Chapter 54 #2
She sat with her hands wrapped around her cup and tried to make sense of the sight before her.
She had known each of them in pieces, and to see them all sitting at one table, eating eggs and bread while dawn brightened over Algernon’s gardens, felt like another strange fold in reality that had opened and gathered every version of her life into a single room.
Dario sat near Dominic and Algernon, his plate pushed aside while the three of them bent over the rough map Dominic had sketched on the back of a folded letter.
Dominic had somehow claimed the table without claiming the head of it, one boot hooked behind the leg of his chair, his dark hair still wind-tangled as he spoke around a piece of bread with the confidence of a man who had never once considered manners a survival skill.
Algernon answered with serene disregard for the crumbs, tapping two ink-stained fingers against the map.
Ivan sat to Elara’s left, silent and watchful, his breakfast largely untouched, while Reynnar sat to her right and had not said a word since they had entered the room.
Avis, apparently deciding that no breakfast should be allowed to remain quite so grim, leaned across the table and smiled at Reynnar.
“Maidin mhaith,” she said carefully, in Tírrísh so labored it sounded as though each syllable had been dragged from a book and interrogated.
When he only blinked, she seemed to take his silence as encouragement. “Tá…tú…an-capall.”
Reynnar’s brows drew together as Elara’s lips parted, then closed again.
“I’ve been practicing,” Avis said, looking pleased with herself.
Reynnar angled his head toward Elara, his expression asking several things at once, none of them charitable.
“She said good morning,” Elara murmured. “She also called you a very horse.”
Reynnar looked between them with growing suspicion, though the Cara softened against her side, the faintest warmth threading through it.
“I think,” Elara said gently, before Avis could accidentally compliment his hooves or insult his lineage, “that pronunciation may have changed since your last lesson.”
Avis blinked, then glanced between them with dawning horror. “What did I say?”
Dominic’s voice drew their attention to the other end of the table.
“Mordenhall is not impossible. Irritating, heavily warded, and designed by men with a romantic attachment to paranoia, yes. Impossible, no.” He reached for another piece of bread and used it to point toward the rough map.
“The outer patrols have changed since your last report. Osin pulled most of his ceremonial guard inward after the last breach, which means the perimeter looks weaker than it is. Fewer men, more wards. They are expecting bodies. They are less prepared for misdirection.”
Ivan’s eyes lifted. “Osin is always prepared for misdirection.”
Dominic smiled without warmth. “Then we give him something worse.”
Avis glanced at Dario, whose expression did not shift, though Elara caught the faintest tightening at the corner of his mouth.
Dominic tapped the map again. “The north corridor beneath the old infirmary still connects to the lower stores. If we can get through the service gate during the hour before the morning bells, we can reach the vault access without crossing the main court. The issue is the—”
Elara sighed.
The sound drew every eye to her.
She looked at Dominic over the rim of her cooling tea, already tired of where the conversation intended to go. “There is no need for that.”
Dominic leaned back slightly. “No need for what?”
“For whatever elaborate burglary you are about to propose that involves finding, stealing, or manufacturing access to my blood.” She set her cup down. “I’m here. Just take what you need from me.”
Silence fell so swiftly that even Dominic stopped moving.
He looked at her for a long moment, his expression altered by the effort of weighing her words without allowing too much of his reaction to show.
He chewed over the offer with visible distaste, as if it were a bitter herb he knew would heal and hated for it.
“That,” he said at last, “would make things considerably easier.”
Ivan sat forward, and though the movement was slight, the room noticed. He had that effect, Elara had learned. “Even if it does make things easier,” he said, voice low, “Osin’s store of your blood still needs to be destroyed.”
Elara nodded. “It does.”
“Then the raid on Mordenhall remains necessary.”
“Eventually.” She folded her hands around her cup.
“Right now, we need to focus on the fold. If you raid his stash, he will know someone had a reason to do it. He will start asking the right questions, and we cannot afford to have him looking too closely while we are trying to collapse the thing holding who knows how many soul-fields.”
Ivan held her gaze long enough for the argument to gather behind his eyes.
He did not like it. He hated it, in fact.
But his eyes dropped to her lifted chin, to the stubborn set of her mouth, to whatever treacherous shine she had failed to blink away in time, and the protest died before it reached his tongue.
He knew it was absurd to sit around a table plotting a raid, counting risks and routes and lives, when the key to the Foldsat directly before them.
They had no time for absurdity.
The rest of breakfast passed with the brittle civility of people trying to make plans around hunger and exhaustion. They spoke of the fold, of timing windows, of the wards Algernon believed would need to be dampened before the collapse could be safely attempted.
Dominic, to Elara’s surprise, answered every question she asked.
He did it with the same wry, sideways tone she remembered from months ago, as if the northern defenses, the old roads, the sympathies of border lords, and the likelihood of surviving a march through contested territory were all subjects one might discuss while deciding whether the eggs needed more salt.
He was cleverer than he pretended to be, which she had already known, and far more careful, which she had suspected.
Still, he did not seem very princely.
No one treated him like a prince, either. Dario argued with him twice. Avis stole food from his plate without asking. Algernon corrected his grammar once, which Dominic accepted with only slight irritation.
Perhaps they did things differently in the north.
Elara was still considering this when the dining room door slammed open, rattling the silver and waking every weapon in the room.
Ivan was on his feet before the door struck the wall. Dario’s chair scraped back, his hand at his knife, while Reynnar rose with a heat that pressed against Elara’s skin. Dominic only turned with a piece of toast halfway to his mouth, looking deeply inconvenienced.
Tristan stood in the doorway.
He was beautifully, spectacularly disheveled, his dark hair falling into his eyes, his coat thrown over an untucked shirt, one bootlace loose as if he had dressed while actively threatening someone. There was color high in his cheeks and fury in every elegant line of him. “How dare you,” he said.