They’re What I Kept #2
Rasen’s hand hovers a careful inch over the curve of her belly, and the mark he left answers him. The antler branch flares to life beneath her coat, like sunlight through a window. Rasen closes his eyes and exhales. “It held.”
“It did,” Eden whispers. “You can touch her, Rasen. You know that.”
He looks toward Ashán, always respectful, the other three could learn a lot from him.
Ashán takes Rasen’s hand and lays it over Eden’s belly.
“She’s kicking!” Rasen bows his head over her stomach.
Kaeran comes through the snow with his hammer still out and blood on his knuckles. He stops in front of Ashán and looks at the fractures running through his flaming skull. His eyes follow the black ichor crusted down his chest, and over the ruined places where his wings used to be.
“You look like shit,” Kaeran says.
“I’ve had a rough couple days.”
“You finally sealed that bond.” He sets down his hammer, rolls one shoulder, and looks at a tree. “Glad you are not dead.”
“Me too.”
He walks off toward the horses without another word, which, from Kaeran, is a sonnet.
Pestilence slithers over, robe trailing through the snow without disturbing it.
He stops in front of Ashán, and he looks at him for a long moment with an expression nobody has ever successfully read.
And then he bows. Deeply, from the waist, one hand flat over his heart.
He holds it long enough that the whole clearing notices.
Long enough that Damien’s head comes up, and Kaeran, twenty feet away, stops walking and turns around.
Because Pestilence does not bow. Pestilence has never bowed. Not to me. Not to any of my brothers.
He straightens and drifts silently back toward the others.
Death comes last. He doesn’t dismount. He sits on his horse at the edge of the clearing with his hands folded on his pommel.
Without a head, it’s impossible to know that his eyes are on the glittering clover. But I know they are. “Two bonds sealed,” he says.
Damon’s charms chime softly. “One more, Caluxe.”
Andrik comes through the birches with one arm thrown back across Lumi’s body, his antlers lowered defensively. Bundled against his chest, wrapped in layers of wool and one enormous fur-lined coat, is Eirlys. And what a beautiful little combination she is.
Lumi’s eyes dart from the blood to Damien before they land on Eden tucked into the arms of the reaper who was cursed to kill her.
“Lumi!” Eden yells.
She runs toward us and wraps herself around Eden, sobbing into her hair.
Andrik stops a few feet short. One hand still braced on a birch trunk. His eyes settle on me. Three thousand years of grief arrive on that boy’s face all at once.
“Why?” is all he says.
Damon clamps a hand tightly over my shoulder.
“Why was I never worth your love? Why did you never come for me like you did for him?”
Lumi looks over at him, tears falling for an entirely different reason now.
I get up from the ground. “Bimby Button.”
“What does a M?rvenkae* have anything to do with this?”
“She has everything to do with this,” my voice cracks. “She lit up the night when you were young, so you weren’t scared and alone.”
“How do you know that?”
“I sent her.”
“And Mallow,” I continue. “The reindeer that pulled you out of the whiteout when you were nineteen,” I say. “The snow leopards who hunted for you before you learned how.”
“Stop.”
“And the woman.”
His head snaps up.
“The woman who chased a murderer right to this very forest.”
Lumi’s eyes squint in confusion.
“Who do you think led Mark O’Reilly to your door?” I ask.
Andrik shakes his head over and over. “No. You weren’t there. You were never—”
“I was there for every one of them.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?” he bellows.
It rips through the clearing. Eirlys startles against his chest and Lumi flinches.
Every bird in the forest lifts off the branches at once.
“Why didn’t you say something? You were there?
You were there, and you watched me—” He chokes on a sob.
“I prayed. I prayed for someone. Anyone. And you were standing right there—”
“I could not!”
“That’s not a reason.”
“Every curse has its own laws.” I press my palm against the base of my neck, instinctively waiting for my vocal cords to constrict.
“Three thousand years I could not speak to you. I could not appear to you. I could not write your name, or send you a word, or stand anywhere you might see my face. But I could send animals. And so I did. And I made sure all of your favorites stayed so you were never truly alone.”
He hangs his head.
“I have watched you sleep from the edge of this forest more nights than I can count. I could not cross it. I could not call you, and I could not tell you the one thing I have wanted to tell you since the hour you were breathed into existence.”
He doesn’t look up at me. I cannot say I blame him.
“Eirlys...” I murmur.
He goes rigid.
“You know the Rhavari cannot reproduce,” I murmur. “Not one, in the whole history of the world, Andrik. It is an impossibility for your species.”
Lumi lets out a small squeak.
“Who do you think bartered that deal?” I look at the infant on his chest. At the dark curls and tiny fist knotted in her father’s fur. “You have spent every day of her life believing she was a miracle that happened to you.”
Andrik’s arms tighten around her.
“She was not a miracle.” I take a step toward him. “She was a petition. One I would not give up on until the fates agreed.”
His knees give out, and he drops hard onto the snow. I go down into the snow in front of him, placing my hands on either side of his face.
“I was always there,” I whisper. “I was only ever silenced.”
His forehead comes down against mine.
“When I came to you before, after Micah died. Your curse had ended, but Sage’s had not yet begun. I was still not able to speak freely, or to even show you my true form.”
“Say it,” he chokes. “Say the thing you couldn’t say before. Say it.”
“I love you, my son.”
Sobs erupt around the clearing.
“Both of them,” Damon says thickly. “Both of your boys are finally whole.”