by T. A. Miles
Korsten didn’t make a solitary move to act on that thought, knowing that he didn’t want to leave. He knew also that the unease he felt wasn’t actually remorse, but rather fear. I’m afraid, Ren. I’m terrified of what I’ll find … and more of what you’ll show me.
The room was dark with evening’s passing into night. Eventually Korsten lit a candle and dared to leave what had in the past been his sanctuary. Analee followed him, hovering near to the flame he carried for a span before fluttering off into the deeper shadows of the house. It wasn’t all that late, but there were no lights displayed in any of the rooms Korsten visited. In fact, the house appeared to be utterly abandoned. Perhaps Merran had advised Donnel and Penna to abandon it before spiriting their master away. Korsten hoped for as much and that the two servants had heeded such advice. The very last thing he wanted to find in his former home were the bodies of the two people who had made this place feel like home to him. Especially after Fand’s death.
At sixteen, he used to drive both of them to their wits’ end; refusing to eat, refusing to accept Donnel’s assistance with almost everything, scarcely speaking a word to either of them. He must have seemed an ungrateful brat. Seemed? You were an ungrateful brat, Korsten Brierly. An arrogant little bastard. You still are. Dammit, what’s wrong with you? You shouldn’t be here. After everything Ashwin and Merran have done, you’re only going to get yourself killed. And why? So that you can see your lover again? And see the truth you’d been blinded to for…. How long, Ren? Gods, how long have you been keeping this from me? Lying to me…. A hiss of pain shattered the silence as Korsten, still in his stocking feet, stepped on something sharp. He lowered with his candle to look at the bottom of his assailed foot, bleeding mildly, and spied what had caused the complaint. Frowning curiously, he reached for the misplaced knife. It was nothing terribly dangerous. A paring knife perhaps. What was it doing here, in the hallway?
A closer examination revealed that the blade was stained, with old blood. Korsten dropped it immediately as his imagination met past events and drew gruesome conclusions. Penna … oh gods. Gods, no.
Korsten moved slowly forward with his inadequate light, checking the floor for traces of blood. He found it every bit as quickly as he’d dreaded and clapped his free hand to his mouth, sickened and terrified. A smudge of dried blood preceded a brief trail, leading to a large smear on the wall, indicating nothing specific, only that someone had been badly hurt, quite possibly killed. There was not a body anywhere near and no further trail to follow. It was as if the victim had been bandaged up and carted away … or absorbed into the wall.
I shouldn’t be here. I should Reach back. I’m not ready to face this nightmare again. I’m not…. A noise pulled Korsten away from his verging panic. He looked instinctively down the hallway in the direction the sound had come from. He wasn’t quite sure what it was, but then he heard the distinct closing of a door and snuffed his candle flame at once between thumb and forefinger. The Vadryn probably didn’t need light to see while in their true form, but perhaps in their borrowed human guises they did. Korsten’s immediate plan was to let the beast pad around in the dark, hunting by instincts alone while he worked the necessary spell to avoid a confrontation.
He would need both hands to work another Reach. His hands were shaking, but he still felt that he could do it. Footsteps sounded elsewhere in the house. Korsten recalled again that the spell would require both hands. He lowered slowly and silently to set the candle down, timing the actual placement with the unhurried pattern of the intruder’s steps. Any noise the base of the holder might have made was covered by the other’s sound.
Breathing carefully, Korsten straightened and tried to set his mind on the Seminary. He had the image of the kitchen knife branded upon his thoughts. Visions of blood followed. He thought of Markam and of Hedren. His memory brought back the wraithlike demon that had slain the constable. The blood … so much …
Gods, don’t be distracted now! Concentrate! Think of the balcony outside of your room at the Seminary. Think of…. Silence.
Whomever was in the house had stopped somewhere or wandered out of earshot. Wandered? Maybe it was just a person. Someone passing through Haddowyn, looking for signs of life. They would find unlife. Perhaps they already had. Except they hadn’t called out. It didn’t sound like someone scared and panicked, seeking help or a place to hide.
