by K. C. Lannon
The book slipped from James’s fingers and onto the ground. He was barely aware of it, of anything. He saw Alvey’s lips moving, but he could not process anything else she was saying for a long while.
A thrall? What does that mean? Come on! You know this! You know what it means; you remember seeing the term before. Just focus on the knowledge. Forget about everything else. Just think!
“—your father?”
James flinched. “W-what?”
“Do you think it was your father who sold you to this Unseelie creature?” Alvey asked conversationally. “That is the conclusion Deirdre came to. I am curious as to what he got in return for your life.”
The realization hit him, striking truer than Boyd bashing his face against the ground.
James let out a ragged breath. His throat tightened, and when he tried to respond, no words came out.
“Are you going to cry?” Alvey asked, not unkindly. “I can hear it in your throat, like a clicking sound. I suppose that means you were not aware. I have done you a favor by telling you.”
Snatching the book from the ground, James staggered off toward the others numbly. He was not conscious of his anger until he saw his brother standing there, laughing at something Deirdre had said.
He was not aware of whom his anger was directed at until he threw the book at Iain’s head.
The book fell short, arcing through the air and thudding right in front of Iain’s feet, causing him to jump back. Iain looked up in alarm as James charged toward him.
“You’re a liar!” James shouted, unable to stem the flow of the dam breaking in his chest. “You said he was still looking out for us, but you were wrong! You were wrong about everything!”
“James? What are you talking about?” Iain’s expression shifted from annoyance to concern. He held out his hands to calm James, to reason with him, but it only made him more irritated.
Deirdre, wide-eyed, attempted to step in. “You shouldn’t throw things at people,” she scolded unhelpfully, sounding just as much like a mother hen as Iain usually did. “James, we need to talk about your behavior—!”
James ignored her.
“I wanted to leave a long time ago!” he continued, his voice raw, but as long as he kept yelling, he wouldn’t break. “I wanted to leave, and you always said that we would, but you were lying, and you just kept—you just let him push us around and use us, and—”
“James, just calm down, yeah? Take a seat, and we’ll talk about this.”
“I’m done talking, and I’m done listening to you try to defend him. You don’t even know anything about him, do you? Or anyone! I’ve always been able to see it, and you made me feel like I was—like I was wrong for thinking it!” James heard his voice falter, and he paused to steady himself.
“This is about Dad.” Iain reached toward him, but James shrugged his hand away. “Isn’t it?”
“We should have left before any of this happened! Before Elaine happened!” James continued, though he was losing steam each moment his brother stared at him. “We should have gone after Mum when she left! I told you he was a monster, and I knew he hated us, but I didn’t think he would—” James broke off, breathless, all his energy spent. “But you never listened. Not when I asked you to trust Marko and not when I told you Deirdre was safe…”
Sitting down on a nearby log, James hunched over, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
At that point, Alvey strolled up in her chair. James did not know for certain, but he thought he heard her clapping lazily over the roaring of blood rushing in his ears. He stubbornly fought back a wave of embarrassment.
“What a display,” Alvey drawled. “In case you did not grasp what your little brother was screeching about, I merely informed him that his father must have sold him as a thrall to this moorland creature he was going on about and that his mother had, logically, taken his place.”
James glared at the ground, unwilling to see his brother’s dumbstruck expression as he fumbled over his words and asked senseless questions.
“Alvey!” Deirdre shrieked. “I was going to break it to them gently. Gently!”
“Best to rip the bandage off with haste, methinks.”
“What—what’s going on? How did you figure that out?” Iain asked, bewildered.
When James finally looked up, he asked Iain, “What’s a thrall? I remember the word, but I can’t place it. I can’t… think.”
Ignoring James’s question, Iain turned to Alvey, asking firmly, “How do you know he’s a thrall? Are you certain?”
“Aye. I can sense it on him, like a mark. He was a thrall at some point in time, but that title had shifted, I presume, to your mother, whom James said was missing. It was not a difficult conclusion to come to.”
“Marked by dark magic,” James said. “Now we know what that means.”
“We don’t know anything for certain yet.” Iain sat next to him a little ways down the log. “Thralls are rare. Some people don’t even think they exist outside of tales…” He sighed and then said carefully, “But a thrall—a thrall is an indentured servant of a faery.”
James nodded, his head clearing. As the anger faded, slowly being replaced by recollection, he felt himself begin to calm down, though the resentment did not fade. It never did. “Mum used to tell us the story of Rumpelstiltskin. The miller’s daughter made a pact with the faery man if he turned straw to gold in exchange f-for her firstborn.”
Alvey nodded sagely. “Aye, that is one example—though that faery intended to eat the babe, rather than keep it as a thrall. But the point of the tale is that there is always an exchange.”
“Alvey told me that people who make faery deals are well off. They make the exchange for, um, a big favor,” Deirdre cut in, standing in front of them and rocking back on her heels.
