by E G Radcliff
✽ ✽ ✽
When Finnan said goodbye and set off down the street, Boudicca and Áed wandered down a side street that constituted just one arm of the sprawling market. Boudicca stopped at a spice merchant and fingered the sweet-smelling leaves, unscrewed caps from jars of earthy powders, and examined glass vials of different extracts that sparkled in the sun. A vegetable booth laden with fat, colorful fruits was next, and then they paused at a table that was heaped with cut flowers.
It seemed there was a booth for everything. They passed a bakery stand, an oily vendor of scrap metal, a peddler selling glittery, light-catching jewelry, and another selling every variety of textiles. There was a stand for honey, a stand for glass, a stand for books of all sizes and bindings. Soap, knives, cured meat, herbs, candles—the market lacked nothing. Áed could barely take it in.
“Alright,” Boudicca said, tugging Áed by the elbow into the hollow of an alley. She hiked her bag more firmly over her shoulder and crossed her arms against the chill in the air. “How are you feeling? Can you last another hour?”
In truth, he was exhausted and aching, but Boudicca sounded excited. Besides, the market was interesting and alive. That struck a stark contrast to what he knew he would find if he dared to close his eyes and sleep, so he shrugged gingerly. “I’m fine. We don’t have to go back yet.”
She nodded and smoothed her hair over her shoulder. “What I want to show you is best seen at night.”
That piqued his curiosity as Boudicca stepped back out onto the bustling street. “And what’s that?”
She looked over her shoulder as he started after her. “We’re going to see No-Man’s-Land.”
No-Man’s-Land. The words echoed through his head as they hailed a carriage to take them farther from the heart of the city. The name made Áed think of gangs and the turf wars with which he was all too familiar; in the Maze, No-Man’s-Land was the strip of neutral territory that separated warring parties. The White City, however, didn’t seem to have gangs, and so he didn’t know what the phrase could refer to.
Boudicca, meanwhile, provided a torrent of facts about landmarks they passed. Áed found himself being involuntarily educated about the oldest building, a new cistern, the history of this, that, and everything in between. When he wearily leaned his forehead against the window, she seemed to take the hint, and from then on, she limited her commentary to information she deemed strictly necessary.
A headache was beginning to build in the base of Áed’s skull as the cab drew to a stop. Permitting himself a little groan, Áed flicked the handle and leaned his door open, and Boudicca raised an eyebrow at him as he slumped against the side of the carriage. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine.”
“Of course you are,” she sighed, not fooled. “I promise this’ll be worth it, and then we’ll head home.”
“Sure.” He looked around in an attempt to discern where they were. It was someplace he’d never been before, but that could be said of most of the city. “What is this place?”
“The coppersmiths’ guild,” Boudicca replied as the carriage started away with a clatter. “Northwest of the palace, if that helps.” She took his arm even though he hadn’t offered it, and her touch lent a welcome warmth as she led him down a side street. The flawless pavers became rounded and uneven, and the windows of the buildings veiled themselves in a scrim of grit.
Áed was certain that Boudicca hadn’t brought him all this way to see the coppersmiths’ guild, and he debated asking exactly what she was planning. Eventually, he decided against it. She was being secretive, like she was waiting to surprise him. Despite not wanting to be surprised, he lacked the energy to argue.
Forge smoke hung in the air and adhered to the pearl-white bricks. The sounds of hammering and the flickering of firelight emanated from some of the buildings’ windows, and every now and then people working inside would move across the light to cast giant shadows on the walls of the alley. Behind them, a burst of flame rose periodically into the sky as somebody manned a forge’s bellows.
From the gloom at the end of the alley, there materialized a tall, curling gate, greenish with the patina of old copper. It was decorated with dull, symmetrical coils, and Áed fancied that despite its elegant construction, it appeared gloomy against the unusual grayness of the buildings.
Boudicca swung the gate open and held it for the both of them, and it closed with a raucous clang behind them. Boudicca quickly turned around. “Right,” she instructed. “Close your eyes.”
