“We’ve had visitors,” Shaw told them when he bustled back down to collect their dishes. “The Guard is going door to door, looking for an exile and his fey companion.” He glanced at Wil with an apologetic shrug as he doused several of the lamps. “Remarkably little description on you, though—apparently no one got a good look at you.”
Wil shot a look at Brayden’s lax face and smiled something tired and cheerless. Well, Brayden’s beard had done little good by way of disguise, but the hats seemed to have fulfilled their purpose. Wil propped his elbow on the small cupboard to the side of his chair and rested his head on his palm. You do have your uses, Constable Brayden. Sorry they weren’t terribly useful to you.
“You’re safe enough here,” Shaw went on. “The Chester constabulary has no jurisdiction on Temple grounds, and we’ve the right to grant sanctuary, if it comes to it, though it’ll be best if we keep your presence from them entirely.” He waved at the doorway. “I’ve prepared a cot for you in the next room. Clean water for washing. I’m afraid the bathroom is little more than an indoor privy, but it’ll do best if you stay down here and out of sight. The priests and initiates can be trusted to keep silent, but the fewer who know you’re here, the fewer chances of mistakes or missteps.”
Wil agreed wholeheartedly with the logic. He offered sincere thanks as Shaw retired, but he didn’t move yet from his uncomfortable seat.
Calder, however, stood slowly, then stared down at Brayden for quite a while before he turned his sharp eyes on Wil. “Pleasant dreams.” He kept his gaze even and unflinching as Wil gave him a deliberately unfriendly look, then merely nodded and quit the little room, leaving Wil alone with Brayden for the first time since they’d burst onto the road this morning.
“Is it wrong that I keep wanting to tell him to fuck off?” Wil muttered quietly. Brayden, of course, didn’t answer, just twitched his eyebrows a hair and slept on. Good. Sleep was a better healer than any infusion, in Wil’s admittedly slim experience, and Brayden had got sparing little of it over the past days, instead watching over Wil in the deeps of night. “My turn on watch.” Wil sprawled as much as he could against the stiff back of the chair, toed off his boots, and gingerly propped his feet on the edge of the cot. The waiting cot Shaw had referred to didn’t even occur to Wil. He merely got as comfortable as was possible under the circumstances and settled in for a long night.
Surprisingly, he didn’t even try not to doze.
“TELL ME about the gift,” he asks Father. “Tell me how to help him.”
Father smiles dreamily, sighs a song. “At last the binding begins.” It’s dulcet and slow. “Weave it well.”
“I don’t know what that means.” He can’t help the anger. He’s tired of hints and allusions and nonsense advice that means nothing. “Can’t you just say it, damn it, just for once?”
But Father only closes his eyes, a lone tear leaking from one corner. “You accept a cage like you belong in one, beautiful Gift.” Another sigh, this one deep and wrenchingly sad. “And yet the keys to your prison are right within your grasp.”
And then He’s gone, leaving Wil alone but not alone. Wil turns and looks behind him.
He’s not surprised to find Brayden here, Watching as always, but he is rather surprised by Brayden’s hereness, his presence, which has always before been more a part of the background and not as finely etched and clear as it is now.
Certainly no threat.
Brayden’s dark eyes near blaze at Wil, urgent beneath the unruly fringe of gold. Wil is both startled and discomfited that Brayden looks just as unhealthy here as he did lying on that too-small cot—face sheened with a thin, clammy sweat, pale and wan, wide shoulders somewhat stooped. Brayden doesn’t say anything, doesn’t intrude, though Wil can tell he wants to, he’s almost vibrating with it, but he just keeps Watching, and Wil wonders for the first time ever if it’s because Brayden can’t say anything, can’t intrude, not unless Wil allows it—demands or requests it.
He thinks about it. For quite a long while. He’s been avoiding this for days and days—they both have—and if he does this now, opens the door, he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to close it again. More to the point, he doesn’t know if he’ll want to, and that scares him quite a bit more. He’s grown to like Brayden, trust him more than he should—why else would Wil have hesitated in that alley, insisted upon dragging Brayden with him, instead of taking the opportunity to run?—and he can’t really explain it, but Brayden’s opinion matters to him. Wil gives a shit what Brayden thinks.
