by Jean Lee
20
Arlen Must Surrender
Captain clicks to the other two guards, then turns to Charlotte. The chime-like voice is a welcome tinkling in the air after all the Its hissing—and the cub screaming. “I’ve ordered them to report to Queen Avo, and to fetch what provisions they can. We’ll help you board this,” she pauses to double-blink at the barge like she’s still not sure it’s allowed to exist, “craft, and then Sergeant and I will moor you near Aranina’s center.”
“G-gotcha.”
“And hurry it up,” Dorjan’s head flops over the boat’s side. His green eye’s the shade of kelp vomit. “The sooner this thing’s done moving, the happier my stomach will be.”
“Oh sh-shut up, you big b-baby.” Adrenaline gives way to the cold as Charlotte coasts through the water with Captain’s guidance, Liam and Sergeant close behind. She grips the barge’s edge, smooth and white as a bleached bone, and hoists herself into the sun. Liam sheathes his dagger and mimics her movements to board. The guards hand over their ropes, and with their officers’ farewell take off into the deep.
The white of the barge blinds Charlotte. She has to blink herself into comfort with the sun again. Finally, she can see Cairine and Aine curled together in the center, still and silent.
Arlen kneels next to them, holds a finger to pursed lips.
“Can’t say as I blame them,” Dorjan whispers as he flops himself onto his back. His coat falls open, revealing a bright red UW Wisconsin 1999 Rose Bowl victory shirt. His blue eye doesn’t even bother to roll as Charlotte hides her laughter in the crook of her arm. “You know you’re jealous.”
“Shame you couldn’t get Liam one to match.” (Though to be honest, she’s fine he hadn’t.)
“Oh, I looked,” Dorjan says with a smirk. “All I found was ‘Favre 4ever’. Even I have my limits.” He rises to his knees to take off his coat. “Damn, I have to take a piss. Think they’ll notice if I stay on this side of Mount Auntie?”
Charlotte snorts and looks the bears’ way…and really sees Arlen post-battle for the first time. His skin is more bruised and bloody than that sophomore who thought it was funny to grope one of Charlotte’s breasts during co-ed basketball. One eye is nearly swollen shut, and one arm is locked at a nasty angle. Yet there he sits by his kid, his broken fingers running through the fur upon her head again and again, a smile on his face no thorn could cut away.
Liam’s staring, too, and yanks Dorjan’s coat off him mid-piss.
“Hey!”
“Did the herb roll stay in the satchel?” Liam asks Charlotte as he folds Dorjan’s coat and lays it in what little shadow Cairine’s body offers. Then he gently takes hold of Arlen’s shoulder. “You need attention.”
Arlen does not look up. His fingers are beneath Aine’s nose, feeling her short, soft breaths of sleep. “I will be fine until we return to Rose House.”
Charlotte unbuckles the flap. “Hope waterlogged herbs and velifol are better than nothing.” She hands the roll and pouch over to Liam and dumps the water—and muffin mush—into the lake. “Arlen, you look like hell. Let Liam do something.”
“We haven’t the velifol.”
“Sure we do.” Dorjan zips, shakes his hands in the lake, and pulls his pockets inside out to reveal a few dozen violet petals. “A bit, at least. Enough to help with the fractures, right?” His blue eye flickers with hope, the green searching Liam’s face for the truth.
Liam blinks, taking that in: Dorjan truly considers my word worth hearing. With Charlotte on one side and Dorjan on the other, Liam says, as softly yet as firmly as he can: “For once, Sir, let us take care of you. Please.”
Arlen’s good eye narrows upon them all. A sad smile grows upon his face. “Well. Since I find myself outnumbered, I surrender.” He lets Charlotte assist him to lay down with his head on the rolled-up coat while Dorjan plucks every last velifol petal stuck to his pockets and lays them carefully next to Arlen’s head. They’re small, pathetically small, but velifol is velifol. With injuries of this magnitude, every petal counts.
Liam undoes the herb roll. It’s a soggy mess, but he can still find a little archangel, a little stonecrop. Too little, blast it. “What else do you have in here?” He says more to himself than Arlen, his fingers walking among soaked stalks and sachets of petals, nothing quite right…
Arlen’s eyelids flutter as the pain ebbs and flows within. “Some, comfrey, I believe. And yarrow. But something must be saved—”
Liam pulls out both, as well as the plump dandelion-like coltsfoot. “Of course,” he says, portioning the velifol among the herbs. The dagger can amplify the bone-mending. Too dangerous by his eye, I suppose.
