Byrne and Colley exchanged another of their looks.
After a pause, Byrne said, "Settle in. Colley and myself, we'll get you all squared away on happenings in this lovely neck o' the woods."
~
Kellen lay face down on a table in Samuel James's study, her head turned to one side as James prepared with brisk efficiency for what was about to come. He wore a shirt with a standing collar and a cravat, but no coat, and he'd rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. The midnight form of a Crow—what would become Kellen's Crow—perched on a table in the back of the room, perfectly aligned to fill Kellen's field of vision.
"Blood and will and wings." James motioned toward the metal bird. "The wings, obviously."
Papers rustled, just out of sight, and Kellen glimpsed the girl, Annie, as she moved around the desk above Kellen's head. A flash of green skirts, and then Annie was out of sight again, but she moved with the same brisk efficiency as her father. Kellen had noticed that Annie talked like James, too, all smart and uppity and businesslike. Ellis, the man in charge of all this, was apparently much the same, although Kellen hadn't more than glimpsed him so far. Smart and uppity. And oily, that was the word Byrne had used for Ellis. Oily.
He'd said that about Vincent, too, but he'd refused to elaborate beyond that.
James glanced toward Annie. His brow furrowed, and the corners of his mouth turned down. Kellen wondered if he was displeased with his daughter. A couple of the other men had mentioned how Annie looked as wrung out as they felt, by the end of things. Maybe he was just worried.
God knew, Kellen was worried. Or maybe just nervous. Her stomach had risen up to about the level of her throat. Kellen tried to swallow it back down, but her mouth was too dry.
"Your job is to provide the will," James said, picking up the line of his instructions to Kellen. "Remember that."
He reached down, below Kellen's line of sight and toward the smaller table alongside the one she lay on. Earlier, while Annie used a fine brush and ink to trace designs onto Kellen's skin, Kellen had watched James lay out his tools on that table—a small pot of black ink, a plain wooden stick, and something that resembled a small hoe, a flat rectangle of carved bone with tiny serrations along one edge mounted on a wooden handle.
James didn't repeat the blood part of his initial speech, but Kellen had talked with the other men. She knew what was coming.
An urge gripped her, to fling herself off the table and run from this room, from this house. It wasn't that she feared the pain, so much—but when had she made this decision? Had she? Had she ever decided she would do this, or had it just happened? She felt like she'd just wakened and had no idea where or when or, hell, even who she was.
Two days. Only two days since she and Ger had fled Philadelphia, since Ger had set Ripley on fire. Since Em Jacobs had died. Only two days, but it seemed like it had all happened to someone else.
The part of her life where Vincent had loved her seemed even more distant. She'd caught only glimpses of him since he'd deposited her in the kitchen like some stray head of livestock he'd rounded up. He didn't seem to recall she even existed, let alone that he'd ever cared about her. She should have been furious, but all she could manage was a constant hollow ache behind her breastbone.
She'd seen more of Ger than she had of Vincent—how could she not, when they lived in the same barracks and ate at the same table for every meal? But while she'd caught Ger giving her furtive looks now and then, they'd barely spoken more than she and Vincent had. She felt like he was a stranger all over again.
And yet there was an awareness between them now that hadn't been there the first time they'd met, an unspoken bond that both tied and separated them. Most disconcerting, though, was how much Kellen missed him, even though he was right there.
A cool touch on the small of Kellen's back was her first warning—too late to get out now. Across the room, the Crow sat perfectly still, like the hunk of metal it was. Even so, Kellen imagined it was staring at her.
"This will hurt," James said.
Wood tapped against wood, sudden and loud like a gunshot. Pain as sharp as a hundred needles sucked away Kellen's breath. That first strike flowed into the next, the unrelenting drill of an impatient knock, and with each beat the needles pricked again. Kellen struggled to catch her breath. At least she hadn't been able to scream.
So far. She clenched her jaw, sucked in a breath through her nose—one breath, two. Another. Kellen stared at the Crow without really seeing it.
