Chapter 51 #2
He stepped closer still, and even in spirit, Elara felt him. Through the air. Through the stone beneath her feet. Through that strange, aching place where the bloodstone seemed to press against her heart. His eyes dropped briefly to the dagger in her hand. “The way that blade answers you…”
“It answers to Osin, too.”
“Osin has always found ways around the natural order of things,” Reynnar said, his voice low. “That does not make him chosen. Only clever enough to be damned.”
Elara’s fingers tightened around the hilt. “So you’re saying what?” she asked. “That I’m Tuatha?”
Reynnar hummed, but there was no ease in the sound. “That is not possible. We would sense such a thing.”
Ivan did not look convinced. “If not Tuatha, then something close to it. The stars,” he said. “The constellation Osin burned into your skin. They were coordinates.” His voice remained controlled, almost mercilessly calm. “Not a mark of ownership. A map.”
The dagger seemed to pulse in her hand, or perhaps that was only her own blood answering the word.
“A map to what?” she asked.
A muscle ticked near his temple. “To the fold,” Ivan said.
“An fhilleadh, the Druids call it. Three fixed stellar points. A pocket in the substratic field right above the Jade Sea. Osin learned that if Draoth and memory could be stripped from a person by force, the field did not disperse. It resolved into the fold. Stored itself there. And once stored, it could be drawn out again. Re-impressed. Applied.”
“Shades,” Elara said, dread coiling tight within her.
“Yes.”
Her fingers had tightened around the bloodstone until the edges bit into her palm through the fabric.
“The Vredians believe that without the fold, Osin cannot make new shades. Cannot sustain the ones he has.” Ivan’s expression did not change, but something in his eyes had darkened, deeply tired. “Dominic intends to destroy the mechanism. After they salvage whatever remains.”
“What remains?” Reynnar asked.
Ivan’s gaze flicked to him. “Memories taken from the living.”
The words struck clean through her.
Disbelief first. Then pain. Then, worst of all, longing.
Her eyes fluttered shut.
The memories Osin had stolen—the pieces he had stripped from his victims—were locked away like valuables in some hidden vault beyond the world.
Lantern-light smeared gold across her vision.
There was a chance that something of herself still existed beyond the reach of her body, beyond the ruin Osin had made of her life; a chance that the missing years, and the person she had been before all this, might not be lost forever.
She looked down at the dagger in her hand, at the bloodstone clenched against her chest, at all the old instruments of power that had been made from her suffering.
And for the first time, the horror did not come alone.
Hope came with it.
Small. Vicious. Terrifying.
“And the dead?” she whispered.
Ivan said nothing for long enough that Elara understood before his answer came.
“If Rhiannon is freed in the process,” he said, “then the souls trapped in the Void may finally pass into the Otherworld.”
Thane.
The name moved behind his eyes, though his face gave nothing away. Elara wanted to offer something—an apology, a mercy, any small word that might ease the wound of it—but Ivan went on before she could find one.
“The Foldhas a seal,” he said. “A blood-seal tied to you. To your line. áine used your blood to lock the outer gate when she built the system.” His gaze held hers.
“Osin kept stores of it in Mordenhall. What he did not spend in ritual, he preserved. Dominic means to raid what remains of the house and take it back.”
Elara shivered. The name still had the power to draw old cold through her bones. Reynnar stepped closer, not touching her, but near enough that his warmth reached her side.
She drew in a breath. It cut on the way down.
“So the Foldis locked with my blood,” she said. “My dagger may be a relic. A Sídhe lord may have helped Osin build the whole thing. And the only way to stop it from happening again is to open a rift over the Jade Sea.”
Ivan’s eyes held hers. “Yes.”
A derisive laugh escaped her, the joy of the night brittled with it. The kiss in the square. The running. Reynnar’s mouth at her throat. It all felt suddenly impossibly far away.
Then Ivan drew one breath, slow and controlled, and Elara’s entire body went rigid.
“There is one more thing.” All the sharp calculation fled his face. “Raijin is alive.”
A hollow ringing opened in her ears.
“What?”
The line between his brows eased. “We found him in a compound in Arwn’s Void,” he said. “The same site where Godfrey was held. He was alive when we brought him out. He remains alive, though he has not woken.”
Her heartbeat had become useless. A thing battering itself against bone.
“Where is he?”
“Vredia. In a town called Eldham.”
Elara pressed her fingers to her mouth and dragged in one breath, then another. “I need to see him.”
“I know,” Ivan said. His eyes did not leave her face. “How?”
Elara dragged her hand from her mouth and looked to Reynnar.
Her thoughts were racing so fast they seemed to spark against one another.
“I’ve been thinking about the gates,” she said.
“The one in Luirigh. The way Uisce came to me. The way the spirits moved tonight.” She shook her head, impatient with the inadequacy of language.
“I think there are places where the seam wore thin and never healed properly. Places left half-open.”
She took a step toward Reynnar. “Where were you taken?”
His face had already changed. Whatever remained of the quarrel had been driven inward, lost beneath thought. “Bánrith,” he said. “East of here. A small Ellylldan village, nearest the draguin passes.” His gaze had gone somewhere beyond the colonnade now, into memory. “An Aelfhenge rests there.”
Elara nodded, swallowing. “Will you take me there?”
His eyes flashed. “Eilíara—”
“I know,” she said quickly. “I know what I’m asking.
And I would not ask it lightly. But I need to know before the Tribunal begins and the next thing rises on top of it, and the next, and the next.
” She reached for his hand and laced their fingers together.
“I would never ask you to go back there… I—”
A brief, grave softness crossed his face. “You need not ask.” His voice dropped. “If you go there, I go with you. You will not walk back into that country alone.”
Her heart struck once, hard enough to hurt, then again. Her lips parted, but no answer came. It was Ivan who spoke first.
“When?”
She faced him fully. Below them, the city breathed in gold and ember, and beyond the walls, a fire spirit drifted through the dark, untouched by what was being decided above.
“Tonight,” she said, lifting her chin until the fear had nowhere to go but down. “Now.” Her gaze held his. “We’re going back to Latheria.”