Chapter 10 #3
The Night Soul unburdened him of his fractured relationship with the world. It had always been a shelter. There was no reason to believe it wasn’t still.
“Do you smell that?” She lifted her nose with a sniff.
He didn’t at first, but then he took another breath. “Is that... bread pudding?”
“And mulled wine?”
Two of the place settings now had shallow bowls, within which were generous portions of the steaming dessert. Both goblets had been filled to two-thirds.
“I think we’re being summoned.” Elloven clapped her hands in delight.
“Would be rude to refuse,” he agreed, then surprised himself by holding out his arm for her to take. “Join me?”
“I would love to,” she said with a gleam in her eyes, and together they approached the strange but welcoming scene.
They ate until their bowls were empty, save for some dark, delicious smears he watched her swipe with her finger and pop into her mouth. The dainty way she then slipped her gloves back on would live in his mind for a long time.
Elloven’s eyes glossed from the wine. She watched him with a slow smile, her laced fingers tracing the base of her cup as she leaned back in her chair.
The dark kohl around her eyes accentuated their haunting vibrance.
Her wavy hair reminded him of sunlight bathing strawberries in the early evening.
“What?” he asked. He felt himself flush.
“I was thinking of how terrible we are at talking when we’re awake.”
Jesstin tossed back more wine. He was feeling it too, a tingle in his fingers and toes. It had been a year or two since he’d done more than sip, but he hadn’t forgotten those first whispers of drunkenness. Hopefully he wouldn’t relive the morning headache as well. “That’s true.”
“You’re angry at me. I understand. I just don’t know how to find the words. Every time I try, I forget how to speak.”
“I am angry.” It wasn’t just that he couldn’t lie in the Night Soul. It was nice to have one place in the entire world where he could be exactly who he was. To say what he meant, without games. “I have a lot of anger in me, Elloven, but most of it belongs to others. Myself.”
“You’re entitled to it.”
“So are you.” He set his glass down and leaned in. “So why aren’t you?”
“Who says I’m not?” She seemed amused by the question. “Anger, when you’re powerless, is just as dangerous as fear. And it’s...” She sighed. “It can consume you, and I won’t allow it.”
He’d never thought of it that way, but who suffered the most when he was raging at the world? “Sesto told me Mathias is dead.”
“I know,” she said gently. “I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure condolences are what you need.”
A darker truth emerged. “I wish they were both dead. Castien too.”
“I’ll see to that.”
“What?”
“Sestinn and Castien.” She said it like she was speaking of some long-established truth and not premeditated assassination. He liked this side of her. It was raw and honest, two concepts he struggled with himself. “You can help, if you want, but then you’d have murder on your conscience.”
Jesstin couldn’t wipe the guilt from his expression fast enough.
But if it was transparent, she hadn’t read it.
He took another sip of wine. “I won’t deny you the pleasure, but I’ll stand at your side.”
“Will you?”
“If you’ll suffer my presence.”
“I’ll even let you have Sestinn if you want,” she said amiably. “Castien is the one I have unfinished business with.”
It was yet another way their lives were intertwined, a history older than their bond, and it all came back to brothers.
One of his had hurt her greatly. Another tried to make up for it by taking care of her mother.
Her brother had done something so vile, Jesstin was still cleaning up the mess left behind.
The only thing worse than her finding out what Jesstin had done would be the moment she learned her brother was no different from the men who had hurt her.
“If this is real, and you’re happy to be back here, with me,” he said, “then why have you been avoiding sleeping at the same time as me?”
Elloven cupped her goblet with both hands and stared into its contents. “After what happened with those guards on the road, I couldn’t face you. I’m sorry, Jesstin. I panicked and offered Taven the only thing I could. I thought you were going to die.”
“If it had been you lying there, dying, I’d have done the same.” Truth only required truth. The degree of elaboration was optional. “And I lied to you when I said I wouldn’t have made the choice you made in Mythgarde. I would have.”