“Save some velifol for Aine.”
“Aine’s fine.”
Arlen’s working arm blocks Liam’s before he can apply the first mixture to Arlen’s face. Even with but one eye, Arlen’s gaze arrests him. “She is a child.”
The temptation to argue smolders behind Liam’s lips, especially after the cub nearly killed them all with her foolishness. He tries to douse those angry embers as best he can. “No blossom or vine touched her. I’m sure Devyn or Ember will have enough for her tomorrow.”
“But what if they don’t?” Arlen grunts as he sits upright, his good arm pushing Liam back and away from the herbs. “Aine’s survived on a pittance in that cursed prison. I won’t deny my daughter what her heart’s fire needs.”
Liam bites his lip. A breeze blows a few leaf-addled curls across his face, but he can see enough of the stubborn, swollen teacher to think that of course, my words mean nothing, not compered to proper kin who clearly don’t care as much as I, who—
A new hand gets involved—Charlotte’s. She gently pries Arlen off Liam and presses the teacher back. Her green eyes glow again with all the warmth of the thousand candles Orna had nearly snuffed out. “Sir, your daughter was ready to run a marathon back there. Right now, Aine needs a dad who can keep up with her. Please?” Her voice cracks on the “please.”
Arlen exhales deeply through his nose. He remains sitting.
Then Dorjan adds, “You keep this up, Uncle, and I’ll start rocking the barge. Bet Aine and Auntie will just love that.” He burps for good measure.
With a small bearish grunt, Arlen lays back down. “The stonecrop should be shredded with the velifol, not ground.”
“Yes, I know,” Liam says with the shredded bits of leaf and petal to prove it.
“But leave the coltsfoot whole.”
Liam moves closer to position the coltsfoot and a few velifol petals on Arlen’s swollen eye. “I know.”
“And the archangel—”
“Mac an donais, Sir!” Liam almost falls backward onto the herb roll but stops himself. “I know what I’m doing.”
A small, happy melody bubbles up and out of Charlotte’s throat. “You two are hopeless,” she says, still laughing. “Now hush, Aine’s waking up. Show her what a good patient Daddy is.”
The lady Charlotte knows just what to say. Arlen immediately quiets and sits still. She motions to Dorjan and says, “C’mon, it looks like one of the guards has got something for us.”
“Suppose they don’t bake under water…” Dorjan follows Charlotte to the edge where one waterfolk holds up a bottle and sack.
Liam gently presses the coltsfoot and velifol into Arlen’s swollen eye and begins the Gaelic spell with a slow, ebbing rhythm. The words flow over Arlen’s face, spreading the glow of the velifol and the coltsfoot’s fragrance. It takes several minutes, but at last the swelling is gone, and Arlen can open both eyes once more.
He first blinks upon the still-slumbering family next to him, then upon Charlotte’s smirk. “I thought you said Aine was waking.”
Charlotte shrugs. “Did I? Hmmm.” She hands over a bottle of starlight, “Don’t recall saying she was totally awake.”
Arlen scowls. “Don’t be cheeky.”
Her eyes go wide, face now ridiculously serious. “Then don’t be difficult.” She passe
s the starlight to Liam and Arlen before handing it off to Dorjan. “Don’t slug it all.”
Dorjan sniffs the bottle, winces. “Like I can drink anything with this blasted motion beneath the feet.”
“Stop whining and check the shore. I’m gonna see if Captain needs help with mooring this thing.” She sets the sack down. “Be nice, Doctor,” Charlotte pulls a loose curl out of Liam’s eyes and hooks it around his ear. With a quick smile she moves to the barge’s edge and waves to the Stellaqui, now easing the barge to a halt.
Liam risks a quick sigh as his eyes follow her hair dancing in the wind’s rhythm, her neck golden in the afternoon sun—
“Over here,” the words wryly slip from Arlen’s lips, “Doctor.”
Liam coughs and jerks himself into motion. “Right. Yes. Let’s work on your arm. The dagger should help here, once the stonecrop and velifol are in place.” He takes the stonecrop between both hands to shred it.
