Chapter 5 #4
Elloven’s breaths came in short as she glanced up, squinting against the sun breaking through the dense clouds.
Jesstin agitatedly struggled to grab her notice.
His eyes flared in caution when they briefly connected, and he shook his head firmly but carefully, his boots skating the top of the wobbly stool.
Elloven nodded that it was all right, but it only made him panic more. Did he want to die? Did he think she was going to sacrifice herself?
Am I?
“I...” Elloven cleared the blockage in her throat. “I speak for him because I was there. I was there for all of it. And what the Virtue has said happened did not. She was bribed to use her words against this man, and I won’t allow him to die for it.”
The crowd exploded in stunned gasps and whispers.
“I see.” The man moved toward her, his beady gaze swiveling between the people and her. “I see. But have you considered it may have happened when you were not there?”
“But I was there,” Elloven retorted. She ignored Jesstin’s signaling.
Maybe he knew something she didn’t, but there wasn’t time.
She saw they really would kill him, that Asterin’s army would arrive too late.
The solution could only be found within the village’s own code.
“Jesstin and I were there alone until the man who started this, Taven Considine, arrived and incited a fight. The two men tussled, but this Virtue was nowhere near us. I was still with Jesstin when the guards came to take him. I was with Jesstin the entire time. The first time I even saw the Virtue’s face was when she came with the guards to spread her lie. ”
“That’s not what happened!” the Virtue, Sanja, screeched.
“But my word is as good as yours, no?” Elloven retorted. With each step toward the young woman, she backed away. “Did your prophetess not confirm I am who I say I am?”
“We approach a dilemma,” the announcer said to the crowd, though he seemed delighted at the complication. “For now, their words have canceled one another out. How shall we solve it?”
“Duel!”
“Trial!”
“The bond!”
More and more voices joined the ones shouting the last suggestion, until they drowned the others.
“Elloven,” Jesstin hissed, spitting his words through his teeth. “Go!”
I will not, she mouthed with a tight smile, which didn’t reassure either of them, and turned away.
“The bonnnnd,” mused the man with increasing amusement. He clapped his hands. “We have not had a bond in dozens of years! Shall we raise our hands in assent and make it so?”
A sea of hands shot up.
“We have spoken. The bond it is.” The man peered up at Elloven. “Do you consent to the bond as the breaker of the tie?”
“Elloven!” Jesstin screamed again. The crowd gasped when the stool nearly toppled.
“What is the bond?” Elloven asked. She watched Jesstin from the edge of her vision. He looked more horrified than he had when being arrested.
“The bond is one possible consequence of the neutrality created in competing testimony,” the man said. “The crowd has chosen the bond, and without it, our verdict in the man’s guilt and sentence stands.”
“But what is it?” she demanded.
The man laughed and everyone joined him. How na?ve she is was the clear message. “How can a sister of the blood not already know this?”
“I was not raised among my people, but my blood is no less for it.”
“Fascinating. A refugee.” He shuffled in place. “The bond is an extension of your word. If you are willing to put your word into power for this man, to cancel out the words of your accusing sister, then you must offer something even greater. Your life.”
“My—”
“Joined to his.”
“What?” She cringed at another wave of derisive laughter.
“The bond is a seal of magic. It binds you to him until his blood is yours and yours is his.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she said, all her senses overexerting at once. The noise became all-consuming, the chill in the air biting through her flesh. Everything around her vied for her attention. It was like drowning without water.
“Once bound, you will have one year to conceive a child. If you fail to conceive within a year, you will both die. If you are successful, may you find peace in each other for the remainder of your days, for you’ll be tied together until you rejoin your ancestors in the Halls of Ilyn.”
“But how does...” A guard held fast to her, and she looked up, then down, realizing she’d collapsed. She wrested herself away, dizzy on her feet. “How does that... How does that make my word stronger and more powerful? A child? How does that make a spit of sense?”
The announcer smirked at her unsophistication. “A true woman of the Seven Sisters is a bastion of fertility. The only way you would fail is if you have deceived us, which is impossible.”
But she was infertile. She had to be. There’d been no access to teas or other abatements when in Whitechurch, and between all those men, all the times she’d been forced to receive them...
What if she had deceived the woman? What if she was not who she believed herself to be—who her mother had always said she was?
“Your decision, daughter of the curia?”
Sweat trickled down her temples and brow.
What curia? She’d never heard the word before.
The morning was so cursed cold, and the sun was blinding, yet no one but her seemed to be struggling.
She counted the knots in the board beneath her boots.
Four. There were five men standing behind Jesstin, and between them she noted nineteen buttons on their dark-blue coats, though there’d be twenty if the fourth man hadn’t lost one.
Seven eyelets on each side of Jesstin’s boots, still struggling on the top of the stool so broken it could only have been chosen intentionally.
Maybe I’m not who I think I am.
Maybe this is not the man I want to be bound to for a day, let alone a year... or a lifetime.
Maybe we’ll both perish in a whirl of dark magic in one year.