James paused to reload ink onto the marking comb and then started again. Kellen gasped and had to start all over again with her breathing.
"It will hurt less if you relax." Annie's voice, not so uppity as usual, even kind, coming from near Kellen's head.
Another breath. Kellen drew air in as deep as she could, let it gather up the pain, blew it gently out again. Once more. Again.
The tapping of mallet on comb seemed less strident. Kellen tried to let it flow through her instead of fighting it, and it became the steady pulse of a heartbeat. The pain transformed from a sharp attack into a dull ache, no less unending but more bearable.
She could do this. It wouldn't be fun, but she could endure. The others had spoken with a dazed look in their eyes, as if this had been terribly difficult, but Kellen dared to begin to believe that they'd exaggerated.
Paper rustled near Kellen's head.
"I will begin now," Annie said. From the corner of her eye, Kellen saw James nod.
In a voice so quiet that Kellen could barely hear it over the strikes of mallet on marking comb, Annie began to chant. Kellen strained to hear the words, but quickly realized that they were not in a language she could understand. Single syllables with no emphasis or inflection flowed forth in Annie's careful voice, in as rhythmic a cadence as the tapping heartbeat.
Kellen closed her eyes. She started to think she might even be able to doze.
Behind Annie's voice, beneath it, something whispered.
Kellen's eyes flew open. Imagination, she tried to believe—but she'd been down that path once already. Nausea swept her.
At the edge of her vision, shadows swirled. She tried to turn her head, but they moved with her, a fading more than a darkness. A sense of pressure built inside Kellen's head, like something trying to get out.
Or to get in.
Panic flooded up from Kellen's chest and into her throat, trying to turn into a scream.
"You are the will," James said.
Kellen fought back the scream, but the pressure inside her head—outside it?—kept clawing at her. Her eyes prickled with tears.
Listen to me.
Annie's voice, but Kellen was sure Annie hadn't actually spoken. Her chanting had continued without pause, and Kellen still didn't understand the words.
The words. Annie's voice. Kellen couldn't understand them, but those words seemed to hang in the air, as if more important than any ordinary sound. They tugged at Kellen, and she listened to them, and they smoothed away the edge of panic that had gripped Kellen.
Something moved again, but this time it wasn't in Kellen's head. Across the room, the Crow lifted its jointed wings—not much, but enough that Kellen knew the motion was real.
Panic fled. Kellen's breathing steadied and slowed. She stared at the Crow. She thought she couldn't have looked away even if she'd tried.
Sound faded. The tapping of the wooden mallet on the marking comb's handle, Annie's voice, everything went away, until all Kellen heard was her own pulse keeping a rhythm not so different from the mallet's. The unnatural quiet seemed less like an absence of sound, though, and more like the sound of waiting, like a held breath, a nothing that was actually something.
The pressure in her head shifted. Kellen's mind seemed to stretch outward, away from herself and toward the Crow.
Into the Crow.
She saw herself, stomach down on the table with Annie near her head and James working over her back. She saw the mallet's rise and fall, saw the tin
y pricks of the comb's needles press into her skin, saw the equally tiny droplets of her blood well and mingle with black ink. Her jaw was slack and her eyes glazed.
Something indefinable shifted, a sensation like that of a door opening somewhere just out of her sight.
The Crow tilted its wings. Lowered them again—Kellen couldn't see them, but she knew. She knew.
Suddenly, with another sickening lurch in her mind, Kellen was looking through two pairs of eyes at once—through her own at the Crow, and through the Crow's back at herself.
Darkness whispered again, although it seemed more distant than before. Kellen decided it was a different sound from the watery gurgles she'd heard from Em's water ghosts—whatever that had really been. This was not the same thing at all—but it still scared her.
She thought she understood how to stand up to it now. I am the will, she told it. She spoke the words clearly in her head, with force. She meant them.
The darkness receded. The whispers faded.
