Maewyn's Prophecy: A Heart Aflame Page 6

  Roman was just a dim shadow standing far back against the wall. “Is he hurt?” he said softly.

  “Yes and no,” Bear said contemplatively. He stooped and got his arms under Archer’s body. “Let’s get back to the house.”

  * * * * *

  Archer lay in their bedroom. An elven healer stood by the side of the bed. Her expression of contempt had softened slightly into diagnostic indifference. “Systemic shock,” she said.

  “More like catatonia,” Bear added gruffly.

  “Shock,” the healer re-emphasized. “Caused by sudden intra-laminar schism. He’ll be more himself in time for the hearing.”

  She turned aside and stepped abruptly from Archer’s narrow frame of view. She continued to speak to Bear as they left the room. “Heron’s physical state is stabilizing, but it appears he was working some kind of act incantation, with the unforeseen consequence that he is connected to this place. It would be ill advised to move him until he has had some chance to ...”

  As they moved down the corridor, the sound of their footsteps and voices faded away. Someone stayed by the door. Archer did not turn to see who it was. Time passed, but that, too, was a matter of indifference.

  A cobweb wafted upon some slight, intangible breeze near the ceiling. Archer’s mind drifted from the moment it had all gone wrong up to the present purgatory. He could feel the despair and turmoil somewhere beneath him. But he had learned how to not touch his feelings, and in extremity, all he need do was this -- nothing. Do nothing, feel nothing, respond to nothing.

  Approaching footsteps, familiar. Roman’s voice said, “I’ll take over, Veleur.” And the door gently closed.

  The cobweb fluttered and then stilled. Roman sat beside him on the bed and looked down with a frozen face. Perhaps now that Archer wasn’t magical, there was no longer a bond between them. Archer knew his own feelings had not changed, but Roman ... well, Roman was easy to love. Archer knew the same could no longer be true of himself.

  His eyes felt dry, vision fogged. He still saw Roman reach out a hand swathed in bandages. The rough cloth dragged against the grain of the stubble on Archer’s cheek. Roman sat like that, looking down, but Archer did not meet his eyes.

  It was a peculiar state he found himself in. Such a relief to no longer need to respond to the world, to be a part of it only in the most necessary and passive sense.

  “Tell me what happened, Arch. Did you really think anything would come from Heron’s advances? You must know me, trust me, a little more than that. And that you have chosen to ... mutilate yourself like this ... What purpose can that possibly serve?”

  Receiving no reply, Roman stepped away and went through his usual nighttime routine. Archer could track it by the sounds. The indirect light from the bathroom splashed across the ceiling. The glass in which Roman kept his toothbrush clinked as he replaced it clumsily. There was a plasticy rustle that seemed a little out of place. Water ran, first the hand basin and then the shower, and the musk of hot water and flesh bled into the room.

  Roman returned naked, as he always slept, and leaned over him again. “Archer? Just say something to me. Any word. ‘Hello,’ perhaps. ‘Sorry.’ It won’t help much, but the effort would still be appreciated.”

  Finally Roman doused the lights and climbed into the bed, a handspan and infinity away. Archer continued to lie, fully clothed, on top of the covers. He was a little cold, but it didn’t bother him much. Almost as an afterthought, he closed his eyes.

  Morning was unwelcome; he felt like he could sleep forever. Roman went through his morning routine without haste. He leaned over the bed.

  “You may not be inclined to explain yourself to me, Archer. But you will not make matters worse by spending the rest of your life lying like a rag doll and developing bedsores while I look after you without the faintest idea --” His voice rose to an uncharacteristic shout. “-- what the hell was going through your mind!”

  There was a period of silence while it seemed Roman collected himself back up into his usually tightly sprung but essentially orderly self. Well. Archer supposed he should be happy -- he’d finally got to hear Roman shout.

  “So unless you want to make life even more difficult for me, I suggest you get the hell up and come down for breakfast. And I expect to see you eating it.”

  Archer opened his eyes, contemplated the ceiling, and finally opted to not cause Roman any more pain. He stood up and looked Roman square in the neck. The last thing he needed to do was look into those eyes right now.

