“Ellie.” Taven gently nudged her back and plied her with a deeply solemn expression. “You have been there. She wouldn’t want you to know that, just as she never wanted you to know your father was not Wilder Hawthorne, not by blood. These are the truths Esmeray has kept from you and continues to. Your truths.”
Blood rushed away from her face. She should have pushed her mother harder about her “father’s people.” She should have just waited another day to leave.
She rolled her shoulders back with a deep, bracing breath aimed at the sky. “We need to get this stew to the others.”
“My Ellie.” Taven swept her in again. He tilted her face upward for another kiss, but whatever weakness had compelled her had passed, and she jerked her head down. “What’s gotten into you?”
“I said I’d accept your betrothal. I never said I’d be happy about it.”
“Elloven.” Jesstin’s deep, commanding timbre broke the moment for her. “Everything good here?” He sounded hopeful for the opportunity an answer of “no” would provide.
From his tone, it was hard to glean whether he was still angry with her. They hadn’t spoken at all since the “Night Soul.” She’d felt so unburdened there, but she already knew that courage and openness wouldn’t apply anywhere else. The words would never come so easily out here as they had in there. Whatever that had been, it surely was no ordinary dream. Her fear of wanting to go back, to feel close to him again, was at least partly responsible for her insomnia.
“She’s fine,” Taven replied, assertive. He wound his hand through Ellie’s hair at the crown in a claiming gesture. “Aren’t you, El?”
Another fight between the men was more than her nerves could handle. And Taven was right about one thing: she didn’t actually know Jesstin at all, and yet she’d been ready to give up everything for him. If they couldn’t break the bond, she had less than a year to live. Jesstin had made it clear he’d rather die than touch her, and she didn’t want him to. In asking Taven to save his life, she’d given away a part of herself she had only just gotten back. “We were about to bring supper back. Are you feeling better?”
“I’m alive,” Jesstin answered flippantly.
“I can see that.”
Jesstin’s half-squinted eyes were aimed at Taven. “We should eat and get to bed. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow, if the stable hand even knows where the fuck we’re going.”
“But aren’t you nocturnal, heathen?” Taven asked.
Jesstin grinned, his stormy gaze dark and suspicious. “Fortunately, because if you were the one taking first shift, you’d just scamper into the forest again like a bloody rabbit.” The ground crunched as he approached. “I’ll take the tray.”
Taven wrenched it off the stump. “No need.” He leaned down to kiss Elloven’s forehead and whispered, “Everything will turn out exactly as it should, Ellie. Trust me.”
Jesstin hung back, waiting and watching Elloven like he expected her to fall apart.
She wouldn’t.
The only thing bigger than her anxiety was her pride.
“Stew is getting cold,” she said and marched past him.
Chapter 9
Cleansed in the Light
After hours and hours of endless forest, they’d passed through two small villages, but Jesstin knew they weren’t Rivenholde.
He could hear the conversation inside the carriage all the way from his bench seat, where he took his turn driving, but it had become background noise, like the birds flying overhead or the creak of the turning wheels. He was exhausted from driving since dawn, and he’d been waiting hours for Considine’s signal. They were well into the foothills, and the drop in temperature was only one sign. He could barely see the snow-tipped peaks of the fifth and sixth sisters, and the others, once a distant line across the north and south horizons, had disappeared hours ago.
He hadn’t actually known the names of the seven peaks of the west. Did they have names?
Jesstin rolled his neck and stretched as best he could, but it hardly helped. He was lonely too, though he preferred Sesto stay in the carriage where he could keep an eye on the stable hand.
No sooner than he thought, Huh, haven’t heard from Gennady in a spell, his duplicitous ghost popped onto the seat beside him. “I find it so touching when you miss me.”
Wonderful. Amazing job, Jesstin. Way to manifest misery. “Who could miss you?”
“My sister does. I reckon the only thing she cares about as much as getting to the mountains is finding my killer and dealing with them in her own... special way.”
The insinuation that Elloven might obliterate him was less terrifying than imagining the horror on her face when she learned the truth. Would he have the heart to tell her why? Would she believe what he still struggled to, even after seeing it with his own eyes? “Tell her. What’s stopping you?”
Gennady glowered.
