Sentiment #5
Scalding tears blurred his vision. His hand flew to his waistcoat pocket—or rather, where he ought to find his pocket, but as Shrike had undressed him that very morning, he of course had neither waistcoat nor handkerchief.
He could only set the book down on the nest and tilt his head back to scrape at his eyes with the heel of his hand, lest the falling tears mar his mother’s pen-strokes.
A hand alighted on his shoulder, warm and solid and familiar. A body followed, its weight settling onto the nest beside him.
Wren turned and buried his face in Shrike’s collar.
Shrike withstood this sudden attack with admirable stoicism. The hand on his shoulder slipped down to encircle him alongside its fellow. A sharp cheek laid against his skull.
“What do you need?” Shrike murmured into his scalp.
A strangled laugh escaped Wren. “You’ve already done everything for me.”
For it was only through Shrike that Wren had these books at all, these scraps of his mother, his own teeth and hair as proof of her love of him.
Privately and bitterly he lamented that he’d never given her anything in return.
He could only hope that keeping these tokens all her life had brought her some comfort.
Shrike hadn’t asked him to speak of it—would never press him to do so—but his quiet presence nonetheless provoked Wren into confessing things he would never dare voice to a fellow Englishman.
Then again, Wren supposed, he held precious little in common with most of the Englishmen he’d encountered in his life.
“After all these years,” Wren muttered, “it still seems unfair. Which is rather stupid, isn’t it? Death is never fair. Or almost never,” he added, recalling the swift justice Shrike’s blows had dealt to his guardian’s murderers.
But Shrike only replied, “Not stupid at all.”
A wan smile tugged at Wren’s lips despite himself.
“Whenever I let myself think of it, all the outrage I felt as a boy rushes back. It’s never lessened.
Only shut away for a while, and now…” He swallowed hard.
“More than once, then, I’d wished my father had died in her place.
” Already too honest, and yet, the monstrous truth roiled up in his chest to claw its way out of his throat, and he heard himself whisper, “I still wish it.”
Shrike did not condemn him. Did not shove him away in horror at the wretched thing in his arms. Instead, Wren felt a soft and steady hand begin to stroke his hair.
This did nothing to allay the scalding tears that gathered in Wren’s eyes. It did, however, induce him to swallow down the wretched lump in his throat and speak on.
“And even as a boy… my grief wasn’t anything consequential in the grander scheme. Many of my school-fellows had already lost their own mothers. Some had lost their fathers as well. I grew up alongside a half-dozen orphans. It wasn’t as though my circumstances were anything out of the ordinary.”
So he’d swallowed it down and bottled it up until his hands shook at the mere thought of his stubbornly-surviving father, because to think of her was unbearable.
What would she think of her son now? The man he had become?
Her great regard for her cousin Mr Grigsby had driven Wren to seek him out when his father had cast him from his home and hearth.
If she could love a bachelor cousin, surely it must follow that she could love a bachelor son.
Even if she could not at first understand the happiness he had found with Shrike, perhaps Mr Grigsby could’ve helped persuade her.
Would she understand? It was futility itself to wonder.
Yet he could not prevent his mind from wandering down the same spiralling path.
“I wish I could bring her here,” he blurted, with the same schoolboy impunity that cried out against the injustice of her death and wished his father buried in her grave instead.
“To the fae realms. I want to show her the cottage.” She above all mortals deserved to dwell within its peaceful bounds.
Before his courage could fail him, he spoke on.
“I want to introduce her to you.” The man who had given him this beautiful life deserved to meet the woman who gave him life altogether and sent him on his path with boundless love.
“We could bring her with us to visit Daniel and Mrs Durst and show her all her favourite birds from Audubon’s book.
” To say nothing of the flora and fauna of the fae realm.
He would give anything to see them interpreted through her own watercolours; those very watercolours that had inspired him down his own artistic path.
Would she have hated his drawings as much as his father had?
Or would she have appreciated their artistic value despite his unnatural vice, perhaps even have mollified his father’s anger at his son’s transgression…
He would give anything to hear her laugh at the antics of Blackthorn’s goats, to introduce her to the ambassador and watch her receive the royal welcome she so richly deserved, to bring her to the Moon Market so she might marvel at its magic…
Had any of her watercolours survived? Or had his father destroyed them all or selfishly locked them away for his own keeping?
Wren realised he had ceased to speak. His arms still clutched at his Shrike, his hands contracted into claws, their embrace like the briars surrounding the cottage.
He knew not how many of his racing thoughts had spilled from his lips.
Perhaps all of them. Perhaps none. His own ragged breath echoed in his ears amidst the looming silence.
Shrike broke it with words as soft as drifting snowflakes. “I wish you could meet Larkin, as well.”
The admission astonished Wren still more than the sudden speech.
He hardly thought himself worthy of introduction but wisely bit his tongue on that head; for his Shrike was speaking, and if it pained Shrike to speak on his lost guardian as much as it pained Wren to speak of his mother, as it must, Wren would hardly disregard his effort with distraction.
Shrike continued. “I think he would like to see Blackthorn Briar as it is now. Not quite as he left it. But far better than it was at the moment of his murder.”
Shrike did not mince words as Wren would; one of the many things Wren admired about him.
Still, Shrike hesitated. “When the briars first grew… I thought I’d ruined everything. Blighted our home. Finished the work the knights-errant had begun. But when they bloomed… when they withdrew to make way for what I built within them…”
Painstakingly, Wren added for himself. Stone by stone, rough-hewn from the realm around him.
A life rebuilt with one’s own hands, and utterly alone…
And how selfish Wren had been to complain of the unfairness of his mother’s death.
She had not been murdered, after all. He had not been forced to stumble upon her body in the blaze of what had once been their home.
His petty mortal grief was nothing compared to Shrike’s suffering.
Shrike had not chided him, had never chided him, but he could not prevent Wren from chiding himself.
“I’m glad,” Shrike said, surprising Wren anew, “to have someone to share in it again. And I think,” he added bashfully, “that Larkin would rejoice in knowing you are here.”
Wren hardly thought anything about himself or his life would impress upon a medieval yeoman.
One who had a much harder go of it to say the least. Escaping a battlefield by the skin of his teeth, then raising a child in the wilderness alone.
Only in the past year had Wren acquired any callouses of note.
Finally he had something besides ink marks his hands.
His shoulders had grown broader, his arms stouter.
No one felt more surprised than himself that he had found strength enough to duel and defend his beloved on their very first summer solstice.
Aloud, however, Wren merely said, truthfully, “I would be honoured to know him.”
Shrike’s dark gaze glistened. His already low voice turned hoarse as he replied, “I would be honoured to know your mother in return.”
In light of that, Wren could hardly do otherwise than throw his arms around his shoulders.
Shrike cleaved him tight.