Chapter Fifty-Three Wayland
Chapter Fifty-Three
Wayland
Wayland did not like goodbyes.
He watched with rising petulance as Sinéad and Chandi mounted their horses, slinging heavy packs over rumps and settling cloaks over shoulders, although the day was still hot.
Nearly a month had passed since the Bealtaine War.
Of their fateful bargains beneath the Heartwood, Wayland, Laoise, and Irian had been left with little but broken tools and fading memories.
Wayland’s trident had dissolved into sea-foam; Laoise’s vambraces had melted to obsidian ash.
Irian’s unbreakable blade had shattered from its hilt into a dozen shards.
Not long after, the living dead had simply…
dropped. The Gentry warriors who’d remained in Tír na nóg all waited for their brethren to return from beyond the Gate.
They never did.
The Gates had closed, and if the bardaí still lived, they were trapped in the human realms.
With Fia.
The thought still made Wayland smile, although the expression faded as Laoise descended from the tree city, strapping on a plain leather vambrace over her uninjured arm.
The collarbone she’d broken was still in a sling.
She’d let her hair grow out a little—her curls tumbled over one ember eye, half obscuring her features. She looked up, caught him staring.
She stuck out her tongue at him. “Like what you see, water boy?”
“Oh no, fire girl,” he prodded back. “I never taste things I know will burn my tongue.”
“You’re growing wise in your old age.” She checked the buckles over her knives. When she looked back at him, her face was serious. “Are you going to be all right?”
He knew what she was talking about. The three of them—he, Laoise, and Irian—had not explicitly spoken about what they’d bargained to unforge their Treasures. But it had not been hard to guess.
The heirs had clambered up to the apartments near dawn, exhausted and blood-spattered and smoke-stained.
The eldest draigs had not yet returned from battle, and as the younger ones crowded toward their mother, it occurred to Wayland that Laoise did not seem concerned about their safety.
Enfys barreled into her waist; Anwyll wove between her legs with glee.
Laoise stared down at them, something akin to distaste pooling over her lovely features.
“Idris,” she said to her brother, who was hovering. “Can’t you manage the draigs?”
Confusion swept over Idris’s face, but he quickly collected the draiglings as Laoise repaired to her room, clearly intent on removing her boots and wiping the soot from her face. Idris turned to Irian, raised his eyebrows.
“What happened in the battle?” His gaze skated to Wayland without much interest, then snapped back to Irian. “The Treasures? What happened to Fia?”
Irian frowned, his stark brows lowering over eyes that were now the color of slate—gray as the cliffs where he was raised. The same gray Wayland remembered from their childhood.
“Who?”
And they all began to realize—nothing would ever be the same again.
Laoise’s vast maternal love for her draig children had been excised from her heart as if with a surgeon’s blade.
Conversely, Wayland retained all his feelings for Idris, but Idris no longer looked at him.
Barely spoke to him. When he did, it was with neither love nor hate—it was with no feeling whatsoever. He spoke with perfect cordiality.
Cordial ought to be a curse word, in Wayland’s opinion.
He reminded himself: He had chosen this.
He wished he had been more selfish.
And Irian? For Irian, Fia had simply ceased to exist. Her name elicited no memories, no thoughts, no emotions. For Irian and Irian alone… Fia was just gone.
Wayland supposed, if he was being perfectly cynical, that it might be a kindness.
“I’m all right,” Wayland said now to Laoise, though it was a lie.
What else could he say? That his heart was broken?
That he mourned for something he had barely possessed?
That every time Idris’s eyes slid over him, he wanted to grab him by the shoulders and kiss him so hard he saw stars? “And you?”
“There are only so many times I can be told what I have lost before I find myself glad I am no longer burdened by it.” Her words were callous. She didn’t seem to notice when Wayland flinched.
“Then it is back to Dún Scaith for you?”
Laoise nodded. “Chandi wishes to make amends for all her misdeeds. Sinéad wishes to hone her battlecraft. And I—I have no one to take care of, now that Idris is grown, and little else to occupy my time. Perhaps Lady Scáthach will finally take pity on me and show me how to brew her famous heather mead.”
The holes in Laoise’s words gnawed at Wayland—the spaces where the draiglings used to live vast and horribly hungry. He folded his arms, as if he could clamp his grief within the cage of his ribs. He did not understand how she could hear herself speak and not feel what she had lost.
It was cruel, cruel magic.
“If you learn, please write to tell me.”
“But then I’d have to kill you.” Laoise saluted, then mounted her own horse beside Chandi and Sinéad. The human girls both waved at him before urging their horses away over the waving plains of golden wheat.
Wayland sighed and climbed back to their emptying apartments.
Idris was packing up what once had been their room.
Books, mostly—in the time since they’d arrived in the Summerlands, he had accumulated a decent portion of his and Laoise’s lost collection from the Cnoc.
He had three saddlebags already full and was packing a fourth.
Tucked behind his ear, the sleek waterfall of his red hair caught the sunlight like fire.
He did not hide any part of his face as he sorted scrolls.
Wayland girded himself, then approached the other man. “You’re going to need a mule.”
“Perhaps I will.” Idris sat back on his heels, surveying his collection before cordially adding, “Thanks for the suggestion.”
Cordial. Wayland’s skin tightened, the muscles of his back going taut as he fought to hold in everything he was feeling.
This room especially felt haunted by all he and Idris had shared, before he’d lost him: the bed bruised by their embraces, the pillows marked with their whispers, the air perfumed with their ardor. “May I ask where you’re going?”
“Annwyn, I think.” Idris glanced out the window.
All seven draiglings cavorted in the trees, leaping and tumbling with abandon.
