Chapter 67 #3
“Most of mine are gone.” She reached for his hand before she could think better of it, and his fingers closed around hers at once. “We tried to get them back. I saw the soul fragments fall, Raijin. Thousands of them. More than thousands. I felt the Draoth come back, but the memories—”
She looked over her shoulder.
Ivan stood just inside the door with his hands in his pockets and the expression of a man giving the room only as much of himself as courtesy demanded. He looked too pale in the gray light, the bruising at his throat darkening even further.
“Godfrey believes the Draoth dispersed,” Ivan said. “The soul-fields returned. He has a working theory that memory might have been a different substrate. It was stored with them, but not bound in the same way. He fears they might have been destroyed when the Fold collapsed.”
The hope she had been trying to keep alive died at once. She looked back at Raijin and forced her fingers not to tighten around his.
“Godfrey,” she said, the name arriving abruptly, too many losses crowding the same narrow doorway in her mind. “Is he—”
“Recovering,” Ivan said. His voice remained level, but something in it had gone carefully flat. “It was bad. But he’ll live.”
The door opened.
Raijin moved before she registered the sound. One smooth step placed him between her and the threshold, his chin lowering in open threat.
Dominic stood in the doorway.
He took in the room with one swift, assessing glance: Raijin’s position, Elara behind him, Ivan half-shadowed. If he took offense, he hid it well. His gaze returned to Elara, and something warm moved through the exhaustion in his face.
“I’m glad to see you’re both well,” he said.
Elara swallowed around a lump in her throat. “Yoni,” she said. “How is he?”
Dominic looked down at the floor. When he looked up again, his eyes were red-rimmed, though nothing in his posture had softened. “He's—” He shook his head once, as if the words were too small for the devastation they were meant to carry. “Give him time.”
Sorrow moved through her like cold water. Behind it came shame, familiar and ugly, sinking its teeth into the places already tender. Bryn’s face flashed behind her eyes, the press of Ivan’s hand over hers, the dagger answering them both, Yoni’s scream tearing across the shore.
Dominic saw it on her face. “It was a mercy,” he said.
Elara looked away.
“What you did,” he continued, his voice roughening, “was a mercy, Elara. He knows that. Somewhere beneath all the grief, he knows it. He just needs time for the rest of him to catch up.”
She dipped her chin, but it still hurt.
“We’re having a meeting,” Dominic said after a moment. “Today, if you’re able. There’s a great deal to discuss—”
“I have to go back.”
Ivan straightened from the wall.
Dominic’s mouth closed.
Elara looked at Raijin, then back at Dominic, the decision gathering in her faster than pain could argue against it.
“Now. We both do. Reynnar made a public declaration of war against Latheria. Every hour I am not there is another hour he moves toward something I cannot stop from here.” She paused, her gaze flicking to Raijin’s face, to the shadows beneath his eyes.
“And Raijin needs Tír na nóg. The land heals. He needs to go home.”
Ivan’s voice cut from the wall. “You’re in no state to rift across realms.”
Elara looked at him. “I have been in worse states, and you know it.”
His eyes narrowed, and she met the look and let him see every ounce of stubbornness rising beneath the exhaustion. “I left without telling anyone. Who knows what is happening across the veil—”
Dominic stepped toward her, and Raijin snarled.
The sound tore out of him low and lethal, his lips peeling back from fangs sharp enough to make the room go still. Dominic looked at him with commendable steadiness, though his next step stopped short. Slowly, he lifted both hands, palms out.
“I’m not stopping you from leaving.”
Raijin did not move. His hand remained locked around Elara’s.
Dominic’s gaze flicked to the fangs, then back to her. “I need one hour. There are hundreds of prison breaks happening as we speak.”
Elara’s heart leapt.
“The freed Sídhe don’t have roads home,” Dominic said. “They’re breaking out of compounds across the realm right now with their Draoth returned and no protection, no direction, no way of knowing who can be trusted. We need to decide how to help them before Osin decides for us.”
Elara’s fingers tightened around Raijin’s hand.
“One hour,” Dominic said. “Then you go.”
She looked at Raijin. His gray eyes watched her from a face she had only just found, and he gave her nothing that might sway her one way or the other.
He didn’t understand Latherian, so Elara told him what was happening, and the exhaustion in his face changed as she spoke.
Not vanished, not truly, but honed into something harder.
His spine straightened. A fire kindled behind his eyes, cold and bright and terribly awake.
When she finished, Raijin dipped his chin.
Elara turned back to Dominic. “One hour.”