The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  That is, if he’d had any actual insides.

  Vaile found her voice. “What are you doing here, Baelfeir?”

  A smile tilted one corner of his mouth. “I admit, after twenty-five hundred years, that’s not the welcome I was expecting.”

  Her gaze sparked emerald ice. “After an absence of twenty-five hundred years, you should’ve been expecting a squad of archers armed with Merdanti arrows.”

  He gave a slight wince. “Touché, my love.”

  Vaile looked him over caustically, wishing she could believe his return might mean something more than ruin. “Have you two settled your accounts? Made your peace?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  His lips said, “Your brother mentioned I should pay you a visit,” but his eyes said something else entirely.

  Vaile recalled Phaedor’s veiled warning, his intimation, so clear now in hindsight. She exhaled resignedly. “You’re what he wasn’t telling me.”

  He eyed her with amusement. “I thought surely Phaedor would’ve used my return to at least make some didactic rejoinder.”

  “I don’t want to talk about my brother.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  Her gaze narrowed to a focused point. “How about the fact that you Healed me,” she growled dangerously.

  All that time fighting instinct, living with a seed of death germinating in her core, enduring the saddened gazes of her friends—sacrifices wasted!

  She knew what he would say, But I’ve returned now, as though this decided everything in existence, as though the only reason she’d sought oblivion was to stop longing for him, as though elae’s decline, as well as her own, found their source in his absence.

  Well—burn him—all of that was true, but it wasn’t the only truth.

  Vaile pinned him beneath unforgiving eyes. “You know Healing me wasn’t your decision to make.”

  “No one else was around to make any decisions at the time, my love.”

  “You knew well enough I’d made my decision long ago. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “What did you expect I would do? Let you fade on the eve of my return?” Now his voice edged on a dangerous growl. “It’s beyond my understanding why he didn’t Heal you.”

  His words sank fangs into her heart.

  Vaile clenched her jaw and looked away. “I wouldn’t let him, nor my brother. I was ready to join the others.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “If that were true, love, you would’ve faded long before now.”

  Vaile growled an oath. Damn him for knowing her so well. He and her youngest brother were two peas in an immortal pod. It was beyond irritating.

  He accepted her ire without protest, knowing well her fiery temper. Then he exhaled a slow and rather ponderous sigh. “Sometimes one knows better than another knows for themselves.”

  “It wasn’t your choice to make, Baelfeir.”

  He settled a pinpoint stare on her. “I maintain that it was, Vaile.”

  “Because you think you can see farther than I can?” she retorted. “Simply because you could?” Their old contention came bounding back, vivacious and eager to contest anew. “Because your determination towards your own ends was stronger than mine? Because I was unable to resist your will?”

  He bound his gaze to hers and shrugged helplessly. “Because I love you.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. Vaile cursed him in the language of stars.

  When she was finished, she turned burning eyes to look elsewhere in the room, anywhere other than where he was sitting, radiating such complacent and calm certainty of self. Sometimes he reminded her so nearly of the First Lord that she thought they must’ve been brothers.

  She managed to swallow her emotion and pushed a hard edge into her tone—though not nearly hard enough for what he deserved. “Where have you brought me?”

  He shifted in his chair and ran a pleasant gaze across the furnishings. “I’ve taken a house, as you see.”

  “A house,” she repeated, looking flatly back to him.

  “Well, a manor.”

  Vaile pierced her stare into him. “What did you do with the people who owned the manor?”

  “Their threads were staining the tapestry.”

  “And now? What, you enslaved them? Slew them?”

  He waved off her accusation. “Nothing so untoward. They had a sudden urge to turn themselves in to the Empress’s Red Guard. Couldn’t stop talking about their apparently illegal import business—mor’alir weapons.” He tsked with mock distress. “Very naughty.”

  In response to her blank stare, he added with a hint of mirthful propitiation, “They made all the headlines, Vaile.”

  This was...not the modus operandi she’d come to expect from him. Compulsion, domination, dismissiveness towards humanity and disregard for consequences—he’d worked tirelessly to counter everything Cephrael tried to implement in the tapestry.

  But in their private moments together, as she’d listened to his rationale, trying to understand how he could justify what she thought to be monstrous crimes, she’d realized that he cared for the Realms of Light every bit as deeply as the angiel. Unfortunately, he was equally as willful and uncompromising.

  She tilted her head to inspect his aura in another spectrum. “You can’t have given up the game.”

  His smile answered her clearly enough. But it made no sense. He wasn’t the type to abandon an effect he intended to create, or to change his point of view because he’d been sent to his room to think on his misbehavior for upwards of two and a half millennia.

  She studied him carefully. “I don’t understand. Why the change of heart?”

  “Think of it not so much as a change of heart as a change of intent, my love.” He looked her over meaningfully. “My gambit to dominate mankind failed to achieve the effect I’d intended, so I’ve abandoned it. Isn’t that the entire lesson of the First Law?”

  His self-satisfied smirk made Vaile want to rake her claws across his face.

  Instead, she inquired coolly, “Where are my clothes?”

  “They were ruined, I fear.”

