Chapter 23 The Thunor Moon
The Thunor Moon
Osric
Ruain’s leycraft shook as they entered a ley line. The feeling was familiar to Osric from the waystone graticule, but it was more intense, more prolonged, and far more discombobulating. Then he ceased to think at all, because he was a million particles whisking over the sea.
When they emerged from the ley line, the Rummy Thing and the Kentish coastline were nothing but a smear upon the horizon.
Osric was going to comment, but Ruain tilted the craft and flew into another ley line, and Osric was a million particles again.
Two or three more times, he came back into being, before being scattered into nothing, then materialising again.
When Osric came back to himself the final time, feeling, admittedly, a bit green, he found the craft whipping violently from side to side. Ruain was whistling to himself—the tuneless whistle of one concentrating hard.
“No more ley lines now,” said Ruain, pushing his loggles to his forehead. “We’re flying manual to get close enough to the isle for a drop-off. Wind is feisty.”
Fairhrim had responded well to the Druid anti-nausea drug in the sense that she had fallen asleep. Which was for the best, given the leycraft’s convulsions.
Ruain pulled a U-shaped steering device up from somewhere between his legs and locked it into place.
Steering the craft in these winds looked more akin to wrestling.
Were they riding the wind or were they humping at it?
Whatever it was, it made Ruain’s forearms pop. (Osric could respect a good forearm.)
“Derepmet visibility,” said Ruain as they advanced into the void.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Osric.
Ruain tapped at his windscreen, etched on the outside with a blurry word. “Old joke. It’s when you can’t see a bloody thing outside—you’re only able to read ‘Tempered’ backwards in the glass.”
Night fell, along with churning cloud cover.
It was impossible to see anything outside.
Ruain navigated using his instruments and his tācn.
He said it was too bad: sometimes, apparently, you could see whales from up here.
Osric, feeling a bit vomity, would have preferred to see solid ground, and also never see Ruain again.
The Leyfarer’s tācn served as a compass and other things; he pressed it against the golden half globe at intervals, and against flat silver plates.
A series of pendulums hung above the windscreen; one of them spun violently in a tight circle while others swung slowly, and one stayed completely still in spite of the craft’s shudders.
They were made of precious metals, various woods, and one or two of bone.
Gauges spun and rang, inscribed with things that weren’t letters or numbers.
Ruain consulted them frequently, followed by bits of mysterious arithmetic on a notepad.
Osric’s respect for the Leyfarer Order increased substantially; all his Order required was a bit of stabbing.
Fairhrim slumped onto Osric’s shoulder. He tried not to move; her head on his shoulder gave him again that feeling of having been chosen by a rare thing.
Ruain observed them in the dark reflection of the windscreen.
“Are you two together?” he asked.
“Yes,” lied Osric, because fuck Ruain.
“Lucky,” said Ruain.
The word meant something different coming from a man from īrland; there was weight to it beyond the opportune.
“Are you helping her with her research?” he asked.
“I’m the test subject,” said Osric.
“Have you got a tācn under those gloves?”
“No,” lied Osric again.
“Ah.” Ruain concentrated on steering for a moment before saying, “You bear yourself like a man who’s got a tācn.”
“Do I?”
“And after that remark, if you didn’t have one, you’d hasten to show me.”
“I’ve got eczema,” said Osric.
Ruain studied him in the reflection. “I suppose the Haelan knows what she’s doing.”
“She does.” Osric interrupted himself, given that luminous blue flames suddenly sizzled upon the leycraft’s sails. “Er—I don’t mean to alarm you, my good man, but I think your boat is on fire.”
Ruain studied the phenomenon with remarkable calm. Osric didn’t know whether he should respect him or screech that he was a lunatic.
“That’s witch-fire,” said Ruain.
“Should we—should we not put it out?” said Osric. (Was there water on the premises? What was in the chamber pot?)
“It’s harmless,” said Ruain. “Happens under certain meteorological conditions. You see it on mastheads, before a storm.”
“Ah.”
“You don’t sail, then?”
“No.”
“What do you do?”
“Business.”
“What sort of business?”
“Acquisitions. Terminations.”
Fairhrim awoke, mercifully missing Osric’s display of panicked idiocy about the witch-fire by half a minute.
“How are you feeling, Aurienne?” asked Ruain, before Osric could make the same enquiry, which aggravated him.
“Honestly, good,” yawned Fairhrim. “I’d like a tin of those sweets.”
“Can’t help you,” said Ruain. “My Druid contact’s gone missing; those are all I’ve got left. We’re almost at the isle. How long do you need down there?”
“A few hours at most,” said Fairhrim.
“Right. I’m taking the Farewell up past this storm after I’ve dropped you off. Send your deofol when you’re ready. I’ll bring you down as close as I can. I’m not going to land in these winds. Use the ladder.”
Osric pushed the hatch open, and Fairhrim rolled out a rope ladder, which whipped sideways in the wind. They descended inelegantly and dropped onto a beach.
The leycraft scooted off like an airborne crab and swept upwards.
Osric and Fairhrim stood ankle-deep in salt water on a flat beach. The Isle of Stígr was hardly an island, more like a sandbar. The water was warm.
“Well,” said Osric as Ruain and his leycraft disappeared into the clouds, “I hope your deofol can find him again, or we’re properly fucked.”