“What could Dad have gotten in exchange?” James asked, more to himself than to anyone in particular. “He doesn’t have anything. Only our house—” He startled everyone by letting out a mirthless laugh. “Maybe he sold me for that moldy, run-down house of ours. I would think I’d be worth more than that.”
Iain’s hand was warm against his back. James did not resist.
He knew he was angry with the wrong person. This was Dad’s fault—all of it.
“It doesn’t matter what he got in return,” Iain assured him. “Nothing makes it right. And we’re going to fix this, yeah? I… I promise you, we’ll fix this.”
“We should have left a long time ago,” James whispered bitterly. Repeating it felt almost like doing something about it, like it would change things.
“Where would we have gone? There was nowhere else to go—”
“I-I don’t know. Anywhere else!”
Iain met his gaze. “I messed up a lot, James. But when I wasn’t being an idiot, I was trying to do the best I could, yeah? Leaving… Running away… It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“I know you did your best…”
But it wasn’t enough.
Though he hadn’t spoken that out loud, he could almost see the flicker of Iain’s expression as if he had. His brother looked tired; he was beaten and bloodied, but there was still a spark of determination in his eyes.
“But what could it be? His job?” James asked.
“No.” Iain sighed wearily. “He worked for everything he had.” Then Iain’s eyes lit up, and he said, “That machine. There was something—a weird machine that got rid of the smoke after the attack on the king. I’ve never seen anything like that before—”
“Maybe that’s what he’s planning on using to break the barrier with!” James interjected. Then, less enthusiastically, he added, “Then that’s what Mum’s been paying the price for.”
“She decided to pay it for you, James, because she loves you. That’s why she left.”
The phrase struck him like it was not intended to. Even when he’d read the letters, it hadn’t fully hit him that he was the reason Mum left. Everything had fallen apart
when she’d left…
Mumbling some half-hearted excuse to leave, James got up and began to walk away. Before he did, he reached down and snatched what he thought was his pack from the ground.
He hoped to clear his head, maybe process everything that he had learned. Most of all, he wanted to get away from all the staring eyes he felt on him, even as he turned his back to them. He felt the eyes of his brother and his friend and even Alvey’s smug expression.
At any rate, I’m done listening to Iain.
He was finished with all of it. It seemed like no matter how many steps his brother took to better himself, to be better, Iain still ended up letting him down somehow. Iain had promised him Dad was looking out for them; he had promised that he would make things right. But could he really trust anything Iain promised, after what he’d done, good and bad?
He wanted to trust his brother—that was what he wanted more than anything.
“James—” Deirdre called after him.
“Let him go,” Iain suggested. “He just needs some space.”
James tromped into the woods, wanting to just keep walking and walking and not stop until he was far away from everything. He’d run away from home, but everything he’d been trying to leave had seemed to follow him out of Neo-London like smog. He was no freer than he had been in that awful house—and his father still controlled everything, even his fate.
Finding a tree stump, James sat down, reaching for his belongings for his notebook. Only it wasn’t his pack—it was Iain’s.
“Damn.” He couldn’t go back so soon after that dramatic exit. It would be too awkward.
Hang on a moment…
He quickly found the radio in Iain’s pack. He tried to switch it on, but the batteries had been taken out. Luckily Iain hadn’t thought to throw the batteries away.
After James placed the batteries back in and turned on the radio, he scanned the channels for the one he wanted—the one that would give him answers.
“Dad?” James pressed the Talk button, speaking quickly, and then released.
His heart quickened. There wasn’t static on the other end or anything indicating that the signal was off or his father was about to speak. He was listening. He had to be listening.
“When did you decide to make your bargain?” James asked, the words clumsy, his tongue feeling too thick for his mouth. “Was it before I was born, or after?”
When had he decided to get rid of him, to sell him, to trade him like he wasn’t a human being? Had it been one moment, one instance that had made up his mind? Had he planned it for a while, or had it been a reckless decision?
Did he think about trading Iain instead of me?
James could see how he would have been chosen instead, how Iain would have been spared. Iain was more like their father than he would ever care to admit—and he had been shaping up to be the good soldier his father always wanted. But James…
Of course it would be me. I didn’t have anything to offer.
“Did you know that Mum’s taken my place?” James demanded. “Do you even care?”
For one brief moment James thought he heard breathing on the other end, like a quick inhale, like his father had pushed the Talk button for just a second before releasing it again—a reflex.
“Hello?” James nearly bellowed, holding the radio up to his mouth and then banging it on the tree stump. “I know you can hear me!”
Then he chucked the radio as hard as he could against the nearest tree. Bits of plastic and buttons popped off, and it went dead.
Something rustled through the leaf litter on the ground to his right. James shot up, looking around, breathing hard. There was something there, and—
It’s watching me.
For the first time, James could sense a presence in the dark, endless woods. Maybe it had always been there, and he’d never realized it until now. James straightened, looking around. He decided he was not afraid of whatever it was.
Whatever creature had claimed him, it was probably the only other being besides his father who knew the answers to all of James’s questions. He would find out what it was, and he would face it himself. He would get answers.