Perhaps because Brayden seems to think so well of Wil, and it makes Wil childishly pleased.
Wil sighs, moving toward Brayden slowly, no longer afraid of Brayden himself nor what he might do to Wil—Brayden won’t do anything harmful, Wil knows that now—but a little bit afraid of what Brayden apparently needs to tell him, show him, the urgency and asking in his eyes making Wil shiver and slow his steps. He stops just in front of Brayden, peering closely for a moment, somewhat surprised he’s not nearly as much shorter than Brayden as he’d thought. Brayden looms so large in the waking world, and Wil does his best not to—he’d never noticed before that Brayden is only perhaps half a head taller than him.
It matters very little, Wil thinks, but it’s interesting.
“You’re here.” Wil can’t help the twitch of a smile in response to Brayden’s tired shrug.
“Apparently….” Brayden’s voice is hoarse and strained. “Apparently I’m always here.”
Wil shrugs too, belated apology for previous declarations made from within tangled bitterness.
Brayden’s mouth turns down in a scowl, and he reaches out to take Wil’s hand, frowning at the bloodied fingertips. “Why d’you do this to yourself?”
Wil doesn’t answer, just watches with interest as Brayden smooths his fingers over ragged flesh, sores closing up and healing beneath his touch, and Brayden doesn’t even see it. Wil wonders if it had happened that first time but can’t remember. A tiny shock goes through Wil, a twinge of power that runs from Brayden’s fingers into his own. There’s a slight shiver from Brayden, but he otherwise appears to have no idea.
Wil looks Brayden over thoroughly, registering the new lines spidering at the corners of Brayden’s mouth, knows them for pain lines, and Wil’s own mouth pinches up in worry.
“D’you feel it even here?”
Brayden sucks in a long breath, looks like he wants to negate it with a shake of his head, but ends up nodding instead. “It’s bad. Worse than I thought. I may have mucked this up entirely. I’m sorry.”
“You still don’t understand, do you?” Wil has to smile in exasperated wonder. “You’re as chosen as I am. You’ve the gifts of a shaman—the gift of the Shaman, I’m told—if you’d only look inward.”
“I don’t like to look inward. I never find anything there I want to look at.”
Wil shrugs. “You might be surprised.”
“And what would you find if you looked inward?” Brayden’s voice and gaze are both very kind, but implacable. “I’m sorry, it’ll be hard, but I think it’s why I’m here. I think it’s part of my job, and I can’t take the chance I’ll be gone before you dare it.”
Wil scowls, surprised by how fierce it is, surprised by how the words hit him like an undeniable punch in the gut. “You’re not going any—”
“Likely not.” Wil can tell Brayden doesn’t really believe it, not yet, at any rate. “But it’s something I should have told you already. You need to know it, and I can’t take the chance that you won’t understand when you really need to.” Brayden holds out his hand, palm up. “Come with me?”
He wants to make it a demand—Wil can see it bubbling behind his eyes—but he’s refraining, relying on a trust that wasn’t there as little as two days ago but strong enough now that Brayden feels confident in testing it. It doesn’t irk Wil as he would have thought; instead, it makes him smile.
“I’ve nowhere else to be.” He stretches out his hand and lays it
lightly in Brayden’s. “Lead on.”
The regret is almost instantaneous. He doesn’t know what he was expecting—he didn’t think he’d been expecting anything—but the sensation of finding himself behind the eyes of another is intrusive and unnerving and absolutely bloody terrifying. It’s only the fact that he can still feel Brayden’s great hand around his, holding on, tethering—“It’s important, I swear I wouldn’t show you, else”—that Wil doesn’t scream and jerk away, but purposefully controls his breathing, answers “Just don’t leave me alone in here,” and lets himself be guided.