She took his wrist and guided him. They didn’t walk far, perhaps twenty steps, before Boudicca gently stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Okay,” she said, and her voice was touched by awe. “You can open them now.”
When he obeyed, he could not immediately comprehend what he was seeing.
The wall of the alley and the ground in front of him had vanished, and his first impression was that of being suspended in mid-air. He looked around, and realized that they were no longer enclosed by buildings on both sides. Instead, the two of them faced empty air separated from them by a thin, blue-green railing.
Áed took a step toward the railing, working to comprehend what filled the space where the buildings had been.
In vastness, he could compare it only to the expanse of the Sea, but that comparison fell magnificently short, because the sea did not vary. He and Boudicca stood on the edge of a precipice, a cliff of umber dirt, and where the cliff met the flatland, a heath spread out before them in a colony of whispering grass. Farther away than he’d ever imagined was possible, a ring of low mountains enclosed the grassland protectively, and they were hazy with distance.
He stepped back from the edge when the wind blowing from below made his eyes water. “So,” Boudicca said, and he knew that nothing was going to follow. She was waiting for him to speak.
“This.” He could barely get words out. “This is No-Man’s Land.”
“It is.”
There were so many questions in his head that he couldn’t isolate just one. At length, he managed, “How?”
Boudicca’s reply was a shrug and a blink. “I don’t know.”
“Does it end?”
“Nobody knows.”
His gaze drifted over the massive landscape, spellbound.
“Look,” Boudicca murmured, pointing out over the precipice, and Áed realized her arm was glowing with orange warmth. “This is the magnificent part.” Following her instruction, he looked.
And the sky slowly lit on fire.
That was his first thought as he looked out over the low mountains: that the sky, with some strange lightning, had ignited itself and was flaming away. It was a sunset such as he’d never seen.
Streaks of quiet light swabbed like paint over the sky, and the clouds, thin over the mountains, had their tendrils cloaked in sheets of orange and red, yellow and pink. Beams of retreating gold highlighted ripples in the clouds and hung illuminated curtains onto the sides of the hills. The grassland swayed, absorbing the fine, warm light, and turned bluish in the shadows as the colors slowly dimmed.
He watched, entranced, as the light withdrew first the oranges, then the reds, and finally the pinks from the sky, creeping over the hills and leaving in their place a faint lavender. Patiently, even the lavender bled away from the vast panorama and left the lands in darkness.
If he’d been breathless before, it didn’t compare to the way he felt at that moment, staring out over the hunched silhouettes of the mountains.
“Well?” Boudicca prompted.
Áed just shook his head, still awed. “It’s so big.”
She leaned against the railing. “I know. Suibhne’s been growing into it for centuries, but it seems there’s just as much of it now as there always has been. Look over there.” Her finger indicated the way, and Áed looked. “There are farms to the north, and they make a sort of barrier between the city and the wild. But here, and all to the south, No-Man’s-Land comes right up to the edge because of the
se cliffs. That’s why I thought I should show it to you from here.”
“Has anybody tried to explore it?”
“Oh, yes, certainly. Cynwrig has. He says there are animals in the woods, and lakes, and streams so clear that you might think they were made of diamonds.”
Áed braced his forearms on the railing and let the wind blow his hair back from his face. “Was Seisyll the king of this, too?”
Boudicca understood the subtext of his question. “Formally, if you took the throne, No-Man’s-Land would be yours. But it’s far too wild to govern, and as far as we know, it’s uninhabited anyway.” She let him stare at the darkened vista for a few seconds more, and then she took his elbow. “Come on. Let’s go home, alright?”
Áed drank in the view for a couple more seconds, and then let Boudicca lead him away.
✽ ✽ ✽
His sleep that night, though the exertion of the day had filled him with the kind of exhaustion that made his very bones feel heavy, was not restful.
Nearly the moment his mind slipped into sleep, the shadows in his head hardened, and their soft edges grew razor-sharp in the quiet before dreams. Even before his eyes began to flicker behind their lids, before imagined sounds slid into his ears, those shadows carved their way through his mind.
