12. Castor
Castor
The hearing is in six days and Wes goes to it like a man going to war, and I cannot go with him, because I am stone in the daylight, and that is the cruelest thing the binding has ever done to me.
He stands in the nave at dusk and tells me about it, the hire, no, not hire, he keeps catching the word and putting it down, the fight, his fight, our fight.
Marisol has filed the deed of guardianship.
The developer’s lawyers have filed against it.
There’s a magistrate who’ll decide whether a lay caretaker’s right from the fourteenth century still runs against a modern freehold, and whether, if it does, a man named Wes Calder can claim it, and whether claiming it keeps St. Wracken’s “holy” in the eyes of an old law that the diocese signed away.
“It’s thin,” he admits. He’s pacing the nest of dust sheets, too wired to be still.
“Marisol says it’s the thinnest thing she’s ever filed.
But it’s filed. The sale’s frozen till the magistrate rules.
Six days. And if I win…” He stops, and looks up at me, and the hope on his face is a terrible, beautiful thing.
“If I win, I stay. I become the keeper. I hold this building holy by my own right, separate from the diocese, and the binding has a wall to anchor to, and you…”
“And I live,” I say.
“And you live.”
I cross to him and I gather him up. He’s been across the river all day fighting magistrates and lawyers for the life of a thing on a gutter, and he’s exhausted, and he’s brave, and he’s mine, and the want in me tonight is different from the other nights.
It’s not the new-body wonder of the first nights or the careful learning of the middle ones.
It’s deeper and rougher and it has the dawn in it, the real dawn, the count, six days, and I think he feels it too, because when I gather him up he comes against me hard and grabs two fistfuls of the heat of me and says, into my chest:
“I don’t want slow tonight. I don’t want careful. I want you to take me like you mean to keep me.”
The sound in my chest drops to the bottom of the world.
“I do mean to keep you,” I say.
“Then show me.”
And I do. I have learned, these nights, the difference between the carefulness that is fear and the carefulness that is love, and tonight I keep only the second kind and let the first kind go.
I take him up off the floor, he’s small, he’s nothing in my arms, I can hold the whole of him against me with one arm and brace us with my wings, and I press him against the cold pier of the crossing, his back to the old stone, and I cage him there between the rock and the heat of me, and the stone is cold at his back and I am sun-hot at his front and he cries out at the difference, the cold and the hot, the wall and me.
“Like this,” I say against his throat. “Against the wall I’m sworn to. With you the thing that keeps it holy. There’s no better place in the world for me to have you.”
I open him fast tonight, the oil and my careful fingers, and he’s loose and ready from the nights before and he’s begging before I’m done, his legs come up around as much of me as they can reach, his arms locked around my neck, and I take him against the pier with the whole of my held strength, deep and hard, and the carefulness is all in the claws held off and curled into my own palms and the wings bracing us so the stone never bruises him, and none of it is in the way I move, which is exactly the way he asked for, like I mean to keep him, like the dawn is coming and I will spend every minute I have left buried in the one thing that ever wanted me.
He goes over against the pier with my name ringing up the lantern tower, and I follow him with my wings crushed around us both and my mouth at his throat and three hundred years pouring out of me into the only home I’ve ever had that wasn’t made of stone.
And after, holding him against the cooling pier, his heart slamming against my chest, I let myself say the thing.
“I love you,” I say. It comes out gravel and wreckage. “I don’t know if a thing like me is allowed to. I don’t care. I love you. Three hundred years and the first thing I ever felt that wasn’t duty, and it’s you, and it’s that.”
He goes still against me. Then his hand comes up to my horn, the way it does, the keeping way.
“You’re allowed,” he says, fierce, wet. “You’re allowed everything. And I love you too, you great stone idiot, which is why I’m going to win that hearing if I have to do it with my teeth. Six days. Hold on six more days.”
“I’ll hold,” I say, into his hair. “Holding’s the only thing I know how to do.”
And the dawn, when it comes, comes harder than ever, the stone catching at my wings before I’m half folded, a grip that scares me, and I make it to the post with seconds to spare, and as the grey takes me I fix the feel of him against the pier into the stone, to carry through the long bright day, and I think: six days.
Hold the wall. Hold on. He’s coming back at dusk and he’s fighting for your life and you have, after three hundred years, something to lose.