  “Archer?” Roman’s voice seemed to hit a new emotion every time he spoke, now uncertain, pleading. Archer simply had no response -- there wasn’t one that would be anywhere near appropriate. Without the fire, he was hollow inside. A rash act of repentance had left him with nothing to give Roman but life.

  * * * * *

  Time didn’t seem to pass. It was like being stuck in one moment, the insect fixed in hardened sap for all eternity. Yet somehow each day became the next, words buzzed around him, people stared. A hearing was called, and an advocate berated him for directions, without response.

  Archer’s mind was frozen, too, not in the present, eternal now, but in the instant his raised hands had erupted with multi-hued, tangible, hungry fire.

  He looked at Roman handling his newspaper gingerly in swaddled hands -- and he saw fire. He looked down on the sedated form of Heron, his angelic looks hidden in cracked and blackened flesh that covered shoulder, neck, and almost half his face beneath a pungent, viscous ointment -- and he saw fire. And to his shame, the thing he regretted most was ... there would be no more fire. It was all that had made him special and worthwhile, and now he had ruined and destroyed it.

  In due course, the hearing was convened within the house. A score of people, dimly or well known, arrived. Tania was regal in her official ivory gown with fur trim brushing the ground and hanging heavy on the draped hood. The facts of the case were laid out plainly.

  Archer studied the parquet floor, its regular tessellation soothing his mind. He had never really noticed before the subtle pattern of the interlocking rectangles in some dark wood that was, where the sun reached it less often, almost red. He stopped acknowledging the words. He had learned that if you cannot stop yourself from hearing the words as they are said, you can still, by a simple act of or loss of will, not comprehend them.

  The sun had sunk from its highest point to beam directly through the mended window panes, the new glass clear and free from the ripples and small bubbles the old glass had been marked with. Roman leaned over and clasped Archer’s shoulder in some attempt to focus him upon the events of the day.

  Tania was speaking. “... regret the defendant’s inability to speak on his own behalf, it still seems clear that his actions were rash and out of all proportion, causing harm to our people. We accept as a mitigating factor William Archer’s apparent extreme regret and the actions he has taken. However ...”

  A crow flew past the window, close enough that its wing beats could be clearly heard and shadows were flung across the room.

  “... William’s actions are fundamentally inconsistent with his status as a soldier or even a member of the Society. That status is accordingly withdrawn except in that he continues to be the recognized, full domestic partner of the elf Roman. After deep deliberation, and taking into account the request of both victims for mercy, and the willingness of Roman, Barry ‘Bear’ Winters, and our loyal soldiers Wolf and Veleur to stand responsible for his future conduct, no further penalty shall be imposed. That is all.”

  There was no hint of personal acquaintance or mention of the years of service given; that was all wiped away. Perhaps it would have been better to be locked away, to suffer whatever personal rebuke the queen could think off. Her cool, indifferent verdict was far worse.

  Sitting in the hard wooden chair, Archer saw in a flash a future of monotonous purgatory, a cavalcade of useless days that stretched to the end of his life -- a time that might be long distant, if his bo
nd with Roman endured and extended his life towards an elven term. And that was when he knew that his first impulse had been the better one. He should have run.

  * * * * *

  It took very little planning. To all appearances, Archer continued to spend his day mostly sitting in his old armchair and looking vaguely towards the window, though it showed, from this angle, just the tops of a few trees and a slanted square of sky. But Roman’s orderly ways allowed for swift, snatched preparations.

  A duffel bag on the closet shelf, passport with his current working visa. Petty cash had almost two hundred pounds, but he left it as his last step. A little theft was no great obstacle after all that had happened. No excuses. Hell, his father always had a dozen or more, spun out in a slurred parade of disingenuous deflection. No excuses now. If he was no good, best he be off in some grey city where none who cared for him must watch him living ungratefully on. Or maybe he secretly did hope to shed the whole episode and become a different person, almost as he had when he’d first met Roman and stepped through his own personal closet into a magical world. Well, his own actions now banished him from it.

