“And so do you.” She seemed like she might go to him but crossed her arms over herself instead. “There’s no reason we can’t at least try to find the spiral some other way.”
“The reason is we don’t know where it is, and no one we ask will know either.”
“We haven’t asked a single person!”
“And I won’t, Elloven, because the information we need isn’t fishwife gossip or tavern banter, is it? Like traveling across the Infinitum through a mirror, it’s the kind of thing you trade your soul for.”
She blinked hard. “Excuse me?”
He hadn’t meant to, but he wasn’t in his right mind. At all. He couldn’t stitch together how fast his ease with her had mutated into such bottomless anxiety.
Jesstin led her to the side of the road. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m acting like this.”
“Yes, you do. But right now you’re going to explain yourself, and I won’t move another inch, not another step, until you do,” she asserted.
“You don’t need to worry. I’m handling it.” He hung his head with a shake. “You wanted to know how I got here so quickly. Well, there’s this... magic mirror that can transport you, but I had to offer a... a fragment of my soul. Not all of it. Just a piece.” He emphasized his words with his best attempt at reassuring hands. “But it’s fine. I’ve already planned to steal it back.”
Elloven gaped at him, thunderstruck. “No. Jesstin, no, it is not fine, because if it was, you would have just told me this when I asked. How does trust work between us if it’s only conditional?” She yanked him farther off the road when a group of travelers came by. “After last night, I thought we were beyond this.”
“This” required no definition. He sighed. “Will you let me explain?”
She pressed her mouth tight and held out her hands.
Jesstin waited for two women to pass. He caught the trailing end of their conversation about visiting a place called the Infantorium, which gave him a few extra seconds to consider his words. Softening dishonesty was still dishonesty. There was only one secret he would keep, and only until she was safe and alive again. “Everyone who doesn’t have an underhanded motive for sending me here thought I was insane for even considering it. Even Taven tried to stop me. You too. I could see it in the Night Soul. I can see it now.”
Elloven shrugged with her brows. He supposed he deserved her guardedness.
“I came for you, to bring you home. Hell, I’d have come just to see you, but Lexsea told me Ryquin believed I could do more. These necromancer abilities I have are not like Daire’s or his friends’, and according to them, they’re strong enough that I might be able to bring one person back with me. Back to life.”
“And you believed them? Ryquin and Lexsea, who, as you say, had underhanded motives for sending you here?”
“I can’t explain why, but yes, I do.” He wanted to reach for her—hold her, reassure her of the love she’d asked of him in the night. To do so now, though, would feel calculating. “I’m here because they believe I can save you, and anything less than that, for me, is unacceptable.”
She shook her head at the sky. “Either you’re trying to deceive me, or you think I’m too fragile to handle this.”
Jesstin started to say “neither,” but it stopped short of the truth. “I worry if you stop believing in me, Elloven, you won’t follow me.”
Elloven stared in astonishment. “Jesstin, you followed me across the kingdom?—”
“I didn’t really have a choice with the bond, did I?”
“And now here? You certainly had a choice about coming here. Why would you think I wouldn’t believe in you?”
“I wouldn’t believe in me.” He lifted his shoulders. There it was, the part he hadn’t even admitted to himself. “I’m a colossal failure of a system that was built to give me every advantage. My loyalties shift with my mood, which is cool one moment and hot the next. I arrived two minutes too late to the citadel to save you. Now I expect you to believe I’m going to succeed in the impossible?”
“You know none of that is true, right?” she said softly, barely above a whisper. “Jesstin, the system failed you. Your loyalty is both your greatest strength and vulnerability. Yes, you can be moody and vexing—I won’t deny you that—but if you believe you could have saved me against an entire force of soldiers sent to kill me, then the trait you failed to mention is delusion.”
Jesstin cracked a grin. “And arrogance.”
“The sea is full of water, and wintertide is cold,” she said, obviously trying to hide a smile.
His hand found hers. “I don’t know how I’ll bring you back. All I know is you have to be with me when I go through the door. And I’m terrified, Elloven, that you’ll decide not to.”
She laced her fingers through his. “And the soul fragment? What have you given them?”
“If I don’t get it back, my entire family will forget I existed. They won’t know me at all.” His hands animated with more reassurances, but he saw the pained look in her eyes and held back. “I made the bargain knowing it was a temporary problem.”
“Jesstin, why couldn’t you take the damn road like everyone else?”
