Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Ethram has never tended wounds before, but he has watched others tend to his.
He has some idea of what to do. He cuts the ruined shirt away, and tips warm kettle-water into a chipped bowl.
With a careful touch, he washes the blood from the edges of the wound.
It’s deep, more of a puncture than a cut, as if he’d been caught by a spear or an arrow. Or a fang.
He is gentle, but perhaps his efforts are wasted. The man shows no sign of waking.
When he is done, the wounds and scrapes packed with heal-all balm, he puts a cushion beneath the stranger’s head and a blanket over his bare chest. He can do nothing more—the man is too large to move, and at least the stone tiles will stay warm this close to the hearth.
The last thing he does is remove the knives from the kitchen and put them under his bed before he, too, goes to sleep.
Useless, he knows. Even injured, that man could easily overpower him unarmed.
The storm is still howling when he wakes in the morning, and the light shifts soft and grey through his room. He’d like to stay there a while and listen to the rain. Instead, he throws a robe over his nightshirt, steels his aching shoulders, and heads to the kitchen.
The man is sitting by the hearth. The blanket is draped around his shoulders. He is watching the flames, and he does not turn when Ethram comes in.
The fire is healthy and bright, which means his guest must have gone out in the early morning to fetch more wood from the wood store. Ethram hadn’t heard a thing. He’s not sure how he feels about that.
“Good morning.” He fills the kettle and places it on a pothook, pushing it back over the heat.
It’s old-fashioned, but he’s never quite gotten around to getting a wood stove put in.
Besides, this is how he’d learned to do such things back in his village.
It’s a familiar comfort in a very different life.
“Yes,” says the man. It’s a rasp of a sound, a voice long out of use. “I suppose it is.”
They don’t talk as Ethram slices the last currant buns from the market and puts them in the toasting rack. When the sweet crisp of toasted bread fills the air, and Ethram unhooks the rack to spill the buns onto a pair of plates, the man shifts to make room by the fire.
His nails are not claws today. His face is softer, kinder. Ethram is not fooled. He felt the aether in his scars. He smelled the aether in the blood. He has made a life from asking questions others would rather leave lying dormant. Why change his habits now?
He sits, balancing his plate on his knee. “So. What are you?”
The man goes as still as a hunting mountain cat. He looks at Ethram, right in his eyes, and Ethram sees no recognition there.
“Lost,” says the man. There is a wry twist to his voice.
“Clearly.” Ethram tips his head. “And your name?”
Another pause. Then, no answer.
He’s taller than Ethram, even sitting. The hearth light sets his hair aglow, throws his face into carven relief, but he doesn’t look like anything so solid as stone.
He’s a reflection in still water, clear and cool and just a touch unreal.
His brow is furrowed, though, as if Ethram is troubling him.
“Have I met you before?” he asks after a long moment.
Ethram nods. “I fear so. Do you remember me?”
“No.” The man’s gaze is unblinking. “But you feel familiar in a way that almost nothing does anymore.”
Ethram lifts his arm, pulls his jumper sleeve back to reveal the scars curled around his wrist. The mark of a hand, gripping him tight, a hand large enough that the mark reaches halfway up his forearm. Five sharp divots where the claws cut in.
The man’s hand flexes, as if in memory.
The aether in the surrounding air is so thick that Ethram’s scars have been screaming like they’re freshly burning since he entered the kitchen. It’s worse now that his skin is bare to the air.
“You seem familiar to me, also,” Ethram says. “Though if that is true, the last time we met, I almost died.”
The man raises his hand, though he does not touch Ethram. His hand, while large, is not the size nor the shape of Ethram’s scars. “That must have been a monstrous creature,” he says, though there is no awe in his voice. There is hardly any inflection at all.
“I didn’t see it clearly,” Ethram says. “And I have spent half a decade convincing myself I saw nothing but a night-terror summoned from my own fears.”
“Night-terrors do not leave scars.” His guest takes a deep breath and the aether-pressure fades. He looks desperately weary, as if this conversation is sapping his strength. “I do not know who I am. Or what I am. I did not come to your door by chance, though.”
Ethram had feared so. He is not superstitious, as a rule, but he knows a pattern when he sees it. He and this man are tied together by that one fateful trip into the archives years ago, though he cannot begin to understand how. “Why, then?”
An elegant frown ripples across his face. “I thought I heard someone calling my name, sighing it. I followed the echoes.”
“I did not call you.” He frowns. “I don’t know your name.”
“You do. You must. I would not be here if you did not.”
Ethram fights back a chill. “Then I do not remember it.”
“Alas,” says the man with a flicker of a wry smile. “Neither do I.”
Pale hair. Pale eyes. Nails like claws. The memories stir in his mind, trying to heave up from under the stones that bury them.
Does he know a name? Did he summon something from the darkness, that day in the archives? Esk, he decides, has too many cursed mysteries and not enough books to explain them.
He stands, intending to make tea. “If you wish for a bath, the washroom is out the back. You may stay until the storm is over. Then you will leave.” He pulls his sleeve down. He doesn’t miss the way the man tracks the movement, watches those scars disappear.
“I will not hurt you,” the man says. He does not seem upset. He does not seem angry. He does not seem anything at all.
Not that Ethram disbelieves him, because he doesn’t, really.
He only knows that this quiet, possessed person is not the same wild creature that tumbled through his door last night, and neither of them are truly the monster he found in the dark of the archive.
But if they are all the one and same, if they are linked, then he does not wish to know what changes one to the other.
He’s read tales of the creatures that slink through the archipelago still. Ancient remnants, summoned creatures, storm-fed beasts. He never expected to meet one in Esk. He had chosen Esk because Esk is protected. Esk is safe.
Or at least, he had thought it would be.
His scars ache at the memory of those painful months of recovery after his injury, of the way his body had hollowed out under the aether sloughing through him.
The thing he had met in the archives had not attacked him, not truly.
It had merely reached for him, and in reaching for him, it had changed him entirely.
He owes this man nothing. And yet, he can’t turn him away.
Being unable to turn away has gotten him into every mess he’s ever been in, and still he doesn’t learn.
Followed the echoes, he had said. How strange. If there is one thing Ethram remembers about the dark of the archives, it is that it had been full of eerie, haunting echoes.
The water sighs into the teapot, and with the faint steam of unfurling tea leaves, a memory unlatches from the dark. A breath of a name in a child’s voice. An echo of it in his own.
It’s gone before he can grasp it, but he catches the taste of it on his tongue, and it leaves him clutching the teapot like a mooring rope.
The man is right. Ethram knows his name, somehow.
He can’t remember it, but he knows he knows it.
He grasps at a fragment of it before it flees his mind entirely.
“Ky,” he says, and the man’s eyes widen. A bloom of pale storm light flickers through the grey. Ethram wrenches his gaze away, rescuing the teapot from tipping. He blinks furiously, clearing his head. “I think I remember that much.”
“Ky, then,” Ky says, a curl of a smile appearing on that grave mouth. “Yes. That feels right. Now, will you give me yours?”
“Ethram Hart.”
It is unwise. He knows as soon as he says it, because he watches those lips shape his name and he doesn’t hear it so much as he feels it, right through him, a tug pulling him in.
His arm aches right to the bone.