Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Spring grows on. The garden is bare earth, and then it is not.
The bulbs become green spears, and then soft blooms of colour.
There are flowers along his fence, dog-rose and fragrant stock, and out the back, across from the laundry, Ky has made a kitchen garden that is already awash with tangling herbs.
Ethram ignores the Luminary board’s convening, having no interest in finding proteges to mentor, but he starts going to the university at least once a week.
He writes a letter to a colleague, a researcher of old myths, with vague questions about ancient bloodlines and creatures with claws and moonlight hair.
He flips through his own copy of the Gardens’ work and thinks of Ky lingering on the taste of the springs on Ethram’s skin.
The Gardens worship an ancient nameless god.
Ky has a missing past, and feels like the springs, and remembers the taste of the waters.
It is not a difficult connection to make.
But Ky is not thousands of years old, and for all he is soaked in aether, he is still a creature of flesh and blood.
Ethram is prepared to uncover a magical heritage for Ky.
Prepared to find some beast-blooded lineage or cursed ancestor.
He’s not superstitious, but he believes in the ancient occult.
A god’s descendant, though? Ethram isn’t ready to unpick the tangle of that, and so he puts the research aside.
Instead, he concentrates on the work that Ky’s arrival last winter had disrupted.
He’d like at least one more band of embroidery on his robes before the year is out, no matter what else is happening in his life.
And what is happening is still a mystery.
Ky continues to sleep in his bed and work on his cottage. He never mentions leaving, but the risk of it still drifts along in his wake.
He fixes the pantry door. “That should hold a few years more,” he says.
Ethram can’t meet his gaze, because he is hit by the thought of a day, years from now, when the door creaks again and Ky is not there to fix it. He is struck by how much he dislikes it.
“Just a makeshift fix then?” Ethram says instead, turning back to his book. “I see you’re feeling lazy today.”
Ky laughs, and Ethram pretends to ignore him.
Hopes Ky does not notice how the back of his neck goes hot and aching.
He pretends a lot lately—pretends he does not breathe in Ky’s scent in the middle of the night, pretends he does not look when Ky is brushing out his long hair.
Pretends he is still searching for Ky’s missing name as he had promised to.
He’s sure he calls his name in his dreams, wakes with the taste of it on his tongue. Can almost remember the shape of it. But when he tries to summon it into speech, it flees as if it was never there.
He’s grateful for it. If he gives Ky his name, he fears Ky will leave.
As if he can make up for his guilt over his persistent and undaunted longings, Ethram does other things for Ky.
He answers whatever odd questions Ky asks—about his childhood, about his work, about the foods he likes and the ones he does not.
When he sees Ky watching a woman knit at the markets, he buys a set of needles and an armful of soft yarn skeins and leaves it all sitting on the armchair.
That afternoon, he settles against the wall by the window to read, but he doesn’t get more than a page into his book before he’s distracted by the furrow in Ky’s brow as he twists the yarn around the needles.
It doesn’t take him long to figure out the knack, and he’s mastered the clicking rhythm of the needles in no time.
Ethram leans back against the wall, then decides to stretch out on the floor instead.
He’s lying in the day's last light, the faint glow fading to an evening smoulder, but he’s not so upset about it.
It’s getting warmer, spring rolling into summer, and it’s not such a hardship to be in the sunlight by the window.
And from this angle, it is harder to be caught up over the sight of Ky’s forearms. He reads until he realises the sound of knitting has stopped.
Ky is staring. Ethram lowers his book, stares back. Ky smiles.
Ethram needs to stop that smile, so he looks back at his book. “There’s a whole treatise in here of bloodlines stemming from mythic creatures and gods. It’s fascinating. Did you know the Vyes of the Hellebore are thought to be one such family?”
“I haven’t a clue who the Vyes of the Hellebore are.”
“The Holloways?”
“Nor them.”
“Hm.” Ethram flicks a page, and still doesn’t dare look up. “I think you must come from Esk, though.”
There is a long silence. “That is a fair assumption.”
“There is a lot of early Eskan history that has been lost. It is not such a hard stretch to think some of that might have explained you. And I can’t assume a human timescale to your life, I suppose.
You look no younger than thirty and no older than forty, but you could be twice that or more, I suppose.
And you are full of aether, all the way through.
If you were a stormbeast, you’d fade. But you only ever get stronger, so you must be gathering it from somewhere.
