Chains and Memory

by Marie Brennan

  Moving quietly so as not to wake Kim, he slid out of bed, pulled on his jeans, and went out to the living room. There he sat cross-legged on the floor, centered himself, and reached out for Neeya.

  She was still awake, and studying. Sorry again about the bloody nose, she said once their minds were joined, and then—whoa. Something’s happened.

  Yes, Julian said. It was the paradox of the psychic powers they had inherited from the sidhe, that feelings, which interfered with most kinds of magic, could also be carried by empathy. It made them hard to contain. Neeya, I owe you an apology. I told you about Kim when I met her, told you that we became friends. You know what happened last fall. But I never came out and said, I love her.

  Neeya had to be devoting significant attention to her shields, for him to feel so little from her right now. The sheer length of the silence before she responded, though, told him plenty.

  Okay.

  It wasn’t okay. Not yet. He hoped it would be, though, once Neeya had time to adjust. I’m not saying that makes her one of us. But it does mean she’s going to be with me, whether they gut her or not. She’s important to me, Neeya.

  He sent that last thought as more than just words, letting his sister read the associations. Shock flared in their connection. You slept with her, didn’t you?

  The question came with a gleaming edge of curiosity. Wilders rarely paired up at the Center; the constant monitoring, the drumbeat of self-control, and the sheer familial closeness they shared all weighed against it. Even once out, they weren’t very good at forming romantic relationships. The nature of how they were raised meant some of them wound up with attachment disorders, despite the best efforts of their caretakers. Those with stable partners usually found them among the Fiain, especially those from other Centers. For someone like Neeya, only just now beginning to find her way in the outside world, it was like asking for gossip from a foreign country.

  I did, Julian admitted. And then, because he couldn’t really put it into words, he shared with her the complex knot of understanding that had come to him this evening, the ways in which he had and had not accepted Kim as a fellow wilder. Still didn’t, because understanding alone couldn’t get rid of the entire problem. But he was trying.

  Neeya received it passively, giving no hint of her reaction. It might be a sign of improved control on her part, but he feared it meant she was retreating, locking herself down rather than coping with what he’d just shown her. Neeya?

  Her reply, when it came, was carefully neutral. I should get to sleep.

  Which was her way of saying she wanted privacy in her own head. He bit his lip, wondering if he should say more. Maybe it would have been better to catch her tomorrow, before they went to practice; then Neeya would have had the space she needed to react. But mind-to-mind, he would see too much. If he pushed, she would either shove him out, or let loose on him — and he had a feeling he didn’t want to see just what she was holding back. Not until she’d had some time to process it.

  He did his best to wrap her in the telepathic equivalent of a hug. I’ll see you tomorrow night, m’aithinne. And this time I’ll guard my face.

  She cut the connection. Julian opened his eyes and stared at the dim outline of the window, wishing he could have done that better. But the problem wasn’t with how he’d shared the news; it was with the news itself. There was nothing to do now but wait for Neeya to work through things, and wait for her next move.

  In the meanwhile, it was getting quite late. He went back into the bedroom and looked down at Kim, curled on her side and breathing softly. Learning to sleep with another person in the bed had been hard; he’d had to lie still, not straying from his own side, lest the accidental contact of a foot or hand jar him awake. Now . . . he didn’t know whether to hold himself apart, so that his own restlessness wouldn’t disturb her, or give in to his impulses and curl himself around her body.

  He knew which one Kim would tell him to choose. Easing himself back under the sheet, Julian fitted himself against the curve of her back, draping one arm over her waist. She murmured something indistinct and shifted against his chest, but didn’t rouse. The warmth that grew within him was only partly from the contact.

  Even if he didn’t end up sleeping at all, it was still a good way to spend the night.

  ~

  The whole way to Toby’s the next day, I kept laughing for no particularly good reason. People on the Metro must have thought I was crazy. Or maybe they assumed Julian was telling me telepathic jokes. There was a joke, but it was entirely physical: his hand in mine, his shoulder brushing against me every time the train rocked. Julian was too disciplined to lose his cool the way I kept doing, but I could see the edges of the smile he wasn’t giving into. Happiness radiated off him, a quiet contentment I wanted to wrap myself in. And that made me laugh, too, for sheer delight.

  If anybody had told me a year ago that I would be this close to Julian, physically and emotionally, I would have laughed in their face. And I was a diviner: seeing the future was what I did. But we got blind, the closer to home things got.

  Gods, I couldn’t wait to tell Liesel. She was on a retreat in the Black Forest right now, and I couldn’t just type this up for her to read when she got home. Some things deserved to be told in person, or the closest technological substitute — if only so I could watch her reaction.

  Julian and I had to uncouple at the townhouse; going up the stairs hand-in-hand was too inconvenient. After Toby’s roommate Marcus opened the door, though, Julian ushered me through with one hand on the small of my back, nudging me toward the living room. Rumor said there would be some kind of major announcement on the news tonight, something to do with the sidhe. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be surrounded by other people when the announcement came . . . but I was sure that if I had a community these days, it was the wilders who came to Toby and Marcus’ townhouse. And this, Julian had said, was his chance to show the community that I belonged.