Kellen's fear became near-giddy elation. Whatever the whispers were, they'd gone. She wasn't powerless against them.
She was the will.
Chapter 36
Ger sat alone in the dark—that seemed appropriate. Late morning light, dream-like in its brilliance, seeped through a few cracks between the boards high above the stone-walled lower floor, but the barn's vast space quickly devoured it. Toward the front of the barn, Colley and Petras were long asleep after coming in from night watch. A rumbling snore, like a sleeping beast, rumbled from Petras. That man made more noise in his sleep than he ever did when he was awake. The other men were off at whatever task Ellis had put them to, but Ger had been ordered to another day of rest.
Rest. As if. He'd finally given up on lying on his back and staring up into the blackness swimming between the rafters. Even now, sitting on his cot with his back against the wall, the emptiness around him felt bigger than it ought to.
It felt a lot less empty than it ought to, too. Ger understood that had to do with the Crow sitting on the ground at the foot of his bed. Part of him was eager to get to the part of things where he got to leave the barn with the other men, to learn to control the Crow and make it soar, to look through its eyes.
Part of him was flat out terrified.
The door at the far end of the barn opened, and Ger lifted his head. He heard the Crow click and rustle as it turned its head, too, a response to Ger's instinctive reaction. God, would he ever get used to that?
In the time it took her to open and close the door, he recognized Kellen's silhouette. His heart flip-flopped, partly because he was glad to know she'd gotten through her making, and partly because that was just the effect she had on him lately. Which was stupid, because while he might not be sure where he and Kellen stood with each other, Ger had seen enough hurt, longing looks directed from Kellen to Vincent to understand that whatever she felt for Ger, it was nothing at all like that. Maybe they weren't really even friends. Maybe the only thing they'd ever shared was a mutual fear and hatred for Burke Ripley.
But she'd fought for him. When Vincent had tried to make Kellen leave Philadelphia without Ger, she'd refused to go alone. She'd fought for Ger. That had to mean something. Didn't it?
Ger could no longer see Kellen clearly, once she shut the door, but her footsteps shuffled uncertainly up at the front of the barracks. Ger hauled himself off his cot and cautiously made his way up the aisle in the barn's center.
"Here," he said, keeping his voice low to avoid waking the sleeping men. "Come this way."
Once he was close enough that he could make out Kellen just ahead of him, Ger could also see the shadowy form of the Crow she carried in her arms. She carried it the same way Ger had carried his, the only way there was, really, with its tail tucked to one side and both arms wrapped around it. Like it was just a package. Like it was just any other over-sized metal bird with glowing eyes.
God in heaven, what had they gotten themselves into?
Ger reached out and put a hand under Kellen's elbow—only against the fabric of her uniform sleeve, but it was a touch, just the same. It was still a touch. Kellen flinched and gasped, and Ger wanted to pull her into his arms, like he had when she'd told him about Em. Like she'd let him.
Em. Ger wondered if she was still blaming herself for that. There was blame enough to go around, there, but he understood. He kept wanting to take the lion's share for himself.
"Sorry," Ger said. "It's just me."
Kellen hesitated a split second, then whispered, "Sorry. Thanks."
Ger offered a reassuring smile before he remembered she couldn't see it. "It's OK," he murmured. Then he guided her to her bunk, at the very back of the barracks, waited while she settled the cumbersome burden of her Crow onto the ground, and watched her sit gingerly on the edge of her cot.
And then that was that. He should have gone back to his own bunk and left her to rest.
"You'll be all right," he said, instead. "The dizziness, it passes pretty quickly."
"Yeah," she said, and Ger heard the tightness in her voice. "Thanks."
He smiled again—still stupid—turned around and took a step back toward the aisle.
"Ger?" Kellen said.
He stopped and turned toward her. She didn't say anything else for a few seconds.
"Don't go yet," she finally whispered.
His heart flip-flopped again—also still stupid. But he turned back and sat on the edge of the cot across from Kellen's, facing her.
