Chapter 35
CHAPTER 35
S imeon was worried about encountering some of the residents of the tiny hamlet. They were his people, yes, but some of them had urged his parents to kill him, and some had been there at the Frugises’ Mayfair house, waiting eagerly for him to be pushed out the window. But although he caught a few wisps of voices between the rooks’ calls, he didn’t see anyone. Most folks would be settled into their homes by now, with dinner eaten and the washing-up done.
Before they reached the cluster of buildings, Simeon took them off to the left. It wasn’t even a lane, but rather a footpath mostly obscured by weeds. Few people traveled this particular route, it seemed. At least, not anymore.
And… there. Barely visible in the gathering gloom, ruined walls poked up above the greenery like rotted teeth. The rooks settled on them and went silent.
Simeon started marching toward the remains of the house, stopped, and looked at Crow. He whispered, “Love, you don’t have to?— ”
“Shut up.”
Simeon grinned and they continued, walking past what had once been the front of the house, where the doorway and two windows gaped silently, and around to the side, where the kitchen garden had once been. Some of the herbs still survived, although they’d gone feral, and their scent filled the evening air. The wall was almost entirely gone here, the tumbled, broken stones softened by grasses and tiny white flowers. Just inside—if you could call a space with no roof and only partial walls inside —a lantern flickered.
Bran sat on the ground with his back against the remains of the fireplace, the lantern beside him on the hearth. He was hatless, shirtless, his trousers in tatters, and he held a long knife in his right hand. Perhaps the poor light and deep shadows were partially to blame, but he looked more like a corpse than a living man.
He looked up at Simeon without surprise. “Help me,” he rasped, sounding remarkably like a rook.
“We’ll take you somewhere you can rest. Find a doctor. We’ll?—”
“No.” The blade caught the lamplight with a flash. “Help me fix this.”
“Bran….”
“We’re right here already, you see. That will make things easier.”
Simeon suppressed a groan. “Give me the box. Can’t you see what it’s doing to you?” He didn’t add that it was destroying him as well, albeit more slowly.
“Thief!” spat Bran.
“Aye. But not this time.”
“It was mine. Mother let me play with it while she sang to me. To me and nobody else. And then you were born and she let you have it instead. ”
Simeon wondered whether Dr. Freud would have something to say about this situation, although it seemed to have more relation to the book of Genesis than a book about the mind. “It belongs to both of us.”
“It was mine. Mine first. When they sent us away, I took it. I was the thief, not you, although one cannot truly steal something that belongs to him.” Bran’s eyes glowed with grief and anger and, Simeon thought, a good dose of insanity. Even if he’d been of sound mind before beginning his travels in time, he wasn’t any longer.
“I didn’t take it from you,” Simeon said calmly. “I told you, I found it. Didn’t even know at the time what it was.”
Bran’s head drooped. “I lost it. I kept it with me at the Castle all those years because it was almost all I had of myself. They even took my name and replaced it with another. I would look at the box sometimes to remind myself that I was a Frugis. But when I… when I leapt off the cliff….”
Ah. Bran would have shed all his clothing when he became a bird, and anything tucked into pockets would have tumbled down to the sea. Simeon didn’t know how the box made it from there into Clara’s possession, but Clara and her sisters were capable of all sorts of things. Besides, according to Atty, the cursed thing had a way of finding its owners.
“Bran, I’m sorry that you feel as if the box was stolen from you. If I could simply let you have it, I would. But in this place, this time, it’s going to kill us both. And even if it wasn’t, I can’t let you keep creating these… these atrocities in the timelines.” He was going to say more but his throat was too thick.
When Bran looked up again, tears made tracks through the dirt on his face. “But don’t you understand? This is my chance to undo the atrocity.”
“They did what they thought was right. It wasn’t, but… I en ded up all right. Happy, even. I found love and had loads of adventures. You can do these things too. We can help.” He wasn’t sure how enthusiastic Crow would be about this, but at least he didn’t protest.
But Bran shook his head. “Not that. I mean the true atrocity.”
Ice froze Simeon’s heart because suddenly he knew . Crow must have understood as well, hissing and moving a step closer.
“What did you do?” growled Simeon. He didn’t really want to know, but he had to.
“After the… the cliff. I came here. It was quite odd, in fact. Previously I had no notion of where home had once been. It could have been any of the countrysides in Britain. Yet after I learned to become a bird, all I had to do was wish to fly to the place where I was born, and I knew the way.” The echo of wonder still showed on his face.
“It’s a useful skill.”
“It is.” Bran sat up straighter, an effort which clearly cost him. He looked ancient, although in actual years lived, he was no older than Simeon, not yet thirty. Despite his weakness, however, Bran’s grip on the knife looked strong.
“What happened when you got here?” That was Crow, speaking for the first time since they’d entered the ruins. His American accent sounded odd in this place. Not wrong or unwelcome, simply… unexpected. As if even the broken walls were surprised to hear it.
