Chapter 71 #2
“There now, Nuala,” he said gently, his thumb brushing over her shoulder as if he had any right to tenderness. “No need for tears. Be a good little girl and run to your brother. He has done a great deal to get to you.”
For a breath, Nuala did not move.
Then Eamon whispered her name.
The girl broke.
She tore free of Osin’s hand and ran across the onyx floor, her polished shoes slipping once before she caught herself.
Eamon dropped the spear at his side and opened his arms just before she crashed into him.
The sound that left her was small at first, a broken little gasp muffled against his coat, and then she began to sob.
Eamon folded around her.
His face broke completely. All the cold resolve, all the righteous fury, all the terrible certainty he had worn like armor fell away as he pressed one hand to the back of her head and the other across her shoulders, holding her so tightly his fingers trembled in her curls.
For one breath, he looked only like a brother who had found the last living piece of his heart.
Then his eyes lifted to Osin.
Whatever softness had opened in him burned away.
“You will pay for what you have done to my people,” Eamon said.
His voice was low, ragged, and every shade in the hall seemed to lean toward it.
“As we speak, the ones you twisted inside my realm are being put to death for their treason. Soon, I will find this Patron, and when I do, we will come for you.”
Osin laughed, and it was not the laugh of a frightened man. It held no surprise, no insulted pride, no need to convince anyone in the room that he remained in control.
“Very well,” he said. “Run along, then. I am sure you will be missed.”
Eamon’s hand closed around Nuala’s shoulder. He looked once at Elara, and there was nothing apologetic left in him. No shame. No hesitation. Only rage and resolve, so complete it had made a stranger of the man who had once opened up to her about his past—who had smiled at her across a balcony.
Eamon lifted the dagger and tore a rift open into the waiting dark, then walked through with his sister clutched against him. The light sealed behind them, leaving only the fading echo of Nuala’s sobs in the hall.
Elara turned her gaze to Osin. “I’m surprised you let those weapons walk out of your hall.”
Osin’s smile curved slowly. “I like you with a spine,” he said. “It will make breaking you again so much more interesting. But do not trouble yourself over the relics. I let him leave with them.”
Relics. Plural.
She was right about the dagger.
Elara’s nails bit into her palms. “Why?”
His eyes gleamed. “Because desperate men run faster when they believe they are carrying salvation.”
Osin walked toward her slowly, each step measured against the polished onyx, until his ruined face was close enough for Elara to smell the faint, bitter salve rubbed into the scars she had left behind.
The scent nearly pulled a laugh from her throat.
He, of all creatures, should have known that no scar made by Draoth would ever truly heal.
“Now,” he said, his pale gaze moving over her as if deciding where to bite down first, “what to do with you.”
“Indeed.”
The word did not come from Osin.
The voice came from everywhere, soft enough to stroke the skin and powerful enough to make the black pillars tremble in their foundations.
It moved through Mordenhall like time made audible—the slow turn of seasons, the hush of dust settling over dead kingdoms, the sun rising and dying and rising again over bones that had once believed themselves eternal.
Elara’s body knew it before her mind did.
Her breath stopped halfway up her throat, and the onyx walls vanished for one terrible heartbeat, replaced by dew-cold grass, dawn light, rain on her tongue, and a hand so gentle it had felt holy while it guided her toward a monster.
She wanted to scream, but the sound never made it past her teeth.
Then she saw the raven perched on the open window high above the court, black feathers sleek against the bruised glass, head cocked as one bright eye fixed on her.
Elara’s mind stuttered as another memory cut through the confusion: the raven in Luirigh, watching from the fountain, then again from the roofline as they tracked Tieran.
Midair took it apart.
Feathers loosened into ribbons of black.
Bone lengthened beneath a skin of gathering light.
Wings unfurled into veils, and the air bent beneath the weight of something entering the world by choice rather than permission.
The blue-black plumage dissolved into a cascade of red hair that spilled nearly to the floor, bright as a wound beneath sunlight, and every torch in Mordenhall bloomed blue.
Pain flashed up both legs as Elara's body struck onyx, but she barely felt it beneath the pressure pouring through the hall. The shades bowed their helmed heads. Even Osin lowered his gaze, one hand pressed over his heart with reverence.
áine stood where the raven had fallen apart, radiant enough to hurt.
Her freckled shoulders gleamed beneath a gown that seemed woven from sunlight and old blood, its fabric shifting between gold and crimson with every slow breath she took.
Her hair moved though no wind touched it, a red torrent spilling around her like time unwinding from its spool.
She looked no older than a young woman in the first spring of her beauty, and yet the longer Elara stared, the more her eyes watered from the strain of trying to hold all that agelessness inside a single face.
áine smiled. “Hello, sweet one.”