Trust me, Elloven, you do not want me to be real with you. “Yeah. Of course.”
“I don’t plan on staying in Riverchapel long. My people—my mother’s people—have something I need. Information. About myself.”
“The mountain witches?” Did Elloven know the connection between the Seven Sisters and Mythgarde? Was that why she’d come?
She didn’t laugh. “Mother’s been elusive about who and what they are my whole life. But they know who I am. What I am. Until I know what they know, there’s nothing here for me.”
“Not even the amorous Considine?”
“Don’t be cute.”
Jesstin grinned. After a moment, so did she.
“If you want to understand your magic better,” he replied, “it’s only a short ride to the Sepulchre.”
Elloven shot him a bracing look. “There’s nothing the Sepulchre can tell me about this magic.”
He’d heard plenty about the mysterious men and women of the Seven Sisters in the Westerlands. Mythgarde had been built by those same people, but most of it seemed like folklore. Clearly she believed there was more to it, but that surfaced the question he’d had since the moment he’d slipped into the carriage across from her. “You wanted to be real, yeah?”
She nodded.
“You’re acting awfully calm for someone who just annihilated four men.”
“Five.”
His brows fused.
“It was five. Let’s at least be accurate when speaking glibly of the dead.” She suddenly tilted her head and smiled at a passing Virtue. “Is it really true they’d kill someone for touching them?”
“You gonna try it, test it out?”
“Just wondering.”
“Happens a few times a year. Enough to be a deterrent, not enough for drunken imbeciles to rein it all the way in,” Jesstin replied, shifting. He still wanted her answer.
She nodded to herself, then turned back toward him. “You were looking for remorse in me.”
“Maybe not remorse, but... something.”
“I feel at peace actually.” She leaned back in her chair. The candles in the chandelier danced shadows over her pale face. It occurred to him he’d so far seen her as not quite tangible, an idea of someone rather than a whole person. “If they came for me, and I died tomorrow, I’d die in peace.”
Jesstin balked. “How morose.”
She lowered her gaze. “I don’t know why you asked why I came here tonight. You already know.”
“I—”
“No, you do, Jesstin, because it’s the same reason you’re here. Out there, we’re whoever they say we are. But in here? We’re whomever we choose to be, and we can choose differently hour to hour, day to day. I see the appeal. If I didn’t have more pressing needs, I might spend all my time here too.”
Jesstin did not at all endorse the flutter in his chest at the idea of seeing her every night, nor the pit that followed, knowing it would never happen. He could see, almost taste, what it would be like to wake up next to her, the sun beaming across their bedspread... to join her in the kitchen as they pretended they knew a thing about cooking, feeding one another bites of food that barely passed muster, and laughing together at the silliest things only the two of them could understand. Fuck everyone else.
It was better that she was leaving. Even if... even if she was as enchanted by him as he was with her, there was nothing he could offer her, and the most important thing he knew about Elloven Hawthorne was that the last man she needed was the one who had killed her brother—even if he had been a predator. She deserved so much better.
She was right. She’d never find what she was looking for in Riverchapel.
Stay here, with me. We’ll figure it out together rested right upon the tip of his tongue, but the words were poison and could never be said. He shouldn’t have been thinking them either. “I belong here,” he said, the closest he could come to the full truth. “I’ve accepted that. My sister, on the other hand...”
Elloven smiled, a soft, warm gesture that made him even more conflicted. “I remember Rhiain. She was impetuous but always kind. Asterin is a good man. You’re fortunate to have them in your life, regardless of all the rest.”