  Roman couldn’t track him by the fire now, but remote viewers and diviners could find him most places except the unintended safe-harbor their enemies made -- Ireland. It was open to him now, and none of these, his erstwhile comrades, could follow him there.

  The internet provided a network of timetables from local bus to train and ferry. No need to book this time of year; there would be ample walk-on fares. He wondered for a moment if he was being melodramatic. He’d made an error, serious enough, but even Veleur, who had not spoken a word to him since it had happened, had stood by him before the queen.

  But it just was not in him to claw back some kind of standing inch by inch, and there was something more than that -- a subtle, sourceless feeling that it was more than arbitrary fate that had brought him here, a dark hand ready to keep him in this place if he could not escape.

  The rational part of his mind protested that this was outright paranoia, a last attempt to escape blame. Yet in his unreliable heart, he believed it to be true.

  Roman returned to the bedroom, looked at the things he had laid out beside Archer, still untouched. A game console, new magazines, and other bribes for some response. Lindt chocolates, which he usually coveted, a hint perhaps that, try as he might, he was not eating as much as he should. Food, like wet polystyrene, resisted chewing and took effort with every swallow.

  Roman crouched by the side of the old chair. The bandages were off his hands, pink and marked with lines of scar tissue, like tangled strands of cotton, with puckered skin between. The healer said they would diminish to a barely noticeable network of lines and thickened skin that ran across the back of both hands and in a swath over one forearm. Archer could tell they itched. Roman was restless and twitched sometimes, and although he followed the instruction not to scratch, he sometimes applied moisturizer rather vigorously.

  He curled a tortured hand over Archer’s forearm. The palm and underside of each finger were unharmed, protected from when he’d grasped Heron’s body and pulled him down. Slowly he slid that hand from side to side, skin against bare skin, albeit gingerly. It was like he was seeking a connection. Are you there?

  Archer could feel what Roman was thinking of doing. They’d always had the sex. Even in the beginning, when Archer was young, raised full of hate for anything he didn’t understand -- so full of ‘I’m no fag, and you can’t make me one’ -- even then, their bodies had connected. They could fight all day, Archer might rage or sulk, Roman wound so tight he could barely breathe, and at the end of the day they would fall into each other’s arms, greedily.

  Roman’s dry palm ran down Archer’s arm and up again, against the grain of the fine hairs, sending small sparks of sensation.

  But there are limits to the emotion of lust. It might cut through denial and petty grievances, but even if it could bypass the piled-up, grievous errors of these last days, it should not. Archer would not compound his stupidity by indulging his body’s impulses. Perhaps what had led to all this was the fact that, deep down, Heron was right. They should never have been together. Perhaps they never would have been, if not for the bonding spell.

  Roman, so patient for so long, might finally be freed of the bond now that Archer had surrendered the fire and when he traveled to a place no magic touched. Heron had been speaking, he remembered dimly, of the bonds between some elves and humans being caused by nothing more than magic.

  Archer hadn’t thought much about it before, but he’d assumed the bonds came down from someone ‘up there.’ Some being from the pantheon of gods and spirits that elves and pagans spoke of. Some divine being who saw a pattern greater than mortal eyes could hope to perceive or understand. But it made more sense that it was something more arbitrary than that. The two of them were hardly an obvious match, and besides, even as he’d slipped into the pagan ways common to the house, he’d found no deep conviction within himself that any god existed, be it his father’s Yahweh or Roman’s Mother Goddess.

  He let his thoughts curl up inside his head, lost his consciousness within that tangled skein rather than follow his lover’s too beguiling touch. Roman sat by the side of the chair, lifting one arm to place a hand on Archer’s thigh. The elf sighed and rested his head, cheek to Archer’s arm, dejected. It was the most unfair thing. Archer knew that Roman could forgive him -- not that he should.

