Chapter 63
Mercy would have to wait.
The dead had not been moved, the wounded had not been tended, and Osin’s shades were already carrying word of them through the dark. Elara crossed the blood-slick deck toward the apparatus, one hand still locked around the dagger’s hilt.
The blade burned low against her palm.
She kept her eyes on the bronze basin because looking anywhere else would make the world too crowded: with bodies, with blood, with Sybil’s ragged breathing behind her, with Ivan’s torn coat and the brief, terrible way he had looked at her when she reached for him.
The Fold waited above them.
So did Raijin.
Elara took another step, and Dominic stopped her with a hand around her arm, his grip carrying the heat of battle and the restrained force of a man who knew exactly how much strength lived in his body.
She looked up, confused, but Dominic’s attention had dropped to the dagger in her hand, where the gold metal rested against her palm with its brilliance lowered, the last traces of light breathing along the blade.
“I saw you use that in the Pit,” he said, his voice rough beneath the roar of the water and the frantic movement of men around them. “All those months ago, when everything had gone to shit and we were all pretending we weren’t already dead.”
His mouth pulled toward something like a smile and failed.
“That light cut through Osin’s shadows like sunrise. For the first time in years, I thought maybe we weren’t fools for hoping. Maybe we could actually stand against him.”
His gaze lifted to hers then, and the disbelief in it was almost harder to bear than fear.
“What kind of weapon is that, Elara?”
Yoni appeared at his brother’s shoulder, as he tended to do, with no announcement and no apparent hurry, though blood streaked one side of his temple and his coat sleeve hung torn from his shoulder.
“I stole it from Osin,” she said. “He used it to open gates into Tír na nóg. That was how he took the Sídhe across the veil. I thought—” Elara forced the words through the tightness in her throat.
“I thought if it could open a way into their world, perhaps it could close something in him. Whatever power keeps him alive. Whatever he has become.”
She swallowed.
“I thought it might kill him.”
The dagger’s glow trembled, a pulse like a heartbeat beneath her palm.
“It couldn’t.”
Dominic looked back down at the blade, and whatever hope had sparked there went dim.
“No,” he said. “We saw.”
“It was never going to,” Dario said, from somewhere behind Dominic's shoulder. “Nothing stolen from a god kills the god. That’s not how the stories usually go.”
“He’s no god.” Yoni stepped closer, his attention moving slowly over the blade, cataloguing every line and mark with the care of a man memorizing an enemy's face.
Nothing showed openly in his expression, which told Elara there was plenty beneath it.
“We always wondered how he took the realm so quickly. How he crossed borders the goddesses themselves had barred to us. Even with áine answering his prayers, the story never sat right.”
He cracked a knuckle.
“But all this time, he had this.” A faint, grim smile touched his mouth.
“And when the hour turned against him, it left his hand for yours. That is either a flaw in the weapon or a truth about the hand that wields it.” He looked back at the dagger, and reluctant wonder crossed his face.
“For all our sakes, I find myself hoping it's the latter.”
“Perhaps the truth is simpler than worthiness.”
Avis drifted closer from the bow, chart tucked under one arm, her gaze resting on Elara with the faraway attention of someone listening to a song beneath ordinary sound.
“Old things tend to move toward what they’re missing,” she said. “Like certain stars only appearing when you stop looking directly at them. The ones at the periphery. Perhaps it was waiting for someone who needed a door closed rather than opened. That would explain why it came so willingly.”
She considered this, apparently untroubled by anyone else’s opinion.
“Stolen things do that sometimes. They wait very patiently to be found by the person they were meant to leave with.”
A beat of silence followed.
“Right,” Tristan called from across the deck. He had not moved from Sybil’s side, but his voice carried cleanly through the cold air. “Profound. Truly. Are we doing this, or—”
A copper rod struck the deck, ringing out clear and sharp, and every head turned.
Godfrey straightened beside the apparatus, his broken spectacles sitting crooked on his nose. “We’re ready.”
The deck shifted beneath Elara’s boots as men from the other vessels crossed over, their footsteps hurried, their faces drawn tight beneath the stars. The apparatus hummed faintly now, answering the ley, and the sound settled in her teeth like a warning.
Dominic turned from the dagger. He looked at his brother; Yoni was already rolling up his sleeve.
