Chapter 34 #3
He had spent the better part of ten years making himself easy to hate.
Not by accident. By craft. In many cases, by preference.
Compulsion or no, he had lent his own hand to the work often enough.
Better to be hated cleanly than trusted poorly.
Better to be the blade men flinched from than the one they reached for and found wanting.
He had made peace with that long ago and slept just fine besides.
But there was something in the uncomplicated generosity of a man who had every reason not to bother, and had bothered anyway, that Ivan found he had no ready response to.
Only the faint, unpleasant suspicion that he owed a debt he hadn’t asked for and didn’t know how to repay.
“We have much to do, old friend,” Dominic said, and squeezed Godfrey’s shoulder once more.
The Druid’s throat worked. His gaze dropped to his wrists—to the livid grooves the irons had left behind, red and raw as if the metal still bit there—then lifted again. When he spoke, the name scarcely made it past his lips.
“Fenlin?”
Dominic held his gaze for a moment. “We got him out,” he said at last. “He lies in Eldham now, beneath the willows where the earth stays soft. We gave him the proper rites. Salt and cedar. The old words.” A pause. “Your husband did not go unmourned.”
The sound Godfrey made was scarcely a sound at all.
It seemed to tear out of him, shoulders drawing up as though he had been struck.
It came without dignity, as true grief always did—sudden and total, racking through him in harsh, broken sobs.
Dominic caught him before the worst of it could fold him to the floor, one arm wrapping broad and sure across his back, pulling Godfrey against his chest. He bent his head and said something into Godfrey’s hair, too low for Ivan to catch.
Ivan did not intrude. He looked away instead, granting the man what little privacy the room could afford, and fixed his gaze on the stone floor, on the pale seams between the slabs, on a dark knot of old mineral veining that ran through one of them like dried blood.
And as he stared at the floor, the memories began to rise.
The two of them—Godfrey and Fenlin—at Osin’s court.
Passing in corridors, exchanging dispatches, speaking in the low, unhurried tones of men who had worked alongside each other long enough for words to be mostly unnecessary.
Ivan had seen them a hundred times beneath candlelight and banners and all the painted rot of that court and seen nothing—not the work they were doing with the Script Keepers, not that they had gone home to the same bed.
He had been thorough. He had noticed everything that mattered.
He had not noticed this.
Godfrey pulled back after a while, pressing the back of his wrist to his face. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you for bringing him home.”
“Always.” Dominic kept a hand on his arm.
Godfrey nodded. Pressed his lips together. Nodded again.
Dominic’s eyes found Ivan across the room, and his expression shifted into something more careful. “You’re awake.”
“I am,” Ivan said.
Dominic looked to Bryn. She obliged without being asked—“Three cracked ribs,” she said.
The shoulder was taking to treatment better than expected and ought to heal clean.
Bruising along the left side deep enough to keep him cursing for a sennight.
No internal bleeding that she could find, though she allowed she had not found everything.
The darkness beneath his skin—she said it differently, more carefully—was present but unpredictable, and she wanted him still for another two days before she made any assessments about moving.
“And him,” Dominic said, nodding toward the Sídhe.
Bryn’s mouth tightened at the corners. “Unchanged. No wounds, no fever. Whatever is happening to him is somewhere I can’t reach.” She paused. “If he doesn’t wake in the next day, we’ll need to think carefully about how we move him through the ridge.”
“Can we rift through the mountains?” Ivan asked.
No one answered immediately.
The fire crackled softly. Wind pressed at the stone somewhere beyond the walls. At the question, Dominic’s mouth thinned.
“No,” he said. “The wards won’t permit it.”
Ivan let that sit where it fell. He said nothing more. He was near certain he had known as much already, though the herbs Bryn had forced down his throat earlier had left several of his better certainties harder to locate.
Above him, Dominic and Bryn exchanged a look.
A long one.
Bryn crossed the room and held out a cup.
Ivan looked at it. Looked back at her.
“Drink,” she said.
He considered refusing on principle. Then his ribs shifted when he breathed, and principle seemed a thin hill to die on. He took the cup, swallowed, and regretted it at once. The draught moved warm and slow through his veins, and he looked up at her with what he intended to be a withering stare.
“Rest, Hunter.” Bryn stooped for her satchel and slung it over one shoulder.
“The ridge will still be cold, and Yoni will still want you dead when you wake.” At the doorway, she glanced back, and something touched the corner of her mouth—too brief and too mean to be called a smile.
“The least you can do is be unconscious for it.”
The fire swam and blurred.
Ivan leaned back against the stone and let his head rest there. His eyes were already making their case, and unlike his ribs, this was an argument he was not going to win.
He closed them.