* * *
Iain sat there, stricken, stuck between wanting to face what he had learned and wanting to numb himself to it—that impulse was always there, to ignore or mask what he didn’t have the strength or bravery to deal with. It was that very impulse that had led him to Pan.
He decided to fetch the amulet from his pack. He wanted to see if the word he’d seen etched into the surface was still there or if maybe he’d only imagined it. After looking around and discovering his pack was gone, he felt a strange sense of unease and that the amulet wasn’t with him.
James took my pack by mistake…
He’ll probably be back soon once he realizes I don’t carry books with me. That will be awkward.
After he decided to wait for James to return on his own and sat down, Deirdre came up to him, and he forgot all about the missing trinket for a moment.
“Are you okay?” she asked, standing in front of him, absently combing bits of rock dust from her long ginger curls.
“No,” he said honestly, almost too softly to hear. “But I will be, once James is okay.”
His own admission surprised him. His first instinct, like an automatic response, was to insist he was fine, only… he found keeping anything from her pointless. He had nothing to hide from Deirdre. She had already assumed the worst from him, and now that she had forgiven him, he felt like he could talk to her openly.
He’d never really felt that way with anyone else.
“I’ve got no idea what I’m doing,” Iain admitted. He somehow felt better and worse for having said it. “I’ve got no idea what to do about any of this, about James.”
For the first time in a while, he felt like a child. Helpless.
“But you always seem like you know what you’re doing,” Deirdre pointed out brightly.
His mouth twitched at a grateful smile. “That’s good to hear, at least. Maybe if I keep acting like that, I’ll actually fool myself.”
“James really shouldn’t have said all those things,” Deirdre said after a moment. “If you still want me to talk to him, I will.”
She really did care about James. And it was strange, unfamiliar, but nice to be defended.
“I think that’s a good idea. Everything I say seems to make him angry these days.” Iain exhaled softly, looking up and meeting her gaze. “That will really help me out, so thanks.”
Wondering if he would ever get used to saying thank you and realizing how much he had to be thankful for in the first place, Iain reached up absently and rubbed at his face—then he winced as his fingers brushed the gash on his cheek, opening it afresh.
Without a word, Deirdre leaped away and went to her pack, which was sitting on the ground.
Iain looked after her, confused, and not really wanting her to leave.
A moment later she hopped back into his line of sight. “Here!” She thrust something into his face, nearly causing him to fall off the log backward in alarm.
“What—?” Iain leaned back, focusing on the object Deirdre was holding out to him. It was a cloth. A handkerchief. He merely stared at it.
“Take it. For your face.”
Iain held out his hand for it. The cloth was soft and silken, and there was something embroidered into it on the corner. “Did you… make this?” he asked.
“Well, I did the sewing—”
“I can’t take this. I’ll ruin it.”
“Oh, it’s already ruined.” Deirdre waved her hand dismissively. “Just look at the embroidery.”
Iain studied the cloth, looking for a pattern in the mess of too loose or too tight threads. The more he looked, the more desperate he became. He had no idea what it was supposed to look like, and Deirdre was waiting for him to comment on it.
“It’s really nice.” Iain cleared his throat. “Is that… an apple?”
&n
bsp; “It’s supposed to be a redbird.”
Iain bit down on the inside of his mouth, willing himself not to crack a smile. He looked up to see Deirdre making the same strained expression.
Without warning, Deirdre burst into laughter, and Iain lost it as well, laughing even louder than her, which was impressive.
He doubled over as his spasms made his bruised ribs ache. “I can’t stop!” He gasped. He hadn’t laughed that hard in a while, and now he felt as if he were making up for lost time.
“I know!” Deirdre giggled. “It really does look like an apple!”
“Or a very, very well-fed bird,” Iain said, letting out a final chuckle.
Deirdre flopped down on the log beside him, breathless. “They tried to teach me to sew at the orphanage, but I never got the hang of it.”
“They taught me to sew during basic training for mending our clothes and stuff,” Iain commented. “I’m actually not too bad at it.”
“Maybe you could teach me!” Deirdre exclaimed.
Iain laughed. “You taught me about magic in the cave, and all I’ve got to teach you is sewing? It hardly seems like a fair trade.”
Deirdre just giggled, still obviously tickled.
“Anyway,” Iain said, holding out the cloth, “I can’t use this. It’s got sentimental value to you. It’s from your… home.”
“Not really. I guess the orphanage was my home, but it isn’t now. I guess they weren’t my real family either.” Deirdre smiled faintly, looking away from him, kicking her feet through the air distractedly. “Keep it. Please.”
“Um, thanks. Yeah.” Iain nodded, appreciating the gesture more than he would have thought possible. He dabbed at the gash on his cheek with the cloth, then absentmindedly tucked the handkerchief into his jacket pocket.
Deirdre hummed under her breath, tapping her fingers rapidly on the log.
They settled into a comfortable silence for a moment; it was not at all awkward like their silences usually were. Iain supposed that was because they had come to an understanding. He had never thought that he might be sitting chatting with a faery like this or that he would consider her a friend.