Then their eyes shifted to him.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “If that’s how you feel about her, I… I don’t have to tell the Council about the seeds, about Kester, about any of it. I can keep looking for the traitor. There’s still plenty of Order magicians we haven’t questioned. And there’s less than two weeks of Winter left. Some cataclysms take years. We could still have time.”
Domenic managed to nod, even as his doubt warred inside him—doubt that he and Ellery would live, doubt that he and Ellery would die. But worse was hishatred,such hatred. Not at Hanna, but at everything. Everything except the one person he was potentially meant to hate. The true monster he’d maybe been born to slay.
Domenic paced, yet as he strayed onto trampled, snow-packed grass, his muscles automatically locked tight. His magic simmered. Like it knew he stood on Winter’s land.
A horrible realization dawned on him.
If Ellery Caldwell was truly his enemy.
If he couldn’t kill her.
If he loved her.
Then all along, Summer’s traitor had been him.
XXXIVELLERY
WINTER
The phone rang in the dead of night, rousing Ellery from her uneasy slumber. She fumbled for the light. After returning from Nordmere, no sooner had she changed out of her traveling clothes and curled up with a magazine than she’d promptly passed out on her living room couch. Although she’d lived in her Order-subsidized apartment for a month, it still didn’t feel like home.
The three days they’d spent in Nordmere had been an utter nightmare. But even after their confrontation with Julian and Kester, Hanna had insisted they remain in the city until they’d combed through nearly every alleyway in search of Summer’s traitor, of Kythion, of anything that might prevent the trip from being a failure. But multiple visits to the alban tree from Maltherius’s vision had proven fruitless, and the journey back to Gallamere had been a tense, near-silent affair.
“Hello?” she answered the phone.
“Hey. It’s me. We need to talk.”
It was the first time Domenic had called her since before the border’s fall.
Ellery reached for Iskarius on the coffee table, then hesitated. She longed to feel his closeness, but after Nordmere, she didn’t know if she could bear it.
“Oh, now you want to talk? After you confessed all those feelings at the bar and then haven’t even made eye contact with me indays? Why should I care what you have to say when you’ve made it impossible for me to ever believe you? So good night, and—”
“No, no, no, don’t hang up! I know I’ve been avoiding you, but that’s because I’ve been keeping something from you.”
The direness of his tone kept her on the line. “Whatever it is, just tell me.”
As he spoke, time seemed to slow. She was suddenly, acutely aware of the tiniest of sensations: her bare feet on the hardwood floors; the snow that had blown in through the open windows as she slept, clinging to her collarbones; the rustle of her silk slip against her skin.
The receiver trembled in her hand. Oblivion descended, not the quick slash of a scythe but a cruel crush of inevitability. She felt eerily, pristinely calm.
“So that’s it, then,” Ellery said once he finished. “We were never supposed to be heroes. We were supposed to be martyrs.”
“You’re sure?” Domenic whispered.
“What Hanna told you didn’t leave much room for interpretation.”
“I know, but you really thinkthisis what we’ve been meant for? Something… somethingterrible?”
She chuckled darkly. “I think part of me always knew.”
At last Ellery understood the final wall between her and Glynn. If he’d suspected all along that she was Chosen, then he’d always known that one day, destiny would ask her to die.
“If you’re so sure,” Domenic said weakly, “then I guess I really have just been kidding myself.”
After that, neither he nor Ellery spoke for a while, instead only listening to the other breathing, still breathing, at least for now.
