Page 60 of Threadbound

“You definitely need more sleep, James,” Trixie admonished him.

Jamie nodded again. “Yeah, probably.”

What he needed—really needed—were answers. He just had no idea how to go about finding them.

Chapter

Twenty-Four

Bran paced the stone floor of his room at the Court of Shades, a little unsteady on his feet, a little dizzy, and a lot agitated. His health had hit a plateau—as Cairn had warned him—and he wasn’t improving. He wasn’t dying, either, which was a definite improvement from when he’d come back to Elfhame, but the combination of thegeàrd soilleir’s poison and the erratic deterioration of his magic from the incomplete threadbond was a far cry from healthy.

Maigdeann wanted him to remain at the Court or come and stay with her, Sian, and Bhàth so that she could keep providing him with tinctures and teas that would give him strength. His sister’s treatments might help with the fatigue, but they would do nothing to help his magic.

Only Jamie could do that.

And the more Bran thought about it, the less he wanted to pull Jamie away from his life. From his friends. From his books. But Bran also couldn’t keep pretending he was stable without the half-breed at his side.

The only solution, as far as Bran saw it, was that he had to go back to Dunehame.

The problem was that nobody else thought that was a good idea. Maigdeann had threatened to tie him to the bed with iron chains the one time he’d asked if he was well enough to step through the Gate again. Cairn had told him that if he did try to pass through the Gate, he’d probably end up unconscious, but that it was possible it would kill him.

Bran didn’t want to die.

But he was increasingly worried that staying away from Jamie Weaver was the new thing that was killing him.

His father clearly knew Bran wasn’t feeling well—he also knew that it wasn’t the poison that was killing him. But Bran had tried very hard to hide the full extent of his sickness—the sickness caused by his separation from Jamie—from both his father and his sister. To some extent, he’d been lucky. When the worst of the chills and tremors hit him, he’d been alone, and while Maigdeann had come to see him in the aftermath of one, Bran had made the excuse that he’d just overextended himself too soon.

But it was clear to him that his magic had been at its most stable—at least in recent years—when he’d been near Jamie.

He told himself that he would go back to Dunehame, he would go back to the little attic room near Jamie’s apartment, and he would stay in raven form whenever Jamie might be able to see him. But that while he’d benefit from being close by the half-breed, Jamie shouldn’t ever know he was there.

Because if he did, Bran knew he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. Sooner or later, he’d tell Jamie everything.

And then Jamie would want to help.

And Jamie helping would mean coming back to Elfhame and completing the threadbond.

And completing the threadbond would mean giving up his life.

And that would result in Jamie resenting Bran and everything that Bran had caused to happen to him. Because being threadboundwouldchange his life. The magic of the bond would likely mean that the world would never be the same—even if he did return to Dunehame and go back to his studies, he’d be able to see the thin places in the world around him, the cracks and peepholes between Elfhame and Dunehame. The pools of water where the fuath could slip from one realm to the next, the paw-prints of theCuandCait Sith, the bookas and dunnies and spunkies…

It could very well drive Jamie mad to see the magic that surrounded him—magic to which he was now blissfully blind.

Bran had no wish to destroy the life Jamie had built for himself. But he also had no desire to slowly lose his own mind, either.

The sun washigh when Bran slipped out of the shadows of the Court of Shades, leaving its cool hallways and shaded gardens for the harsh brightness of an Elfhame day.

Daylight was the time of the Sidhe, not the Sluagh. Bran’s already weak and erratic magic was even weaker during daylight hours, and the heat and brightness intensified his fatigue. It was worse, somehow, in Elfhame’s day than that of Dunehame—although there, too, Bran preferred the cool and dark of the night and twilight hours.

But if he was to make it to the grove and pass through the Carraig Gate that would leave him back in the Greyfriars Kirkyard, then he had to do it during daylight.

He also had to hope he was the only one attempting to make the crossing. Weak and still sick as he was, Bran knew that if he encountered thegeàrd soilleiror any other agent of the Sidhe king, he was liable to end up dead or dying—imprisoned if hewas particularly unlucky, although his magic was just as likely to kill him at that point as any torture inflicted on him by Darach mac Craobh-na-Beatha or the members of the Sunlit Court.

Truth be told, Bran wasn’t actually sure how many members of the Sidhe were truly loyal to their king. In name, of course, but his own siblings were Sidhe, and they had made it clear that their loyalty was to their family first—to Cairn mac Darach and Gaotha nì A’Mhuir. Bran’s mother had chosen to make her life in the Court of Shades, and so all of Bran’s brothers and sisters—Sidhe and Sluagh alike—had followed her example, even if a few of them had chosen not to literally live in the Court of Shades, their fealty was to their father and great-uncle, Cuileann mac Eug, the Sluagh King.

Perhaps there were other Sidhe outside of the Court of Shades who felt the same—whose families had both dark blood and light, or whose view of the world was not as clearly cut as that put forth by Darach mac Craobh-na-Beatha.

So much of Bran’s life had been dedicated to the Court and to his father, asNeach-Cogaidh, that Bran hadn’t had the time or energy to think deeply about the lives of the Sidhe beyond the Sunlit Court. But, he supposed, if the Sidhe King truly was the tyrant his father believed him to be—and Darach was Cairn’s own father—then would it not be likely that there were Sidhe who also disliked the way their king chose to rule the day?

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