Elara Meadows's Arc

Chapter 3 of 7

The lanterns faded up the shore. Elara knelt beside the stranger where the tide licked his boots. His skin had gone dry and gray, cracked at the lips. He was drying out fast, though she did not know why the water mattered so much to a man. She only knew he would die on the sand. So she gripped him under the arms and dragged him toward her shack. He was heavy and cold. She hauled him through the door and laid him on her cot. His breath came shallow and slow. She lit a candle and looked at the wound in his side, a deep gash crusted with blood. She tore an old cloth into strips, soaked one, and pressed it to the cut. He flinched but did not wake. "Stay," she whispered. "You gave me this. You don't get to die." The pearl he had handed her sat warm in her pocket. As she worked, it pulsed against her thigh, matched to the slow beat of his heart. She wrapped the wound in the stained cloth and knotted it tight. Then the fever took him. He shook. His teeth clenched. His skin burned where it had been cold. Elara pressed her palm to his chest. The cord behind her eyes drew tight, the same pull she had felt in the cove. It ran from her into him, hot and bright. She could feel his heart failing. Without thinking, she pushed. She poured whatever lived behind her violet eyes down that invisible line and into his body. The pearl flared. Light spilled through the seam of her pocket, gold and rose and blue. The stranger arched off the cot. His gash sealed. Color rushed back to his gray skin. He gasped like a man breaking the surface after too long below. His green eyes opened. They fixed on her at once. The pull between them snapped solid and stayed, deeper now, welded by whatever she had just done. "You finished it," he said. His voice was rough but steady. "Finished what?" He sat up slow. He touched his healed side, then looked at her hand still resting on his chest. "The bond. You took my pearl. Now you've fed it your power." He did not soften it. "There's no undoing that." Elara pulled her hand back. "I don't understand what you are." "Maris." He gave the name like a fact and nothing more. He swung his legs off the cot and stood, whole and strong, filling the small room. He looked toward the dark water through her window, and something in his face closed. "They'll feel it," he said. "That much power, all at once. He'll know where we are now." "Who will?" Maris did not answer. He crossed to the door and stared out at the sea, waiting for something Elara could not yet see.