  I took a seat in one of the armchairs, as I usually did when we were in the living room instead of the basement. This time, though, Julian didn’t take the chair next to it. Instead he settled on the floor at my feet, leaning back against my knees.

  Marcus noticed it, and didn’t try to hide his noticing. His eyebrows went up. My angle didn’t allow me to see Julian’s expression, but I guessed from his stillness and the tilt of his head that he was giving Marcus a level, unblinking look—the sort that asks, Is there something you’d like to say? Marcus shook his head, his own expression unreadable, and went to call Toby down.

  I got to watch the pattern repeat with variations over the next fifteen minutes as people arrived. Guan came in, blinked in a way that was the highly-controlled wilder version of a double-take, and ensconced himself at one end of the couch. Toby clattered down the stairs, raised his eyebrows the way Marcus had, then sat next to Guan. Really next to him: in the middle of the couch, rather than at the far end, the way most people would have done. Their arms and knees were touching. The next wilder who showed up was Inola, who was the next best thing to a total stranger; she shrugged at the sight of me and took the remainder of the couch. Not just that, but she turned sideways, putting her back up against the arm and draping her legs over Toby’s lap, feet resting against Guan’s thigh.

  They really are theatre people, I thought, and suppressed a laugh. Which was easy: I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  It didn’t take long. Neeya came in, saw me—saw Julian at my feet—and stopped dead in the archway.

  No matter how hard I listened, I didn’t feel the subliminal tickle of a shielded telepathic conversation. The exchange between her and Julian operated on some other level entirely: the shared intuition of two people who had known each other since childhood, who didn’t need words or even psychic powers to communicate. I realized I was holding my breath, and reminded myself to act normally.

  Then Neeya jerked her chin, as if to say she didn’t care, and flopped down in one of the empty chairs. I
couldn’t tell whether that was a statement or not. There wasn’t room for her on the couch unless she actually sat on somebody, and attaching herself to me or Julian seemed like a bit much this early in the game. But she squeezed Marcus’ hand in thanks when he brought her a glass of water, and I took that as a sign.

  Julian, by the simple act of leaning against me, had issued a proclamation to the rest of the Fiain. And they were listening.

  It was a start.

  We had twelve people there by the time things got started. Toby and Marcus had a large screen in the corner, which hadn’t been turned on at any point during my weeks of visiting. Now Marcus tapped at his port, sending a video feed up onto the screen. The image was of some news anchor standing in what the text at the bottom of the image identified as U.N. headquarters in Vancouver. Fortunately Marcus left the sound off, because it was clear nothing had happened yet; the man on the screen was just talking to fill time.

  Much like the rest of us were doing. “It’s going to be some kind of agreement,” Inola said. “If it were a declaration of war, we’d have seen the signs long before they made it official.”

  That was the closest thing I’d heard to actual news about the sidhe since the president announced the creation of the planar injunction. My mother undoubtedly knew more—as a Ring Anchor, she had to—but her work involved classified material often enough that she was very good about keeping it to herself.

  Come to that, I probably knew more than some of the people here. “Congress is still thrashing through the Otherworld Act,” I said. “I think they wanted to have it done before anything changed on the U.N. front, but, well. It’s Congress.” The return of the sidhe had split open every division between the three parties, and even set factions within them at each other’s throats. And nobody wanted a repeat of what had happened with the old Psychic Powers Act, back during First Manifestation—the so-called “Apocalypse Act.” That had been rushed through without even enough time for the senators and representatives to read what they were voting on. The results had been predictably bad.

  “This will probably send some of the text back to the drawing board,” Toby said, and I couldn’t argue with his prediction. It didn’t take divinatory gifts to guess that whatever got said today would affect how the U.S. would deal with the sidhe going forward.

  We continued to speculate, low voices betraying our unease. I was unspeakably glad that Julian and I had sorted out the touch issue last night. Having him leaning up against my shins kept distracting me in completely inappropriate ways; his head was right there, and I wanted to run my hands through his hair, or brush my fingers against his cheek. I kept having to tend my shields. But I was grateful for the reassurance of his warmth against my shins, because nervous tension made the rest of me cold. I leaned forward to put a hand on his shoulder, and he laid his own hand over mine.

  He and I, of all the people in this room, knew exactly what the world was facing.

  Movement on the screen. Marcus unmuted the feed. “— Security Council members,” the news anchor said. A number of men and women were filing out of the double doors, a heck of a lot more than the Security Council itself consisted of. Bodyguards, I supposed, and clerks, and—

  Julian’s hand tightened painfully on mine.

  The sidhe were there.

  Three of them, tall and silver-haired. The best efforts of the world’s technomagicians had yet to invent a way to communicate anything other than sound and image over broadcast, so we were spared the effects of their presence, which made your average wilder feel completely mundane. But there were little zones of isolation around each of them, as everyone avoided contact.

  As soon as I saw that, I saw something else, too.

  More than three people on that platform were being given a wide berth.

  I counted fifteen of them, scattered through the crowd. One accompanying each member of the Security Council. But the rest . . . they didn’t look like sidhe. Or rather, not like the ones we’d dealt with last fall.

