Chapter 55
Ivan brought her back to the infirmary.
No one made a procession of it. Perhaps they all understood that Elara could bear the thing itself more easily than she could bear being watched while she walked toward it.
Algernon had returned to his study with Dario and Avis to ready the Foldwork, while Dominic and Tristan had gone to find Sybil, who, Elara learned with an odd little twist beneath her breastbone, had been in Eldham all along.
She had left before dawn for a town in the lower valley to prepare for the Mordenhall raid.
Now there would be no raid, and Dominic had taken Tristan with him to bring the news.
Gray morning pressed against the windows, the mountain beyond beginning to separate itself from the sky in pale, uneven lines.
Even with the early light, the lamp remained necessary, its small flame trembling over the washbasin, the folded linen, and the tray of clean instruments waiting beside three empty vials.
Godfrey was already there.
He stood beside the narrow table with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, his hair still rumpled from sleep and his expression fixed in that tender, anxious concentration Elara remembered too well from years spent working under Osin’s gaze.
When he saw her, his mouth tightened. “You should sit,” he said, then seemed to hear himself and softened. “Please.”
Elara sat on the edge of the narrow bed and folded her hands in her lap.
The broken bloodstone still hung at her throat.
She had not had the heart to take it off.
The crack ran clean through its center, a dark seam beneath her fingers, and there was no warmth left in it now, no answering pulse, no faint press of Ivan’s oath beneath her skin.
It was only stone, cold and split and dead, yet it had rested at her throat for so long that removing it felt like pulling away some final piece of herself before she understood what might grow in its place.
Reynnar and Ivan stood on either side of her like sentries, both silent, both watching Godfrey with an intensity that made his nervousness suddenly seem quite reasonable. Under other circumstances, Elara might have laughed. Under these, it only struck her as terribly, bleakly fucked up.
Godfrey stepped closer and took the chair beside her with care. “We only need enough to feed the apparatus we’re constructing,” he said. “Not enough to weaken you. If you feel dizzy, tell me immediately.”
She looked down as Godfrey folded back her sleeve.
Her skin appeared almost bloodless in the early light, the blue lines beneath it delicate and traitorous.
She had been bled by priests, by monsters, by men who called the theft of her body holy.
She had watched her blood poured into goblets and used in spells, sucked from her very veins.
It had been taken from her so many times that some part of her had begun to think of it as a thing that belonged first to others and only incidentally to herself.
This time, she gave him her arm.
“Ready?” Godfrey asked.
“Yes,” she said.
Godfrey’s expression flickered, as if he understood more than she had intended him to.
Then he bent to his work. It was not painful.
He worked cleanly and quickly, with the practiced care of someone who had done this in conditions far worse than a warm infirmary at dawn.
The blood was dark in the glass, filling each vial in turn, and Elara watched it gather.
Of course Osin had kept more of it.
The thought arrived with such cold, orderly rage that she nearly shook. Osin had taken everything useful and cataloged it, stored it, weaponized it. Her blood would never have been the exception.
She was only furious that she had not considered it sooner.
Godfrey stoppered the third vial and set it carefully beside the others.
“There,” he said softly and pressed a square of linen to her wrist, holding it there until the last bloom of red stopped spreading through the cloth.
Then he wound a strip of bandage around her arm with the same care he had always used, tucking the end beneath itself and smoothing it once with his thumb before drawing back.
Elara brushed her fingers over the bandage. It was still warm.
“I want to bring Raijin home,” she said.
She angled herself toward Reynnar, needing him to see the promise settle, needing him to know it had not come from guilt or fear or the peculiar madness of blood loss, though all three were making respectable arguments in the background.
“After this is done.”
His thumb brushed once against her knuckles. “After the Tribunal, we go to Ailltir. We bring him home.”
She nodded once and made herself say the next words evenly.
“And I’m going with you into the Fold,” she declared, turning to Ivan.
The room seemed to draw in around the statement. Godfrey’s cloth stilled against his lenses, while Ivan remained motionless in a way that told her he had expected this from the beginning and hated being right. Beside her, Reynnar’s brow furrowed faintly, and Elara repeated the words in his tongue.
Understanding came over him slowly, and Elara watched it settle there, not as anger, nor even surprise, but as calculation.
His gaze shifted from her to Ivan, then to the three vials of blood waiting on the tray, and she saw the moment the implications reached beyond her body, beyond the human realm.
Whatever waited inside the Foldwas not just a human problem.
“You were always going to insist,” Ivan said, his mouth curving without light.
Elara lifted her chin. “Did you really expect otherwise?”
Reynnar’s hand slipped from hers, and the loss of his warmth was immediate. He stepped around her, not placing himself between her and Ivan, but near enough that his presence altered the balance of the room. The fire in him had gone inward, banked into something cold and focused.
“After the Tribunal, we go to the fold. We take back what was stolen. Raijin. Your memories. The dead they trapped there.” His gaze shifted, briefly, to Ivan. “And whatever else waits inside it.”
Ivan’s face revealed nothing, but his eyes were dark with that old, brutality.
“We do it together,” she said.
Ivan’s answer came quietly. “Together.”