  Vaile considered him for a moment’s pause. Then she tossed back the sheet and rose lithely to stand before him in the nude.

  This, as was to be expected, elicited a smile from him. And well it should. She knew the spectacular form she posed. Besides which, she doubted he’d made love to another living being since Cephrael sent him to his room.

  His desirous eyes admitted candidly to this truth.

  Images flashed suddenly to mind, memories of their bodies entwined, copulating within a cocoon of wings, hers of velvet fur and his of silken power...

  Vaile banished these memories. He’d obviously matched her starpoints and was inserting unwelcome images into the space of her thoughts. Well, two could play at that game.

  She matched his starpoints and in return pushed her own pictures into the universe of his mind. Her visions were not on the same order of activity—more like slashing claws and gnashing teeth.

  “Make some for me,” Vaile purred threateningly.

  His eyes were roaming her form with ardent admiration. He lifted them slowly to meet her gaze. “Gnashing teeth?”

  “Clothing.”

  “Oh...” he sighed. “If you insist.” He summoned something gauzy and ridiculous into the space between them.

  Her arched brow challenged him to think again.

  Baelfeir chuckled. The summoned clothes reformed to something more resembling her usual fighting blacks.

  Vaile matched the particles of his illusion and bound them to solidity with the fifth.

  She could’ve done it all herself, summoned the outfit directly onto her form and risen from the bed fully clothed; but he had twenty-five hundred years to make amends to her for, and he would more feel the sting of that beginning by watching her dress in front of him.

  Vaile hooked the clo
thes with the fifth and flung them onto the bed. Selecting the pants, she angled one long leg into the opening and then the other, and took her time sliding the leather up over her hips.

  She knew the torment was working when an edge came to his tone and he asked with reservation, “You sought him out, I suppose.”

  She eyed him coolly over one bare shoulder. “You left. What did you expect I would do?”

  “Leaving isn’t the word I would use to describe getting kicked out of the realm because of a deity’s infantile tantrum. But I grant you the effect was the same.” He watched her as she took her time with each button on the britches. “You went to his bed, didn’t you?”

  “You were gone for twenty-five hundred years, Baelfeir.”

  “A blink of the eye for ones such as us, Vaile. Cephrael sneezes and more time passes.”

  Yet she’d felt every grain of sand passing through the hourglass of time.

  She knew it wasn’t fair for her to hold that against him. He wasn’t anchored to any timestream. He wasn’t forced to watch the meticulous erosion of everything he held dear, or clock the inevitable debilitation from moment to moment, century to century.

  Vaile reached for her tunic. “I laid with others in your absence, certainly.”

  “Was Cephrael one of them?”

  She angled him a taunting smile. “How am I meant to have done that? You buried him under a mountain.”

  He fell back in his chair and flung up his arms. “Why does everyone keep bringing that up like it matters?”

  Vaile slipped her tunic over her head. “Three thousand years matters, Baelfeir.”

  He pursed his lips and shut off his thoughts from her inspection. “I couldn’t just return.”

  She cast him a dubious glance. “No?”

  “You might’ve torn the fabric and come to find me.”

  “And how would that have gone over, do you imagine?”

  He growled an oath. “Be it so, I had to wait until the time was right.”

  “You mean until the realm reached its lowest ebb?” The words sounded more bitter than she’d intended.

  He gazed at her with regret suddenly darkening in his sapphire gaze. “If I’d known what was happening to you, I would’ve returned sooner.”

  She flung him a glare while she reached for her bodice. “If you’d returned sooner, you would’ve known.” She slipped the bodice on and jerked the laces roughly. Then she tied them off and swung a look around the room. “My blades?”

  He nodded wordlessly towards a cabinet.

  Vaile opened the doors to find her short swords hanging within.

  He observed as she was donning them, “They were mewling quite piteously while you slept.”

  Vaile speared a stare at him. “My blades do not mewl.”

  He chuckled. “Wailing, then.”

  She turned rather forcefully to face him. “What did you do with the sa’reyth?”

  “I left it where you left it, languishing in the future. As soon as I could move you, I brought you here. I couldn’t take the risk of one of your sunny companions returning. They would’ve asked too many questions—that is, if they took a breath to ask any questions at all before attempting to annihilate me—and I wasn’t in the mood to clean up another mess.”

  Mention of the drachwyr brought a melancholy ache to her chest.

  Vaile dropped her arms to her sides. “The drachwyr are cast forward in time. All save Mithaiya.”

  “Ah...” He actually had the decency to look concerned. “That would explain the ripples in the tapestry.”

  Vaile went back to securing her blades. She knew he was watching her, seeing far too deeply for comfort when her psyche was still so fragile, when she could barely believe he’d returned at all, when she’d had no time to process what his return actually meant to the Balance, to the game...to her heart.

  She knew an urgency to be elsewhere. “I have to go.”

  He rose from his chair but didn’t approach. “Twenty-five hundred years...” His eyes conveyed a quiet meaning. “Are you so anxious to leave my company?”

  The look she speared at him could’ve frozen space. “And you well know why.”

