Chapter Twenty-Two. Rory
Rory
“I can’t believe it’s over,” Elliott said, half slumped on the table. “I feel like I can actually feel my brain leaking out of my ears.”
Maggie patted his head absently as Noah—the only one of them old enough to order at the bar—placed a pitcher of beer on the table.
Rory sat back in the booth, still unsure of his place amid their sprawling limbs.
He had spent the better part of this visit studying next to them, sharing the snacks they sneaked in and taking turns quizzing them with flashcards.
And now it was the last night of his visit, and the exam was all over, and Rory didn’t know what any of that meant, if it meant anything at all.
Was he even going to see them again after he went home the next day?
Noah groaned. “I can’t believe I’m right back to this if I don’t get at least seven hundred and twenty.”
“You can always ditch prelaw and join me at engineering.” Elliott waggled his eyebrows. Noah threw a chip at him.
The word engineering made Rory’s spine straighten. “You’re doing engineering?”
“Well, I have to get in first,” Elliott said, fishing the chip from his jean jacket. “It’s not as bad as prelaw, but I still need to score pretty high. But yeah, that’s what Hanna and I are aiming for.”
“I’m still undecided.” Maggie leaned forward to snag the pitcher. “I want to shop around a bit before declaring, though I’ll probably end up in the language track. Or chemistry.”
Rory looked down at the mug in his hands. Up to now, he had always thought of the university as a nebulous thing, a tangle of hallways and strangely named buildings. At best, something library-adjacent; at worst, a void into which sisters disappeared. Not a concrete future, precise and named.
Hanna stretched, her shoulders knocking against Rory’s. “Thanks again for helping us study, Rory.”
“Sure, no problem,” Rory said, the ache in his chest growing. “I’ll miss you guys at the library.” Two-thirds of the way through his first-ever beer, Rory found himself inadvertently honest. The library was going to be so quiet without them. The evenings in the city so long.
“You’re not getting rid of us so fast.” Maggie chuckled.
“Even assuming none of us have to take the exam again”—Noah groaned loudly—“we’ll be right back in the library once the semester starts.
And until then, you’ll just have to meet us here.
” She patted the booth. “If anything, you’ll see even more of us when you come, now that we don’t have to spend the whole afternoon studying. ”
“Yeah,” Elliott echoed. “We’ve been curious about you for way too long to let you disappear.”
“What? Really?” Rory asked, startled. “Why?”
“Let’s see.” Elliott leaned forward. “You appear out of nowhere for days on end, like you don’t have school or chores or something, reading really advanced stuff and having long conversations with the librarians.
All to study Blodeuwedds, of all things.
For fun, since you seem to have zero interest in going to the university.
C’mon, we were all dying to know what your deal is. ”
“Yeah,” Noah contributed. “Maggie and Hanna were dying for an excuse to—”
“To what?” Maggie cut him off.
“To be nosy,” Noah answered.
“About Rory,” Elliott supplied.
“Oh, that,” Maggie said offhandedly. “Yeah, we were.”
Hanna blushed.
Rory could feel his cheeks heating, too, though he couldn’t tell why. “I, um, I’m homeschooled, sort of. I have a tutor. So I can pretty much do what I want?”
Noah pinned him with an unimpressed look but seemed to have decided against pressing further. Maggie, on the other hand, had no such qualms. “But why do you want to study Blodeuwedds?” she pushed on, undeterred.
“Maggie!” Hanna admonished quietly.
“What? We all want to know.”
“I—” Rory gulped. “I—” Know a Blodeuwedd. Have a Blodeuwedd. Am best friends with a Blodeuwedd. He had no idea how to talk about Daye. How to explain their relationship in a way they’d understand.
It should have been easy. It would have been easy before he came to the city. Before he saw the shelves upon shelves of construction theory, where Blodeuwedd-focused books were sandwiched between books about the construction of cranes and fish-farm operators.
Rory had learned long ago to shrug off Wynne’s dismissal of Daye.
And it had always been easy to ignore Mrs. Matthews’s constant tutting over Daye, since she seemed equally disapproving of Rory himself, along with anything else that reminded her of the city, the university, or most other things, really.
But Mrs. Finnebone’s words—the casual way she compared Blodeuwedds to butterflies, the way she called them a passion, of all things, like collecting stamps—were harder to shake.
What if Elliott and Hanna, who wanted to study construction, viewed Daye the same way? What if they all did?
“I—” He’d just say it. How bad could it be? They wouldn’t be like Wynne, he knew they wouldn’t. “My best friend is a Blodeuwedd.”
A stunned silence followed.
