Chapter 8 #2
“I’m fine, Ses,” Jesstin muttered, thinking of something his friend had mentioned earlier in the conversation. Though it’s a shame she couldn’t take a shift. She was awake nearly the whole time, worried sick about you. I don’t think she’s slept since.
He hopped out of the carriage and onto the frozen ground, feeling lighter already. “Almost forgot you, big guy,” he said and climbed a step so he could reach for his broadsword.
“Planning a melee, are you?” Sesto asked.
Jesstin clipped it into place and peered into the dusky forest. “You never know.”
Elloven removed the kettle from the firepit she’d fashioned. Taven came up behind her when she poured, and he guided her arms like a child’s. Her shoulders pinched back with a twist, but her arms were shaking, and she hated that he’d noticed. “Don’t. I’m fine.”
“You haven’t slept. You’re dead on your feet, love.”
“I will when I need to.” She dabbed at the edges of the stone bowls to clean them up, feeling a little silly for it.
They were in the middle of a dense forest, miles from anywhere they’d recognize, being hunted by her late husband’s family and headed toward a place so foreign, she could only piece together her expectations from the tiny morsels her mother, and now Taven, doled out.
A little slop on the sides of the bowls was nothing.
“Why are you cross with me? Hmm?” Taven danced around her until he was close enough to lean down and look her in the eyes. “You’ve been cold for days. I saved him. He’ll survive, though Guardians know he’s a misuse of human flesh.” He shook his head.
“Not from any goodness in your heart,” she answered and slid the bowls onto her mother’s treasured obsidian tray.
Esmeray had packed their provisions trunks incongruously, a mix of highly practical items and head-scratching ones.
Elloven had found the piece wedged between candles—useful—and some delicate lace handkerchiefs—less so.
Too bad there was nothing to prepare her for having turned two men into solid ice.
“I won’t deny your survival was front of mind.”
“Or accepting your betrothal?” She scowled up at him.
He cupped her cheek, his thumb brushing the tired flesh with a tenderness far too easy and unearned. “Destiny decided for us long ago.”
Elloven returned to the tray. “I don’t believe in destiny. You know this.”
“You don’t have to, Ellie. It finds you either way.” He dipped to kiss her, but she turned her head, and his lips grazed her cheek. He sighed softly. “You think I’m coldhearted, that I can’t see how much you’ve endured, can’t appreciate what it’s done to you. But no one, no one, knows you as I do.”
Elloven didn’t bother responding. If anyone could make her trauma about themselves, it was Taven.
He embraced her from the side, enveloping her like a blanket that was too big and too scratchy.
“It’s only because you can’t see what I’ve seen.
Our beautiful future. The clouds parting to make way for all the sun.
If I could’ve stopped any of it, I would have, but the clairsight was clear; intervention would have led to your demise.
I had no choice but to wait, and for that, I will spend our lives making you the happiest woman in the realm, helping you put all of that behind you so you can heal and be loved the way you deserve. ”
This time she remembered to repress her cringe. She’d made her bargain. At some point, she’d have to learn to live with it. “You keep talking about clairsight like I’m supposed to understand.”
“I’ve had these visions since I was a little boy. You know this.”
“Taven, they’re more than visions.” She pivoted to look up at him again. “Someone is sending you messages. There’s no other explanation, unless you’ve lost your mind.”
His hesitation gave him away. “Everything is a message. The sun rising, setting. The shifting of the seasons. My clairsight shows me there’s far more than our eyes can see and our minds can comprehend. Our people, El...”
“Our people what?”
He hunched lower. “They are not from this realm. They’re from the lost kingdom.”
“Ilynglass? Repeating myths now?” Until two days ago, she thought freezing men where they stood to be myth too.
“It’s not myth if you’re of the blood, and, Ellie, you’re.
..” He caught himself, though it was unclear why.
“When we arrive tomorrow, you’ll experience so many wondrous things, and they will all help you to better understand yourself.
Me. Us... and why I’ve never given up on you.
You’ve never known such a bounty of truth!
Most will never, ever know this much about anything, let alone themselves.
” He spoke like a man drunk, though he was a teetotaler.
He was drunk on something worse though. Power.
“How can you be certain what you’re being shown is real? And not a deception?”
Taven’s grin, half shadow, half dancing orange light from the firepit, reminded her they were alone, in the forest, at night. “I’ve been there, love. To Rivenholde.”
Her eyes narrowed. “But you told my mother you only know the way from your clairsight.”
“I didn’t want her to worry needlessly.”
She pulled back. “I saw how you let her live. I know who pays her debts and funds her life. What do you think Asterin would think if he’d have visited Nightwood before I cleaned up?
How interesting that the man responsible for her needless squalor is the same one who was hell-bent and determined to see an innocent man, Asterin’s own brother, murdered out of jealousy and spite. ”
Anger flashed across his waxen expression. “Asterin, with his pretty books and colossal libraries, knows nothing of who we are, where we came from, or what we can do. The most well-read man in the kingdom knows nothing, Ellie. Doesn’t that tell you everything?”