“In all my centuries, never had I once considered a blood weapon capable of healing instead of destruction.” Arlen shifts himself out of the shadow of his wife to watch concentration ebb and flow across Liam’s face, often hidden behind his curls as he works. “But it occurred to you.”
Liam’s face reveals little, his words less. “It felt...” He unsheathes the blood dagger and sandwiches it between Arlen’s arm and his own hand. “It felt right.” He sings quietly, eyes only for Arlen’s injury. The sparks on his blade dance slowly through the grooves of carved feathers as the embers of Liam call upon Arlen’s own heart’s fire to meld his bones together.
The spell’s end brings silence between healers.
Arlen flexes his arm. A pleased smile comes to his lips. “I knew your gifts in the healing arts to be great. But to alter the nature of your blood weapon…that is a wonder, Liam, a true wonder.” He readies to stand.
But Liam shakes his head. He is flush with…with feeling. What feeling, he cannot say, for it is…foreign. Peculiar to his heart’s fire. It does not douse the embers, at least. “Let’s tend your fingers, then check your ribs. You must be hale for your family. As Charlotte said.” Liam hears little of Dorjan’s sarcastic comments about the lake shore, or of Charlotte’s movements in and out of the water to do something with the barge corners and the nets. Captain mentions something of the Library.
His body tingles from his chest to his toes, and…ah, he recalls it now. It comes to him with Arlen’s words during Liam’s schooling at the little cottage on Ireland’s shore. Liam had just mended a cat’s leg after some rocks from the garden wall came loose and fell. Arlen was admiring his work when more rocks came loose and fell upon Liam’s hand, breaking some fingers. “Never be ashamed of your tears. Even the bravest of princeborns will succumb to tears. Shall we find the stonecrop?” he asked, smile like sun-warmed honey. “I bet you’ve never ever cried over a hurt,” said little Liam. And Arlen laughed. “Oh, on the contrary, many times. Everyone needs mending sometime along the way.”
Liam soars over this memory time and again as he works Arlen’s fingers. Though the Gaelic fills the silence, a dark noise begins to press against Liam’s inner wings. Liam furrows, grits his teeth, even counts his breaths as Charlotte does. But that pressure merely expands into his stomach. Everything starts spinning in him as he continues the spell, demands Arlen’s heart’s fire to reach into his fingers and make them whole. When he lifts the blood dagger off Arlen’s hands, he rakes his own fingers through his hair.
You were no good, boy
Listen to your mother. Twist the words. Stop healing that cut, and make it bigger
Listen to your mother
You foolish boy
“Why’s it smell so bitter over here?” Charlotte asks as she plunks down to rummage through a sack. “Hey hey, no raw duck this time!” She pulls out a plastic-wrapped muffin. “Looks like some fruit’n’muffins. Banana nut! Musta pulled a Yogi Bear and stole someone’s beach breakfast.” Her eyes dart between Liam and Arlen. “I’ll just, um, give this to Dorjan. And stay. Over there.”
Liam waits until she rounds to the other side of Cairine, then quietly says, “Can you unbutton your shirt on your own now?”
Arlen’s eyes travel from his hands, bruised but mended, to the blood dagger point full of sunlight resting on Liam’s thigh. “Do you know why your parents brought you to me?”
Stop helping that woman and CUT her, boy
Liam swallows back a warm, metallic taste—he’d bitten his own tongue. “Because Father had no patience for children.”
Arlen raises an eyebrow. “You can do better.”
Why is the old king mending? Listen to your mother and DO IT RIGHT
Liam slouches a little. “To learn the powers hidden in earth’s green life.”
“What kind of powers?”
You failed me again, boy
Finally, Liam meets Arlen’s gaze. “What do you mean?”
“They never wanted you to be a healer.”
Cairine lets out a short, gruff snore. Some sea-speak, a splash in the water.
Liam observes none of it. Faded memories are slowly piecing themselves together, but like muddy glass they slip apart, cutting Liam with their dirty edges. “They…they said you had wasted their time, betrayed their trust. They said I was a failure.”