Wandering, searching, years and years of searching and anxiety and worry, and still his charge stays hidden—hides from him. It’s deliberate, he can feel it, and he can’t fathom it, but there’s trouble, deep fear and pain within the knowing, and so he keeps searching, moving from one blank road to another. The Old Ones are no help—they can’t find him either, lost his thread the moment they heard the final cry from the last Guardian, filled with betrayal and rage and the deep regret of failure. And now the Aisling has been waiting for nearly two decades, waiting for a new Guardian to grow and learn and train and finally come find him, but failure has marked the search from the first step.
Others have gone before him while he grew and earned his Marks—twice-brave men, for they’d taken on the calling without the blessings that would shield them, stepping into the shoes of the Guardian without the Guardian’s protections, without even the barest knowledge of the Guardian or his charge. None of them have returned, all of them blank roads, and their blood cries out to him, but it’s only so much noise beneath the cries and screams of the Aisling. He writhes with it—it’s under his skin—and he near weeps, because he can hear but he can’t see, and he tries to call out, to soothe, to beseech, but there is too much rage. It’s like a wall of anger and agony, and he can’t break through it. His charge will not hear him, refuses him, refuses the Mother, so he is blind but not deaf, and he keeps searching.
One name stands out amidst the cacophony of bewildered pain, but it’s blurred and garbled, indecipherable, as though it’s being deliberately skewed, but snarled over and over again through rage and agony and deep, dark, betrayed hopelessness. He answers, or tries to answer, calling out his own name, begging the Aisling—Just let me through, I’ve come to help you, the Mother hears your call—trying to break through the desperate denial, but it butts up against a wall so thick and strong it only lances back into him, choking him with his own thwarted rage.
He is hunted here in the land of his enemies, and he can’t hide among them, for he has the look of the Coimirceoir. He can change his hair, can speak the language, but he can’t change his size, and so he ventures among them only when he has to and only fleetingly—there and gone before they have a chance to think about why he doesn’t belong. Still, his trail is followed, he can feel it. He doesn’t know by whom, but if they know of him, they know of the Aisling, so he allows a slip now and then, leaves a marker.
He’s close, he’s been close for days now, circling around the city cautiously, hearing the cries waking and dreaming, but he couldn’t determine the where until tonight. Tonight he saw. Tonight he understood.
The Turning—the one night a year when the Aisling is brought before the people, blesses them—it revealed him. They know now he Watches, and they know he’s close, for he couldn’t keep back his shout of dismay when the huddled figure tottered on the parapet, moved with too-obvious intent. Foolish and reckless, he’d made a run for the gates, shown himself, and beyond anything he’d imagined, he’d been recognized. They shouldn’t know, they shouldn’t understand, and yet he’d seen them understanding as he stood there at the gates trying to figure the best way through them; saw them recognize him even through the henna in his hair and beard and the cloak snugged round his hunched shoulders.
So he lets them follow, lets them believe he is unaware that the Watcher is watched. Not too quickly, or they’ll know he knows, but he can’t wait too long. The Aisling’s pain is his own now, and his choices are few.
He allows them to come upon him in the deeps of night, allows them to accost him. He’ll give them a token fight until he sees their numbers, then take out all but one and force from him the final key. But surprise works against him, for they wear his Mark, they have power they shouldn’t, and it’s harder than it should be to thwart it and regain his advantage. The Mother’s blessing shields him, but not enough—there are too many. He takes seven down to three and then one, his own wounds many and mostly superficial, but one leaks blood that seeps near black from just below his ribs, and he thinks perhaps it’s mortal.
He can’t die, he can’t—it’s already been too long, and the Aisling suffers. He can’t leave him here to endure through another two decades, waiting and not knowing. He staunches the bleeding as best he can, but he’s weak now, tired, and the one man left knows it. The survivor chuckles, blood seeping from between his lips, down his chin, his own wound gory and open, a deep gouge down his chest to his belly.
“The Aisling belongs to us, brave Watcher,” he says. “We Watch and shall have what is ours, where you have failed in your blindness. We are the Guardians now.”