“What does it tell me, Taven?” she practically screeched, nearly tripping over the stump where she’d arranged the tray. She was suddenly very cold. Had the wind been so fierce the entire time? “No one ever tells me a damn thing!”
“Ellie...” Taven held his hands out with a wary glance around. “You’re doing it again.”
“What?”
He backed away from her, his eyes on the ground. Horrified, she watched ice crystals spread along the fallen boughs at their feet, racing toward his boots.
“I’m not doing this,” she whispered, but she was.
“Look at me.”
“I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Look at me, Ellie.”
She lifted her head, her breath shaky. His soft smile was so warm and unpretentious, it reminded her of a time when she’d trusted him more than anyone else in the world.
Long nights by the fire, head in his lap, listening to him read her some of the most fantastical stories from her father’s library.
He’d stroke her hair, changing his voice for every single character.
She’d wake the following morning in her own bed with no memory of getting there, but there’d always be a single violet rose on her nightstand.
Taven could be a monster, but he’d also slayed them for her. There’d been no confusion about who Fabrien and Castien were, who she was to them. One of the greatest conundrums of her life had been the ongoing struggle to reconcile gentle, loving Taven and controlling, abusive Taven.
Both Tavens believed they loved her.
Neither could be trusted.
He reached for her again, and she was too tired, too scrambled to object. When he kissed her, she allowed that too, and hated herself for it.
“Ellie, I know what an imperfect man I am, but I have loved you since the day you found me in your father’s stable.” He brushed the tip of his nose against hers. “I have loved no one else.”
So much would have been simpler had he been just another indisputable monster.
But Esmeray was right... No matter who Taven really was, or which face he was wearing, he believed in his own righteousness.
In moments of candid reflection, she missed her brother the most. Though they’d been many miles apart for years, he’d always been the brightest star in her small and suffocating sky.
He alone knew how dark and complicated her relationship with Taven had always been.
But the trip to her homeland wasn’t about anyone but herself. Elloven had long ago stopped thinking of her future, but the idea that she could dream, could plan, was astoundingly hard to wrap her mind around.
“Going back is the right thing.” Taven’s soft, deep voice cut through her reverie.
“You want us to go home?”
“To the mountains.” He wrapped his hand around her head, tugging her against him.
“For you?”
“No, El, for both of us.”
“I was born at Nightwood, and other than Whitechurch, I’ve been nowhere.”
“Ellie.” Taven gently nudged her back and plied her with a deeply solemn expression.
“You have been there. She wouldn’t want you to know that, just as she never wanted you to know your father was not Wilder Hawthorne, not by blood.
These are the truths Esmeray has kept from you and continues to. Your truths.”
Blood rushed away from her face. She should have pushed her mother harder about her “father’s people.” She should have just waited another day to leave.
She rolled her shoulders back with a deep, bracing breath aimed at the sky. “We need to get this stew to the others.”
“My Ellie.” Taven swept her in again. He tilted her face upward for another kiss, but whatever weakness had compelled her had passed, and she jerked her head down. “What’s gotten into you?”
“I said I’d accept your betrothal. I never said I’d be happy about it.”
“Elloven.” Jesstin’s deep, commanding timbre broke the moment for her. “Everything good here?” He sounded hopeful for the opportunity an answer of “no” would provide.
From his tone, it was hard to glean whether he was still angry with her.
They hadn’t spoken at all since the “Night Soul.” She’d felt so unburdened there, but she already knew that courage and openness wouldn’t apply anywhere else.
The words would never come so easily out here as they had in there.
Whatever that had been, it surely was no ordinary dream.
Her fear of wanting to go back, to feel close to him again, was at least partly responsible for her insomnia.
“She’s fine,” Taven replied, assertive. He wound his hand through Ellie’s hair at the crown in a claiming gesture. “Aren’t you, El?”
Another fight between the men was more than her nerves could handle.
And Taven was right about one thing: she didn’t actually know Jesstin at all, and yet she’d been ready to give up everything for him.
If they couldn’t break the bond, she had less than a year to live.
Jesstin had made it clear he’d rather die than touch her, and she didn’t want him to.
In asking Taven to save his life, she’d given away a part of herself she had only just gotten back.
“We were about to bring supper back. Are you feeling better?”
“I’m alive,” Jesstin answered flippantly.
“I can see that.”
Jesstin’s half-squinted eyes were aimed at Taven. “We should eat and get to bed. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow, if the stable hand even knows where the fuck we’re going.”
“But aren’t you nocturnal, heathen?” Taven asked.
Jesstin grinned, his stormy gaze dark and suspicious. “Fortunately, because if you were the one taking first shift, you’d just scamper into the forest again like a bloody rabbit.” The ground crunched as he approached. “I’ll take the tray.”
Taven wrenched it off the stump. “No need.” He leaned down to kiss Elloven’s forehead and whispered, “Everything will turn out exactly as it should, Ellie. Trust me.”
Jesstin hung back, waiting and watching Elloven like he expected her to fall apart.
She wouldn’t.
The only thing bigger than her anxiety was her pride.
“Stew is getting cold,” she said and marched past him.