  Their appearances varied wildly, sometimes paralleling the people they stood with, sometimes not. Skin shading all through brown to black, different colors of hair—but not of eyes. As the camera panned over the assembled dignitaries, I saw that no matter what else had changed, they still had eyes of emerald green . . .

  Or gold.

  “The Unseelie are there,” I whispered, staring in horror at the screen.

  It shouldn’t have been a surprise. It wasn’t a surprise. There were two Courts of the sidhe; of course the U.N. would have to deal with both of them. Or whoever led them. You kept communicating with the other side, even when you were at war. And we weren’t at war—yet.

  But it felt like a betrayal, seeing them standing there in peace with the representatives of humanity.

  “They don’t all look like you described to us,” Neeya said.

  Julian shook his head. The movement seemed to remind him that he was crushing my fingers; he released the pressure, but didn’t move his hand away. “Those others—I never saw anyone like them. They have to be sidhe, though. The eyes . . . and look at their faces. Look closely. They aren’t human, and it shows.”

  He was right. A certain cast marked all wilders as subtly different; my own face had changed when the Unseelie drugged me. Even in a digital image, the sidhe could not be mistaken for human.

  I let my breath out slowly, trying to steady myself. “There’s a lot we don’t know about the Otherworld. We don’t even know whether its geography is like ours, whether it has the same continents, the same kind of weather. They might vary just as much as we do.”

  “Or it might be a glamour,” Julian said.

  “Or what they showed you might have been a glamour,” Neeya said.

  Maybe, but— “I saw them when they weren’t putting on a show for anyone,” I said quietly. The memories of my time among the Unseelie weren’t anything I liked to revisit, but they were still there, and crystal clear. “They all looked like those three on the left.”

  Guan spoke up for the first time. I was pathetically grateful to him for it, because his words gave me something to focus on besides my ragged breath. “Look at the one behind the Chinese ambassador. She looks like a fox spirit.”

  The sidhe woman in question was as human-shaped as any of them, but I saw what Guan meant. Her hair was red, and the angles of her face gave a vulpine impression. Celtic legends had kept more of the truth about the sidhe because the crossbreeds, the half-sidhe hybrids, had been dumped in the British Isles before the Otherworld passed out of reach. They were kidnapped by the Unseelie, but the Seelie freed them, so that humanity wouldn’t forget about the sidhe entirely. But that didn’t mean the folklore from other parts of the world didn’t preserve their own bits of the truth.

  Hakeema el-Bayoumi, the Secretary-General of the U.N., stepped up to the microphone and began speaking. The early part was nothing of substance, just an unnecessary recap of history up until this point: the long-distant past, when humans and sidhe interbred; the departure of the Otherworld; its return last fall, and the reappearance of the sidhe. The woman knew this was a historic moment, and clearly wanted her speech to be remembered. I could barely pay attention enough to parse her words.

  But my attention snapped into focus when she finished her introduction and got to the actual point. “In the months since contact between the worlds was restored,” she said, “representatives from human governments around the globe have been in negotiation with the two Courts of the sidhe. Our worlds will merge in time; it is inevitable. We must therefore consider how our peoples, so long separated, may live in harmony.”

  The plan she outlined was simple—as it had to be. Nothing complex would survive worldwide experimentation. The two Courts had agreed to register all visitors with the governments of the countries they entered; any violators of this agreement would be subject to the full judgment of the local authorities, with no immunity granted. In exchange . . . they had the right to enter any place th
at did not deny them access.

  “That’s going to be a nightmare,” Inola said immediately. “If it’s determined on a country-wide level, the states will be screaming bloody murder tomorrow. If a state can block access, though, then what about a county, or a city? Are the sidhe really going to be negotiating with every local hat for permission to walk down the street?”

  Toby snorted. “Forget permission. Whatever the government says at any level, there will be chaos wherever they go. Sales of iron nails are up more than five hundred percent in the last three months.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Julian’s quiet voice cut through the rising chatter. “This is them putting a good face on the inevitable. Even if the planar injunction is keeping them out now—and we’ve got pretty good evidence it isn’t—that won’t hold forever. The closer our worlds draw together, the easier it will be for them to step through. The sidhe will come and go as they please, until there isn’t any ‘coming’ or ‘going,’ just one world with two species living in it. But this gives each country a cover. They can follow the ones who register with them, and if anything happens to the ones who don’t, they can wash their hands of it.”

  Swallowing hurt my throat. “What about humans going into the Otherworld?” Going, or being taken.

  We’d talked over that part of it, but Neeya had kept her attention on the screen. “They can register the intent to visit with the same offices that will be regulating traffic the other direction,” she said. “If they go that route, then they have a promise of safe conduct from the sidhe—which is, in theory, the same thing we’re promising to their visitors. If they hop through on their own . . .” She shrugged. “They get what’s coming to them.”

  “And what about those who don’t go willingly?” I asked. It came out as a growl, and Julian sent me a calming surge.

  Neeya shrugged again. “In theory, their kidnappers get prosecuted.”