Chapter Twenty-Eight
The palace workers were in silent astonishment. They stood gathered at back windows or on the grounds, staring at the tree that had risen from nothing in seconds. The whole city could likely see it, as it stood as clear and prominent as the temple once had.
They did not disturb Ethyr and Poyut limping through. He brought her to her room and let her sink onto her bed.
“Are you in much pain?” he asked. “Should I get the physician?”
“No, no,” Poyut sighed, closing her eyes. “I just feel… weak.”
“Rest, then. I will be back shortly.”
He changed into his wool tunic, woven belt, and leather boots.
He paused when he caught sight of himself in the mirror.
Golden tan skin, brown curls, hazel eyes.
He had human ears, no fur or antlers of twisting branches, but his human body did not look much different.
Not as different as Kyarin’s had. And despite being in it for only two decades—a blink of an eye—he still felt human.
He was still Ethyr. Was it how Kyarin had felt, becoming Kiaro?
Everything he had once been, only memory woven into who he now was.
He opened a little compartment on the side of the vanity and took out the opalescent earrings, his first pair, and put them on. The pendants shimmered against his neck even in the pale light from an early morning sun.
He took the cloak Kiaro had given him, a lifetime ago, and returned to Poyut.
He sat with her for an hour or two while she slept. Then she had the strength to change into clean clothes and wash her sword and scabbard of blood. She did not ask when he beckoned her through the palace to the stable, and had a stable boy tack two horses.
The priests had picked through the rubble of their home and were already beginning to move into the palace, under Klara’s guidance and help from the guard, who seemed lost and meek now without their leader. None of them stopped Ethyr and Poyut from leaving the grounds or the city.
They traveled slower than gossip. Every inn they stopped at had murmurings about what happened in the capital, but they were all uncertain, incredulous.
Rumors that a giant tree had grown and toppled the temple in a matter of minutes was interesting enough to spread, but too incredible to fully be believed.
Ethyr’s appearance and Poyut’s palace guard livery and pouch of gold turned heads and wagged tongues, but they traded the decorated saddles and bridles of the palace for simple, plain ones.
It did not stop the stares, but it prevented their arrival from drawing attention before they’d even entered a town, and they didn’t stick around the commons long enough for courage to be found to ask them.
They traveled north, through cities that Ethyr had once gawked at and through communes whose familiarity had ached in his heart. Now they were wounds that would not grow over. They trudged through groves of trees, marshland, and fields of melting snow.
While Poyut slept, Ethyr watched the moon, when it was visible.
He watched it open to full and round, and blink closed again until only pinpricks of stars lit the night.
And between them, the endless cascade of darkness.
The home Ethyr once felt among them had vanished, and the night sky felt only indifferent and distant.
The occupants of Linwood Village stopped tending their gardens and stepped out of their homes to watch the pair of riders approach. When they saw it was Ethyr, their murmurings became stunned silence.
Ethyr dismounted at the center well and continued on foot to the little stone hut, its thatch roof still dingy from winter and not yet refreshed.
Deian knelt in the garden, pulling out any root vegetables that had been missed and left to rot, and turning over the soil to get it ready for spring planting.
She turned at the sound of footsteps. Her pleasant, mild expression turned to dumbstruck disbelief. She stood slowly, reflexively wiping dirty palms on her apron.
“Ethyr?” she whispered. Her gentle voice was a warm salve on some wound in his soul that he had forgotten existed.
“Aunt Dei,” he said softly.
“Tebhen!” she called, even as she flung herself forward, wrapping Ethyr into a suffocating hug and burying her tears against his neck. Tebhen rushed out of the hut, but his panic halted at the sight. He did not hesitate, pulling them both into his arms.
Ethyr lifted his own to return the embrace, leaning into Dei’s shoulder, closing his eyes and sinking into the dark confines of their bodies against his, smelling of smoke and dirt and straw.
The questions came later, after he introduced Poyut, after the whole village greeted them, after Dei’s insisted meal of hot porridge was warm in their bellies.
They’d heard the same rumors as everyone else; the temple had been destroyed, the advisors had been killed, and the king had confronted the gods and lived.
The gods had killed the advisor and released Ethyr from service.
Those were the only answers he had, disappointing as it was to them.
Weeks later, after they’d reconciled and fucked in secret behind the stone wall, Ethyr whispered the truth to Mikel.
Showed him his wound healed over in wood, grew flowers around their lounging bodies.
Mikel promised to keep the secret, even from his wife.
Poyut taught the village kids how to swing her sword and ride the horses.
