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Alex says nothing to that. For once, even he knows better than to keep questioning him.
Ellen cuts in, frustration clear in her tone. “If the lines answered to those bonds, why did they reach toward us?”
Mannie stops moving then. He turns, and the look he gives her is lit with that deep, strange knowing of his.
“There are indeed bindings that answer to lineage,” he says. “Some answer to kinship. Some to promises made. And some,” he says, looking from Ellen to Róisín, “when deep enough to root themselves in the soul, answer to those affections by which a life has been most surely altered.”
The words strike them both differently. Ellen’s lips are curled between her teeth, and it almost appears as if she’s fighting back tears. Róisín only looks at Mannie with her brows drawn, one hand closing around her own wrist.
“You make it sound as though we’ve no say in it,” she says.
“Not at all,” Mannie says gently, but with great weight in it all the same. “If that were true, I would not be here to ask something of each of you. You see, dear Róisín, no binding is as powerful as those made under oath.”
When he speaks again, his voice is quieter, but more terrible for it.
“What answered in the tablet was the potential,” he says. “Deep devotion. The hidden architecture by which souls may be drawn into one another’s keeping. A choice that is made freely. Loyalty granted without question. Those that would be willing to uproot their lives to go on a quest for the gods.”
He turns back to the tablet. The thin lines still shimmer above it, faint as frost.
“What happens next will determine whether those ties remain no more than traces...”
He lets the silence gather round the words.
“Or whether, by vows freely sworn, the Emerald Oath shall bind anew.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
JAMES
Mannie’s last words keep sounding in the room long after his voice falls away, as though the basalt tablet itself has taken them up and means to make certain none of us escape them.
Those tethers still shiver in the air, pale blue like moonlight cast across the loch, and I can’t look at them without feeling the weight of all they imply.
My eyes go to Ellen at once.
Her chin is lifted, her face composed by force, but tears stand bright in her eyes all the same.
For one shameful instant, I think of nothing noble. Not about this long-buried thing has chosen tonight to wake and lay its hand upon us.
I think only of her.
Of the vows we shared. Vows I made with the fierce certainty of a man who believed the hardest thing had already been endured and the rest of life, however difficult, would be faced in comfort as long as I faced it beside the woman I loved. That the road ahead with her would be its own kind of paradise.
I had the arrogance of thinking I had earned that much.
Alex shifts first. The scuff of his boot against the carpet is slight, but in the silence it might as well have been a shot.
“So,” he says, and though he keeps his tone even, strain runs under it, “if we’re meant to agree to this, what exactly are we agreeing to?”
Mannie stands with one hand near the tablet, his face gone remote in that old, unreadable way of his, as though some part of him is listening still to something none of us can hear.
“At the very least,” he says quietly, “that the oath would know its keepers.”
Alex lets out a short breath through his nose. “That explains almost nothing.”
“No,” Mannie says. “It explains precisely as much as I know.”
Alex groans like a man wrestling for patience by the thinnest thread, then throws both hands toward Mannie in such theatrical disbelief. Róisín glances his way with an expression perilously close to agreement.