When the dream came, it was splintered and washed-out, broken as it churned up from the depths.
In it, he heard shouts and cries and soft words, as if he were listening to the sound of memories playing over each other. He heard Ninian’s voice in the tangle and searched longingly for him, but then he heard the fry of Óengus’s vile purr and recoiled. Boudicca spoke too, and Ronan, and he could hear the guard whom he had burned, and the grating voice of Áed’s adoptive mother. There came a scream and he jerked, and it was followed by a hungry moan and a weak, exhausted cry.
“What’s the matter with you?” his adoptive mother screeched. “Put it out!” Étaín’s hand whistled toward Áed’s head, and then she drew back. “Wicked boy!”
“Get away!” His own voice echoed in his head, a frightened phantom acting out a scene that he did not consciously remember. “Please!”
“You have no power here! Nothing, do you hear me?”
Áed’s voice was desperate. “Just get away.” Firelight flickered into his awareness, and it was his, and Étaín was angry. “Don’t touch me!”
“I told you to make it stop!” Étaín’s face twisted. “I will stop it for you.”
“No!” A quiver had entered his voice, and it was afraid. “No, please! No! NO! Oh, Gods—” The swirl of colors in his mind grew dark, and his own voice broke off into a series of screams, gasps, and broken words. Étain cried too, bitterly and angrily as she shouted and his mind flooded with the sound of it, and he could feel splinters of pain cracking through the bones of his hands as he screamed in his head.
He sat bolt upright in bed, sweat dripping between his eyes.
He was panting for breath like he’d been running, and he could feel his heart galloping madly in his chest as he tried to blink away the dream. His hands were crumpled and tingling. Spikes of pain stabbed up and down his body, and he knew from the twisted bedspread that he’d been thrashing.
In that moment, longing for Ninian crashed over him. Ronan was too young to be burdened with the crushing significance of the nightmare, and Boudicca seemed too unfamiliar, and so the sharp remnants of the dream trapped him. He felt Ninian’s absence as though his chest was a hollow cavity filling with the brackish swill of nightmares and loneliness and crippling responsibility, and a small gasp flitted into his chest, trying to fill the unfillable. He choked on it, suffocated, and then his defenses failed and he wept. Sobs tore through him and shattered as he shook; he pressed his forehead to his knees, searching for comfort in something solid, but it was to no avail. At that moment, he was small and alone, and the cracks inside him were deep and wide. He was broken, he was ruined, and the pieces had not at all healed.
He was grateful when he heard the sound of the door open and felt Boudicca’s arms encircle him, if only because it kept him from falling apart there and then. She sat on the bed next to him, tucked her knees up, and let him lean on her while she cradled him. Her hand was on the side of his face, her chin on the top of his head, and his tears soaked her bosom as she held him together. “Shh, shh,” she whispered gently, and the sound was like a heartbeat, soft and stable. “It’s going to be okay.”
“It won’t—”
“It will, I promise it will. Áed, it takes time.”
She brushed his hair from his forehead and swayed with him while he shook. Her arms were strong and warm, and he clutched at them like he was drowning.
“Breathe,” she murmured, and he tried his best to obey. Air entered his lungs in ragged gasps while she traced circles on the nape of his neck. “Good,” she soothed. “That’s good, keep doing that.”
When he had his breathing under control, glad for something to focus on, she leaned back ever so slightly and examined his tear-streaked face with an expression of protective concern. “Boudicca—” he choked. His back and arms hurt as if someone had taken a scythe to them, but he had no capacity to care.
Boudicca’s soft fingers gently dabbed the tears from his cheeks. “What happened?” she asked quietly.
“Nightmare.”
She sighed and took his left hand in hers, where she worked her fingertips in tiny circles on his ruined palm as if divining the content of his dream.
