Chapter 6 #3
“That there are people who put honor above their own needs!” Elloven had the audacity to sound disgusted.
“I don’t believe you when you say you wouldn’t have done the same.
I saw something in you last night, same thing I saw when you escorted me home, and it’s the same thing I know you see in me.
Both of us know what it’s like to be lost in the fabric of a world that seems determined to kill us.
Both of us have known betrayal and pain.
” She laughed bitterly. “What better way to feed the darkness than turning against each other?”
Jesstin’s cheeks prickled with rising heat. Her rationality made his retorts seem small and immature. Why couldn’t she just scream and curse at him, like a normal person? “If you have a better idea, now’s a good time to share.”
“I do, actually, but no one wants to hear it.”
Her smooth pivot from acrimony was incredible to watch. It took him far too long to move on from any anger, and now that, too, felt childish.
“You want to go to the mountains,” he surmised aloud. The suggestion left him unsettled, but he couldn’t say why.
“Which will be impossible until my mother tells me the way.”
“You familiar with maps?”
Elloven sighed. “Sure, they’d get us to the common paths. The one thing I do know about my homeland is no ordinary traveler can stumble upon the highest villages, not without the help of the locals. Whether it’s magic or... I don’t know.”
“Your mother lied to you about everything else. Why not this?”
Elloven tensed, but her eyes drifted to the side in concession.
Traveling to her people was probably their only chance of solving their problem, but he had a gnawing instinct it was also the most dangerous place in the entire realm for them.
For her.
“I need sleep,” he announced and fluffed the hard, rough cushion from the chair across from him. It still had the imprint of Taven’s ass, which Jesstin refused to press his face to all night. He turned the cushion over with a scowl and searched for a blanket.
“I don’t want to fight with you,” Elloven said calmly. “No matter what else happens in the next year, we have to find some solidarity until...”
Jesstin’s resentment returned as he finished for her. “Until they murder us both because no child is coming?”
Her expression clouded. “Yes, Jesstin.”
Whatever patience or grace lived within him was as dry as an old well, but he found the presence of mind to say, “Well, I don’t think we should go.”
“No? Why?”
“Just a sense.”
Elloven shook her head slowly. “I can’t make sense of you. You want me to be crystal clear how furious you are with me, how much you loathe me, but your intuition tells you we shouldn’t travel to the one place that could solve all of this?”
His hand shot up in frustrated surrender. “I told you I need to sleep. Will you let me, or does this verbal sparring excite you?”
“Excite me?”
“Titillate you? Rouse you? Make you wet?”
The air in the room changed. A soft, startled exhalation sliced through it. “By all means, get your sleep,” Elloven snapped and stormed from the room.
He only realized how poorly his words had landed when she was gone.
Jesstin dropped onto the smelly, uncomfortable pillow and stared at the crack running down the stone wall near the mantle, no longer tired at all.
“You don’t think I know why you’re really here?
What you really want? That I have not always known?
” Esmeray scraped a hard stare over Taven, deflating what had been, at least in his mind, a rather stirring speech about doing what was right for Ellie.
“I know you better than you ever will, so do not come in here pretending to care about my girl’s well-being when you have your own motives and priorities.
I know what you want, and you can’t have it. ”
He wasn’t quick enough to hide his surprise. Esmeray had never intimated she knew he was anything more than a displaced orphan from the curias. She’d never been openly against him courting Ellie, and she had certainly never intervened when he was sleeping in her daughter’s room.
“Esme, Ellie has always been my priority, since the day I met her.” He approached, but her countenance had him thinking he was better on the other end of her bedchamber.
“You have no idea how hard I’ve worked to balance Elloven’s life, to keep you satisfied enough so you wouldn’t cart her off to the same people I had to get her away from.
I watched you climb into her bed for years!
Do you know what that’s like as a mother?
To allow harm to come to your child to prevent an even greater harm? ”
How long had she known, and why had she said nothing until that moment?
He hadn’t kept her pacified enough, apparently.
He changed tactic. “Then you’ll understand me when I tell you Elloven will make the trip.
She is that determined, with or without your guidance.
But if she ends up in the Eversong Valley, asking how to find her mother’s people, you know what will happen, don’t you? ”
Esmeray simmered in silence.
