4. Castor
Castor
Icome down slowly so I won’t frighten him, which is a thing I have never had to think about before, because I have spent three centuries making sure no one I dropped toward ever had time to be frightened for long.
I land at the edge of the candlelight and I let him look.
I know what I am. I have seen myself in the leaded glass and in the dean’s nephew’s coloured lamp and in the long stone hours of my own awareness.
I am tall, when I straighten I am half again the height of him, and I do not straighten, I stay in the half-crouch that is closest to how he’s used to seeing me.
I am grey, the grey of the wall I am sworn to, and my skin holds heat like the wall holds the sun, so that the air near me moves the way it moves over a roof on a summer day.
I have horns that curve back from my brow.
I have wings that I have folded down now, high over my shoulders, because open they would fill the crossing and put the candle out.
I have hands that end in claws as long as his fingers, and I keep them loose and turned, palm up, low, so he can see I am not reaching.
He looks at me the way no one has ever looked at me.
He looks at me the way he looks at the carvings.
Like there’s a body under it that he wants to understand.
His eyes go to my shoulders and my hands and the place at my chest where the sound lives, and there’s no fear in them that I can find, only a working attention, the same one he turns on a stone face he’s deciding how to clean.
“You’re warm,” he says. The thing he said before. “I can feel it from here.”
“Sun-warm,” I say. “It doesn’t go out. It’s how they made me. Stone that remembers the sun.”
He takes a step closer. I hold absolutely still.
I am aware of every claw, of the weight of me, of the lethal stupid size of my own body in this small ring of light with this small soft man, and I make myself a held thing, a leashed thing, the way I have made myself stone every dawn for three hundred years.
“Can I…” He stops. Starts again, and the care in it nearly stops the sound in my chest. “I touched your face before. The other night. Is that, are you allowed to be touched? Is it a thing you want?”
No one has asked me that. No one has asked me anything.
“I don’t know,” I tell him, because it’s true, and because he is a man who tells the carvings the truth in the dark and I find I cannot do less. “No one’s touched me to be kind. Only to carve. Only to pray. I don’t know what kind feels like. I think I want to know.”
His breath goes out of him unsteady. He lifts his hand, the same two fingers, I see it, the same ones, and I lower my head to meet them, my horned head, this thing that has frightened crows off the parapet for centuries, and I bring it down into the reach of one small mortal hand because he asked and because I want.
His fingers touch my brow. Slide back to the base of my horn.
And the feeling that goes through me is so large and so new that the sound in my chest breaks open into something I’ve never made, a low rolling note that I feel him feel, his hand stills, his breath catches, and I freeze, mortified, sure I’ve frightened him at last.
“No,” he says quickly. “No, that’s, do that again. What was that.”
“I don’t know,” I say again, helpless. “I’ve never, no one has ever made me…”
“Made you what?”
“Sound,” I manage. “Like that. I didn’t know I could.”
He goes very still. And then he steps in close, closer than is wise, close enough that the heat off me must be washing over his face, and he puts both hands to the sides of my lowered head, one at each horn, the way you’d hold a thing you mean to keep, and he looks into my carved-open eyes that are not carved now, that are mine, that are looking back, and he says, low:
“Then we’re even. Because nobody’s ever wanted to find out what I sound like either.”
The candle on the scaffold leans in my breath.
The rain ticks on the lead. And I, who have held the wall for three hundred years and wanted nothing, kneel down in the crossing of St. Wracken’s so that a mortal man can hold my horned head in his two warm hands, and I let him, and the dawn, hours off yet, but counting, always counting now, feels for the first time in three centuries like a thief instead of a relief.
“There’s a cost,” I make myself say, because he should know, because kindness deserves the truth. “To my coming down. To being here, off my post. The dawn takes it back. I shouldn’t, I can’t do this every night without…”
“Without what?”
I don’t answer. His hands are on my horns and his eyes are on my eyes and I cannot make myself say without dying sooner to the first person who has ever wanted to hear me speak.
“We’ll figure out the cost,” he says. “Later. Stay. Just, stay down here with me a while. You don’t have to do anything. Just stay.”
So I stay. I fold down into the candlelight with my wings tucked and my claws curled safe against my own palms, and Wes sits with his back against my warm side as if I am a wall built to be leaned on instead of leaned against, and he talks to me, to me, until the candle’s a stub, and when the grey starts at the high windows I’m gone up the pier and back to my post before it can catch me, but I take the feel of his shoulder blades against my ribs up into the stone with me, and it makes the long day bearable in a way nothing has in three hundred years.