CHAPTER 20 #3
Avelyn didn’t want to find out. It was getting toward nine o’clock, and for all he’d slept through the early afternoon, tiredness was landing on him now like an oil tanker. It was making him look longingly at the couch. But he shouldn’t stay.
He had teased Annunciata about Saint Sebastian, but she had been right too.
This habit he had of loving where he shouldn’t was a blessing.
It was a psychological assault course: exhausting, but strengthening.
One day, he would be so good at it he could just strangle the feeling the moment it lifted its head.
Hreodwater Avelyn was watching. And that’s consolation, is it?
“I could read more of The Exorcist,” Jericho said.
“No, I should . . .”
“Avelyn. I’ve met Jesuits before—you’re all at least six-tenths Catholic macho nonsense. You’re either upright and building a school in Mexico or you’re unconscious. Sleep down here. Or if you want to be in your own room, I’m going to need to keep checking on you through the night.”
“But you said the stitches were—”
“I’m not worried about the stitches,” Jericho said over him, and Avelyn blinked, partway to astonished to find that Jericho, Jericho, could interrupt someone when he wanted to.
He didn’t speak any louder, but he put more power into his voice, like he had when he sang.
“I know what you’ll do if I don’t keep looking in.
You’ll abscond and walk for miles and open the wound again. ”
“If there really is something wrong with the salt light, and—”
“If there is something wrong with the salt light,” Jericho said over him, very soft this time, “there is literally nothing we can do about it tonight. There’s nowhere for people to go, not Outside, not above. Oh, and before I forget.” He held out a contact lens case and a bottle of saline solution.
Avelyn took them both slowly and half closed his eyes. They ached more than ever now. Lenses left in too long felt stiff and dry, like you’d just spent ten minutes staring into a lit forge, and that was when the air wasn’t full of salt. He didn’t want to take them out, though.
“I . . . don’t really like to—”
“I swear to God,” Jericho erupted, “if you say you have a bit of a complicated relationship with your contact lenses—”
“I’m doing it!” Avelyn yelped. This was it: he’d broken Jericho.
His teachers at the seminary had all hated him, and he still held the Venerable English College record for number of hours spent slumped outside the Rector’s office, but reducing a saint to shouting inside forty-eight hours was new and awful territory.
“Do you need me to get your glasses?” Jericho asked.
“They’re not prescription, they’re just—”
“For Christ’s sake!” Jericho threw a piece of cauliflower at his head.
“They’re out! See? Please don’t kill me with a cauliflower? I’m sorry! Okay? I’m sorry,” Avelyn said, starting to laugh. He went around the desk and knelt down on the floor at Jericho’s feet as if he were begging forgiveness of a bishop. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t forgive you,” Jericho said grumpily. “More grovelling.”
Avelyn put his hands on Jericho’s knees. “Please? I promise not to do stupid things anymore.”
“Why do you wear them anyway?” Jericho growled.
“So I don’t scream every time I look in the mirror. I look like my uncles.”
“Yuck,” Jericho told him. “You’re nauseating. Sort your life out, Brocken.”
Avelyn grinned. Jericho wasn’t broken. This was magnificent. “I’ll sort my life out when you come for a nice long walk on the fen with me, under the lovely huge sky in all the lovely open space where you can see for miles and miles and miles . . .”
Jericho twitched and turned his head away, starting to laugh too.
Avelyn took both of his hands. “Please will you read to me?” he asked, in the ancient, high Hreod only ever used for prayers to the King, and friends you had wronged.
Jericho slid down onto the floor with him to reach the firelight, leaning back against the ottoman between the armchairs.
As if it was nothing, he put his arm out.
Avelyn hesitated, but all at once he was tired of being so paralysingly twitchy, tired of the really-you-shouldn’t voice in his head, and tired of Rome Avelyn.
Rome Avelyn was neurotic. He missed Hreodwater Avelyn, who had climbed all over his friends like a puppy. It was nothing.
He settled against Jericho’s shoulder. It brought him inside Jericho’s dark salt light shadow, and he could see the room with only the candlelight: much darker, stranger, the ceiling lost in shadows. It was colder: the only heat that reached inside that shadow was the fire.
The cool and dark were an unbelievable relief.
He hadn’t noticed it in the front of his mind, but the ceaseless light had been keeping him poised, like it had been six o’clock in the morning all day.
Soothing, too, was the slow lift and fall of Jericho’s ribs.
He must have gone slack, because Jericho touched the back of his head.
“Still with me?” Jericho asked, with an edge that said he was worried Avelyn had passed out.
“I am,” Avelyn said, curling his fingertips over a fold of Jericho’s shirt and watching the firelight, only the firelight, play over the fabric. He breathed in slowly. Beeswax and fire. He wanted never to move again.
Jericho held the book open with one hand and kept the other on the base of Avelyn’s skull.
It was nothing.
17 And sometimes octopuses, in an emergency.
18 Annunciata had read in many papers that tua literally meant “daughter,” but it was universally used as a polite way to denote clan, e.g.
, daughter of the Brocken. This had led to some excitable feminist studies and some impassioned grumbling on online forums, but actually everyone had got the wrong end of the stick.
Hreod did use two grammatical genders, but they had always been mistranslated as he and she by Outsiders.
It was true that often this did boil down to clan ladies being called what the translators thought was she, and Avelyn was referred to by he, but actually it was nothing to do with who had what parts.
Hreod had one pronoun it used for material considerations, like humans, foxes, laundry, bricks, road maintenance, and of course, clan, hence the universal tua; and one it used for anything to do with the King, encompassing stags, salt, salt light, eels, the mine, chance, dreams . . . and witches.