Chapter 54
The study was a study only in the loosest and most irresponsible sense of the word. It had the look of an observatory that had grown dissatisfied with the limitations of astronomy and decided, quite arrogantly, to bring the heavens indoors.
Elara paused just inside the threshold.
The room was not the Sanct, nor the narrow little nook Algernon had colonized in the archives with his slanted shelves, tea-stained ledgers, and pressed leaves tucked between star catalogs as though botany and celestial navigation were naturally adjacent fields of inquiry.
Still, the sight of it caught her somewhere inconveniently tender.
A brass astrolabe hung near the window, turning slowly in a draft Elara could not feel.
Above the central table, someone had pinned a map of the heavens so large it seemed to have bullied the ceiling into submission.
Silver-threaded lines ran between stars and tide marks, seasonal blooms, old migration paths, and notes written in Algernon’s hand.
He spread the charts across the table and held the lamp above them.
Elara bent over the work.
At first, she said nothing, moving from one chart to the next, following the stellar calculations, the timing windows, the substratic field models, the convergence point above the Jade Sea.
Then came the notation in the margins of the third chart.
The pressure tables on the sixth. The current-mapping along the left side of the ninth, its compressed angle and improbable correction.
Her hand stilled on the paper.
“This is my work.”
“A considerable portion of it,” Algernon replied.
Her eyes lifted to his. “More than considerable.”
His pale gaze held hers across the lamplit charts. “More than considerable,” he agreed.
Elara remained bent over the table, her hands braced on the softened paper.
She had drawn those intersections in a room in the Sanct that had seemed cut away from the rest of the world, working the mathematics because mathematics, at least, had the decency to remain consistent.
Numbers obeyed rules. Patterns revealed their logic when pressed hard enough.
Truth, if buried well, could still be reached by calculation.
For a while, that had been the closest thing she had to freedom.
And Algernon had known that.
He had not merely taken what she built and carried it beyond the walls that held her.
He had guided her toward it, he and the Astromancers, bringing her questions for years under the harmless disguises of lessons, exercises, idle curiosities meant to occupy an over-clever girl.
They had trusted that some buried, furious part of her mind might know the truth before the rest of her was allowed to.
A breathless, dangerous satisfaction rose in her as the charts blurred beneath the lamplight.
All this time, the thing she’d made in captivity had been becoming the mechanism of its own undoing.
By dawn, Elara had stopped pretending the tea was helping.
Algernon had not slept. He sat with one hand pressed to his brow, reading through a column of calculations as if fatigue were an argument he intended to win by ignoring it.
Reynnar remained near the window, a dark figure against the paling sky, while Ivan occupied the chair nearest the door and had not relaxed into it once.
The two men had not spared each other a word since their reluctant acknowledgment hours ago, though the room had become painfully fluent in wordless threats.
Elara raised the tea to her mouth and found it bitter.
Then the door opened.
Her fingers tightened around the cup before the threshold filled with a familiar figure, travel-worn and damp with morning mist.
Dario.
Dawn gathered behind him, silvering his cloak and softening the lines exhaustion had carved into his face. He looked older than he had in the Pit, though perhaps they all did now.
The cup touched the table with a dull sound.
He crossed the room before either of them managed a word and caught her up from the floor, crushing her to him with such unguarded force that a startled laugh broke against his shoulder.
It came out ruined and bright, half sob and half laughter, an absurd, broken sound that seemed to belong to some girl she had once been and had misplaced somewhere between the Sanct and the Pit and every place after.
“I heard but I didn’t believe it… You’re here,” he said into her hair, his voice rough in a way she had never heard from him.
“So are you,” she managed, though the words were muffled against his shoulder.
Behind him, Avis stood in the doorway with one hand pressed lightly to her mouth, her eyes bright in the lamplit hush. She looked different, too. Softer, perhaps, though the last time Elara had seen them both, there had been blood and iron and the roar of the Pit around them.
They had survived.
Avis crossed the room before Elara could find words, and Dario set her down only long enough for Avis to take her face between both hands. She searched her with wet, shining eyes, as if needing proof of every bruise and breath, before Dario’s arms came around them both.
