Chapter 60
Hold to the bond and think of me.
Ivan thought of her, though there was no bond left to hold to.
There was only the Void unfolding around him, vast and lightless, with that particular silence that belonged to places never meant to house breath or bone.
It pressed against him from every side, ancient and cold in its indifference, and he understood how easily a man might lose himself here. But he held to her.
He remembered her in the dying sun of Tír na nóg, hair loose in the volcanic wind, color restored to her face in a way that had struck him even through the spirit state. Healthy. Living. So painfully herself that, for one bitter second, it had felt like being shown the future he had forfeited.
He remembered the last time she had said his name in that low, settled register she used when a decision had already been made and no power in heaven or earth would unmake it.
The slope of her shoulder came next, memorized without intent, the way he had memorized everything about her: by proximity, repetition, and the cursed attentiveness of a man who had called it necessity because the truth would have ruined him sooner.
He sent all of it into the dark.
And somewhere at the far end of that impossible thread, something of hers turned toward him.
The current caught with the surety of a needle finding north and dragged him under.
Ivan’s hand closed around nothing. Instinct reached for a weapon his spirit did not carry, for ground that was no longer beneath him, and for one vicious instant, he hated her for still being the only thing in any world that could pull him so completely.
Then the hall arrived all at once.
Such was the spirit state. It did not give a man the courtesy of arriving by degrees.
Sight, sound, heat, and light struck together, whole and wrong, the way places did in dreams. Firelight gilded the hall too richly.
Music came muffled through the veil—strings, a low drum, the measured pulse of a Sídhe court dance.
Heat pressed from every side, volcanic and foreign, though his body remained somewhere in the dark between realms, standing in the spirit-shadow of a hall dressed for celebration.
Ivan had two seconds before he found her.
Elara moved through the dance floor in the arms of the Ellylldan, red silk turning around her like living flame.
The gown clung where a kinder god might have seen fit to leave a man mercy, gold catching along the seams whenever she turned and vanishing again in the firelight like Draoth breathing beneath the fabric.
Her hair hung loose down her bare shoulders, dark against the elegant line of her back.
The grain spirit had burned off enough to leave him useful but not enough to leave him wise.
Sober, he might have forced himself to look only at her face.
Sober, he might have remembered there was a war to warn her about, a Fold to reach, villages burning beneath Osin’s hand.
Sober, he might have had the decency to know he should not look at her like this when she was not his—not at the line of her throat, not at the curve of her waist, not at the soft give of her body as the dance brought her close to the Ellylldan and away again.
Intoxicated, Ivan had no such virtue.
He drank her in greedily, helplessly, every turn of her body another death he stepped toward of his own accord. The spirit state carried sensation strangely, yet he could almost remember the taste of her blood lingering at the back of his tongue like a sacrament he had never properly repented for.
His attention was fixed so completely on her that he did not notice the other Sídhe joining the floor until the hall had nearly filled around them. They entered the dance in seamless procession, slipping from the galleries and the shadowed spaces beneath the banners.
Ivan lost sight of her once, then again, her red gown disappearing behind the sweep of another couple before the current found her for him, drawing his gaze back as surely as a hand closing around his own.
A messenger crossed the outer ring of the dance with his head bowed and a sealed missive pressed to his chest before interrupting Elara and the Ellylldan.
He read the missive, bent to speak low at Elara’s ear, and whatever he said changed her face.
Then the Sídhe left her for the messenger and the gathering lords, while Elara stood alone amid turning bodies and firelit silk, watching him go.
Ivan took his chance.
He moved through the dancers unseen, passing between jeweled shoulders and lifted hands, through the hem of a gown that smelled faintly of herbs. The spirit-state made a mockery of substance; bodies parted and failed to part, their warmth passing through him; he kept his eyes on her.
“Elara.”
Gooseflesh rose along her bare arms. She turned before he showed himself, slowly, as though some part of her had already known where to look, and at the sight of him she drew a sharp breath that lifted her shoulders.
The movement pulled his attention to the folds of her dress, and there, half-hidden against her skin, he saw the broken bloodstone still hanging at her throat.
A cracked and useless thing. Dead stone.
Dead oath. Yet she still wore it there, against her pulse, as though some defiant part of her refused to bury the corpse of what they had become.
The sight of the bloodstone knocked what little sobriety the cold had managed to beat back into him clean out from under his feet.
