Chapter 1 #8
Hull shot a glance at Ephraim, the significance of which remained a mystery to its subject. To the bone-setter, he replied, “I’d rather hoped to wait until my leg had healed.”
“And you expect your sundered bones to knit themselves with no strength to draw upon?” Grytha asked, doing nothing to disguise her exasperation.
Hull assumed a defensive air. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Is his progress so very alarming?” Ephraim cut in, coming to his beloved’s defence not quite so swiftly as a knight but determined to shield him nonetheless from the worst of the bone-setter’s ire.
“It is only the first week of six, after all, and perhaps the following weeks will prove more fruitful.”
Grytha furrowed her brow in confusion. “The first week of six?”
“Yes,” Ephraim affirmed, for that had been precisely what he’d said, though as the moment stretched out still more awkward than before he began to worry he’d revealed hitherto unforeseen foolishness on his part. “Dr Hitchingham told me to expect six weeks at the very least for the bone to mend.”
Grytha’s brows reached new heights. She turned to Hull. “You’ve consulted with a mortal physician?”
“No,” said Hull. “But he is a friend, and my absence had to be explained somehow.”
“I gave him a version of the truth,” Ephraim explained, drawing Grytha’s notice back to himself. “He knows only that a bone is broken. He knows not to whom that bone belongs.”
“Well,” said Grytha after a moment’s consideration in apparent disbelief. “It may take six weeks for a mortal bone to mend, but for one of the hidden folk, my presence ought to be perfunctory at most after a se’en-night.”
Ephraim blinked at her. Glanced to his Hull, bedridden, only able to hobble about the room with the aid of a crutch and a willing arm, utterly dependent.
And found, to his further bewilderment, that Hull’s countenance bore an unaccountably guilty expression.
“Forgive me,” Ephraim said to Grytha. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.
He should be altogether well by now? Then—there is something wrong?
” He forced his voice and countenance to keep an even keel whilst his heart shivered beneath his breast-bone.
“Is there something further I might do to aid him? What course would you recommend?”
Grytha studied him for a moment. Then her gaze slid over to Hull.
Hull worked his jaw but said nothing.
“I will return in three days,” said Grytha—ostensibly to Ephraim, though her eyes remained fixed upon Hull. “I trust the matter will be sorted out by then.”
Still, Hull said nothing.
Grytha bid them both good evening and departed. Ephraim escorted her to the door with a tolerably congenial air. The moment she had gone, however, he flitted back upstairs as swiftly as his stiff knees could carry him.
As Ephraim opened the bedroom door he caught a glimpse of Hull with his chin firmly planted in his palm, casting a pensive, brooding look at the shadowy corner.
No sooner had Ephraim perceived this, however, then he was perceived in turn, and Hull dropt his hand and straightened his posture.
His ears flicked upward as he arose to a more upright carriage.
The gesture, as natural and unstudied as breathing, nonetheless made Ephraim’s pulse flutter.
There was a smile on Hull’s lips, but it was wan and thin, and it did not mask the deep concern pooling in his dark eyes.
“What do you require for proper sustenance?” Ephraim asked him. “Whatever it is, I shall send for it. Or is it something we ought to have fetched from your homeland? Perhaps the wulpertinger—”
Hull’s wan smile tightened. “It isn’t food.”
“Oh.” Ephraim grew only more perplexed by the moment. He supposed he still had much to learn when it came to the ways of the fae. He tried again. “Then… what is it?”
Hull drew in a steadying breath. It left him in an exhausted sigh.
Ephraim took up his customary seat at the bedside and clasped Hull’s outstretched hand between both his own. Whatever dreadful thing Hull needed to impart to him, he would await it with all the patience his beloved deserved.
At length, Hull met his gaze again—with soft eyes that yearned for an understanding that Ephraim felt equally desperate to grant him—and spoke.
“There’s… something I ought to have told you before now.” Hull worried his lip betwixt his teeth. “Regarding the particular needs of my kind.”
Ephraim knew not what to expect.
The ways of the fae were largely unknown to him, as a mere mortal.
(Hull had never called him “mere,” had never once even implied it, but the alliteration sprang to mind nonetheless.) Their customs were a vast dark sea roiling beneath him while he sailed along as a passenger in a splendid ship captained by his Hull.
Every so often something new would surface, like the wulpertinger, and Hull would explain it, and Ephraim would marvel at it, and they would sail on, content to explore the unknown together.
It never occurred to him to demand to know what lay beneath the surface.
He felt secure in his conviction that it posed no danger to him, and if he were unfamiliar with these seas, at the very least his Hull knew how to navigate them.
Now, however, he had glimpsed something gliding beneath their vessel—some looming thing with the sharp edges of fin or fang and unfathomable tendrils trailing behind—and for the first time in all their acquaintance, his Hull seemed reluctant to explain.
“There is a reason,” Hull began, haltingly, “why I have remained in London… and Butcher has not.”
Ephraim had supposed there were many reasons and, furthermore, that very few of them were any of his business. Yet as Hull had at last decided to divulge them, so Ephraim had determined to listen.
“Iron is poison to the fae,” Hull went on.
(He had told Ephraim as much already, long ago, though Ephraim supposed it bore repeating, for the danger was no small thing.) “However, those like myself, huldrekall and our cousins, are defended from its worst effects by drawing our strength from mortals, in the same manner that a poison may be cured by its antidote.”
Ephraim nodded to show he understood, though if Hull had ever drawn strength from him, he had never known it.
Hull continued. “Most often it is done in an… intimate ritual.”
Ephraim could simultaneously hardly believe and hardly mistake his meaning.
Hull spoke on. “But if necessary one may draw from the elation of a crowd. The theatre, for example, is a wonderful source. And this method is far safer for the mortals; they each lose but a fraction of their own strength, so little they do not feel weaker for it, whereas if the same quantity were drawn from a single man, he might require a full day and night to restore himself.”
Ephraim endeavoured to rein in his thoughts which now galloped in conjecture well ahead of Hull’s words.
On occasion after an intimacy with Hull he had felt some weakness, but no moreso than the lethargy that typically followed release.
From what Hull described now, however, he ought to have collapsed insensible altogether for many hours at the very least.
Which suggested a troubling conclusion.
“Without drawing this strength,” Hull spoke on, “I am left with nothing for my body to repair itself, as Grytha said.”
This did nothing to allay Ephraim’s growing concern.
Hull drew in a shuddering breath and released it in an abbreviated sigh. “’Til now I have sustained myself on mortal crowds.”