Harrowe hesitated.
The pause was small. It was devastating.
“And then,” Elizabeth pressed again. “What happens to him?”
Darcy made a sound then—low, warning. “Elizabeth.”
She turned on him at last.
He was worse. The sweat had darkened further along his collar now, his mouth set with a control that felt less like strength and more like surrender. He would go. She knew it with a clarity that made her chest ache. He would go wherever Harrowe pointed, stand wherever he was told, and call it duty.
The knowledge hit her harder than the quake had.
Harrowe spoke again, reluctantly. “The old accounts are clear in this. The breach won’t mend for mere standin’ near. Someone has to offer. Not in token. Not for a moment. But wholly. The land won’t answer to a hand that flinches.”
“You’re describing some pagan sacrifice!” she said.
“I am describing achoice,” Harrowe replied. “One that was refused before. One that left the land to tear itself instead.”
Her pulse thudded painfully in her ears. “And ifwerefuse?”
Harrowe did not look away. “Then the fractures continue. They deepen. The Lady will weaken again—not first, but eventually. And when she falls, the land will not stop.”
Elizabeth shook her head, a sharp, helpless motion. “You speak as though you are certain.”
“Iamcertain,” Harrowe said, and for the first time since she had met him, something like doubt cracked through his voice, “that failing will kill more than choosing.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes. The place he had described rose unbidden in her mind—thorn and water, stone out of keeping. She had never seen it, and yet the image sat with a terrible familiarity, as though it had been waiting for her to name it.
She opened her eyes again.
“You ask us to go,” she said slowly. “To place ourselves in the centre of something you do not fully understand. To let the land decide which of us it will take.”
Harrowe’s mouth tightened. “I ask you to answer before it decides for you.”
Elizabeth turned back to Darcy.
He was watching her now with an intensity that made her breath stutter—not pleading, not command, but a quiet readiness that frightened her more than any prophecy. He had already accepted the cost. He had done so the moment she kissed him, and the world broke.
Her anger flared again, hotter and more desperate than before.
“No,” she said—not to Harrowe this time, but to the shape of the future he was offering. “I will not agree to a plan that begins with his consent to be ruined.”
Harrowe frowned. “Miss Bennet—”
“No!” she repeated. “You have mistaken my willingness to listen for consent. I will not agree to a solution that consumes one of us so the other may stand.”
Darcy pushed himself upright despite the visible effort it cost him. “Elizabeth—”
She turned at last, and the sight of him—pale, drawn, resolute—hit her with a force she had not anticipated. “You have already taken enough,” she said, more softly now. “You will not offer yourself as currency.”
Harrowe’s voice hardened. “Then you doom everything else.”
Elizabeth faced him again. “If the only answer you can imagine requires sacrifice without choice, then you have not found the truth. You have found a story people told themselves to justify what they could not bear to change.”
Harrowe stared at her. “The land does not negotiate.”
She smiled tightly. “Then it will have to learn.”