“He belongs to no one.” It’s a snarl, somewhere between pain and fury, and he clenches his teeth against both, lifeblood leaking from between his fingers. “He is his own, and he suffers—I can hear his cries, and you dare to call yourself Guardian! What do they do to him in those towers?”
He doesn’t really want to know, doesn’t really want to put pictures with the sounds that wind through his head. He wants to kill this man, squeeze the last breath from his throat and smile as he does it, so this pretender will know with his dying thought that the true Guardian will heed his call, will shatter whatever cogs of their sick scheme are grinding even now.
“We are called by the Father.” The man spits weakly, blood and saliva making wide tracks over pale skin. “Born in the blood of your predecessor that was fed to the Father so that He may break the bonds your Mother cast upon Him. The Aisling suffers now for his weakness, his very life a blasphemy, for he serves the Guild as he should the Father. Dúil. Elemental. He deserves no name. He rejects the Mother, and Her soldiers will not have him, but the day of the new Watchers approaches.”
The man is insane, blue eyes on fire above his stolen mark. He speaks as though the Father were some ghoulish revenant wakened by the blood of fallen Guardians, and the Mother his gaoler.
“You do not speak of the Father,” he rebukes the man. “You blaspheme of dearg-dur, of daeva. The Mother and the Father do not suffer either to live. It is law! You twist your own religion and make of the Mother’s gift a tool for—”
He sees the flash of the knife too late, tries to cry out as it buries itself in his throat, but his own blood chokes him. He falls back, eyes wide, staring at the stars that wink and sing his thread into the weave of a shroud.
It is complete. He has failed.
“Forgive me.”
He speaks it to no one but pushes it through the cracks in the wall the Aisling builds against him. The stars belong to the Father, but he reaches out to them, sings his story into their hearts, so at least they may know what happened here.
“Your Mother is dead, Watcher.” The man leans over him, blots out the stars, and the knife flashes again, slashes the Marks from off his cheek. “We die together now.”
The man’s voice is weaker, and he doesn’t know if it’s because he is fading or the man is. He doesn’t think it matters. He is dying, he has failed, and the Aisling is left once again bereft of his gift, tricked and entangled while his Guardian leaks his life on alien ground, this false guardian’s lies in his ears.
“Mother!” his heart calls. “Hear me. I have failed in my task, and so I call the next.” He takes one last look at the stars, listens to them twine his dirge with the new song of another, and closes his eyes.
“Brayden,” he gurgles through the blood pooled in his mouth, in his thro
at, drowning him. “Avenge us all.”
And behind his eyes, enwombed in stillness as his lungs give up their struggle, enwrapped in silence as his heart beats its last, the Mother pulls his head to Her breast and weeps quietly into his hair.
Brayden stands next to him as Wil opens his eyes, roosting back into himself like tired feet into comfortable old boots, stretching against his own skin until it settles firm around him. He notices the hand first, still wrapped around his. He thinks he should be jerking back, but his reflexes abandoned him days ago where Brayden is concerned, and the whole business seems rather silly to him now, so he doesn’t.
“What’s dearg-dur?”
“Incubus,” Brayden replies. “Soul-eater.”
Wil nods, unsurprised. “You’re not the first.” Brayden doesn’t answer him, only gives his hand a bit of a squeeze, doesn’t let go. “I’ve been….”
He’d been living that not-life for bloody decades, tricked into believing betrayal, into committing his own.
“You’re the third?”
Brayden nods slowly. “You weren’t forgotten.” His voice is low and soothing, like he’s trying to gentle a spooked horse.
Wil can’t help but put Brayden’s face on those others, can’t help the weight of responsibility, the guilt, the sorrow. “How do I ever atone for this?”
“You don’t,” Brayden says forcefully. “Fifty or more years of treachery, Wil. Fifty or more years of being lied to.”
It sounds so… easy. Wil would like to believe it, except…. “Oh.” He closes his eyes. “No wonder She hates me.”
“Hey.” Brayden’s hand tightens around Wil’s, squeezing hard. “If that were the case, would I be here?”
It would almost be easier if he weren’t. It would almost be easier if Wil had just died back there in Ríocht, never knowing any of this.
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