“What?” Elliott exclaimed.
“That’s . .” Maggie trailed off.
Noah frowned, shaking his head in disbelief.
Rory started throwing words at them to fill up the silence.
“My sister built her when I was eight so that I’d stop bugging her to play with me.
She was … I guess she was about our age.
And our parents, they’re not … they were never around much, so it was basically just the two of us, my sister and I.
So, she, um, built Daye. That’s her name, that is. My friend’s.”
They kept staring at him. He could feel his cheeks reddening.
“Anyway,” Rory continued, “since my sister moved out to go to the university, she hasn’t been the most reliable at arriving back home to do the …
stuff Daye needs to survive, so last year, I took over.
And at first I was just trying to figure out what the hell I was doing.
But lately I’ve been trying to find ways to make it so she won’t fall apart at the end of each season.
So that even if something happened, and I couldn’t do the transition, she’d still be all right. ”
“So, just to make sure I got it right,” Noah said. “Your sister built you a Blodeuwedd?” He placed his mug back on the table, the click of glass meeting wood like a punctuation mark. “Not a pet construct, or a construct that plays fetch, but a living doll to play with?”
Rory flinched. “I don’t think she actually thought it through at the time.
She all but said as much later. And I honestly don’t think she actually believed it was going to work, not the way it did.
But Daye isn’t a living doll.” He looked Noah in the eye.
“And I never thought of her that way, not once. You wouldn’t, either, if you met her.
She’s a person. She’s just like us, only she’s made out of different things and needs different things to survive.
So, while I know that what my sister did was”—he groped for the right way to say it and came up empty—“complicated, I can’t regret it, not for a moment. Because Daye’s my best friend.”
“None of us ever saw a Blodeuwedd,” Elliott offered. “That’s hedge stuff. You hardly ever see it in the city.”
“I always thought they were illegal.” Noah’s mouth worked like he was tasting and discarding other, harsher words.
“No! Um, not really.” Rory faltered. “It’s just, um, sort of … frowned on, at least it is where I’m from. But there are no laws about it.”
Noah looked startled. “No laws?”
“Um, no. Well, I guess all the usual regulations for constructs apply to them, but nothing specific to Blodeuwedds. I’m not sure why. I think it’s because they survive only a few months without transition, which is basically rebuilding them? And since building them is so tricky?”
“Tricky?” Elliott snorted. “They don’t even teach it when you take engineering, not unless you go into advanced studies. How the hell did your sister make her?”
“Luck mostly, is my guess.” Rory smiled wryly. “Also, being homeschooled in the middle of nowhere meant she had a lot of time to waste. Me, too, I suppose, seeing what I’m here for.”
“I think that’s really nice of you,” Hanna said, her hand on Rory’s forearm. “To try and take care of her like that.”
Rory smiled gratefully back.
“What is she like?” Maggie asked, hushed.
“She’s Daye.” Rory shrugged. “She’s …” He had no words to encompass her.
She’s beautiful, he thought. So beautiful.
Too beautiful for comfort. “She’s my best friend,” he offered instead, lamely.
“She’s kind. And fun. She’s always restless during the winter.
She’s good at running and climbing and everything like that.
Bunnies keep following her around, and neither of us has a clue why. ”
Elliott leaned forward, an eager glint in his eyes. “How was it to actually build a Blodeuwedd? Was it as crazy complex as they say?”
“Terrifying.” Rory gave a weak smile. “Crazy complex is the right way to describe it. I didn’t do the initial weaving, but the seasonal maintenance stuff is pretty extensive.
Last autumn transition, Daye asked me to add four inches of height, which was …
yeah.” He shuddered. Elliott’s eyes grew round with wonder, even as his mouth curled with sympathy.
“But I built some animal constructs for practice,” Rory continued. “Mostly birds and rabbits. It was pretty interesting and not as hard, plus on a much smaller scale. I could show you,” he added hesitantly, “if you’d like.”
Elliott grinned and rubbed his hands together. “I knew I liked you for a reason.” He pulled over a few napkins and fished a pen out of his bag. “So, what do I need to know?”
And it was suddenly so normal, to outline the process on a couple of smudged, greasy napkins.
To describe to Maggie the way Daye changed from winter to spring.
To soak up Hanna’s conviction that what he was doing in the library was a good thing.
Noble, even. Even Noah seemed to unbend just a little.
Enough to throw a couple of dry remarks and tease Elliott’s wide-eyed wonder and Maggie’s unabashed prying.
They all got too drunk on cheap beer, and he stumbled to his sister’s apartment in that indefinable stretch between late evening and late night, grinning.