“You do know, because it’s why she’s here and not there!” He expelled the words in a vicious whisper.
“She’d never find her way to them.” Her head shook. “Not possible.”
“Is it a risk you’re truly willing to take, Esme? After everything Ellie has endured?”
She seemed ready to add his name to the list of affronts against her daughter, and it was a good thing for her she didn’t, because Taven had spent twenty years calculating his moves, his moods, and his responses, all in the name of the clairsight, in the name of a love he’d been born with.
It had taken fourteen years, but he’d found Ellie and had fought for her over the next twenty, and no one, no one, would ever understand.
“And your suggestion...” Esmeray flicked a hand at the air. “Is what, Taven? Direct her to another curia, one just as dangerous?”
Taven lightened. She didn’t like what she was hearing, but she was listening.
“If I tell her we’re going to her mother’s people, and there’s no one there who knows you, she’ll quickly figure out she’s been deceived, by one or both of us.
She won’t find anything but trouble at Curia Eversong. It must be Rivenholde.”
“Rivenholde?” Aghast, Esmeray wrapped her shawl tight. “If you actually knew what you claim to know, if you actually were sincere in your affection for her, then you’d never let her anywhere near there.”
“Her father’s blood protects her.” Taven didn’t know if that was true or not, but it was an easier truth for her to swallow than telling her he’d been guided by an invisible hand for two decades.
“Not against...” Esmeray trailed off in exasperation.
“Do you think I... that I would ever allow anyone to harm her?”
“What a brave question when I have watched you covet her sadness with the interest of a predator sizing up his prey.” Esmeray’s body shuddered.
Her hand was shaking, as it often did, and her lids were so heavy, he was amazed she hadn’t surrendered to the call of her herbs.
“You only protect Ellie when it’s convenient for you.
So tell me, Taven, why you are suddenly viewing a trip to Rivenholde as a convenience you require. ”
“If you are implying I had any authority over what Castien Edevane did to her... over Fabrien Quinlanden declaring to all the realm she was his choice...”
She thrust a veiled arm toward the wall. “You wanted to know why I asked Jesstin to see her safely through our village? I knew that if it came down to choosing between yourself and her, you’d have thrown her to the wulves.”
Taven burst out laughing. “And you think the little heathen in the other room would have done any better? Do you know how he makes his coin?”
“You don’t understand him,” she replied, insistent.
“How could you? You see him once a season. Is that enough to know a man?”
“I knew who he was as a boy, and I know who he is becoming as a man. Don’t you dare suggest he’s anything like Mathias or his birth father.”
Taven only remembered the steward had hung himself after Esme’s mention.
In the blur of activity since, he wasn’t even sure Jesstin had been informed.
“Esme...” He reached for her, banking on the gentle surrender in his tone being enough to soothe her.
“She can’t stay here. Her crime will catch up to her, it’s only a matter of time, and you know that as well as I do.
As I see it, there are only two realistic options available to us.
Either you tell her everything and let her decide if she still wants to go, or you give her your blessing to follow me, and I will lead her to her father’s people and the answers she needs to rescind the bond.
She’s going either way. You know this in your heart.
All you can do now is set her on the safest path available, and we both know that means coming with me. ”
Esme’s eyes fluttered shut. She flinched when his hands found her arms. “Jesstin will look after her interests and not solely his own.”
“Of course.” Taven practically vomited the words.
Jesstin would not be going, or coming anywhere near Ellie, if not for the physical limitations set by the bond, but if it helped Esme to see Taven as being diplomatic in the matter, so be it.
“Esmeray, I love your daughter. I would lay my life down for her.” He decided it wasn’t the time to discuss a betrothal.
Her permission wouldn’t be needed anyway.
“Love?” Esmeray peeled back. “You covet her, Taven. They are not the same. But, you know...” She didn’t finish.
She was disgusted and furious, yes, but also retreating, as he knew she would. And he didn’t even have to force her hand. Splendid. “You’ll talk to her first thing? Tell her to follow me?”
“Leave me,” Esme hissed. Her shaky hand fumbled the cap on her glass tumbler, sending it to the ground, where it rolled into a corner. “Leave me!”