herself into it.
And Ivan had found the line.
“And you thought it wise to step blindly into a current—into a realm that would kill most men for crossing its borders uninvited.”
Ivan did not so much as blink. “Blind, perhaps. Not aimless.”
Something dangerous flashed in Reynnar’s eyes. “No. Aim was never your failing. It was your appetite for what was never yours.”
Elara’s pulse began striking everywhere at once. Her palms were damp. The mark at her throat burned. The whole scene felt horribly intimate, as though someone had dragged the contents of her body into the cold and set them before two men who already had too much reason to hate one another.
Reynnar’s eyes went to Elara, and the question in them landed harder than anger might have. Her stomach dropped.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and hated at once how thin it sounded.
“I should have told you sooner. This has happened…twice before. At first, I thought it was grief. Or some hallucination. Then I thought I was losing my mind.” She shook her head, impatient with herself.
“I meant to tell you when I could explain it properly. Then Uisce happened, and there was never a right moment, and after that too much time had passed. It only became more difficult.”
Reynnar looked at her for so long that she had the absurd impression she might simply come apart under the weight of his gaze until it dropped to the bloodstone at her throat. He reached for it and caught the pendant between two fingers. The chain drew tight enough to make her breath catch.
“I know, ealaín.”
Her thoughts snagged. “What?”
His hand stayed where it was, the bloodstone dark against his knuckles. “I’ve felt him,” he said. “The whole time. Every time you pull away from the Cara—from me—there’s something on the other end of it. A presence.”
She swallowed. “And you said nothing?”
Reynnar’s mouth hardened. “Would you have told me if I had asked?”
Shame jolted through her so sharply she nearly flinched.
He held her gaze another moment. “I thought,” he said, very quietly, “you would come to me with it when you were ready.”
He let the bloodstone fall. Then he looked back at Ivan.
No one moved. No one breathed easily. The air between the two men seemed to contract around something old and dangerous and not yet given leave to become what it wanted.
“Whatever brought you, it ends here. I do not trust a leech like you alone with her. She’ll send for you if she wants you. Until then—”
Ivan’s mouth curved. “I’ve found,” he said, his voice mild enough to be insulting, “that speaking for women tends to provoke a justified hostility. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Reynnar’s jaw flexed once.
Elara pressed a hand to her temple. “Gods spare me.”
“Unlikely,” Ivan murmured.
That nearly undid her—not because it was funny, but because it was so exactly him, dropped into a moment when she could neither bear more of him nor any less.
Then Ivan’s expression altered. Whatever had been near his mouth—mockery, bitterness, the old familiar weapon of it—went out at once. What remained was colder.
“I am not here to measure territory,” he said.
Reynnar’s eyes narrowed. “Then why are you here?”
“To warn you.”
The words cut through the colonnade with enough force that Elara’s heart skipped. Ivan looked at her then, and she knew before he spoke again that whatever he had brought with him was not small. The city still breathed below them, gold and ember and distant drums, but the sound seemed to recede.
“There is a Sídhe lord named Lugh working with Osin. I know you are building a network,” Ivan said. “Collecting the names of the guilty and trying to find allies before bringing it to light. Be careful where you place your trust.”
Elara blinked, then turned to Reynnar. “Have you heard of any Lugh?”
His shoulders went rigid beneath his coat. “It’s an old name. A legend. The sort told by hearthfire and half-forgotten by morning.” His eyes did not leave Ivan’s. “Lugh was one of the first Tuatha in the old songs. A spear-bearer. Light-handed. Battle-bright. But those are stories.”
“Legends have proved inconveniently durable,” Ivan said.
Elara looked between them. “What are the stories?”
Reynnar sighed. “The first Tuatha Dé Danann were said to have brought four treasures with them from their making,” he said.
“Epona drew them down from the first lights, from the places where the stars touch the Spioraid. Some say she shaped them from starlight and breath and the first green things that broke through the dark. Others say they were not made at all, but called—that they heard her voice before there were ears to hear it, and stepped out of the heavens already singing.”
His gaze lifted briefly to the lanterns, to the drifting sparks beyond the columns.
“And with them came the four treasures of the nebula. The Spear of Lugh, which no battle could stand against. The Sword of Nuada, from which no man could escape once it was drawn. The Cauldron of the Dagda, which left no company unsatisfied. And the Stone of Fál, which cried out beneath the rightful king.”
The dagger seemed to grow heavier against Elara’s body. The weight of the hilt. The strange obedience of the blade. The way it had settled into her hand as if it had been waiting for her. Slowly, she drew it.
Both men went still.
“No mention of a dagger?”
Reynnar shook his head, though his eyes did not leave the blade.
“Not in the stories I know. But those legends were passed down by mouth,” he added.
“Sung. Misremembered. Corrected. Hidden inside children’s rhymes and harvest blessings and funeral charms.” A spirit streaked past the open colonnade, quick as a fallen star.
“The old stories have been carried in mouths for centuries. Every teller leaves a fingerprint. Every tyrant who tries to erase them leaves another.”
Ivan took one measured step farther into the colonnade.
“We were always told the Hallowed was made by the divine,” he said.
“Stardust and power. Breath and blood. A vessel shaped by áine’s own hand and set before the realm as proof of her favor.
” His gaze held Elara’s. “What if that was not entirely a lie?”
Elara shook her head. “I don’t understand.”