“I know.” She tilted her head. “Why does it feel like I know you so much better than I should?”
Jesstin swallowed. “I don’t know, but I feel it too.”
“I know we knew each other years ago, but that’s not what I mean.”
“No, me either.”
“Whatever the reason, it’s unlikely we’ll solve it when we’re awake,” she said sadly.
“Could be another feature of this bond.”
“Maybe.” She didn’t sound convinced. He wasn’t either.
“Can I ask you something?” He grinned with mischief. “Aelloven.”
“Oh, here we go,” she said, laughing. “I actually like the name.”
“Esme was real imaginative with that skulduggery. How could anyone ever guess Aelloven and Elloven were the same person?”
“Stop it.” She laughed harder. “Did you actually have a question?”
Jesstin waited a moment for their laughter to fade.
“Sometimes I see you moving your fingers... against your leg. Are you counting?” He immediately regretted asking when he saw the panic in her expression.
She had no choice but honesty. “I’m sorry, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. I take it back.”
“It, uh, it helps me.” She nodded vigorously at the table. “When I feel like my control is slipping.”
“Your chaos magic?”
Elloven shook her head. “Now, maybe, but it rarely manifested until I came back from Whitechurch. I don’t... I don’t even know how to actually summon it. I’ve only consciously done it a few times. I’m not sure counting is strong enough to stop it when it comes up on its own.”
“It’s more of non-mystical aid then?”
“When I was a little girl, I’d run my anxiety away. I’d run until I couldn’t stand. Then Taven showed up, and my father—and Wilder died, and it wasn’t enough anymore. I don’t remember the first time I started counting things, but it’s become a reflex. I’m not always aware I’m doing it.”
Jesstin sat back. Someone else he’d known, one of the Penhallows, though he couldn’t recall which, used to count fenceposts when he couldn’t calm down. His father had taught him. “It brings you back to yourself.”
She nodded. “Not always as well as I’d like.”
“Taven knows that’s why you do it?”
“He knows, but he doesn’t like it.”
“That’s his problem.” Even in the Night Soul, he couldn’t escape his disgust for the man. “I suppose he thinks you’re stealing his job.”
Elloven half smiled. “That’s about the sum of it, yes.”
“I could kill him for you.”
Elloven’s head shot up. She choked on a laugh. “What?”
Jesstin shrugged. “Just throwing it out as an option.”
“I’m perfectly capable of killing him myself, thank you,” she said with a ludicrously serious expression that made them both laugh until they had tears in their eyes. He studied her as it slowly passed. Her languid eyes traveled toward his, her smile dreamy. She was so beautiful when unburdened.
“I’m worried for you here.” Until he said it, he hadn’t been sure he would. “There’s something not quite right about Rivenholde.”
Her exhale was deep enough to nearly break the spell. “Jesstin—”
“Taven was insistent you come here, and not to your mother’s people. They were already waiting for you. They knew when you’d arrive, who you’d arrive with. They had everything waiting, ready. Everything.”
“Clairvoyance isn’t so rare.” Her posture, so relaxed and easy moments ago, became defensive.
“Do you really think that man is your uncle, that those people are your family?”
“Yes,” she stated firmly, then paused, like she’d surprised herself. “Maybe it makes me na?ve, but I do believe them.”
“What’s your plan? Are you going to stay here? Live here?”
“I didn’t really have a plan,” she answered. “But it won’t be safe to travel the roads home for a while. Maybe ever. Lord Quinlanden isn’t a man who lets things go.”
Jesstin hesitated. “How did you kill those men in Whitechurch? You weren’t even with them, right?”
Elloven looked past him. “I can send people dreams. And nightmares.”
“You can what now?”
“I can’t control what the nightmares do once they’re in someone’s mind. I don’t know what they saw or how they died.”
“You sent them a... bad dream?” Oh, he had questions. Dozens of them. Now he understood why she’d been so determined to find her people. “That’s one of the wildest things I’ve ever heard, but now I’m wondering why you haven’t used this more strategically.”
