Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
He wakes in a tangle of Ky’s moonlight hair. He pushes it aside, then takes a handful of it and tugs Ky’s face down to meet his against the pillow. Ky makes a surprised noise, then laughs as he melts into it.
It’s evening, maybe. He doesn’t care. The only thing he cares about is here, smiling against his mouth.
“What changed your mind?” Ky asks when he finally frees himself from Ethram’s grasp.
Ethram chases the taste of him on his lips.
“I thought it through,” he says. He doesn’t want to think about the healing springs and the missing god who should be sleeping at the heart of them.
He wants to kiss that god of a man on the mouth and make him tea and watch him knit all evening.
And then go to bed and let Ky do everything he’s just done again, and more besides.
“That’s a lovely face, dear heart,” Ky murmurs, tracing his nails down Ethram’s throat. “Tell me these thoughts of yours.”
Ky doesn’t get much knitting done that evening, but Ethram manages everything else quite neatly.
He does unfortunately need to go to the university the next day. He’d left his satchel sitting in the lecture hall, and there is a stack of letters waiting for him in his office that he needs to sort through.
Someone—Larsen, perhaps—has taken his satchel to his office, too. Ethram won’t thank him for it, because Larsen has long been labouring under the misguided assumption that he and Ethram are friendly, and Ethram refuses to encourage it.
He forgets about Larsen the moment he sees the letter at the top of the stack. The paper is thick, pulpy and handmade. The handwriting is unfamiliar. He flips it to where a lumpy wax seal is stamped with a plain, unmarked surface.
Tioneia Lucent.
He sits down to read. Tioneia has been thorough in her reply, and she knows far more about mythic bloodlines than Ethram had thought possible.
She doesn’t write of them as theories or possibilities.
She writes as if she has seen them herself.
Unlikely, but then again, there must be something out there in the wilds of the isles that keeps her away from Esk and the university for so much of the year.
But for all her words, she doesn’t give him much of use.
Gods, she writes, are an echo of another time.
If they exist still in our world, they must be much changed.
So much that I do not think we could call them gods any longer.
Perhaps the creature you saw in the dark was one such misfortune, or perhaps it was nothing more than an echo, summoned up by some disturbance and since faded.
Either way, if you meet it again, write and tell me. I find myself quite fascinated.
Ethram sighs as he folds the letter away. Much changed. Well, that must be true, for if Ky was once a god, there is not much of that being left now. Gods, he is quite sure, do not spend their days knitting and lounging in the sunshine.
Would that change if he had his memories back? Would it change if Ethram could remember his name?
It’s always just there at the edge of his thoughts, balancing on his tongue. A rustle of the wind he can almost hear. A trickle of water-echo that haunts him.
He sets his head in his hands, tracing his thoughts of Ky back through his memories. His mouth, hands. His tall silhouette in the garden. A bleeding man on his kitchen floor. A reaching, hungry strangeness in the dark. A set of clawed hands burning through his skin.
He’d called Ky to him in the archives. He’d called, and Ky had come.
He’d called out a name. He can feel the weight of it in his mouth, but he still cannot summon it up. Why?
A sharp rap at the door makes his thoughts rattle, and he loses his thought entirely. He surfaces, irritated. It doesn’t make for a good start.
“Hart,” says the interloper. Ethram knows his face. Mullins. “I need you.”
Professor Mullins is no one important, to Ethram’s knowledge. He’s not even in Ethram’s faction. He’s over in political economy or something similarly boring, and he really should have stayed there.
“Funny. I’ve no need of you.”
There is not another chair in Ethram’s office by design, and so Mullins has to stand there like an airguard reporting to his captain. It makes Ethram’s mood a touch better.
“I’ve been told you are the one who can help,” continues Mullins, dogged. “It’s concerning your paper on the effects of aether on the body.”
Ethram looks up. “That was a collaborative study. You might try the healer who worked on it with me.”
“I have,” he says. “They directed me back at you. Gods, Hart. You don’t think I’d be here as anything but a last resort.”
Ethram sighs. “Fine.” He stands, comes around his desk. He leans against it and gives Mullins his surliest look. “What do you wish to know?”
Mullins flicks his case open. “There has been a series of attacks on villages around Elveresk and the surrounding isles. There are similarities to beast attacks, except for a few victims who appear to have been strangled by a human-like grip.”
Suddenly, it seems horrifically clear to Ethram why Mullins has come to him. “Is that so.”
“The victims all had aether burns on their bodies. There have been no recent storms in any of the areas where the attacks took place.”
“I’m a historian, Mullins. Not a naturalist. I can’t identify creatures for you, aethered or otherwise.”
“Just look at the aethergraphs.”
And there are aethergraphs, Ethram sees.
His stomach clenches. He flicks through them slowly and makes sure none of it shows on his face.
Torn flesh. Bloodied earth. Aether scorched into skin.
This, he thinks, is like something from his oldest nightmares.
This is his village in the aftermath of the storm.
Only for these people, there had been no storm.
He takes a measured breath. There is an odd pattern to his heartbeats, like something has kicked it out of time.
“Horrific,” he says. “I don’t see why you came to me.”
“Don’t you?” says Mullins. He grabs Ethram’s wrist. “This is why, Hart.”
It’s summer, and so Ethram’s sleeves are pushed back. Mullins’s hand lands right against his aether burns. Somehow, it hurts.
“Get off,” snarls Ethram, yanking his hand back.
Mullins is milk-pale, the blood leeching from his face. His hand shakes. He turns his palm up, and his fingers are silver-touched and inflamed. “You burned me,” he says, faint.
“Seems like you burned your own damn self,” he says, tugging his sleeve down. His own hands are shaking.
Mullins cradles his hand against his chest, jaw white. “What in the silver storm, Hart?”
“How should I know?” Ethram pinches the bridge of his nose because he is a thread from freaking out and he doesn’t want Mullins to see that. He takes a deep breath. “Look. That has never happened before, because no one has gone and grabbed my scars like a cursed fool.”
Mullins, to his credit, takes that. “Right,” he says. “I apologise.”
“Putting that aside,” says Ethram, as if the fact he is apparently carrying enough live aether in his body to burn someone is something that can be put aside.
“I still can’t help you. If you want an account of how I got my burns, the university records have a copy.
No creature or weapon was ever found. If you want my opinion on whether what gave me my injury could cause these injuries…
” He trails off, staring at the aethergraphs again.
Ky has not been murdering people across the archipelago, because Ky has been at home, planting herbs and fixing their slate roof.
But, “I suppose it could have. It was a brief encounter, and it did not seem an overly violent creature, but yes. It could have.” He could have.
He swallows that back, and it’s bitter. “Now, Mullins. Kindly fuck off. Maybe to a healer.”
Mullins blows out through his nose, both offence and understanding.
“That is what I wanted to know, yes,” he says.
“I’ll chase up the university documents.
” Before he leaves, he pulls a folder from his case.
“Look at it. Tell me if you notice anything else.” And then he leaves, cradling his injured hand to his chest.