“Clairvoyance isn’t so rare.” Her posture, so relaxed and easy moments ago, became defensive.
“Do you really think that man is your uncle, that those people are your family?”
“Yes,” she stated firmly, then paused, like she’d surprised herself. “Maybe it makes me naïve, but I do believe them.”
“What’s your plan? Are you going to stay here? Live here?”
“I didn’t really have a plan,” she answered. “But it won’t be safe to travel the roads home for a while. Maybe ever. Lord Quinlanden isn’t a man who lets things go.”
Jesstin hesitated. “How did you kill those men in Whitechurch? You weren’t even with them, right?”
Elloven looked past him. “I can send people dreams. And nightmares.”
“You can what now?”
“I can’t control what the nightmares do once they’re in someone’s mind. I don’t know what they saw or how they died.”
“You sent them a... bad dream?” Oh, he had questions. Dozens of them. Now he understood why she’d been so determined to find her people. “That’s one of the wildest things I’ve ever heard, but now I’m wondering why you haven’t used this more strategically.”
“If you knew how little control I had over the outcome, you wouldn’t suggest that.”
“What about dreams?”
“Dreams are just as precarious.”
“How so?”
“Right before Gennady died, he wrote to me that he was struggling with something enormously heavy on his heart. He didn’t tell me what it was.” Elloven bowed her head. “I sent him a dream from afar, hoping it would lighten that burden. I didn’t know if it would work across the distance or at all. I don’t know what the dream was or if it even reached him. I never learned, because he was dead within days. For all I know, whatever dream I sent him is what put him in the path of whoever took his life.”
Jesstin was stunned. He needed a moment before responding. “You’re wrong. You might have been able to alter his mind, but you didn’t put murder in the mind of the one actually responsible.”
“Will I ever know for sure?” Tears spilled down her cheeks, taking some of the kohl with them.
Jesstin cleared his throat and redirected. “Do you know what a valuable tool you’d be to any of our militaries? War would look a lot different if Elloven Hawthorne was orchestrating matters.”
She cracked the slightest grin. “I try to imagine what it must have been like for them...” Her smile disappeared. “I don’t regret it, but enjoying it feels wrong.”
Jesstin crossed his arms. “Allow me to enjoy it for you then.”
Elloven laughed. It sounded even more charming after the brief departure into more serious waters, and he was relieved to have moved on from talk of Gennady as well. “You’re really not troubled by it at all, are you?”
“Nope,” Jesstin said.
“The nightmare magic or the murder?”
“If men want to act like pigs, they can die like pigs.”
She hitched a brow. “Have much experience with that, do you?”
“Enough.” He forced his thoughts to travel as far from Gennady as he could, because if she asked him outright if he knew anything about the murder, there was only one answer he’d be allowed to give.
Elloven studied him. “Why do you want to die?”
The bluntness of the question took him aback, but not like it would have if he were awake. “I don’t want to die.” It wasn’t just a place where lies were unwelcome but where deeper truths unfolded. He watched her take in each word. “I just don’t know how to live anymore.”
Her mouth drew together in sadness. “You give them power with your apathy, Jesstin.”
Jesstin shrugged. How long had they been in the Night Soul? What time was it? He searched for another subject change. “So, what’s with all the weird fucking lanterns in this village? Considine’s voice makes my stomach turn, so I wasn’t listening.”
