“He called them soul lumens. They’re pieces of the dead... I think. Keeps them close to the living. Rivenholde is, after all, the curia of death.”
“They’re made of bones. Bones.” Jesstin blinked dramatically.
“Blood too.”
“That doesn’t disturb you?”
Her lips parted in a blunt laugh. “I expect I’ll come around to the weirdness as I settle in. You will too.”
Jesstin had no intention of being there long enough to “settle in.” “Would you tell me if you had concerns? Would you come to me? Out there?”
“Y—I don’t know.” Elloven frowned through her attempted lie. “I’ve waited my whole life for this. I’m not afraid of what might happen if I stay. I’m afraid of what might happen if I leave.”
“What you did to those men in the woods... You need fear no one again, Elloven.”
“The cost is more than I want to keep paying. But you scared me out there, Jesstin, barging out as if you were daring them to cut you down.”
“Men they send to kidnap a woman aren’t men you can negotiate with.”
“I saw those men. You’re stronger, probably swifter with a sword, or whatever that colossal piece of steel is you carry around. You should’ve had the upper hand.”
Jesstin grinned. He’d had the thing forged with metal collected from men he’d beaten in dice or cards. One piece was from a bondsman who had tried to rob him and instead had earned himself a visit to the medic. Gennady’s sword was in there too.
“You wouldn’t be so amused if you saw what they did to your head.”
“You’d be surprised what amuses me.”
“Warning me while ignoring my warnings to you is the peak of hypocrisy.”
“So is saying you’re sick of Taven and then agreeing to marry him anyway.”
It was the wrong thing to say. He felt it as the final syllable drifted from his tongue, and then he watched her disappear.
Chapter 11
Prominence
Elloven didn’t feel like she’d slept more than a few hours, but the twilight beyond the wispy curtains told another story.
Had she really lost an entire morning?
A day?
She pulled herself from the warm bed with a halfhearted stretch as she made her way to the loft balcony. Jesstin was already awake and clothed. He was looking out a window on the bottom floor, his arms crossed.
It took her a few minutes to work up the nerve to say anything. “I didn’t mean to oversleep.”
Jesstin glanced up. “Haven’t been up long myself. Half tick of the sun at most.” He blew out as he looked back at the window. “What sun?”
Odd for both of them to have slumbered so long, but they’d each struggled with restful sleep on the road, and time apparently ran differently in Rivenholde. What didn’t make sense was Taven. He should have been pounding down their door hours ago, accusing Elloven of hiding away with her “secret lover.”
“So many fucking lanterns,” Jesstin muttered to himself.
Elloven didn’t know what else to say to bridge the distance between them, so she shuffled back to her bedside in anxious silence and dressed herself in the clothes left for her. The leather was softer than it had looked on everyone else, smooth like a second skin. Her sleeve had seven glittering gold bands.
A knock on the door came minutes later. Jesstin answered, then hollered her name.
“We’re being summoned,” he said when she came down. Whatever he said next was muffled by the clang of him roughly fastening his scabbard. The clothes they’d left for him were in a heap on the floor.