There was enough light here that Ger could just make out the lacy lines of the wings etched into Kellen's face and neck, dark even in the shadowy interior of the barracks, disappearing into the collar of her shirt. She looked somewhere past Ger's shoulder, her eyes unfocused. The quiet stretched until Ger wondered if he should leave, after all.
He didn't want to leave. He sat in that quiet and listened to Kellen breathing, and for right then that was enough.
"I'm sorry," Kellen finally said. "For dragging you into this. For everything. For fighting you so hard to start with, when we should have been trying to stop Ripley sooner."
It should have felt good, knowing that Ripley was dead and would never hurt anyone again. It should have at least seemed like an accomplishment. Instead, it just seemed small and faraway and swallowed up by everything else that had happened—that was still happening.
"It's over and done with," Ger replied. "I made mistakes, too."
Kellen nodded. They sat another few seconds before she spoke again.
"I'm sorry about what I said to Vincent, too," she said. "About how pissed off I got when he thought you and me were... When he thought we were... You know."
Ger felt a quiet buzz in his ears, and his face warmed. He didn't think it had anything to do with Crows.
"We weren't." He shrugged, trying to brush it off as unimportant. "Aren't."
Kellen looked at him—right at him instead of somewhere off over his shoulder. The air Ger was trying to breathe suddenly felt warmer. Heavier.
"I was pissed because he thought I'd do... that. For money, I mean. Just so you'd help pay the room and board." She blinked, and her gaze strayed away from him again. "It wasn't about you."
"I don't understand what you see in him." Ger clamped his teeth together, but the words had already leaped out before he could catch them.
Kellen flinched. Ger waited for her to scowl and put him in his place.
"I'm not sure I do anymore, either," was what she finally said. Her eyes had that distant look again.
Ger thought his heart might have stopped. There was that question he'd been wanting to ask her ever since he'd pulled himself together enough to wonder it. He'd figured he might not get to ask it. Maybe now he could.
"You could've left alone with Vincent," Ger said. "Could've gotten out of Philadelphia and come here with him and never looked back. Why did it matter so much, that I come with you?"
Her eyes focused. She turned her face toward Ger's, as though to l
ook into his eyes, but she didn't quite meet his gaze.
"It just did," she said, and then added in a whisper, "Does."
The air around them grew warmer yet, and the buzzing in Ger's ears was no longer just in his ears. With dream-like slowness, he stood, shifted from the cot he'd been sitting on, and lowered himself beside Kellen on hers.
She didn't object. She didn't move away.
"If he'd called your bluff," Ger said, "if he'd really forced you to go without me or not go at all—"
"We'd be living in the streets of Philadelphia," Kellen said.
Something small and hopeful blossomed in Ger's chest.
"Which probably wouldn't have been such a bad thing," Kellen added. Her voice trembled, like she was afraid and trying not to show it.
"Or in the jail," Ger said. "Which would have been a pretty bad thing. If we hadn't already been tried and hanged."
Kellen huffed a quiet laugh. Then she lifted a hand toward Ger's face and touched her fingertips to his cheek, just beside his ear—gingerly. Her fingers slid lower, along his jaw. Ger realized she was tracing one of his Crow markings, but the knowledge did nothing to relax the tight warmth growing in his belly.
"Is that what my face looks like, too?" she asked.
He couldn't think about anything clearly, except that she was touching him.
"Yeah," he said. "Well, no. Your face looked better to start with, so there's that."
Kellen smiled—not vaguely, not hesitantly, not as if she was thinking about something or someone else or like she was about to yell at him. A real smile. It suddenly seemed like it would be the simplest, most natural thing in the world to lean in and kiss her.
So he did. Her mouth tasted like salt and honey and found dreams.
It lasted for the span of exactly three heartbeats. Then Kellen planted her palms against Ger's chest and shoved him away from her. The sudden lack of her lips on his jarred him.
A Stillness of the Sun (Crowmakers: Book 1): A Science Fiction Western Adventure Page 25