His gaze shifted to Arion. "Both of you."
"Is that a threat?" Sian demanded.
"It's a promise." He stepped back, shadows already gathering. "Three nights for her soul to settle. Then she returns. Voluntarily. Or I collect her myself, along with anyone foolish enough to stand between us."
Briar found her voice, though it came out raw. "Eliam—"
"Save your words." He didn't look at her. "You'll need them when you return… to beg."
The shadows swallowed him between one blink and the next.
"We need to go," Arion said. "Now."
He lifted her carefully. She wanted to protest, but her legs were useless and head was spinning.
"The water roads," Sian said, already moving. "I can get us to the court faster. He can't follow those paths, not quickly."
"He won't follow." Arion's arms were warm around her, but his voice was grim. "He'll wait. He knows we have to honor the law too."
Three nights. Briar closed her eyes and felt the mark pulse with each heartbeat. Three nights of borrowed time.
Then back to the darkness.
Or worse.
"The flowers," she mumbled against Arion's shoulder. "Why did they...?"
"Shh," he said, his voice gentle now. "Rest. We'll figure it out."
But as they fled through passages that smelled of river and stone, Briar felt the truth settling in her bones.
The flowers had bloomed for her. Had made a path from nothing.
And Eliam knew it.
Three nights to understand why.
Three nights before he made her pay for it.
Awareness came in fragments.
Water rushed past in impossible directions. Sian's voice sang something in river-tongue, old words that made the current gentle. Cold stone became warm air. She felt herself being lifted, carried, set down.
Arion's face appeared above hers, haloed by light that seemed warmer than Eliam's cold illumination.
Strange, how she'd never really looked at him before. He had the same sharp bone structure but softer somehow, comparing sword edges to weathered stone. His hair was darker, a warm chestnut brown, where Eliam's was white, cold and bright as freshly fallen snow, but it fell in the same way. They bore the same tall frame, the same impossible grace, but where Eliam moved with predatory intent, Arion moved with measured restraint, power held in check rather than displayed.
Her consciousness slipped away before she could grasp the comparison.
Voices filtered through. Worried tones. Fragments of conversation about water in lungs, marks, three nights.
Hands peeled away wet fabric, gentle and clinical. Someone made disapproving sounds over bruises, over the mark that wound up her arm in its possessive claim. Warm cloth touched her skin. Soft blankets covered her. The scent of something herbal and sweet filled the air.
She surfaced again to firelight. Arion sat beside the bed, reading from a book that glowed faintly. The light caught his profile, and for a moment she could have sworn she saw Eliam there. Not in feature but in something deeper. The way he held himself. The way his fingers turned the page. An echo. A reflection in disturbed water.
"The same—" she tried to say.
His eyes found hers. Green depths of spring forests where Eliam's were green of deep winter. But the shape, the intensity, how had she not seen it before?