“Liam.” Arlen almost sings his name, his old Gaelic lilt returning. “Liam, you are no failure. By Artair standards, yes, you are utterly despicable. To your parents, you are a complete failure. And that, I will proudly say, is mostly my doing.” He begins to undo his shirt with a laugh tickling his throat. “‘Teach him every poison you know,’ Bearnard said. ‘He must become our most seductive weapon.’ Treasa said. I nodded along to their wishes, but I knew I would do no such thing. Your gift of healing burned bright in mere days. And to see you now, transforming a weapon of death into a weapon of life makes me so very proud of you, Liam. Yes. Proud.”
Liam’s lower lip quivers. Proud. In a thousand years of life, not once, not once in all those days, all those bloody, hateful days, did his parents every say they were proud of him.
Liam should be thankful. He should be happy. And yet he cannot stop the words that cascade from his mouth without control.
“They said you didn’t want me anymore because I had failed. I didn’t believe them, and I looked for you. Time after bloody time I ran away to look for you, but they always found me first. Said you didn’t want me. Said I was nothing to you, that I never mattered. I would hear whispers in plagued towns of a healer, a man of miracles who laughed and told stories and gave gifts to strangers but could never once leave some message for me. And when I made my blood dagger and I finally found the land Cairine, I thought maybe, maybe, a word was there. Some clue or trace I could follow to reach you. I turned over every rock, every root, every bee...” Two thin lines of tears run down Liam’s cheeks.
Like this, boy
Listen to your mother
Don’t shy away, boy
Do as your mother says
“So I burned Cairine.” The window Liam created in Rose House fills his mind.
Shatters.
The glass stained with the sunset and the sea seem to fill his belly, line his throat, cut his voice. “I burned the hive, the cottage, the garden. I burned every last blade of grass until its smoke choked the gulls overhead because you. Left. Me. Nothing.”
Arlen looks to his wife’s back, swallows. Water laps the barge. Cairine’s hulk shifts.
She faces them both. “Do not blame him, Liam. Blame me.”
21
Loving Cairine
“What?”
With great care, Cairine uses a single claw to help Arlen open his shirt. The garden of bruises is vast, the signs of bone breakage clear. But Liam also sees raised skin from old scars, dozens upon dozens, short and long, across Arlen’s chest and arms. “Arlen thought he need only hide me, claim me dead. He was so sure of himself. Too sure, even when Treasa and Bearnard found him on the land named for me.”
“The story fit,” Arlen says with sad smile. “You were known to never raise hand or claw in violence. A gentle soul like you would never survive the Viking raids in Connacht. They were,” his voice chokes with the past, “a bloody affair.”
“I watched you two from the pasture fields, how you studied the flowers together, walked along the sea…I wished, for a time, I could hold your hand little hand, Liam…” Cairine sits up just enough to nudge little Aine into the midst. The cub yawns, blinks, and curls into a furball in her mother’s arms. “But we three could never be. Your father had already tried to take my virtue and my life. Your mother would never allow her heir to fly beyond her control. Yet Arlen did try to take you back.”
The blood dagger falls from Liam’s hand and hits the barge with a clang. The air in his lungs feels hot and poisonous with the smoke of scorched memories. “Y-you tried? Without, without a word to me, without, saying—”
“A single word to you would leave a trail Arlen dared not risk for my sake.” Cairine nuzzles her husband’s arm. “Arlen snuck into the Vatican like a thief. Disguised himself as aristocracy in St. Petersburg. Always so close, on the verge of reaching you alone with those permitted to hurt you…but Treasa and Bearnard had their hunters, commoner and princeborn both, ever at the ready to keep you two apart. That,” she points to a long, ragged scar down Arlen’s side, “was from Oxford during England’s Civil War, the last time I allowed Arlen to try. When Treasa had recruited my own brother Fiacra to capture Arlen, we realized they knew I was alive.”
“Not that my father was good at that sort of thing.” Dorjan walks around Cairine, pulling at the transparent covering about the muffin but unable to tear it. Charlotte follows, arms wrapped around herself as she listens to Dorjan go on. “Or anything. Like fathering.” Rip. The wrapping tears, and muffin plummets like a baby bird.
Wind whips the t-shirt against Dorjan’s chest, defining every rib in red cotton. His blue eye pales as the green eye burns envy. “Any time I spent with Arlen and Cairine, I’m always hearing about you. What made you,” his pointed finger shakes at Liam, “so bloody special that Arlen kept asking about you, trying to find a way to save you? My parents were all too keen to sell my sister and me off. We had to save ourselves. Why couldn’t you save yourself?”