She took easily to chores and farm work, better help than Ethyr ever was.
She fell into place as one of them within weeks.
Ethyr, though welcomed and treated warmly, remained something of an outsider.
He had been king; he had walked among gods.
It could not be acclimated to the way his beauty had been.
Beauty was one thing— divinity was another.
As sowings, harvests, and winters passed, this was only exacerbated by Ethyr’s untouched youth.
The village aged around him, and though it may have been overlooked at first, as others grayed and wrinkled and he stayed lithe and smooth, it couldn’t be ignored.
It was accepted, as anyone’s peculiarities might be in a small community—accepted and kept private.
News from the palace trickled slowly to their corner of the world. The gods did not choose a new king. The priesthood was not accepting new initiates. An advisor had been elected by the council, and was the new head of the kingdom. So in the end, Lyrian had gotten what he wanted.
Ethyr’s trysts with Mikel ended when his youth stopped being attractive and became unsettling to the man, who was raising two children of his own by then.
Tebhen fell off the roof trying to fix a leak one day, and was too old to ever fully recover.
He spent the next months bedridden until he passed in his sleep.
Deian, relegated to the least demanding activities that didn’t require eyesight—spinning thread or telling stories when the village gathered together—followed Tebhen a few years later.
Ethyr took over household duties and Poyut manned their crop acre.
Anyone might have thought they were husband and wife or, later on, mother and son, if the village didn’t know better.
They lived comfortably and peacefully together.
Poyut confessed once, while they ate around the fire pit, that all she had ever wanted was a quiet life with her brothers, and he had given her the closest she could get to that.
He held her hand in his lap when she died of old age, and stayed beside her through the night until a neighbor came in the morning to see why the household was so quiet.
The morning after her funeral, he found Mikel alone in his hut, turning down the fire. His kids were grown themselves, and his wife spent the days sewing with her friends.
The man looked up when he stepped inside, and said nothing as Ethyr knelt beside him, returning instead to his task. Ethyr watched as ashes smothered the flames and left only pulsing embers in a sea of white dust. Mikel had some white himself, peppering his copper hair and streaking his full beard.
“I’m leaving,” Ethyr told him.
He set the fire poker aside and turned his attention to him. “To where?”
“The forest.”
Mikel nodded slowly. “I’ll miss you.”
Ethyr wanted to say, I wish you could come with me.
He wanted to say, I wish humans lived longer.
Wanted to say, I wish you’d live forever.
He didn’t. Instead he said, “I’ll miss you too.
” Mikel smiled, crinkling the sides of his eyes which still held a glimmer of youthful mischief in their soft brown.
Ethyr held out his hand and Mikel brushed his fingertips over it, down his fingers, across his palm, before laying his hand firmly against Ethyr’s and clasping them together.
“I know I look too young for you,” Ethyr said, staring at their hands, Mikel’s scarred and calloused, his own soft and slender. He raised his gaze to find Mikel’s remained steadily on him. “But will you give me one last kiss?”
Ethyr obeyed the tug on his hand to close the space between their mouths. Mikel’s cracked lips softened into his and Ethyr gave himself over to it, for a moment nothing more than an adolescent stealing kisses from his lover in the heated shade of a summer field.
Mikel broke their lips gently apart and pressed his forehead to Ethyr’s. “You really are beautiful,” he murmured. Ethyr understood what it meant now, understood that Mikel used simple words when his thoughts were too complex. He was like Kyarin, in that way.
He left the village and sea of rippling rye stalks behind to wander into the depths of the forest for the first time in centuries.
Streaks of sunlight faded as the trees became denser.
As it grew darker, it filled with more life.
Birds and squirrels and mice rustling in the thicket or in the branches, insects buzzing, deer stepping through leaves, wolves stalking just out of sight.
None of them paid Ethyr any mind. They had no reason to; he was part of the forest.
He stopped at an ancient, knotted elm, resting his hand on the bark. It still whispered of times long past and forgotten. Ethyr rested into the crook of one of its roots, and fell asleep.
When he wakes, blanketed in frosted moss and a decade of fallen leaves, a presence compels him upright.
Kiaro sits before him under the spring-cold shade of the trees.
His skin is pale, his black hair braided and hanging loosely over his shoulder.
Ethyr cannot feel him; he barely recognizes him.
Yet the sight of him is like a deep breath after surfacing from frigid water: relieving, comforting, agonizing.
His gaze rises to meet Ethyr’s and in his eyes are the lifetimes of sorrow he has never outrun.
He speaks gently into the chill of the air.
“I didn’t want you to wake up alone.”