The hall receded beneath the rush of blood in his ears, music dimming as firelight blurred gold across her skin.
His hand curled at his side before he dragged his gaze from the stone to her face instead—to the fire in her eyes and the stubborn intelligence already gathering behind them.
“We’re leaving for the Fold,” he said, and heard the roughness in his own voice. “Now.”
Elara’s face emptied of everything soft. There she was again—the woman beneath the silk, the mind already moving, weighing, cutting through fear to reach the useful part of it. “What happened?”
“Osin finally made his move on the north.” Ivan watched the understanding begin to settle across her features. “Villages beyond the ridge. We think he means to drag the rebellion south and away from the Fold.”
A couple turned between them, sleeves sweeping through the spirit-state like smoke across candlelight. Somewhere nearby, laughter rose and vanished beneath the music.
Elara’s gaze stayed fixed on his. “How did he know?”
“We don’t—” He shook his head.
Her hand brushed the bloodstone at her throat, just once. A small, unconscious motion. Ivan watched it like a man starved. Around them, the dance shifted. Couples widened, turned, changed partners. Music rose through the hall in a slow, courtly figure.
Elara swallowed. Her throat worked above the broken stone. “All right,” she said. “I’ll be there.”
“When will you—”
The Ellylldan returned before Ivan could finish. He moved through the dancers as if the room had been made to yield before him. Firelight caught on the dark fall of his mantle, and the red channels beneath the floor lit his face until he looked half-forged, half-crowned.
The Ellylldan held out his hand to Elara as the next figure began.
Ivan should have stepped back.
He did not.
The bloodstone rested at her throat, cracked and lifeless, but her current had pulled him through the hall like a summons no sane man would have answered.
Every ruined part of him had obeyed. Perhaps that had always been the truth of it.
Not fate. Only Ivan, again and again, following the hem of a girl who had never belonged to him and never would, still that boy with bloody hands reaching for the one bright thing in his life and calling it duty because duty hurt less than wanting.
Still half-drunk, still caught in the terrible beauty of her, Ivan lifted his hand too.
The dance turned around them, bodies passing in silks and jewels, hands lifting and falling, the floor beneath them glowing with veins of volcanic red. Above, the banners stirred faintly in the rising heat, and all through the hall the music wound on.
Elara’s gaze turned to Reynnar’s offered hand.
Then to Ivan’s.
Her composure faltered in the break of her breath, in the too-quick dip of her lashes, in the tremor that passed through her fingers before she could hide it. Grief crossed her face, followed by something worse: longing, ache, and the ruin of being seen so clearly.
The gold on her dress flickered as she turned between them.
She gave one hand to the Sídhe—and her other to Ivan.
No one in the hall marked it. To them, she was only following the figure: one palm offered to her partner, the other lifted into empty air.
But her fingers trembled before she could still them, and her breath stayed caught too long as her eyes held his across the turning bodies, the look itself becoming confession.
Ivan forgot, for a moment, that he had no body there.
His hand moved closer to hers on instinct, reckless and useless, chasing a warmth the veil would not let him keep.
Still, her fingers opened in the gold haze of the hall, separated by the veil, by flesh, by fate, by every choice that had brought them to opposite sides of this impossible place.
Then the music turned, and the dance took them.
They moved in a slow circle beneath the banners, Sídhe spinning around them in stately rings, pale sleeves and dark skirts passing like wings. Elara stood between fire and shadow, hands raised to either side, neither fully claimed nor fully free.
The thought lodged in Ivan’s heart, cruel as a hook.
The Ellylldan spoke to her.
Ivan heard none of it. The spirit-state stole the words and left only the movement of the Sídhe’s mouth.
She should have looked at him instead. Let Ivan be the ghost he had made himself.
But her eyes kept returning to his, carrying the question she would not ask, the apology he did not want, and the hunger neither of them could name without breaking what little mercy remained between them.
Each time the dance turned her away, she found him again, as if some last shred of the oath still tugged her gaze through the firelit bodies between them.
Enough.
Ivan had come to warn her. He had done it. He had built a life on leaving rooms too late and wanting things too long, and still, as always, he forced himself to be the one who let go.
The music dipped. The circle widened. Sídhe bodies passed between them in a wash of silk and firelight, and Ivan let his hand fall from hers before longing made a coward of him.
“Find me,” he whispered, and stepped back into the dark before she could reach for him again.