Bran barely glanced at Crow, but he did answer. “I spent some time flapping about. Nobody noticed me—there were loads of real rooks everywhere, and they didn’t mind if I joined them. I couldn’t easily change back because I had no clothes, no… nothing. So I watched.” His jaw tightened. “I saw our parents. They had a daughter now. I saw our gr andparents as well. And Mother, she was expecting another child. Soon, I think.”
Simeon couldn’t say anything. He had to listen, as if he were caught in one of those terrible nightmares where doom approached but he couldn’t move. Crow stayed silent too.
“They were joyous,” Bran said. “Mother would sing. The girl would watch Father when he worked at the forge. There was… affection. So much of it. Everyone belonged to this place and to one another.” He gave a long sigh that Simeon would have echoed, had he not been frozen in horror.
Bran wasn’t finished. He twisted his wrist a bit, playing the lantern light along the blade. “I was too frightened to reveal myself. I didn’t know why they’d sent me away and I was afraid they would reject me. I couldn’t have abided that. So I remained with the rooks for several days, until one night when it was cold and wet, when I changed shape and went into the smithy. I had only a few fragments of memories from there, but the smell was entirely familiar. I decided that I’d wait until morning, and if I still lacked the courage to reveal myself, I’d fly away for good. But it was cold and I was naked. There wasn’t so much as a blanket in there to keep me warm.”
A flood of words, and then a single sentence that hung alone, dark and heavy.
“I found a box of matches and tried to light the forge.”
Simeon would have staggered back if Crow hadn’t steadied him. It wasn’t the confession itself; somehow that came as no surprise. And Bran’s recent actions now made more sense. What stunned Simeon was the whirlpool of emotions. Anger, yes, and not just at the stupidity that led to the deaths but also at Bran’s lies. However, Simeon also pitied Bran, who had lived with this guilt for years. And now he understood Bran too. Crow had spent a decade blaming himself for the fire that had killed his grandparents—and for the subsequent deaths of people he knew—and because of it, had closed himself off from his emotions. He hadn’t known himself and hadn’t taken agency over his life.
Bran stood, the blackened chimney stones against his back, the knife in front. “I can fix this. I can go back, and I can change things. I just need your help. Please.”
The plea twisted Simeon’s heart, but he shook his head. “You’ve seen already—it won’t work. We can change the future but not the past.”
“Future!” Bran spat. “I have none. I was going to die, remember?”
“But you didn’t. I was dying once too but I didn’t, and I found… everything.” Simeon gestured toward Crow, who was indeed his everything.
Bran’s expression was closed-off and devoid of hope. “It doesn’t matter to you. You never knew them. I did. I want them back.” He squeezed his eyes closed.
The rooks shrieked.
“No!” Simeon shouted, but even as the sound left his mouth, Crow launched himself forward, directly at Bran. Directly at Bran’s blade, which drove into Crow’s body with a horrible meaty sound. They both began to waver, so Simeon did what he had to. He tackled them both.
Crow screamed at being trapped between Simeon and Bran, the knife no doubt plunging in even deeper. But as Simeon held tight to both of them, the world fuzzed out and then sharpened to a daytime landscape entirely white with snow and ice. All three of them tumbled to the frozen ground.
Bran tried to scramble away but was trapped under the weight of two men. One of them—maybe all of them—were shouting. Crow’s blood was hot against Simeon’s chest and belly and hands. Simeon felt himself unraveling at the edges, as if he were a frayed scrap of fabric.
His vision began to blur again.
He roared, a primal sound that was neither man nor bird but something else—something more akin to Crow’s demons, perhaps. He tore frantically at Bran’s trousers, which were now soaked with Crow’s blood, and he felt desperately for a small item that could do so much harm. His head felt as if it were a balloon floating on a string, his hands lacked dexterity, his eyes saw nothing but white snow and red, his?—
Yes.
With another roar, this time of triumph, Simeon seized the box, clutched the time stream, and dragged all three of them to the remains of a burned cottage a few miles from Avebury in 1883.
Crow lay curled on the ground, unmoving.
Bran, who still clutched the knife, came at Simeon with a wild wail—and stumbled over three rooks that were nearly invisible in the darkness. He fell with a crash and a groan, and there were squawks from the rooks. As he struggled onto all fours, Simeon, whose knees were distressingly wobbly, bent and wrested away the knife. He cut himself in the process but didn’t care. With another roar, he hurled the knife over the ruined wall, where it landed silently, cushioned by weeds growing among the tumble of stones.
Simeon wanted very badly to cradle Crow in his arms and plead with him to miraculously heal one more time. But… time. He still hadn’t mastered it, had he?
His course of action suddenly became as clear to him as if it had been a purple road unfolding below him in Atty’s dream space.
“Crow,” he said, not knowing whether his beloved was conscious enough to hear him. “I have to do this. Not sure that Bran and I will survive, but don’t you dare die. I love you.”
Crow made a sound that might or might not have been a response, and Bran, still on hands and knees, swiped blindly at Simeon’s legs. Simeon allowed himself to be taken down. He fell on both of them—mentally apologizing to poor Crow—closed his eyes, and flew through time.