He glances at my sigil in his skin and then at Jaqual’s. Abruptly, he releases me and says simply, “I forgive you.”
30
Absence
Damien
Iwake to a throbbing temple and a cold bed. It’s late. Eloise is gone. My obstinately greedy fingers search the other side of the bed for her, as if she might be hiding in the rumpled blankets, but come up empty. My body stiffens. Perhaps I was too hard on her. I’d consented to the spell after all.
I rise from the bed and dress for the day, ready to search the compound for her and do whatever I must to make things right between us. But I find a note in the bathroom and realize I needn’t have worried.
Damien,
Went to meet Tempest for breakfast. I’ll tell Thane you needed to sleep off the effects of the spell. Find me when you get a break from training. I love you.
Eloise
I lift the piece of paper to my nose and inhale herscent. Not a hint of bitterness or anger lingers on the page. Only the soft, heady scent of her.
We are as we always have been.
I will never find it comfortable to fight with Eloise. My entire role as her mate is to please her. This isn’t our first argument and likely won’t be our last, but it’s getting easier. Every disagreement is a lesson in her. After all this time, I am still learning how to function with half of my heart disconnected from my body, with another soul existing in the ripple of my own, staying in sync even when we disagree, like planets in rotation around the same sun. We are different; we are one. I would rather fight a thousand battles with her than enjoy a single peaceful day without her.
I find her in the war room, with Tempest at her side.
“Damien, how nice of you to join us,” Tempest says. “I hope you’ve fully recovered from the side effects of your endeavors yesterday.” The way she saysendeavorsgives me the impression that she knows that mine included smoking a field’s worth of feoral root.
“Happy to say I’m as good as new.”
I make my way to Eloise’s side and lean down to whisper in her ear. “Are we okay?”
She smiles softly up at me. “I am, if you are.”
“I am.”
Her hand finds mine and squeezes. “Good, because Tempest and I have received some new information from our spies that could greatly improve our odds.”
I examine the table in front of us. More pegs have been added to the typography in the Borderlands to represent our soldiers. Our troops now form an “H” with Blackspireand Entrydal’s troops to the north and the silver coats of New Stygarde to the south.
I slant a smile in my mate’s direction. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”
Tempest smooths her dark chestnut hair and gestures toward the troops that represent New Stygarde. “As we’ve discussed in the past, a major barrier to us winning this war is that New Stygarde’s troops are augmented with Stygarde’s own children. The young ones are drugged with Nevina’s magic to fight to the death on her behalf. We’ve never been able to capture one of these children because the same magic that keeps them under her control can also be used to track them.”
“It’s the same reason that I can’t develop a cure for the spell that controls them. In the time it would take me to study one of the children, the silver coats could find me five times over. Even using my magic, I can’t guarantee I could conceal my work. Elven magic is foreign to me. A concealment charm might not be enough. It’s very possible I’d be too busy running from advancing troops to actually find the antidote to Nevina’s poison.”
Tempest walks around the side of the table, to the portion of the map depicting Stygarde Castle. “Last night, our spies returned with some very interesting information, however. It seems that New Stygarde is keeping the children in a cluster of tents on the grounds.”
“Tents?” I growl. “Why?”
“Simple,” Tempest says. “As they’ve grown their army, they’ve run out of room inside the castle and the servants’ quarters. The grounds are the only place they have space. And since the children are nothing but her pawns, theyget the most meager accommodations. Our spies tell us they are fed only basic blood stew and water.”
I shake my head. “Keeping them alive to die fighting,” I say through my teeth.
“That’s the general consensus,” Tempest says. “But it does afford us an opportunity.”
“If we could develop an antidote, we could efficiently administer it because they are all in the same place. We could break the spell over the children,” Eloise says.
“You just said you couldn’t develop an antidote because there’s no way to study the children.”
