Chains and Memory

by Marie Brennan

  Neeya stood rock-still, turned so that all I could see was the edge of her face, the tight line of her neck. I had to watch these things, because I couldn’t read anything else, couldn’t try to meet her in empathy. I was deaf and mute, clutching at anything that could help me communicate.

  I sighed, feeling empty and drained. “If we can’t be friends, can we at least have a common enemy? I believe this much: you didn’t want me gutted. And we both want it gone. I swear to you, I’m doing my best.”

  Then Neeya pivoted to face me, and I didn’t need gifts to read her at all.

  “Do you know what my clearest memory of childhood is?” Neeya asked. The light above cast her eyes into shadow, but I could see her mouth, set in a hard, bitter line. “I was eleven. I remember sitting on the floor of Julian’s room, him with his back to the wall, me curled up half in his lap, crying my soul out because I’ve just been gutted. Again. He’s got his arms around me, trying to comfort me. He doesn’t say it’ll be okay. That’s a lie, and we both know it. It isn’t okay, and it won’t be—not so long as they can do that to us. But he promises me it won’t be forever. My gifts will come back . . . and one day, the shield will be gone for good. We’ll find a way to get rid of it. He will find a way. He promises me this. And I believe him, because he’s fourteen and I’m eleven, and I desperately need a god to believe in. And so I believe in Julian.”

  How had I ever thought wilders were all alike, inscrutable and controlled? There was nothing controlled about Neeya right now. She came forward a step, leaning over me, blocking out the light, spitting the next words in my face.

  “Now you,” Neeya growled, venomous and low. “You come here—you, who are not one of us—and you sit there and look me in the eye and tell me you’ll do it. That you’ll succeed where Julian has failed.”

  I pressed against the mildewed back of the swing, retreating as far as I could from her fury. “Does it really matter to you, which one of us does it?” I whispered, my voice sticking in my throat. “Don’t you want it gone? Isn’t that the most important thing?”

  She didn’t answer, standing half-bent with her hands in fists at her side, vibrating with tension. “Gods above, Neeya,” I said. “If Julian got rid of it tomorrow, I’d be the first to fall at his feet in thanks. I don’t—I’m not trying to steal anything from him. Or from you. I don’t want credit, don’t want to be the savior of the Fiain. I just want my gifts back.”

  Nobody had forced me to learn self-control as a child. I didn’t even try to hide my anguish; I let it fill my voice, hoping that Neeya would hear and respond. I hadn’t suffered the same way she had . . . but we had pain in common.

  I couldn’t tell whether it reached her or not. She turned once more, stumbling as if half-blind, and fled back into the house, letting the door slam behind her once more.

  Julian came out maybe thirty seconds later. By that time I’d dried my cheeks and done my best to reassemble my composure. “Is everything okay?” he asked. “Neeya—”

  I couldn’t face the prospect of trying to explain our confrontation to him. Did Julian know Neeya saw him that way? Not just an older brother: an idol, the rock she clung to in the storm. “I should let her get on with her reading,” I said. “Come on—let’s go home.”

  ~

  I spent the next few days looking for sidhe around every corner. Robert sent Julian an innocuous message the following afternoon, saying that he’d made a new friend at the Ardcholáiste — a sidhe friend, presumably. But would the Seelie help us out? If so, when? Would they be as discreet as we hoped? If so, how were they going to pull it off?

  There were relatively few times when I could be spirited aside without anyone noticing. I went back to the hospital for a check-up, which brought back enough horrible memories that I ended up puking in the bathroom, but the surgeon who’d gutted me said I was doing nicely and the shield could probably be deactivated next week. The prospect of getting my gifts back soon made my current state both easier and harder to bear—a contradiction I didn’t even try to resolve.

  At home, I still had my watchdog. Or rather a series of them, switching off in shifts. Would the Seelie try to sneak past them? Teleport into my room? When I moved in, I’d put up shields, but nothing that would slow them down; it would be like bashing through a rice-paper screen. But maybe teleportation was difficult even for them.

