CHAPTER 55 #3
“Well, I think the witches will have to keep on making it safe for a long time,” Jericho said from by the stove.
He was cutting up an orange; Avelyn could catch the scent of it, bright and happy.
Everyone said the oranges from the greenhouses were like huge pearls now, because they were growing more by salt light than sunlight.
“People are going to see things that make them lapse and doubt and all the rest. Scientists especially. If someone gets hold of—I don’t know, black halite, and finds something impossible about it, and they start to think that it wasn’t all so illusory as they thought . . .”
“No, that will sort itself out,” Avelyn said, with confidence that, for once, he genuinely felt.
“The silver we believe into being still tarnishes in oxygen—I’m not going around making that happen, are you?
The chemistry just works. If they have something under a microscope, and they think it’s just salt, it will be.
There’s probably a fancy quantum entanglement way Tallis would say that, but I do think I’m right.
We can ask her,” he added, because Tallis was superb at explaining things to people who didn’t understand much science.
He liked that she had been a musician first. She was bilingual.
“Maybe that only works because you think it does,” Jericho remarked, pouring wine from the pan into two glasses. There was cinnamon there somewhere too, and cloves.
Avelyn liked this game, although he had strictly, strictly banned it amongst the children. “Maybe none of us are real, maybe we’re all your dreams. Or maybe we’re all dreaming each other, and it’s like standing between two mirrors.”
“Ah,” Jericho said, sounding alarmed, “please don’t—think about that too hard, witches have wondered that from time to time and they have a way of vanishing—”
Avelyn snorted. “You haven’t got the imagination to come up with me.”
Jericho laughed an incredulous laugh. “Have I not?”
“Of course you haven’t. I love you, I think you’re the most fascinating thing I’ve ever come across, and if I have a hundred years to talk to you, it will not be enough. You’re much too self-effacing to imagine anyone like that.”
Jericho came to sit on the arm of the chair.
As he moved, Avelyn caught the barest shimmer of salt light from the slim crown sealed through his hair.
He wished he could see him. Halls fell quiet now when other people saw him; long gone was the purposefully unnoticeable figure in the purple jumper.
If Avelyn happened to brush his sleeve, he felt brocade in oak and ivy patterns, and if they sat side by side, he could hear the whisper of silver-woven fabric, but that was all he knew.
Slowly, so that Avelyn could see it was going to happen, Jericho gave him his wine, then touched their glasses together.
“Well. To the lies of witches, and those with the wisdom to believe them. May we all be worth our salt.”
Avelyn had to pretend his glass was fascinating again, and hope that the firelight was too dim for Jericho to see it shining too much in his eyes. It was such a danger of blindness: if you weren’t careful, you started to behave as though other people couldn’t see you.
“The worst of it is over, though,” Jericho said quietly. “I can go back down to the deep soon, and we can fix your sight. There’s no need for me to be here like this anymore. I could be a dream again.”
Avelyn had been waiting for months for this to surface, although he had hoped it wouldn’t.
He had gone over what he wanted to say dozens of times, but now that it was here, it seemed so ridiculous to say that to this man who had been here since the glaciers, for whom he must have been hardly more noticeable than a passing firefly.
“I don’t—think I could make you real again, like that,” Avelyn said.
It came out unevenly, despite how often he’d gone over it in his head.
“I’d know it was a dream. I’d know you were down there by yourself. It wouldn’t work.”
“Avelyn, you just believed us from Caer Halen to . . .”
“No, it’s different. It’s different. It’s like elastic.
There is a stretch to what I can believe.
It can stretch a lot. I know a lot is possible.
But not . . . I can’t stretch it that far.
I can’t know you’re alone on that altar in the dark, and also make you real up above, I can’t.
I’m not that good a witch. If you go back down there, I’ll never see you again. ”
Jericho took a breath and held it before he used it. “Yes, but—would it matter? You’d have your sight back.” Then, as if he were walking on new ice, “You could go after Father Li, if you—”
“I want you much more than I want the Church or my fucking eyes!”
Silence.
Avelyn swallowed, excruciatingly conscious that that might have been the most stifling, needy thing he had ever said, and God, but he was exhausted of needing things, from Jericho and his unending patience most of all.
“I—no. If you’re tired of all this, if it’s too much—no, I know it’s too much—I mean, if you want to go, then of course you should go. ”
Jericho took the glass from him and set it aside, then put one hand to his chest to push him—not hard—against the wall.
For what felt like an confused eternity, Avelyn couldn’t tell what was happening, and all he could think was that it was a relief to have the wall against his back, because he was coming to hate standing in the middle of a room, not knowing what was behind him or if he would fall if he moved, and a relief for Jericho to be exactly in front of him so close.
If he were to open his hands, Jericho’s hips would fit into his palms, but he didn’t, because maybe this meant Stay here and don’t talk to me anymore.
Jericho kissed him. Avelyn froze, not trusting it enough for an entire second, because for all they had eaten together and laughed and Jericho had read the rest of The Exorcist to him and books and books, more every night, they had never once talked about this, never mentioned what had happened on that day at the altar.
There were two reasons why that would be: one, it would have to come from him, because he was the one who had cried over a hand on his knee, so he was the one who would have to say yes—only, he had never known how to say that, because the second reason was that Jericho didn’t want it.
Very slowly, he closed his hand over Jericho’s where it rested against his neck, and a new kind of belief he’d never had before welled up through the ground.
“I don’t,” Jericho said. He rested their foreheads together. “I don’t.”
23 When it had become clear that Avelyn was staying in Hreodwater and that he meant to keep on at An El, ten or twelve of the Brocken clan retainers appeared and explained to him in no uncertain terms that Lord Brocken was not going to do that.
Now the Brocken manor was open, Avelyn and forty witches lived there, along with a full staff, eight foxes, and a baby mammoth who had worked out that if you were cute and fluffy enough, you could hog the best place by the kitchen fire and steal all the pistachios without facing any consequences.
Every waking minute was spent talking to someone about finances, or being handed someone’s baby, or finding someone else’s trunk rifling his pockets on the daily pistachio hunt, and although he was grateful, he was also beginning to see why you might sometimes want to spend a thousand years chained to an altar a mile underground.