  A spell. To tie elves to human partners, but why? When he had thought the bond the work of some nebulous god, he had not questioned it, good fortune that it seemed to be. Roman, the gift of fire, giving purpose to a drifting, wasted life. Gods did as they pleased, and men could not expect to understand any more than a pet animal could comprehend the tribulation of a vaccination or the gelder’s knife. But a spell was the work of elves or men for purposes no more sublime than could be generated by such minds.

  He stifled a grimace to find himself agreeing with Heron again. What right had simple mortal beings like elves or men to shackle others with these bonds of love, felt as real no matter what their source? His world tilted upon its axis. Such arbitrary use of power, which must be known and condoned by the queen he’d served so unquestioningly, serving, killing even, in her name.

  His skin warmed where Roman’s cheek touched it. He could feel the faintest shifts with Roman’s breath as the exhalations skirted over his skin. He felt, no matter how bespelled or undeserved, such love for this elf. Such love, no matter how crumpled and despoiled. His heart lurched; half a dozen beats ran together in a harsh tattoo. But it was not just in the name of cowardice he chose to flee. It was for Roman. Roman, who deserved better.

  Knowing how he gave himself away by making even this reaction after so many days of mute indifference, Archer lurched to his feet, strode to the en suite, and closed and locked the door behind him. He sat down, fully clothed, within the empty bath, head in hands. It would have to be tonight. He could not resist Roman’s advances any longer.

  Chapter Seven: Dublin

  Purgatory would surely be like a long bus trip. In theory, you are going somewhere, but after a while it stops feeling that way. The drone of road and wheels started to invade Archer’s brain, already lacquered over with fatigue from two earlier buses and the ferry, motion sickness only just below the surface.

  By the time the old bus lurched into the old station, Archer hardly knew what to do. It seemed like the tired foam of the old bench seat had sopped up any initiative he’d started the journey with. Finally, when everyone else got off, he prized his stiffened joints out of their positions and grabbed his duffel from the overhead bars.

  It was late in the afternoon, and cars rumbled over the streets as the city workers wended their way home over roads built more for buggies than buses. Fog-brained, he stood at an intersection far too long, trying to make it match his map, finally picked out the right direction, and set off. He wasn’t sure if bed-and-breakfasts took walk-ins after business hours.<
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  Terraced houses tarted up for the tourists stood in rows radiating out from the downtown; little hanging baskets, wrought iron fences, and painted placards jostled to lure in passing trade. He picked the first that seemed inviting. A permed matron looked up in mild irritation.

  “Gotta room?” he asked, voice sounding like someone else’s, reluctant to come out.

  “How long?”

  “Three nights, maybe more after that.”

  It was a backpacker area, cheap enough for the type. He’d glanced at the board and quickly figured how much the money in his pocket would buy -- leaving enough for fish and chips, perhaps pie and a pint. He’d have to find a way to earn some cash after that.

  She reached out, clicking her fingers. “Sixty.” He passed over the crumpled bills, which she smoothed out fussily and slotted into a fanny pack, no receipt offered.

  He followed her wide rear up three flights of tightly turning stairs to a room at the end, just big enough to call a room at all. She passed him the key.

  “Leave the key at the desk any time you go out. There’s always someone there; don’t take it with you.” To emphasis the point, the key was attached by a short chain to a piece of plywood the size of a paperback book.

  “Breakfast seven to eight, not later.” A sharp insistence, expecting protest. Cheap bitch must have known that making it so early would save her money, as most diners failed to sacrifice their sleep for an offering of cold toast and scrimped scrambled eggs and probably baked beans over the lot.

  She left him to edge the door closed and survey his rented domain: single bed, worn yellow carpet, wood painted over many times and now a glossy, lumpy white. There was a small television mounted on a hinged bracket, either to save space or prevent theft -- maybe both. Even humble as it was, he couldn’t afford it for more than a few days. He would have to find something even cheaper pretty soon.

  Archer flicked it on. Quaint, black-and-white, a half-familiar rerun of Friends was barely discernable as the picture rolled upwards with regular flicks. He imagined there was a shared bathroom secreted somewhere, but the effort of creeping around seeking it out seemed rather too much trouble.