He was suddenly certain of the truth revealed through the terror: A memory had been resurrected, and it clawed at his heart, begging to be released. “I remember,” he blurted. It was all he could manage at that moment, and he flexed his hand in hers. She stared at it, and understanding dawned in her face. “I remember.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
He sat at the radial table, staring at the honey-and-mahogany-colored tiles of inlaid wood. A mug of steaming tea sat near his best hand, but it was too hot to drink. Boudicca had shooed Ronan off to Gráinne’s with instructions to give her and Áed some time alone; Ronan had looked concerned to see Áed’s red-rimmed eyes and pale face, but he’d obeyed Áed’s quick, firm nod.
Boudicca sat across from him. She leaned forward while a furrow sidled between her eyebrows, and Áed avoided her gaze. It unnerved him.
“I had ten years,” he began. “I don’t know why I didn’t remember if I had as many as ten. I wouldn’t think I’d just forget.” He rubbed his hands over his face, gathering himself.
“Trauma,” Boudicca said softly. “The mind hides what it doesn’t want to remember.”
“I can see why,” Áed murmured. “I really don’t want to remember.”
“I know.” She put her hand on his across the table, and her perfect nails shone dully in the sunlight. The warmth and soft weight of her touch gave him the strength to keep speaking.
“I lived with a woman named Étaín,” he said quietly. “My mother left me on her doorstep.”
Boudicca’s hand was still on his. It comforted the turbulence in his head, and he allowed the sensation to fill his awareness.
He used his knuckle to trace the rim of the mug, and the light from the window puddled on the table. “I resented her.” He stared, not looking, at the edge of the table. “Boudicca, can I trust you with something? A secret?”
She nodded. “Of course you can. Anything.”
Áed nodded, and, with the hand that Boudicca did not touch, held his palm up. The ember in his heart pushed warmth through his veins, and he allowed a flame the size of a crabapple to gather in his hand.
Boudicca’s mouth slowly fell open.
“I don’t know what this is,” Áed confessed. “I don’t know how I do it, only that it feels just like breathing. Easy. Good.”
Boudicca couldn’t reply, and Áed pulled the fire back inside him and laid his palm on the table again.
“My fire, whatever it is, I had it then. I remember that now. I suppose that means I’ve al
ways had it, but I only found it again after Ninian died.” He still stared, unseeing, at the edge of the table. “Étaín was afraid of it. Hated it, hated me, really. But I couldn’t make it stop, or maybe I didn’t want to.” He closed his eyes as the dream flashed back, but that only made it more vivid. “She tried to make it so I couldn’t do it anymore. She didn’t want to discipline me, she wanted to damage me, so she… she broke my wrists against the edge of the table.” He rolled his right hand and felt the familiar needles. “She kept hitting them, again and again, and I think there was something else, a bottle maybe, that she smashed them with.” He paused. Boudicca’s hand tightened on his, and he drew a breath. “She threw me out, after that.”
Boudicca broke her silence. “She threw you out?”
Áed nodded grimly. “I terrified her.”
“So what did you do?”
He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes and tried to think. “It’s hazy. I don’t remember. I can remember crying and vomiting, but I don’t remember anything after that. Not for a while.”
“Gods,” Boudicca murmured, and he turned his eyes to her. Her face looked repelled, horrified, but her fingers pressed solidly into his hand. “Áed, that is the worst thing that I have ever heard.”
“There are people who’ve had worse.”
“I can’t imagine how.”
“Oh,” he said slowly, “I can.” He shook his head as she looked on blankly, and tried to explain. “I met Ninian. He cared for me, and he told me I was strong, and brave, and good. And then we found Ronan, who I could protect, and he loves me and needs me. We created our own family. We loved each other.” He blinked, looking into his tea. “There are people, so many people, who are far less fortunate than I am.”
Boudicca took a deep breath and stood, her coppery dress shimmering like sparks. That funny expression was back on her face, and she looked like she wanted to say something. She bit her tongue, and finally shook her head. “Let me get you some breakfast,” she said quietly. “It almost hurts to look at you, you’re so thin.”