The three of them folded together in a knot of limbs and quiet, disbelieving laughter.
“Oh,” Avis whispered. “Look at you.”
Elara did not know what that meant, and she did not ask. She only leaned into Avis as her arms closed around her.
“You got the blade.” Avis drew back just enough to see her face. “You did it. I always knew you would.”
Elara smiled, small and tired.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t tell you more. I—”
“It's okay, Avis.” Elara shook her head before she could finish. “I understand.”
And she did. That was the worst of it, perhaps.
She understood why secrets had been kept, why truths had been weighed against lives, why one answer could endanger ten more people.
She understood that people had hidden things to protect her, and hidden things to protect themselves from her, and hidden things because some old pattern of power had taught them that her ignorance was easier to manage than her fury.
Understanding did not make it less bitter.
But Avis was still before her, eyes wet and kind, and Dario’s arm lay warm across her shoulders. So Elara only squeezed Avis’s hand and swallowed the rest, letting it settle in that crowded place inside her where all dangerous things had learned to wait their turn.
Dario’s arm slipped from her shoulders.
The Cara flared.
Elara’s attention flew to Reynnar. He had left the window by only a few paces, nothing anyone else might have thought worth noticing, but enough for the bond between them to burn with warning.
“He was a guard,” Reynnar said, eyes burning. “In the Pit.”
Elara’s fingers tightened around Avis’s hand. “He was a spy. He was there to protect me.”
But Reynnar barely seemed to hear her. His eyes had not left Dario, and the Cara pulsed again, hot and terrible, dragging with it the memory of what he had done to members of Osin’s Legion only hours before.
A cold sweat prickled between Elara’s shoulder blades.
Her grip on Avis became punishing before she remembered herself.
She was still searching for the sentence that would not turn the room into a battlefield when Algernon snored.
Magnificently.
It rolled through the study with such full-bodied confidence that the half-corrected calculations beside him trembled in response. The entire room seemed to pause around him.
Then Avis made a small sound into her hand, dangerously close to laughter, and turned from the sleeping Druid deciding not to acknowledge the tension now leaking out of the walls.
Her gaze found the chair by the door. “Hunter,” she said warmly.
Ivan had risen from it. “Druid.”
Elara’s gaze darted from Ivan’s face to Dario’s, then to Avis, catching on every small tension, already irritated by the familiar sensation of being the only person in the room missing half the story.
She wanted to ask approximately seven questions at once, ranked by urgency and by how likely each of them was to be evaded.
She had only just settled on the first when the door opened, admitting Dominic with a rush of cold air, damp leather, and entirely too much confidence for the hour.
His long, dark hair was wind-tangled, his coat marked with the damp silver of snow, and though exhaustion had settled beneath his eyes, trouble still curved faintly at the corner of his mouth when he found her.
“The Hallowed lives.”
Elara rolled her eyes before she could stop herself. “Please do not call me that.”
Dominic’s brows lifted. “No? All right, then.” He considered her with exaggeration, as though she had set before him some grave matter of state. “What should I call you?”
“How about my name?”
“Hm.” Dominic narrowed his eyes. “Doesn’t suit you.”
A chill skimmed the back of her neck, and her gaze snapped to Reynnar before she could stop it. Pale morning light washed across his face as his brows drew together slightly, his attention fixed on her as though trying to understand whatever had just passed through her expression.
He had said something similar to her once, with far less humor and far more consequence.
The memory pricked, but Elara blinked it away with a small shake of her head.
“Come on,” Dominic said, smirking. “Let’s eat.”
Algernon’s house, Elara was beginning to understand, had been built by someone with either an affection for gatherings or a terrible fear of empty space.
The dining table could have seated twenty, perhaps more.
Morning light poured through tall windows dressed in pale linen, falling across polished wood, chipped porcelain, bowls of stewed fruit, dark bread, honey, butter, roasted tomatoes, eggs folded with herbs, and a silver pot of tea that someone kept refilling before Elara could decide whether she wanted more.