16. Castor
Castor
The sale completes, and the developer owns a cathedral he cannot have, and I have never been so content to be a thing on a gutter.
It is six months later. The developer’s men came, and surveyed, and drew their plans, and then the plans went strange in the way plans go strange when a place is held against them, the flats fell through on a technicality, the wine bar’s licence was refused, the investor pulled out, and a charity nobody had heard of made an offer for St. Wracken’s as a “heritage building and community sanctuary, caretaker in situ.” The caretaker in situ is Wes.
The charity is mostly Marisol and a dry careful committee of old-quarter residents who like the idea of a deconsecrated cathedral kept by an art restorer who talks to the carvings.
None of them know about me. That is the bargain. The guardian is not seen.
Except by one.
It is dusk. The grey leaves the high windows, and the thaw comes into me, the wings, the back, the chest, the sound, and I drop off the gallery and catch the air and sweep the length of the nave that is ours now, truly ours, and I land in the candlelight where Wes is waiting, where Wes is always waiting, because Wes lives here now.
He moved his whole life into the rectory.
His books, his tools, his terrible jokes. He kept his promise. He kept me.
He’s made the rectory ours in six months.
There are two mugs by the kettle now. His tools share the dean’s old desk with a chess set neither of us is good at, played by candlelight in the hours before dawn takes me, a game we abandon and resume across nights, the pieces holding their places like we hold ours.
He reads to me when I’m stone, knowing I can hear, working through the cathedral’s whole forgotten library out loud, and I spend the bright hours of every day listening to my keeper’s voice move through four hundred years of psalters and chronicles and the occasional terrible novel he buys across the river specifically because the badness makes me laugh at dusk.
He’s right about the things that make me laugh.
He’s right about most things. He was right about the one that mattered.
“There he is,” he says, the way he says it every dusk, looking up at me with that working attention gone soft, the looking-at-beautiful-things look. “Evening, stone saint.”
“Evening, keeper,” I say.
He has news; I can tell from the way he’s vibrating.
He’s been across the river all day with Marisol and the committee.
“It’s registered,” he says. “Officially. Not the old right, that one stayed dead, the magistrate saw to that. A brand new post, the charity’s gift, written fresh.
I’m the legal caretaker, in perpetuity, with a residence right and a conservation mandate, and the building’s protected, and the binding…
” He puts his hands on my chest, over the sound, the way he does.
“Marisol asked me how long I’m signing on for.
The caretaker’s term. I told her perpetuity.
She said nobody signs for perpetuity. I said I do. ”
“You signed your whole life,” I say, “to a ruin and a thing on a gutter.”
“I signed my whole life to the only thing that ever wanted me to stay,” he says. “Same thing I told you the first time. It hasn’t changed. It’s not going to change. Get used to it.”
I gather him up. Six months, and the wonder of it hasn’t worn off, that I am flesh every dusk and stone every dawn, but the dawn is gentle now, the binding anchored to the keeping, to him, to a wall that stays holy because a man keeps it holy with his whole heart.
I will hold this wall as long as he keeps it.
And he is mortal, and one day, I do not look at that day.
He does not either. We have decided, the two of us, to take the nights as they come, the way we took the first one, the way we took the one that made me holy.
The dawn still counts. It always will. But it counts the ordinary way now, the way every mortal’s days count, and we have made our peace to spend them.
“Take me up to the bell tower,” he says, against my chest. “I’ve never been up there at night. I want to see the old quarter from the top. I want to see what you’ve been guarding.”
So I take him up. I gather him against me and I open my wings, the whole dark span, and I drop us out through the broken louvre of the tower into the night air over Veilwood’s old quarter, the rain just stopped, the lead roofs shining, the river a dark ribbon, the lamps of the old quarter strung out below us like the candles down the nave.
He gasps and holds on, his arms around my neck, his face against my throat, and I beat up over the bell tower I was carved beside three hundred years ago and I show him the city I have held all this time and never been thanked for, never been seen for, never once been loved for, until him.
“This is what I guard,” I tell him, over the wind.
“All of it. The old quarter, the roofs, the people asleep under them. I’ve held it three hundred years and I’ll hold it as long as you keep the wall.
And now…” The sound in my chest rolls out over the city, the subsonic note he was the first to feel, the first to ask about, the first to call warm. “Now I’m not holding it alone.”
“No,” he says, fierce, into my throat, his small warm hands locked in the heat of me.
“You’re not. I’m the keeper. I keep the wall and I keep you and I’m not going anywhere.
Now take me back down to the nave, stone saint, and let me have you on the holy floor till the dawn, because we’ve got all night, and I plan to make it last.”
I wheel us back over the shining roofs toward the broken louvre, toward the dark nave and the dust sheets and the candles burning down the centre of the crossing, toward the only home I’ve ever had that wasn’t made of stone, and I think, for the first time in three hundred years, with the whole certainty of a thing that has finally, finally been seen, that I am not a thing that guards.
I am a person who is allowed to want. And I am wanted back. And the dawn can come; he’ll be there when the dark gives me back, and I will hold the wall, and he will keep it, and the candles will burn down the centre of the holy floor every night for the rest of our lives.
“All night,” I agree, and dive us home. “Keeper. All night, and every night, and I’ll never once be careful with the wanting again.”