Elloven tensed, but her eyes drifted to the side in concession.
Traveling to her people was probably their only chance of solving their problem, but he had a gnawing instinct it was also the most dangerous place in the entire realm for them.
For her.
“I need sleep,” he announced and fluffed the hard, rough cushion from the chair across from him. It still had the imprint of Taven’s ass, which Jesstin refused to press his face to all night. He turned the cushion over with a scowl and searched for a blanket.
“I don’t want to fight with you,” Elloven said calmly. “No matter what else happens in the next year, we have to find some solidarity until...”
Jesstin’s resentment returned as he finished for her. “Until they murder us both because no child is coming?”
Her expression clouded. “Yes, Jesstin.”
Whatever patience or grace lived within him was as dry as an old well, but he found the presence of mind to say, “Well, I don’t think we should go.”
“No? Why?”
“Just a sense.”
Elloven shook her head slowly. “I can’t make sense of you. You want me to be crystal clear how furious you are with me, how much you loathe me, but your intuition tells you we shouldn’t travel to the one place that could solve all of this?”
His hand shot up in frustrated surrender. “I told you I need to sleep. Will you let me, or does this verbal sparring excite you?”
“Excite me?”
“Titillate you? Rouse you? Make you wet?”
The air in the room changed. A soft, startled exhalation sliced through it. “By all means, get your sleep,” Elloven snapped and stormed from the room.
He only realized how poorly his words had landed when she was gone.
Jesstin dropped onto the smelly, uncomfortable pillow and stared at the crack running down the stone wall near the mantle, no longer tired at all.
“You don’t think I know why you’re really here? What you really want? That I have not always known?” Esmeray scraped a hard stare over Taven, deflating what had been, at least in his mind, a rather stirring speech about doing what was right for Ellie. “I know you better than you ever will, so do not come in here pretending to care about my girl’s well-being when you have your own motives and priorities. I know what you want, and you can’t have it.”
He wasn’t quick enough to hide his surprise. Esmeray had never intimated she knew he was anything more than a displaced orphan from the curias. She’d never been openly against him courting Ellie, and she had certainly never intervened when he was sleeping in her daughter’s room.
“Esme, Ellie has always been my priority, since the day I met her.” He approached, but her countenance had him thinking he was better on the other end of her bedchamber.
“You have no idea how hard I’ve worked to balance Elloven’s life, to keep you satisfied enough so you wouldn’t cart her off to the same people I had to get her away from. I watched you climb into her bed for years! Do you know what that’s like as a mother? To allow harm to come to your child to prevent an even greater harm?”
How long had she known, and why had she said nothing until that moment? He hadn’t kept her pacified enough, apparently. He changed tactic. “Then you’ll understand me when I tell you Elloven will make the trip. She is that determined, with or without your guidance. But if she ends up in the Eversong Valley, asking how to find her mother’s people, you know what will happen, don’t you?”
Esmeray simmered in silence.
“You do know, because it’s why she’s here and not there!” He expelled the words in a vicious whisper.
“She’d never find her way to them.” Her head shook. “Not possible.”
“Is it a risk you’re truly willing to take, Esme? After everything Ellie has endured?”
She seemed ready to add his name to the list of affronts against her daughter, and it was a good thing for her she didn’t, because Taven had spent twenty years calculating his moves, his moods, and his responses, all in the name of the clairsight, in the name of a love he’d been born with. It had taken fourteen years, but he’d found Ellie and had fought for her over the next twenty, and no one, no one, would ever understand.
“And your suggestion...” Esmeray flicked a hand at the air. “Is what, Taven? Direct her to another curia, one just as dangerous?”
Taven lightened. She didn’t like what she was hearing, but she was listening. “If I tell her we’re going to her mother’s people, and there’s no one there who knows you, she’ll quickly figure out she’s been deceived, by one or both of us. She won’t find anything but trouble at Curia Eversong. It must be Rivenholde.”
“Rivenholde?” Aghast, Esmeray wrapped her shawl tight. “If you actually knew what you claim to know, if you actually were sincere in your affection for her, then you’d never let her anywhere near there.”