“What time is it?”
Osric made a show of using the pocket watch she’d given him. “Half eleven, minus the quarter hour.”
Fairhrim noticed and looked pleased. “Healing’s at midnight. We’ve got a bit of time to explore.”
A little way up the beach, they found a wooden structure, perhaps used by long-ago fishermen, which Fairhrim generously called a hut. She removed her cloak, as well as her stockings and boots, and left them upon the sandy floor. Osric followed suit.
They walked along the beach barefoot, Fairhrim with her skirts hitched up, Osric in shirtsleeves and braces, to where a long spur of sand jutted into the sea. The beach undulated away to the left and to the right, a line between here and the infinite. Shells dotted the sand like small moons.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Fairhrim shuddered. “That storm is on the way. But at least we’re here. Five ley lines cross near here. And as for your precious Widdershins, his note for the Thunor moon said, Waves draw you under.”
“Dear Widdershins,” said Osric. “It seems so long ago that he cast spittle in my eye.”
“I hope he’s all right,” said Fairhrim. “If this healing goes as well as I think it will, I’m going to write an article about this experience. And I’m going to try to clear his name.”
“Is tonight going to be it?” asked Osric. “The last healing?”
“I hope so,” said Fairhrim.
In the face of his prolonged silence, she asked, “Don’t you?”
Osric should have wanted it to be the last healing. But he didn’t. On the contrary, he almost hoped it wouldn’t work. His hope had been inverted, turned inside out and back to front. Then he could be with her for another five, ten, twenty moons. For all the moons he had left.
He looked down. So translucent was the water that it seemed as though they were stepping through something else: some briny, otherworldly quintessence in which silver fish drifted.
Perhaps it was a night for transparency.
“If this is the last time, we won’t be seeing each other much anymore, will we?” he asked.
Fairhrim looked soft in the cloud-diffused light. “That was always the objective, wasn’t it?”
“Then we’re hurtling towards one of your inevitable goodbyes.”
“Yes,” said Fairhrim. “You should be pleased. It’ll mean success against all the odds. But,” she added with typical Fairhrim scepticism, “we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Results first. Come on. It’s nearly midnight.”
“Where shall we stand?”
“Between,” said Fairhrim.
They stepped into the shallows until the water reached their knees. They watched midnight tick closer upon the golden heart pocket watch.
Fairhrim asked, “Well—shall we see if we’re wasting our time again?”
“Always a pleasure to waste time with you,” said Osric.
A smile was her answer.
He pulled down the back of his shirt. Fairhrim stood before him and put her arms around his neck.
The light was salt and silver. Waves washed back and forth over their skin; the slow heartbeat of the sea. Cloud-clotted moonlight danced across black wave tips in soft fractals.
It began to rain. But the rain did not fall only from the clouds. It was met, as it descended, by rain rising from the sea, from somewhere to their left, and to their right, and then all around them, gushing upwards.
The black backs of whales gleamed amid the waves. And Osric heard, for the first time, one of the strangest, most unforgettable sounds in the world: whale song. Deep songs of journey, of peace, of celestial immensities. When they spouted, in the mist of their breath, moonbows danced.
Then—beauty upon eerie beauty—in the bow waves of the whales, gleaming blue-green multitudes shimmered to life. Every whale left trails of bioluminescence in its wake; every raindrop splattering made widening rings of brightness. The surface of the water was alive with light.
In this light, in the rain, in the sea, danced the forms of another place—other waves, other whales, another sea in another storm. They stood in the waters of another world.
Fairhrim’s tācn—that divine touch, that gift of life—found the back of Osric’s neck, as it had so many times before, and there, for the last time, between their first greeting and their final farewell, between the sickness and the cure, on a beach that drew a line between Here and There, in rain-fractured moonlight, she pushed her seith into him.
It surged into him in a blaze, kind and strong, curative and loving.
It went to the very tips of his fingers, filling him with something hallowed.
The song of the whales died away and left behind only the ceaseless adagio of the sea.
“It worked,” said Osric, breathless and soaked.
He did not need Fairhrim to cast her usual diagnostics to know that it had worked. He felt his seith system alive, vibrating, whole.
She held up her tācn anyway. The diagnostic image appeared between them, as insubstantial as the moonlight.
Raindrops sprinkled through it like silver motes.
She pivoted the image this way and that way, spun it, magnified it.
She took several steps back. Blinked. Waved away the diagnostic and pulled up another one.
“I can’t find an obvious trace of the rot,” she said in amazement.
“I told you: I can feel it,” said Osric. “You did it. You’ve cured me.”
Rain-soaked, disbelieving, Fairhrim pressed her hands to her mouth. She laughed a silvery laugh.
“You’re healed,” said Fairhrim.
She hugged him hard. He embraced her like a flagellant embracing his torment.
She had cured him of one thing and afflicted him with another.
He kissed her smile. And he knew sadness then, because this was the end, because he was who he was and she was who she was. This was the inevitable goodbye. They were already standing in a memory.
He tried to fix it all in his mind as it slipped away with the passing seconds. Black-bright eyes. Rainwater on lashes and lips. A mouth the very shape of loveliness. The exquisite impossibility of their kiss.
Kiss me and kiss me again; our tomorrows are so few.