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"Idonea." His voice was rough. "I told you what the Eitr does. What I am made into. I should not be able to want like this."

Her breath simply died in her throat. "Then your Order lied to you."

"Or I am broken in a way they didn't predict." He scrubbed a hand across his face. "I don't know which is worse, witchling. I don't know what I am if I can do this. I need to think."

He backed away, putting the table between them. His hands braced on its edge.

“Lysander—”

“I need air.” He closed his eyes. “Just, stay here. Please. Don’t follow.”

His voice frayed on the last word.

She took a step towards him. He stepped back.

“Fine,” she murmured.

“I’ll set this up.” He took the sensor and retreated from the basement.

Silence settled in the basement, thick and cold. She pressed her fingers harder to her lips, as if the heat might burn away.

Idonea swallowed and forced the sensation down. This was not longing. This was muscle memory. The body was treacherous; it remembered what the mind refused to dwell on.

Grief was not a thing she indulged in. It was a thing she used.

Her eyes hardened.

So much had delayed her. Nellith needed her. Everything else was noise.

Chapter 25

Idonea made her way up into the cottage and stared at the front door. Without Lysander by her side, the Templars might not permit her exit. It crossed her mind that he might’ve locked the door behind him when he left, thinking it safer for her.

Her mouth remembered him. She pressed her lips together and put the remembering aside. There was no time for it. There was never going to be time for it.

She couldn’t doubt herself now. It was too important.

Her hand trembled as she reached for the latch. The door opened without resistance, and cold air swept into the room. She peered out, but the Templar who normally stood guard near the fountain was absent.

Her pulse leapt, relief and dread tangling in her chest. An empty watch could mean fortune, or trap.

She stepped out, drawing her cloak tighter and pressed onward, each step testing the silence. Every corner of her mind screamed that the Templars must be near, hidden in shadows, watching. Yet no footsteps followed, no steel rang out. Idonea hurried towards where she spied that old oak tree near the gazebo. Her boots crunched against the frost-hardened earth, breath curling white in the still air. The world was hushed, save for the distant creak of ice shifting on the water.

The sky stretched vast above her, dusky purple, streaked with pale blue mist that hovered over the black water. No guards, no Templars. No one asking where she was going. Only the wild expanse of night. Her fingers rose unconsciously, tracing along her collarbone.

She stood before the oak, taking in its dark bark, and still the strange sense of wrongness wrapped itself around the space. Her fingers twitched. She swallowed hard and pressed her hand up against the tree.

Idonea’s eyes widened. The tree had an absence of Current.

It was a void, an unnatural silence where it should’ve hummed beneath her palm.

Her breath hitched. A living tree with no Current was like a body with no pulse; it shouldn’t have been possible.

She darted a glance over her shoulder, but there was no one else. No noise but the river nearby, and her own heartbeat in her ears.

Crouching, she brushed snow away from the trunk, pushing aside brittle leaves and frost hoping to reveal roots, sigils, anything that explained why it continued to stand when it should've withered years ago.

Her fingers dug through the icy crust, numbness prickling up her knuckles. Warm. The ground was warm, in winter, under snow.