Chapter 56 #2
She did not call to it. She had learned beneath the canal in Luirigh, and again in the practice yard, that the dagger did not respond well to being called. Like the older Sídhe, it preferred to be addressed.
She spoke to it now, in her head, in the small wordless way she had been working out across the past week—good morning—and the blade warmed.
Elara had no Draoth of her own. Not now, and perhaps not ever, and she had decided she could live with that. She had survived ten years in the human realm without knowing what had been taken from her; she could survive it now with the knowledge.
What she would not do was pull from another Sídhe’s Draoth unless absolutely necessary, though that necessity had begun to arise more often than she cared to admit. Reynnar was all but willing to feed his power into her, and that was exactly why it needed to stop.
Draoth, she had conceded, was hers to be without and his to keep. She would not take from him what the realm had already taken too much of.
This, she suspected, was why he had been training her the way he had.
Reynnar would not say it. But she had watched him, across five mornings, push her past the edge of what her body had thought possible—then beyond that again, his focus honing each time she staggered and still found her feet.
It had begun to feel less like instruction and more like preparation, as though he were teaching her how to survive in a country he feared he might not be able to enter beside her.
The first hour belonged to air.
Aoife and Caelion moved together as if they had been born from the same storm.
Aoife struck from the left, cutting the wind into narrow blades that snapped past Elara’s ribs and thighs.
Caelion came from the right, compressing the air into invisible walls that hit like a shove from a much larger body.
Between them, the yard became a shifting corridor of pressure—wind at her back, wind beneath her knees, wind slicing toward her throat.
Elara learned to read it by what it disturbed.
Dust lifting before the strike came. Loose strands of hair pulling toward the wrong direction. The brief hollowing of sound a heartbeat before the air compacted and released.
And her blade had power.
When she caught a strike on the flat of the blade, the metal took the force into itself and gave it back in pale arcs of light that split across the yard, scattering dust and sending Aoife or Caelion rushing out of its path.
If she angled the blade wrong, the returned force tore through her shoulder hard enough to numb her fingers.
If she angled it correctly, their wind became hers for the space of a breath.
She was learning to make that breath count.
The second hour belonged to earth.
Eamon was the least conspicuous of the three, which somehow made him worse.
There was no warning when he worked. No grand gesture.
No dramatic lift of his hands. The ground simply stopped being trustworthy.
Packed ochre softened beneath her heel as she turned.
Loose dust hardened to flint beneath her toes.
The yard rose by a finger’s width where she meant to step and dropped beneath her the moment she adjusted.
It was not enough to look at the ground; Eamon taught her that earth lied with a still face.
Elara had laughed the first time he did it, before she understood the danger.
Then she broke a toe on a patch of dirt he had hardened beneath her foot half a breath before she committed her weight.
She did not laugh after that.
By the time Reynnar entered the yard, sweat had soaked through the back of her tunic and her hands trembled around the dagger’s hilt.
Elara lifted her head. Reynnar carried the House Brannoc sword in one hand, the pale metal smoothed by generations of warriors. Morning light caught along the line of his shoulders as he crossed toward her, fire held deep beneath his skin, not summoned but never absent.
“You’re tired,” he said.
“I hadn’t noticed.”
His mouth almost curved. “Good. Then you won’t have time to overthink.”
He came at her and Elara caught the first strike on the flat of the dagger, turned with the impact, and slipped beneath the second before the sword could crack against her shoulder. Reynnar shifted his weight, and she read it a heartbeat sooner than she would have weeks ago.
Sweep.
She jumped back and the sword passed beneath her feet close enough to stir dust against her ankles.
Reynnar’s eyes hardened. “Again.”
This time, he drove her backward across the yard.
Every strike stole space. Every step he took narrowed her choices.
Elara turned one blow aside and ducked another, her breath coming hard, her arms burning from exhaustion.
He pressed her toward the training wall, then shifted at the last second, forcing her to pivot into uneven ground Eamon had left treacherous beneath the dust.
She nearly fell.
Nearly.
The dagger flared.
White-gold light snapped between them, bright enough to flash across Reynnar’s face, and he turned his sword just in time to catch the force with the blade angled low.
