Chapter 54 #3
Dominic raised a cup. “Good morning, Tristan.”
“Do not good morning me, you barbaric wall of muscle.”
Avis made a small choking sound into her cup.
Tristan rounded on Elara. “How dare I find out you are here from a stable boy with the conversational subtlety of a dropped chamber pot?”
Dominic’s mouth twitched. “In fairness, he is one of our better informants.”
“He told me,” Tristan snapped, “while holding a turnip.”
“A trustworthy vegetable,” Algernon observed mildly.
Tristan’s glare slid to him. “And you. You ancient menace. You could have sent word.”
Algernon shrugged. “I was distracted by the imminent metaphysical crisis.”
“How very convenient for everyone except me.”
A laugh escaped Elara before she could stop it. She stood, swallowing past the sudden ache in her throat.
“I missed you, Tristan.”
His gaze warmed, the beginning of a smile touching his mouth as he pulled her into a tight hug. “Against all odds,” Tristan murmured against her hair, his voice low enough that it should have been tender and was instead insufferably smug, “you’re alive.”
Elara huffed a laugh into his shoulder. “Disappointed?”
“Devastated.” His arms tightened around her, then he drew back just enough to look down at her, the corner of his mouth lifting with the kind of amusement that usually meant he had found a bruise and intended to press it. “I heard what you did, you little rat.”
Elara froze.
“Why did you lie to me?”
Across the room, Ivan’s attention cut toward them.
Elara’s stomach sank. She and Ivan had not spoken of it yet—the plan beneath the plan, the choices she had made outside the fragile strategy she, Tristan, and Ivan had built. Of course Tristan would say such a thing aloud.
Her mouth opened, found nothing remotely useful, and settled for offense instead. She shoved at his shoulders. “Rat?”
Tristan allowed himself to be moved back half a step. “Yes. Small. Clever. Frequently found where one has no business being.”
Avis, who had been watching Reynnar with the gentle concern of someone observing a storm forming, leaned slightly toward Tristan. “I don’t think I’d call her that just now,” she said. “The Sídhe lord looks as though he may remove your hands and beat you with them.”
Tristan’s fingers vanished from Elara’s arms.
Reynnar sat back down with that terrible, cold patience of his, eyes fixed on Tristan as though deciding how many bones a friendly embrace reasonably required.
Elara snorted before she could stop herself.
Mother above. What did he think was happening?
Dominic leaned back in his chair. “Are you finished making an entrance?”
Tristan straightened. “I have only just begun.”
“Gods help us all,” Dario muttered.
Tristan’s eyes flicked toward him, then to Avis, then back to Elara. His smile flashed, crooked, though the shine in his eyes did not fully leave. He swept toward the table and dropped into the empty chair with the tragic air of a man accepting exile. “Fine. I shall forgive no one, but I will eat.”
Dominic pushed the bread toward him. “A generous compromise.”
Tristan took a piece without looking at him. “I am known for my mercy.”
Breakfast ended slowly, though Elara could not have said who first stopped eating.
Conversation thinned. Dominic’s last remark went unanswered.
Dario set down his fork. Avis lowered her teacup, porcelain kissing porcelain in the hush.
Even Tristan let his last complaint die unfinished.
The maps lay beneath the wreckage of the meal, and beyond them waited the thing no one wished to name.
The bloodletting.
Elara rose, and the scrape of chair legs answered at once, a rough wooden chorus against the floorboards. The room came up with her in a ripple of motion. Only Ivan stood a heartbeat later than the others, and in that single beat, the bloodstone at her throat stirred.
Heat spread through it; Ivan’s oath.
The last one.
The room seemed to fall away from her—the table, the windows, the faces lifted toward her. All that remained was this final thread between them, drawn tight by blood and fate and the long, cruel history of everything they had been to one another.
And when it was fulfilled, what then?
The thought opened beneath her like a drop.
She swallowed and looked at him. Ivan’s eyes were already on her, and there was no polished indifference in his face now, no dry contempt, no cold civility he could stand behind.
He looked at her with all of that stripped away, and the nakedness of it struck her harder than if he had reached for her.
“Take me to Godfrey,” she whispered, and the words resounded in the room and held there, bright and irrevocable.
The vow stirred between them at once, drawing taut with the deep, ancient certainty of power recognizing its own name, and Ivan hesitated only long enough for something dark to pass across his face and vanish before the compulsion took hold and he inclined his head.
The bloodstone at her throat flashed white-hot against her heart—and split cleanly down the middle.