  His lips slowly spread in the very smile she’d been dreading to see, the one that said he could read the ineffable language inked into her soul simply by smelling of her skin; the one that confessed how barren he was without her; the one that had claimed her heart the first instant she saw it.

  How did you deny a being who knew you so completely, who anticipated your every rejoinder, who only fought back when you wanted him to?

  He opened his palms in entreaty. “Stay a moment. Watch the sun set. I recall you prefer flying in the night.”

  He well knew that she did.

  Baelfeir searched her gaze. “Did you miss me not at all?”

  Vaile could’ve strangled him. Her eyes hardened, but her heart quavered like gelatinous goo. “I wept for you every night for twenty-five hundred moons, and cursed your name with the sun every morning.”

  He dared cross the room to her then. His hand found hers, which he lifted to his lips. “One does like to be missed.”

  She cursed his name in a host of dead languages.

  He knew every one of them.

  She tried to jerk her hand free, but he’d claimed it for the moment.

  “Vaile.” He tugged on her fingers and drew her out of the room towards a staircase and a hallway and the tall doors standing open at the end.

  Beyond them, sunset was painting the sky in broad strokes. She followed him onto a rooftop patio overlooking the distinctive skyline of Faroqhar.

  She wondered what he was doing in the Sacred City, what game he was playing now. She wondered why he’d returned to Alorin in this time instead of another, and whether his return would result in an end to the feud between the two beings she most admired in the universe—or whether it would be just one more permutation of their inexhaustible contention.

  He drew her to the very edge of the roof, where the stone fell away and the sky loomed large, and there he held her hand tightly in his and directed her gaze towards the glowing horizon.

  She watched a window open in the air before her, a glimpse into his own universe. She saw a starry sky of nebulas vast and innumerable, and she saw a plain of obsidian where stood uncountable thousands of feminine shells bearing a single face—hers.

  Some were imperfect in their perfection, for they appeared to have no flaw, while she had many. Others had flaws more obvious to her eye—a brow too arched, a lip too thin or slightly too full. Many others seemed to be her exact duplicate.

  “I tried to reproduce you...so many times,” he confessed low at her ear. His breath brought tingles to her flesh, his words an ache to her soul. “But no matter how intimately I recalled you, no matter how intricately I summoned you from the depths of my memory, I could never make these reproductions resonate with truth.”

  Baelfeir closed the window and ran his nose along her temple. “Because none of them were you.”

  Vaile fought to resist the tides of her heart. She thought of her brother and what he would say, and of the First Lord and all those who were counting on her.

  She would’ve faded into the stars if Baelfeir hadn’t come. Did that mean the cosmos needed her involvement, or did his immutable determination override even the will of Balance?

  She looked to him with a furrowed brow. “How did you finagle your return?”

  “Finagle.” He gave her a wry smile. “That’s an intriguing word choice.” Though she noted he didn’t deny it. “Shailabhanáchtran and I came to an arrangement. He opened a portal from Shadow into Illume Belliel. The others of my kind remain in the cityworld with the Malorin’athgul as their gatekeeper.”

  She blew out a skeptical exhale. “Then nothing is really resolved.”

  He chuckled. “Except the Balance.”

  Vaile turned him an aggravated look. “Only if the welds of connection are reestablished.”


  He saw the accusation in her gaze and acknowledged it with a weighty sigh. “Which you know I can allow.”

  He released her hand and pushed his into his pockets. “There was a rationale behind Cephrael sealing us out, I’ll admit. It held merit, in portions. I’m no longer interested in the game of domination, but I can’t speak for the others. To allow them to return without...monitoring their intentions would be courting disaster all over again.”

  Vaile wasn’t sure what was more tormenting: the fractious absence he’d maintained for millennia, or this unexpected return, in which he proved to her that every molecule of his being was as perfectly honorable as she’d always believed.

  He drew her hand into his again, brought it once more to his lips. “Why can we not be as we are with each other, independent of the game?”

  Her eyes flashed. “Because you and Cephrael will tear the realms apart with your tantrums and your bickering.”

  “It won’t come to that this time.”

  She eyed him narrowly. “Why? Because you’ve finally decided to let him win?”

  He chuckled. “You know, he could decide the same.”

  “You know how likely I think that is?”

  “Yes, I do.” He kissed her hand again, while his eyes invited her to remain.

  Vaile reclaimed her hand. “I haven’t yet decided if I’ve forgiven you.”

  “I sincerely hope not.” He looked her over again with possessive invitation. “Gaining your forgiveness so easily would be no fun at all.”

  She shook her head at him. “I have to go.”

  “Twenty-five hundred years, Vaile...” he paused her anew with his admiring smile, “and I adore you as much as I did on the day you captured and bound me to your lamp of glass.”

  She frowned at him. “You let me capture you.”

  “Yes, but it’s been well worth the trouble, don’t you think?”

  Vaile shook her head. “I really have to go.” She summoned the form.

  He watched her quietly while she shifted. But as she was leaping into the night on velvet wings, he whispered into her thoughts, intimately, Ma dieul tan cyr im’avec.