The impact hit like a breaking wave, skidding him backward across the yard, boots tearing through the dust before he drove the sword down and brought himself to a halt.
A smile stretched across her face.
Reynnar noticed. “Pleased?”
“Extremely.”
“Unwise.”
He struck again and she barely caught it.
The force jarred up her arm, and pain sparked through her shoulder.
Reynnar was already moving, already inside her guard, and she had to drop hard to one knee to avoid the next pass.
Her palm hit the dirt. She rolled, came up on her off foot, and drove the dagger forward in the motion Aoife had drilled into her until she hated it.
The blade stopped an inch from Reynnar’s ribs.
So did his sword, hovering at her throat.
For a breath, neither of them moved, and Elara’s pulse hammered in her ears. Reynnar’s gaze dropped to the dagger, then rose to her face, and something like relief moved through him before he hid it.
“Seo í mo chailín,” he said quietly, and her chest tightened with pride.
By the end of each day, Elara was too tired to undress.
After lessons on the old Tribunal protections with Eamon, political histories with Mamó, and another hour of Aoife correcting how she stood before an imaginary Concord, she would reach her chamber and fall asleep before her head fully touched the pillow.
It was from Mamó, in one of those long afternoons, that she learned what Reynnar had done before the first delegation ever reached the gate: a Decree of Sanctuary, drawn up and signed by Eamon as Tuatha, sent ahead to every house in Turlaith, declaring that any who entered Ellylldan territory for the Tribunal would come unarmed and would not raise a hand against another soul within its borders, on pain of the ruin that would follow.
It was the only reason, Mamó said, that a kingdom currently hunting her name could be made to sit in the same hall as she did.
On the seventh evening, Odhrán came.
Elara heard him before she saw him. She had been crossing the lower courtyard with Caelion at her side, returning from Mamó’s long muster in the herald’s hall, where they had counted which delegations had arrived, which were still riding, which had sent word, and which remained troublingly silent.
The courtyard was washed in torchlight and caldera dusk, the red stone still holding the day’s heat beneath her boots, when a familiar voice rose from the inner gate.
“—not a stable-boy. I was here before any of you were a twitch in your fathers’ breeches, do not put your hand on my horse, do not, I said—”
Elara huffed a laugh. “Odhrán,” she said, turning toward the gate.
He looked exactly as an old maistir should on the evening before four Tuatha gathered beneath one roof.
His robe was deep Naidiryn blue, brushed free of road dust with more care than he usually wasted on himself.
His white hair had been undone and re-braided, and his spectacles sat high on his nose instead of slipping down it.
By every measure Elara could make of him, he had refused to arrive as anything less than what he was: a maistir of five generations, entering the council he had spent weeks arranging.
When he saw her, relief crossed his face first, followed quickly by irritation, and a small fierce thing she could not name—before settling, with great effort, into the dry, composed mask he preferred to wear when he was, in fact, deeply pleased.
“Halfling.”
“Maistir.”
Odhrán drew himself up the last step toward her, took her chin between his finger and thumb, and turned her face, briefly, toward the lamplight at the gate, with the open academic curiosity she had begun, in the long, careful weeks since Luirigh, to find rather fond.
He looked at the small mark fading at her throat.
He looked at the line of her brow. He looked at the small ring of shadows beneath her eyes that no amount of cold morning bathing had quite been able to dispel.
“You have been preparing.”
“I have.”
“And eating?”
“As much as Mamó forces upon me.”
He patted the tip of her nose. “Good.”
The inner doors of the keep opened, and Mamó appeared at the top of the steps.
The courtyard changed around her. Conversations thinned.
A groom near Odhrán’s horse found sudden purpose in the bridle.
Even the torches seemed to quiet in their brackets as Mamó descended with one hand trailing lightly along the carved rail, lavender and hearth smoke moving with her through the heated dusk.
She stopped halfway down.
Odhrán’s muttering died at once.
Mamó looked at him with a face that offered nothing. Odhrán straightened beneath that look, the road-worn scholar and irritable old man falling away until only the maistir remained.
He did not bow. She did not ask him to.