But if I do nothing, or if I say no, he will die now.
And for nothing more nefarious than wanting her to have a night of peace from the demons.
The eerie silence snapped her back. Taven was yelling—this isn’t what I saw, the boy is going to die, he must die—but she didn’t hear the rest because the announcer—whose name, Meric, jumped into her head like a sudden crash, in a way she knew it must be real—repeated his question.
“I...” Glancing at Jesstin made her voice rasp.
His face was beet red, like his bloodshot, bulging eyes.
She couldn’t read the source of his terror, his sadness.
.. Was it for himself? For her? Would he rather die than be bonded to her?
Was she, as always, overthinking a moment that couldn’t afford distraction?
Did it matter when he was seconds from the stool giving way?
A stool he would not be standing upon at all if not for her? “I accept the bond, Meric.”
The man’s smarmy assurance flagged. “I did not give you my name, daughter.”
“And yet I know it. Cut him down.”
Meric’s eyes knit in chary cynicism. He hadn’t expected her to accept such a bargain, and neither had the crowd, judging from the unnerving silence rolling off them like a dense fog.
The announcer sucked his teeth, blew out, and nodded once at the guards standing near Jesstin. A sharp blade cut the air, followed by a muffled grunt as Jesstin toppled to the wooden platform.
“Pick him up,” Meric commanded, sounding neither pleased nor disgusted. “And call the sister back. We have a bond to forge, and I need it done proper.”
Elloven rushed to Jesstin, who was struggling to stand on his own. The redness in his face and neck had turned into a purplish hue. He looked less like a man who had cheated death and more like one who had returned from it.
Jesstin croaked and coughed into his arm. “You don’t know what...” He wheezed a whistling breath. “You’ve done.”
“Saved your life is what,” she hissed in a whisper, her eyes drifting toward the men listening.
“Only to damn your own.” Jesstin nearly fell into her arms when the men let go. He gripped her shoulders, righting himself with a blench, then let go of her and cupped his neck with a swallow of air. “Elloven. You’re a bloody fool.”
She was completely dumbfounded by his anger. “They were going to murder you, Jesstin.”
“And?” Resentment flashed in his eyes.
“You’re serious?”
“Entirely!”
“You would have done it for me,” she retorted.
“No.” His expression twisted in contempt.
He was unsettled, rightly, but his anger toward her made no sense at all.
“I would not have. It wouldn’t have even crossed my mind.
I helped you because your mother asked me to, but I’ll hold no guilt for your death, because you will die, you stupid, stupid. ..” His mouth pursed.
“This isn’t who you are,” she stammered. “You’re acting like... like...” Like Taven. Like Fabrien. Like Castien.
“And how the fuck would you know who I am? Your brother thought he knew me and look where that...” He bent in a sudden vomit.
“Where what?”
He dragged his sleeve over his mouth. “I’ll never touch you... never put a child in you. You’re fucked. Me, I was fucked already, but you?”
The robed sister stepped between them before Elloven could fathom how to respond to his vicious shift of nature.
The girl tugged at both of their hands, placing them atop one another.
Jesstin shook his head, looking everywhere but at Elloven, as the sister whispered words of magic too low to hear.
Elloven tried to withdraw but was unable to move her hands at all.
Jesstin laughed like a madman. Tears settled on his lower lashes.
What have I done? Elloven wondered as the magic drifted through her veins. She felt the bond forming... the crawling of skin over bone, the dread of being parted from someone she now, too late, understood couldn’t stand her, a feeling she was too stunned to reciprocate.
“You’re a daughter of the curia, and you don’t know fuck-all what that means, do you?” Jesstin asked as both their hands trembled from the weight of the curse. “You’d have known such magic is irreversible.”
Elloven didn’t have the heart to speak at all, not to him, not to anyone. But he had to be wrong. Of course it was reversible, and it was only further reinforcement she was meant to go to her people, where they could give her the means to undo magic they had created.
“It is done. You are bound under the web of magic woven between you. Absence leads to pain. If you allow more than a thousand feet to distance you, you will suffer increasingly until it is again narrowed. Pray your womb does not fail you,” the sister said and disappeared as hastily as she’d arrived.
Jesstin ripped his hands away. Elloven could only stare, speechless at how terribly she’d misjudged him—the entire situation.
A thunder of hooves had everyone turning toward the east, where Asterin and Rhiain sat at the head of a small cavalry. Asterin raised his sword, followed by Rhiain and then the rest of the men.
“Release my brother.” Asterin’s soft but deep voice carried on the wind. “There is no need for war.”
“You’re too late!” Meric cackled, slapping his thighs, spurring laughter all around.
“Jesstin of Skylark and Edevane is already saved, by a daughter of the curia! His life is spared! They are bonded, and the chaos of time ticks, ticks, ticks!” Meric looked up at the couple, bound by magic, fate, and a newfound, unfathomable revulsion.
He winked as though he knew something the two of them wouldn’t until it was too late. “For now.”