Don’t dwell on it, Korsten told himself. Just leave. Now, while you can. This isn’t the appropriate time to set things right here. You can’t yet. You don’t know enough. You’re only going to…. An eerie sense of presence suddenly fell over Korsten. Though he could neither see nor hear anything, he knew somehow that he was not alone in the blackness. The individual in the house was in this passage, nearby. He felt eyes on him. Demon’s eyes? It was a cold, burning gaze.
Korsten held utterly still, not paralyzed with fear, but overcome with a sudden unwillingness to do anything. It wasn’t the will of a demon oppressing his own this time. It was indescribable, what he felt just at that moment. Relief mixed with dread. A sense of familiar over a feeling of unknowing. The urge to move forward, countered by the cry at the back of his mind to get away. He felt warm inside, but cold as well, like he had swallowed a lump of ice that refused to melt. It had lodged in his chest.
“Ren….” Korsten had never made a sound so weak, so devoid of warmth. He felt dead, like a ghost returned to haunt the life he once knew and to watch the lives of others continue on without him … wrongly. He had never felt so helpless, so truly, utterly useless. A witness to something he could not alter. Am I?
His eyes adjusted gradually to the lack of light, enough to make out a dark, motionless shape in front of him … an arm’s reach away. He could smell the familiar smells of Renmyr’s clothing … his skin … his hair … all of it stirring too many memories, too quickly. Images of a hurried, hidden love rushed forward, and met scenes of murder and of betrayal.
“What have you done?” Korsten asked softly, angrily. Tears warmed his eyes. “Did you do this? Did you ki—” Though Renmyr gave him plenty of opportunity, he couldn’t finish. He couldn’t bring himself to believe it.
And then, finally, Renmyr spoke. “Is that what you think you’re doing here? Judging me? Judge yourself … heart’s dearest. Remember who did the leaving.”
Though he wanted to break down upon hearing Renmyr’s acid tone, Korsten somehow managed to hold his ground. “Yes, Ren, I do remember. I remember death all around me, unaware that it was embracing me. That it had been for some time. How long?”
“Does it matter?”
“Tell me!” Korsten shouted suddenly, before Renmyr had even finished speaking. “Tell me when it became a lie, Renmyr! Tell me when it was over, when this became our future!”
In the very next instant, Renmyr came forward, too quickly for Korsten to react. He seized him by the throat with one hand, and squeezed. Korsten lifted both hands instinctively to the one that was choking him. His attempts to pry it away were useless. Renmyr’s grip was too strong.
“How long do you think it would take for me to choke the life out of you?” Renmyr snarled. “I could snap your neck, and make it faster. Is that what you want? Is that what you think I want?”
Korsten continued to struggle, too confused and betrayed to decipher whatever point Renmyr or the demon he’d bonded with was trying to make. Suddenly Renmyr dropped his grip from Korsten’s neck to his shoulder, propelling him into the wall, slamming away the breath Korsten had hastily recaptured. In the next moment he tried to suffocate Korsten again, this time by crushing their mouths together. Korsten fought the kiss. He tried pushing Renmyr away, but his lover kept him pinned against the wall. He used his whole body to do it. Korsten wasn’t strong enough to force him back, but he kept trying anyway. His heart was spiking, his lungs aching, and his hands beginning to sweat as they pushed against Renmyr’s shoulders. His insistence eventually earned
him enough space to turn his head away, to just catch a breath while Renmyr went at his neck.
“Stop,” Korsten panted, still pushing and trying to wriggle away. Renmyr’s strong hands clamped tighter around his arms and his solid body continued to press. “Stop it … Ren. Ren, stop!”
His heart continued to race, thrashing painfully in his chest as fear and desire competed to gain control of his senses. Renmyr’s tongue found the sensitive spot behind Korsten’s jaw and he went limp, sinking with his back still to the wall, bringing Renmyr with him. He lifted his arms around his beloved and finally kissed him back. Renmyr’s hand slid under his shirt, gently now over his skin.