“Blodwen is starting to get huge, and the others won’t be far behind.
I still fear what the Ellyllon might do to them, but I can’t protect them here.
Not without Laoise. The Summer Twins may be the only bardaí left, thanks to Fia’s mercy, and the Septs may be gone…
but dominion abhors an empty throne. Some new ambitious leader will soon hunger for power in Tír na nóg.
At least in Annwyn, the draigs will be honored and valued.
Perhaps I’ll even learn more about where they came from. ”
“And where you came from,” Wayland added. Idris didn’t seem to hear him, his attention fixed out the window.
Hog detached herself from the other draiglings, sailing on her stubby, wobbly wings through the window. She bypassed Idris completely, colliding with Wayland’s chest and nearly barreling him over. She, too, was getting bigger. She slid her claws through his long hair and purred, “Mine.”
A wonderful, awful idea sparked inside Wayland. “Idris?”
He’d returned his attention to packing his books. “Mm?”
“Can I keep her?”
Idris’s gaze narrowed.
“I mean, can she stay with me? For a while. If she wants to.”
The other man stared at him, then at the draigling, who had climbed on top of Wayland’s head to drape herself around his ears like an elaborate hat. At length, he asked, “Will you promise to keep her safe?”
“With my life.”
Idris nodded. “Then so be it.”
Hog mewled her satisfaction. Wayland pivoted away, then turned back before he could change his mind. “Idris?”
The other man’s head snapped up, but now he was annoyed. “Yes?”
Wayland beat back fury and sorrow. He had chosen this, living gods be cursed. “Do you remember the night on the beach? Before I renewed the Treasure?”
Unlike Irian, whose memories of Fia were completely gone, Idris seemed to remember all that had passed between them. Yet the emotion had been wiped clean—transient fog from clear mirror glass. He narrowed his eyes again. “Yes.”
“I just want you to know that I meant what I said. Every word.”
A flicker of contempt burned across Idris’s features in the moment before he looked back at his books. “Thank you, Wayland.”
Wayland turned away, pressing his thumbs into his eyes. And as Hog nipped comfortingly at his ear, he whispered, “Goodbye, Idris.”
He found Irian in the kitchen, aggressively polishing a finely tooled steel sword that was already gleaming. Wayland propped himself against the table as he gestured at the blade.
“What’s wrong with this one?”
Irian growled, low in his throat, and slammed the claíomh down with a clang.
Over the past month, he had commissioned a total of three swords from three different blacksmiths in the Summerlands, deeming each to be less satisfactory than the last. The first had been too long; the second, too short.
This one? “The balance is off. It pulls to the left. And my calluses are in all the wrong places for the grip.”
“You could renounce swordplay altogether,” Wayland suggested lightly. “Perhaps the remnants of the Sky-Sword could be reforged into a passable plow.”
A glint of mischief lurked in Irian’s storm-gray eyes. It was a look Wayland had not seen him wear in a long time, and it brought back memories of fonder times—a boyhood running riot over the cliffs of Emain Ablach with a foster brother in tow.
“It is funny you should mention that,” Irian said, with a bemused smile. “For lately I find myself with the strangest urge to grow a garden.”
Wayland’s blood ran cold, pooling dread in his stomach. His hands on the table clenched, and he rose to face Irian.
He had not known how to broach all that Irian had forgotten.
He still did not know. Did he tell his foster brother of the great, earth-shattering, legendary love he had lost, knowing it would be little more than a story to him?
Did he tell him of the woman he’d carried in his arms across half a realm?
The woman he’d adored and protected, only to fundamentally lose her in the end?
It was too big. It was too terrible. It was not his place. Instead, he said, “You should. You should fix up that drafty old fort with the creepy chandeliers and put a garden beside the lough, where you can watch the swans swim.”
“Oh, no,” Irian laughed. “I’ve had enough of swans for one lifetime. But perhaps the rest. A home and a garden. What more could a man want?”
His wife, Wayland longed to say. But he smothered the words.
“And you?” Irian asked. “What do you plan to do, now that you are a free man?”
Wayland thought free was a funny word to use.
“I have a mind to travel.” He patted Hog on her plump tail, which she flicked like a cat. “I have not seen much of Tír na nóg, what with nasty fathers and tight collars. Perhaps I will see the sights before I decide where to hang my hat.”
Irian nodded. “I would offer to join you, but I have a feeling I would make a terrible tourist.”
“No,” Wayland agreed. “You should stay where you belong.”
What he meant was You should stay where she can find you.
Fia was alive. Wayland had to believe she had survived her confrontation with Eala. Surely he wouldn’t be able to miss someone this much if they were dead.
“Perhaps you will visit, Way.” Irian returned his eyes to the mediocre sword. “From time to time. I have been remembering lately—of when we were boys.”
“Perhaps,” Wayland agreed. “Let us not leave it another thirteen years, Ree.”
He clapped Irian on the shoulder, then climbed the broad boughs beyond the apartments, hooking his knee over a branch and watching the sun set over the gilded plains of the Summerlands.
Laoise’s, Chandi’s, and Sinéad’s distant mounts were outlined in gold upon the horizon.
Wayland watched until they disappeared against the purple backdrop of the foothills beyond.
“Perhaps it would not be so bad to be alone again,” he mused, out loud. “Not forever. But perhaps for a while. Maybe it would do me some good.”
Hog slapped him across the cheek with one clawed paw, spitting a shower of sparks.
“Alone,” Wayland amended, “with you.”
He had found love once. He had been forced to sacrifice it for balance. But in time, he thought, maybe—just maybe—he might be able to find it again.
Someday, he would be whole.