Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ky wakes him in the dark hours of the morning. He’s dressed, and his hair is clasped back, and his eyes are shining moon-pale.
“My heart,” he says, folding to his knees beside the bed. He is still taller. He still looks down at Ethram with that grave, handsome face. “Forgive me.”
Ethram is awake in moments, and the night air is cold on his tongue. “You are going after them?”
“I had thought we had time to unpick the tangles. We do not. I cannot stay.”
He hears it then, at the edges of the night. A low, seeking cry. A hunting howl. “You said we were safe here,” he says, as fear claws through him.
“I’ve gathered too much of myself to be easily hidden.” Regret shades his face, but he is resolute. “They won’t come if I am elsewhere. I must go.”
Ethram sits, uncaring as the blankets fall away from him. He grabs Ky’s face between his palms, and there is enough aether under the surface that his palms sting with it. “Can I not go with you?”
Ky kisses him, and his smile against Ethram’s lips is fleeting. “No, my heart. You could not keep up with me.” Another kiss, sweet as honeyed water. “You will be safe here. Stay within the borders at night.”
“Ky,” says Ethram, and what he wants to say gets tangled in his mouth, and he can’t separate out a single strand of it. “Will you come back to me?”
Ky presses his forehead to Ethram’s. He does not answer at first. He does not want to say it, and Ethram does not want to hear it.
In the end, what he says is, “I will try.”
There is little else to say. Ethram knew there was a parting to come, and there is no warning that would have made it hurt any less. It is a jarring, sharp break right along his spine, as if all he is falling apart.
“Then be swift,” he says. “Do not falter. Make them chase you until they fall from exhaustion. Outrun them. Finish them. Swallow them entirely. And then come back to me.” He ducks his face to press a kiss over the flutter of Ky’s pulse, under the hollow of his jaw.
“And know that I love you, and that I am yours.”
“Wherever I am, that I will know.” He strokes across Ethram’s cheek and gives him one last kiss. “I will come back to you.”
Ethram wants to believe him, but he knows Ky is a liar. He only shows Ethram what he wants Ethram to see, and he always has.
As he leaves, the room shifts around him as if a cloak has fallen from his shoulders.
He melts into the hallway, a shiver of air and moonlight, and Ethram sees a glimpse of swirling mist around him, like the eddies of water in a clear stream.
Ky had been kneeling by his bed, but the creature opening the door to the night is not Ky anymore. Not entirely.
And still Ethram opens his mouth to call him back to his bed, but the front door closes, and the house is empty, and it is too late.
Ethram is alone.
It takes a few days, but the river reed biscuits are finally gone. Ethram finishes the last and regrets it as soon as it is gone. He might have eaten it slower, he thinks. He might have savoured it a moment more. Might have let the taste linger on his tongue for the rest of the morning.
He puts his teacup in the sink and goes to the university. When he gets back, wet through with rain and shivering, it’s still there. He heats a bath, but no matter how much wood he puts under it, the water never gets as hot as Ky could make it.
It takes a week before he remembers to check on the garden.
He pulls at a few weeds, but he hasn’t paid nearly enough attention to know which are the ones that should be gone and which are the ones that should stay.
The marigolds under the window finally die off as the weather grows sullen and cold.
Ethram doesn’t know what to do about that, so he leaves them.
He builds the fires high in the evening, and then less high when he sees cobwebbed gaps growing in the woodshed.
He stops going to the university unless he can’t avoid it. He stops going to the market, too. He tells himself it’s because there’s no point until the spring harvest comes in, but in truth, he tires of well-meaning people asking after Ky. He never knows what to say in reply.
Where has he gone? Away for a time. Will he be back after winter? Perhaps.
Etta shakes her head, shrewd as ever. “It’s a poor season to be left alone, lad,” she says.
It is. The bed is cold, and he wakes cold in the morning. His baths are cold, and his tea is cold, and one night he wraps himself in blankets and sleeps by the hearth just for the memory of being warm again.
He dives back into his books, and the stacks grow in the parlour, covering the rug and burying the armchair by the fire, and the sofa too. He doesn’t use them much these days.
He tracks Ky through his books, from poetry to history to fable.
He finds him, now he knows what to look for.
Now he has time to search. In a line of poetry in Lydas.
In the title spring-giver. In the old sayings of Esk.
To love like the rushes love the river. He visits the Gardens, and Sabine watches him with uneasy eyes.
“You have changed,” she says, but when he asks, she cannot tell him how.
And that day, he learns he cannot tell her anything either.
He tries—tries to tell her of Ky, to ask for her help—but the words slide away from his thoughts before he can voice them.
Whatever strange magic obscures Ky from the world, it wasn’t broken when Ethram remembered his name.
It’s still there, hiding him. Ethram can think of Ky, can find him in his books and notes, but he cannot speak of him.
And after he fails once, he does not try again.
He fears that if he tries to force the truth out, then the strange forgetting that lies across Esk will make him forget Ky entirely.
It already has once, after all. He will not let it happen again.
Even alone, it is a struggle to say Ky’s true name. Some days, it will not come. Others, it does, and he whispers it to the tea steam of his cup and watches it drift away. He wonders if Ky can feel the tug of it wherever he is. Hopes it might summon him home. It never does.
For a year, Ethram had lived with a way-keeper of the underworld. He has eaten toast with a creature who once bore passing souls to oblivion. He has sat in his parlour and worked on his papers about ancient rituals while the deity they were created to worship sat across from him and knitted socks.
Absurd is what it is. A fever dream that he must move past.
Midwinter comes, and he spends the night in cold solitude. Beyond the glow from the parlour hearth, the house is silent. But slowly, he grows used to it, in the way one gets used to discomfort. He feels as winter-worn as the garden, but he persists.
The tail-end of winter is damp and endlessly cold. The days barely dawn, just slouch in a grey haze across the skies until, too soon, they collapse back into chill, crystal darkness.
And so the dark days trudge on until finally, one day, spring arrives.