“If you knew how little control I had over the outcome, you wouldn’t suggest that.”
“What about dreams?”
“Dreams are just as precarious.”
“How so?”
“Right before Gennady died, he wrote to me that he was struggling with something enormously heavy on his heart. He didn’t tell me what it was.
” Elloven bowed her head. “I sent him a dream from afar, hoping it would lighten that burden. I didn’t know if it would work across the distance or at all.
I don’t know what the dream was or if it even reached him.
I never learned, because he was dead within days.
For all I know, whatever dream I sent him is what put him in the path of whoever took his life. ”
Jesstin was stunned. He needed a moment before responding. “You’re wrong. You might have been able to alter his mind, but you didn’t put murder in the mind of the one actually responsible.”
“Will I ever know for sure?” Tears spilled down her cheeks, taking some of the kohl with them.
Jesstin cleared his throat and redirected. “Do you know what a valuable tool you’d be to any of our militaries? War would look a lot different if Elloven Hawthorne was orchestrating matters.”
She cracked the slightest grin. “I try to imagine what it must have been like for them...” Her smile disappeared. “I don’t regret it, but enjoying it feels wrong.”
Jesstin crossed his arms. “Allow me to enjoy it for you then.”
Elloven laughed. It sounded even more charming after the brief departure into more serious waters, and he was relieved to have moved on from talk of Gennady as well. “You’re really not troubled by it at all, are you?”
“Nope,” Jesstin said.
“The nightmare magic or the murder?”
“If men want to act like pigs, they can die like pigs.”
She hitched a brow. “Have much experience with that, do you?”
“Enough.” He forced his thoughts to travel as far from Gennady as he could, because if she asked him outright if he knew anything about the murder, there was only one answer he’d be allowed to give.
Elloven studied him. “Why do you want to die?”
The bluntness of the question took him aback, but not like it would have if he were awake. “I don’t want to die.” It wasn’t just a place where lies were unwelcome but where deeper truths unfolded. He watched her take in each word. “I just don’t know how to live anymore.”
Her mouth drew together in sadness. “You give them power with your apathy, Jesstin.”
Jesstin shrugged. How long had they been in the Night Soul? What time was it? He searched for another subject change. “So, what’s with all the weird fucking lanterns in this village? Considine’s voice makes my stomach turn, so I wasn’t listening.”
“He called them soul lumens. They’re pieces of the dead... I think. Keeps them close to the living. Rivenholde is, after all, the curia of death.”
“They’re made of bones. Bones.” Jesstin blinked dramatically.
“Blood too.”
“That doesn’t disturb you?”
Her lips parted in a blunt laugh. “I expect I’ll come around to the weirdness as I settle in. You will too.”
Jesstin had no intention of being there long enough to “settle in.” “Would you tell me if you had concerns? Would you come to me? Out there?”
“Y—I don’t know.” Elloven frowned through her attempted lie. “I’ve waited my whole life for this. I’m not afraid of what might happen if I stay. I’m afraid of what might happen if I leave.”
“What you did to those men in the woods... You need fear no one again, Elloven.”
“The cost is more than I want to keep paying. But you scared me out there, Jesstin, barging out as if you were daring them to cut you down.”
“Men they send to kidnap a woman aren’t men you can negotiate with.”
“I saw those men. You’re stronger, probably swifter with a sword, or whatever that colossal piece of steel is you carry around. You should’ve had the upper hand.”
Jesstin grinned. He’d had the thing forged with metal collected from men he’d beaten in dice or cards. One piece was from a bondsman who had tried to rob him and instead had earned himself a visit to the medic. Gennady’s sword was in there too.
“You wouldn’t be so amused if you saw what they did to your head.”
“You’d be surprised what amuses me.”
“Warning me while ignoring my warnings to you is the peak of hypocrisy.”
“So is saying you’re sick of Taven and then agreeing to marry him anyway.”
It was the wrong thing to say. He felt it as the final syllable drifted from his tongue, and then he watched her disappear.