We’re in Esk, so I can only imagine that the source is the Well. ”
Again, silence. Then, “Stronger. How can you tell?”
Ethram waves his arm in the air. His sleeves are rolled back, so the scar is clear. “I’m never not aware of you. I’m more sensitive to aether since I got this, and apparently, I am sensitive to you.”
“You still believe it was I who injured you.”
Ethram makes the same unimpressed noise he uses on the occasional student. “If not you, then something remarkably similar to you. Can you tell me with certainty that it wasn’t?”
“No. I do not remember it, but I remember little of anything.” He sets aside his knitting and crosses the room.
There is a moment before he folds to sit, when Ethram is on his back, looking up, and Ky is over him, so impossibly tall.
So very far above him. Then Ky kneels, and he’s attainable once more.
The moment is brief, but it leaves Ethram’s thoughts aching.
“I dislike the thought of having hurt you.” He takes Ethram’s arm, pushes the sleeve back. Ethram watches, breath caught, as Ky carefully lays his hand around the marks.
It is not an exact match. The hand that caught Ethram was larger still than Ky’s. And yet, there is little doubt somehow that it is a match.
“Ky,” says Ethram, because Ky is not letting go. His grip tightens. It sends Ethram’s heart faster, but not from fear. It’s definitely not from fear.
“I remember more than I have told you,” says Ky.
“I remember more with each passing week. Not my name, but other things. You showed me flowers that were once sacred. You gave me a ripple of my name. You brought the scent of the springs to me.” He traces his thumb down Ethram’s inner wrist. Presses into the softness there. “But this? I do not remember this.”
“Do you remember anything of me before you came to my door?”
“I cannot tell if my memories are from a month ago, or a year ago, or a hundred years. It is like catching a reflection in a rain-broken pool. All gone before I can look clearly.”
A year, or a hundred. Ky does not look a hundred years old, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t some…remnant of an older thing inside him. Memory can be passed down like blood and magic, or so Ethram has read.
“It feels like there is a fog over the world. Something missing,” Ky says. “From me, from this entire cursed town.”
“It is Esk,” Ethram says. The deeper he searches into Esk’s history, the less there is to be found. But that is always the way with the ancient world, after all. “It has always been determined to forget something.”
“It is forgetting me,” Ky says, his voice dropping.
For the first time, there is anger in him.
But anger is too pallid a word for it. Rage, perhaps.
The distant rage of a coming flood, when the water is still placid but the force of the storm is inevitable.
“We must remember.” Ky’s thumb moves again, a gentle stroke.
A press against his pulse. “Both you and I.”
“What I saw in the archives that day…” Ethram trails off, distracted by that gentle rhythm against his skin. “It wasn’t anything like a man. Perhaps it wasn’t you, after all. Perhaps we have it wrong.”
Ky looks down at him. There is nothing on his face.
It’s as carven-blank as it had been that night he’d fallen through the kitchen door, and then it smudges, ever so slightly.
A fade sideways, then back, and Ethram sees nothing, but he is left with an impression of something other, something monstrous.
Ky, he remembers, is a liar. Ky only shows what he wishes Ethram to see.
“Or not,” he says softly.
“Or not,” agrees Ky.
He releases Ethram’s arm, and in the moment before he does, his hand is a perfect fit for the marks.
And then he’s striding away, and it’s all back to as it was before, only Ethram is left staring at the ceiling, breathless, his heart pounding against his rib cage.
The sound of the kitchen door echoes through the house.
Ethram closes his eyes. Plum blossoms and the scent of the springs. Ripples and reflections.
He has a fair idea of who Ky might be, or who he was once, or what he came from. He’s known ever since that visit to the Gardens.
The Casca family worships a god that has no name, has had no name for centuries. The god of the healing springs, of whom there is nothing left. Not a statue, not a painting, not a song.
Ky. The thing that Esk has forgotten.
As Ethram slowly lets the idea settle into his thoughts, questions surge up. How? Why?
How much of Ky is Ky, and how much of him is something other. Is he a man stricken by the fleeing memories of a faded presence? Or is he not a man at all? Is he truly that maelstrom of river and scale and claw that has haunted Ethram through so many dark nightmares?
Ethram has devoted his life to researching the ancient mysteries of this world. He had never expected those mysteries to turn up on his doorstep and eat his bread and steal his pillow in the night.
He never thought he’d fall in love with…
He lets his arm fall back over his face.
What a mess.