Korsten relaxed and worked his lover’s shirt open, following Renmyr as he straightened on his knees. After placing several swift kisses upon Renmyr’s broad chest, Korsten slowed his affection, gradually halting in his belief that he was intimately demonstrating to the other man just how much he did still love him. It didn’t fully occur to him until after he’d stopped and found himself slumped on the floor in Renmyr’s arms, weeping, that it had been an act of sheer desperation, and that it verged upon becoming so much worse. He felt base and unclean and yet still in need, still in love.
“Why?” Korsten choked miserably while Renmyr stroked his hand through his hair. “Why did you come to me?”
“Should I have waited for you to come to me?” Renmyr asked quietly, seeming sated now after reestablishing the dominance he’d always held over his lover.
“Why didn’t you just leave me alone?” Korsten wept. “Damn you! Why … couldn’t….”
“From the moment I came across you seated on that bench, before a backdrop of sunset and roses, I knew that I had to have you,” Renmyr whispered. “I knew that you would be the one to become my heart’s dearest. In fact you were, in the very instant. It only alarmed me that you were a man and no one I could openly court. Even if I could have, you were not often out in the open. I spent years planning how we would be brought together, how I would convince you of my feelings. Fand’s inability or unwillingness to acquire you a wife gave me hope that only grew with my desire. I deluded myself with fantasies of an ideal love, dreams that quickly became tainted with the reality that no one could ever know except us. I would have let you go to spare you the torment of the years that followed, but it was too late. You came to rely on me and I loved that about you, that you needed me so much … when no one else did.”
“Ren, that isn’t true.” Korsten was still clinging to him, just as he always had in the past. “Your family needed you.”
“They needed my brother,” Renmyr contradicted, his tone gaining a slight edge. “I was second, to everyone except you, Korsten. I was sure recently that that had changed.” He slipped his hand beneath Korsten’s chin and gently forced him to look at him, the shadow of a smile on his handsome face. “But I see now it hasn’t. I should have known that you would come back to me, sweet Kor.”
Renmyr’s fingertips glided lightly down Korsten’s neck. He bent forward, as if to kiss him, and then suddenly stopped. There was a fierce frown upon his lips. Before Korsten could inquire, Renmyr roughly tilted his head to one side with one hand, pushing his shirt off his shoulder with the other, just far enough to see the unhealed wound Korsten had all but forgotten about.
“A seal,” Renmyr muttered angrily. “What else have you let that filthy bastard do to you?”
“Ren,” Korsten breathed, shocked by the sudden change, though perhaps he should not have been by now.
Renmyr took him by the wrist, dragging him along as he leaned sideways far enough to reach the kitchen knife still on the floor where Korsten had dropped it.
“What are you doing?” Korsten asked urgently. “Ren….”
The blade slashed across his arm, missing a vein, but cutting deep enough to proficiently bleed. Renmyr dropped the knife in the next instant and brought Korsten’s wounded limb to his mouth. Korsten felt weak suddenly, ill as he watched his lover lapping at his blood.
“You’re hollow somehow,” Renmyr announced when he was finished. And then, like a snake striking, he had Korsten by the throat again. There was a passion and a hatred in his eyes very unlike Renmyr, not aimed specifically at Korsten, but dangerous so long as Korsten remained in its path. “How is it possible? What magic drains the life essence out of a body and yet allows it to live?”
A tear slipped down Korsten’s cheek. “Ren … it’s true. You’ve … given yourself to them. To the Vadryn. Why?”
In that moment, Renmyr relaxed his grip, allowing Korsten to breathe and to slide away from him. “You are not the only one with needs,” he said, his voice still tense. “And what have you given yourself to, Korsten? The Seminary? Better to be used by them, is it? I sensed your coming. I sensed a mage coming and wondered who would be foolish enough to announce themselves with use of such a spell. I knew better than to hope for Merran. Though I believe I smell him on you. Will you live up to your reputation now, consorting with your teachers instead of students? And what do you believe they can teach you?”
