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We leave the blue cave of names, slog down the muddy mountain and cross the river that the baby and elixir-filled carriage bumbled over days earlier much farther south. The water is clear, making it easy to step from one slippery rock to the next in the shallow current. Rain pelts our shoulders and drips down our bodies, rinsing the white stain from the back of my pants—a reminder of his arms, the safety...and the sweet, unchecked savagery.

It was more than an escape.

He refills the canteens and sits down to go through his soaked pack. A change of clothes is stuffed into the bottom, as saturated as everything else, including the mushy bars we force down.

“They’ll be looking for us. And for Milo and the others too.” He tightens the drawstrings of his pack and stands, hooking his thumbs on his suspenders, tone confident. “Now that we’ve crossed the river, they could be anywhere. It’ll take longer, butwe’ll travel along the northern edge of Sonnet to avoid the village and any other common areas. We hide if we hear anything. I fight if I have to.”

We walk for hours. My tongue is mostly healed, and the medicine took away my rib pain. I don’t mind the light throbbing of my ear, reminding me of Eli’s feral lack of control. The rain finally slows in the evening, and we share a tree to sleep against when night falls, only inches of bark between our heads.

Gripping my raised knees under the gray night sky, so few stars visible behind the thick clouds, I imagine seeing Kelt again, his warm smile and his ears that stick out. I’m so close to getting him back. I try to push myself off the cliff of consciousness and into sleep with those thoughts coiled around me and Eli close by, but sleep doesn’t come, leaving nothing left to do but ask questions I don’t want answers to.

I speak into the darkness between us. “So you’ve lived thousands of lives?”

“Yes,” he responds with a tone of caution.

“And have had thousands of sons?”

Silence.

Then—“Yes.”

“Do—” I brace myself for his answer. “Do you know my father?”

I wait.

“I know nothing about your family.”

Dammit. “Me either,” I whisper.My rings burn as I turn them faster and faster. “And you’ve died thousands of times?”

More silence.

“Yes.”

Everything seizes inside me. I’m broken and rotting because I die imaginary deaths every day when this man—this ancient, afflicted man—has actually died over and over, if I dare believe?Could he understand the visions that haunt me every day? Could the endless life he conceals within rival the death in me?

“What happened at the falls?” His voice is quiet, heavy with idle hope.

Nothing and no one I want to talk about.That’s one death he can’t understand. I scoot away, my muscles wrapping into bands of guilt.

Chapter

Forty-Seven

We’re up at the first sign of dim daylight. We stop and huddle behind trunks and boulders every time Eli insists he hears voices and boots in the distance—noises I don’t hear. He claims his hearing is better, his other senses too, which I doubt, purely because the thought of him smelling my desire every time I gushed in my underwear is disturbing—and arousing. I tuck myself in at his side and hold my breath while we hide.

He crouches, knife in hand and suspenders loaded with slingshot ammo, and holds an arm extended across my chest, keeping me in place. When he deems it safe again, he pulls me to my feet, and we walk on.

Gray clouds shutter the late morning sky. Eli’s demeanor changes, his steps faster. He takes my arm and pulls me along, the warmth of his lightness and a light breeze hitting my skin.

“Isn’t the castle that way?” I ask, recognizing portions of my mental map from the few times I was taken around Sonnet.

“We’re not going to the castle.”

“Are we going straight to the Ring to search for Kelter? What if someone finds us?”

“They won’t,” he snaps. “Not where we’re going.”

“That’s what you said about the lake.”