Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
He must go back to the university eventually. He’s been avoiding it because the Season has been in full swing and the less Ethram sees of dinner parties and evening soirees, the better.
But not even Ethram can avoid his responsibilities forever.
After such a quiet winter, pulling on his town clothes feels like pulling on a ghost of himself.
He trims his hair, shakes out his Luminary robes, and prepares himself for whatever trouble his colleagues will bring him.
Ky stirs in bed as the wardrobe creaks, and by the time Ethram has finished fastening the robe around his shoulders, Ky is awake and watching.
“I’ll be out today,” Ethram says, not looking at him. Ky in the morning is always a touch more radiant, as if he hasn’t yet gathered in all the unspooling otherness of him. Morning Ky is dangerous to Ethram’s weakening heart. “I’ll be late, probably.”
“Very well,” says Ky. “I’ll be here.”
Ethram almost smiles, but catches it in time. “Have a fine day,” he says, and hastens himself along.
Esk is flush with spring green, the trees along the river path unfurling like festival banners.
The air is sweet, bringing the perfume of blossoms and fresh-baked bread.
It would be enough to tip Ethram into a good mood, except there’s a tight prickling under his skin that just won’t cease. It’s getting worse each day.
It gets worse each time he wakes, the fading imprints of his dreams leaving flush-necked shame behind. Ky, it seems, will end up invading all of Ethram’s spaces, even the darkness and privacy of his sleeping thoughts.
Ky is not a mortal man, he reminds himself. He is something other, and he will not be Ethram’s lover. He may not even have an interest in such things. And even if he did, who is to say he’d find Ethram desirable? And more than all that, Ky will not stay.
He is not Ethram’s, and he will not stay.
In his office, the stack of mail is frustratingly thick.
He sorts it. There are a few reasonable requests from fellow scholars, and he responds to them.
There are a lot of unreasonable ones, which go straight to the bin.
There is a reminder for an important university event, but the date is already past, so Ethram consigns it to the bin, too.
Last, there is a letter from Sabine Casca of the Gardens, requesting that Ethram bring in some of the research he had conducted for her in the past, when he can find the time to do so. He checks the date it was written. A week ago.
There are many powerful people in Esk that Ethram will ignore, but Sabine Casca is not one of them.
Thankfully, he keeps folders of copied notes on his office shelves.
His original works are at home in his parlour, because he’d never trust the university with originals of anything.
His Gardens work is in a thick folder, representing a good two years of research.
It is all good work, thorough and precise, but it had been little help to her in the end.
Still, if she has a use for it now, he won’t stand in her way.
He takes a pleasant walk across town to the Sacred Gardens, where he’s ushered in to see Madam Casca at Casca Manor without delay.
“Ethram,” Sabine says, getting to her feet. Her smile is small but genuine as she greets him.
He really should have expected the kiss that follows. She’s always been generous with such things.
“It’s been a while, Sabine,” he says, tamping down another unexpected smile. “It is good to see you looking no less beautiful than you ever were.”
She is late in her thirties, and stunning. Her dark hair is twisted back with a delicate rose-shaped clip, and a waterfall of amber beads winds around her neck. It is easy to see why she is one of the town’s notable beauties.
Her eyes crease at the edges, the way they do when she is teasing. “It would be less long if you visited from time to time. You should take to the waters every season at the very least, with your injuries.”
“I do. The remedial baths do very well for me.”
She draws back, frowning. “Why, Ethram? When the pools here are open to you? You did not cease to be one of the Gardens’ creatures just because you left us.”
Ethram would deny with great fervour that he is a creature of the Gardens if he thought it would do any good. The nightingales at the Gardens are secretly devout worshippers of the old ways, and he would be an awful acolyte. He has no reverence for the gods and wants very little to do with them.
Besides, the remedial baths are practical and have no fuss. And often the attendants will give him a spot behind the private screens where he needn’t see another soul.
So he just smiles and sits himself down on the chair she gestures at. “I brought the research. Here, you may keep this copy. There is little new there, I’m afraid. I had hoped something might have worked by now.”
“You and I both,” says Sabine gently. “There is no need for your apologies. You’ve worked as hard as I on this.”
“Has something come to light?”
“I’m afraid not. I only wanted to look over it again. The waters are still weakening every year, Ethram, and I don’t wish for my son to inherit a dying Garden.”
The sacred healing springs are Sabine’s domain, her family’s charge.
As long as Esk has stood, a Casca has kept court at the Gardens and guarded the springs inside it.
Esk, having turned much of its religion to festivity and splendour, sees the Gardens as the pinnacle of decadence and social heights.
But for those who live within its walls, the nightingales who occupy the spaces behind and between the excesses of the Season, the Gardens are still a sacred place devoted to the mysterious Lord of the Waters.
Ethram had lived at the Gardens in the wake of his injuries, the aether damage so severe that there was nowhere else he could stand to be.
He remembers all the little rituals the nightingales kept, and the parts of the Gardens forbidden to all but the inner circle of initiates.
He’d snooped through them, of course, but found nothing more than the occasional stone statue that might have been man or beast but was long since worn down into an unrecognisable shape.
In return for her protection and care, he had spent the following years after he’d returned to academia researching the history of the Gardens, hoping to help her uncover the source of the healing springs’ malaise.
He found little. Some half-forgotten rituals in parts, but nothing in full. Scraps, broken pieces of history, and almost nothing about the Lord of the Waters, the mysterious god-figure that the Casca family has always worshipped.
Ethram may be the only person in Esk outside the Casca family who knows the truth—the springs are fading. Ethram is sure the secret to their survival is hidden somewhere in the past, but so much of Esk’s past is cloaked in secrecy. The more he finds, the more he forgets.
Any scholar spending any amount of time in Esk’s archives stumbles across Esk’s strange memory magic.
He has read books that have slipped from his memory as soon as the pages are closed.
Walked through rooms he has never found again.
Learned a name and forgotten it, leaving only an empty space in his thoughts.
Esk is a town of forgetting. As a historian, Ethram takes it personally.
“Do you know if your healing waters work on ailments of memory?”
Sabine tips her head. “Your own?”
He shakes his head. “A friend.”
“I’m afraid I have never seen evidence of it. But you are welcome to bring him to try taking the waters, of course.”
Ethram thinks of taking Ky, all his height and all his flowing hair, to the bathing pools, and winces. He’d cause a stir, that’s for sure. “Perhaps,” he says. “And Sabine...” He trails off, unsure how to voice his question.
“Yes?”
“Have you ever come across a person who seems to be…more than human?”
She is silent for a long moment. Her nails rap an even pattern against the arm of her chair. “Once or twice in my career,” she says after a long moment. “And we have both met the heirs, of course. Why?”
“No particular reason. It’s only hard to find any evidence of it in any book.”
“I imagine such things are kept secret, but they are not exactly uncommon. Even Casca blood has some feyness to it, as faded as it is.”
Ethram has no such claim in his blood. He is a plain island-born goatherd, no matter how much gold is sewn into his robes. “I see,” he says, then falls to silence.
“Ethram?” Sabine says, her voice gentle.
He sighs. “Apologies,” he says. “I’m afraid I’m distracted.”
Sabine’s green eyes are as pretty as aetherglass when she smiles. “Come, Ethram. You look like you’ve spent a week on an airship. We’ll bathe before I send you home. Gods know, you need it.”