“How to save you!” Korsten blurted, damning him with his next breath. Renmyr’s temper and the cruelty that came of it had always been too much. It drove Korsten to rare moments of rebellion. He thought it was rebellion against Renmyr, but now he was beginning to realize it was rebellion against his own weakness, the dependency and helplessness Renmyr had just described to him and that he had described to himself through his needful and embarrassing actions moments earlier. “I don’t want this, Ren. I don’t want this separation between us and I know now that I don’t want the union you attempted to force upon me. I want to free both of us.”
“How childish,” Renmyr scoffed openly. “After everything that’s happened to you? After your own father turned away from you … after everyone turned away from you except me … how can you believe that there is any freedom to be had? For either of us?”
“Ren, you’re not yourself. You loved Haddowyn. How could you allow what’s become of it? How could you allow what’s become of you?” Korsten slid toward Renmyr—the man he loved in spite of everything—and carefully lifted his hands to his face. He wiped his own blood off his lover’s lips and gazed long into his silver eyes, searching. “I need you.”
“You’ve found others,” Renmyr argued, softly now, sounding more like the man Korsten knew.
“I need you,” Korsten repeated. “We can find a way to undo this, whatever has been done. I know you never meant for it to come this far. Let me help you, Ren. I love you.”
Renmyr smirked. “I have always admired your sincerity. It moves me, the way you put truth into words.” Renmyr came forward slowly, and kissed him.
This was what Korsten wanted, what he’d been wanting since leaving Haddowyn, but it was wrong … so intensely devoid of everything he thought he remembered.
They drew apart gradually, mutually, and Korsten remained very still afterward, verging on fresh tears as he stared at Renmyr. His heart rattled strangely, breaking even as it attempted to mend itself after he’d just been kissed by Renmyr … for the last time?
Renmyr lifted his hands to Korsten’s and slid them away from his face. He transferred his light grip to Korsten’s arms. “I do not need help,” he whispered. “And I will not share you.”
“Ren….”
“You have a choice, Korsten. That is to reclaim what has been stolen from you and return to me, else make yourself my enemy. Either way I will end all your suffering. I promise you that.” And then Renmyr stood. “I’ll advise you to make your decision quickly.”
Korsten wanted to stop him. He held onto him as long as he was able, watching Renmyr step away from him. His touch slowly slid away, his fingers seeming oddly longer in the darkness, as if followed physically by the shadows in the passage. Those same shadows gradually enveloped Renmyr and Korsten found himself alone once again.
He drew h
is hands back, turning them over as his palms felt wet. They were indeed wet and his sleeves were soaked through as well, with blood. A thin scratch had been made from his elbow just to his wrist on each arm. He hadn’t felt the wounds before … he hadn’t felt Renmyr making them as he evidently transformed his fingers into claws … but he felt them now, as air touched the open flesh and the blood continued to flow out of him.
It was true. All of it. Renmyr had given himself to the Vadryn. He was one of them willingly … a demon.
The lily garden was lush and full of vivid red blossoms when Ashwin began his stroll through it that evening. As darkness settled, the flowers were closing in on themselves. Sleeping, Ashwin liked to think. The souls of the dead also required rest. Particularly these souls, providing so much to others long after they’d physically gone from this world. Perhaps they were spreading themselves thin, empowering new life with a strand of their own, in effect reincarnating themselves while still existing as a spirit. Not a forgotten one.
Ashwin stopped at a specific group of lilies and let his fingers caress multiple buds. “How is it right, Adrea, that a teacher should see his student surpass him and then pass from this world … and return to it again? You said my heart was capricious, but is it, I wonder, when I have only known one love truer than my mortal love? I want to love, I think, even after losing one so beautiful, and so I go through the motions. I invite others to dance with me, but they cannot keep up and is it cruel for me to keep on without them?”
He lowered his hand, holding his fingers out for Nera to land upon. When the brilliant green dragonfly was settled, he drew her close. “I never meant to harm Sharlotte. I chose her as my spouse because I loved her, yes, but perhaps more because she needed to have someone near, more frequently than a casual lover. I thought that I could help her to trust others, but what a foolish idea that was. All I did, as she sees it, was demonstrate how easily even the one closest to her could betray her.”