Bryn appeared before Elara had fully registered the movement, coming around from the far side of the mast, blood darkening the front of her coat.
For half a breath, she stared at Yoni’s exposed forearm, then at Dominic’s hand closing around one of the copper rods.
“What are you doing?”
Her voice held the kind of calm that Elara imagined made men reconsider their bravery.
Yoni gave her a slow smile. “Standing near the apparatus, Bryn.”
“You are not standing. You are preparing.”
“Keen observation.”
She hit him on the arm. Hard. Yoni absorbed it without flinching, and his smile turned wicked when her hand fell back to her side, which told Elara something about both of them that she had absolutely no time to examine.
Bryn turned on Dominic next. “I know you’ve been overseeing the apparatus work.
I know you’ve practiced with them. But you are still the prince of Vredia, and if you think I’m going to stand here politely while you volunteer for the part where men come off those plates half-dead, you are profoundly mistaken. ”
Dominic’s mouth tipped into a tired grin. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you stand politely anywhere.”
“And you—” Her gaze cut back to Yoni. “I stitched your shoulder back together not four days ago. If either of you dies, I’m going to be furious.”
Yoni’s smile gentled. “Then I suppose we had better live.”
Ivan came to Elara’s side without comment, the salt wind tugging at the torn hem of his coat.
He had washed some of the blood from his hands, though it still lingered beneath his nails and in the split skin across his knuckles.
His face had resumed that controlled emptiness she hated, because she knew now how much it cost him to wear it.
He caught her assessing look and huffed a faint laugh. “Still with me?”
Elara nodded, then reached for him before she could think better of it. His coat had torn near the shoulder where the shade’s claws had caught him, and when she pulled the fabric aside, four ragged furrows cut through shirt and skin, dark blood moving sluggishly with each breath.
Ivan flinched.
Her hand fell away at once. Blood streaked her fingertips, and for half a breath she stared at it as though refusing to react might somehow lessen the sight.
“It’s fine.” Ivan adjusted the coat back into place and stepped closer, lowering his voice so the others would not hear. “Do not let it distract you from what needs doing.”
Her gaze snapped to his. “I am perfectly capable of caring about more than one thing at a time.”
A faint, exhausted almost-smile touched his mouth. “I have never doubted your capacity to suffer efficiently.”
Before she could answer, Godfrey’s voice cut across the deck. “Positions.”
The command moved through them like a current.
Men straightened, gloves tightened over trembling fingers, and the replacement casters stepped onto the plates.
One kept glancing toward the covered bodies near the aft rail until Dario moved into his line of sight and held it with grim understanding.
Dominic took one plate; Yoni another, rolling his shoulders once before closing his hand around the rod.
Gideon flexed his burned hands and gripped his own, his face hollowed with pain as the others followed until all twelve stations were filled.
Godfrey moved around the ring. “Do not fight the draw. Set your boundary before the first note. If the rod pulses twice, call out. If you hear a second chord beneath the first, do not follow it.”
A younger Vredian swallowed. “What happens if we do?”
Godfrey looked at him too long. “Do not follow it.”
Elara took her place beside the basin and Algernon stood opposite her with one hand resting on the bronze rim, his robes snapping around his legs in the rising wind.
His gaze lifted to the sky, where the three convergence stars burned in their appointed places, drawing into alignment with such merciless precision that her skin prickled beneath her sleeves.
Algernon lifted a small brass lever, and the bronze reservoir above the basin opened with a soft click—three narrow spouts angled inward, waiting for her blood.
Elara’s palm tightened around the dagger. The hilt was warm against her skin, familiar in a way that had begun to feel dangerously like comfort. Its weight had shifted again, settling into the hollow of her grip as if it had adjusted itself for this moment.
Godfrey checked the final rod twice, then returned to the control lever of brass and black iron. His broken spectacles had been tucked into his pocket; without them, he looked younger, pale-faced and frightened, though his hands held steadfast on the controls.
He looked to Algernon.
Algernon looked to Ivan.
The question passed between them without a word.
Ivan stood a pace behind Elara, torn coat pulled back into place, one bloodied hand near the knife at his belt. The wound at his shoulder had already darkened the fabric again.
He nodded.
Elara’s stomach turned.
Ready.
Godfrey drew a breath. “On my count.”