  I felt like a wolf in a trap, gnawing my own foot off in the hope of freedom. And then, a few nights after we’d called Robert, I had a dream.

  Long before I went to Welton, I’d learned to manage my dreams. I could tell a precognitive vision from the ordinary firing of my synapses, bring myself to lucid awareness of my dreaming state and sometimes control it. That last stood me in good stead after my time with the Unseelie; my therapist had helped me break the cycle where I relived my kidnapping every night.

  I knew immediately that my dream wasn’t an ordinary one. But I was gutted, completely giftless. How could I be having a supernatural dream?

  Julian was there, standing just a few feet away. The dreamscape was my dorm room from last fall, the room Liesel and I had been living in when the Otherworld returned. Comforting and unnerving, all at once. “Kim,” Julian said. “You’re dreaming.”

  “I know. What is—are you here for real?”

  “Yes,” he said, gesturing for me to sit on the couch. “And if you’d prefer not to do things this way, just say so. But Falcon couldn’t see another way to talk to you without anyone noticing.”

  The name made me turn a full circle, scanning the room. “He isn’t here, is he?”

  “Not yet. Do you really think I’d invite a sidhe into your head — him especially — without asking you first?”

  It was a normal dream . . . but not. I couldn’t go spirit-walking so long as I was gutted, so instead Julian had entered my sleeping mind. It would let us talk to the sidhe in secret, without any outsider knowing.

  But for that to happen, I’d have to let Falcon invade my mind—while I was one hundred percent defenseless against him.

  “No, not defenseless.” It was supposed to just be a thought, but I was dreaming; thought and action weren’t so very far apart. Julian cocked his head at the words, no doubt guessing what sparked them.

  Weirdly, being gutted actually gave me a measure of protection. Baselines were often harder to affect telepathically than bloods, because they had no telepathic ability at all. And I could probably make my mind inhospitable enough to drive Falcon out, just by giving in to the emotional turmoil lurking not far away.

  The mere thought was enough to make the dream room flicker, rain starting outside the windows.

  Julian took hold of my arms, gripping just tight enough for reassurance. “I can talk to him on my own, if you’d prefer.”

  “No.” I drew a deep breath and stopped the rain. Lucid dreaming had nothing to do with gifts; baselines could do it. I just had to control my thoughts. And I trusted Julian to keep an eye on Falcon, in case the sidhe tried anything I couldn’t see. “We’ll do this together. Invite him in.”

  There was no visible sign, beyond Julian blinking. But then Falcon was there.

  I hadn’t stopped to consider what it would be like to have a sidhe inside my mind. If I’d still been an ordinary blood, I might have lost control entirely, shrinking away from the shimmering, dimension-warping thing invading my thoughts. A Krauss rating of thirty-one reduced the effect to just this side of manageable. But it felt like the fairy dust burning through my system: pure numinous force, threatening to overwhelm me. For the briefest instant, my dorm room darkened and rounded, stalagmites thrusting up from the floor.

  Then I wrenched it back. I wasn’t in the cave. This sidhe was Seelie, and an ally.

  Falcon made no response to the swift changes. He merely nodded a greeting to me and said, “What demands such secrecy?”

  “We’d hoped to see Shard,” Julian said while I settled the room in my mind, bracing myself against future upheavals. “Is
there a reason she couldn’t come?”

  Shard was the seer he’d dealt with during the initial encounters, and probably the closest thing to an actual friend we had among the Seelie. Falcon said, “She has not yet recovered from her exertions.”

  He delivered the news in a level, uninflected tone. That was how the sidhe usually spoke, but it meant I couldn’t begin to guess what he meant, and how serious it was. What on earth could have weakened Shard for so long? She was a seer, not a combat sorcerer. I’d given myself a headache a few times by spending too long on divination, but nothing to merit that kind of pronouncement. I hesitated, then said, “Does this have to do with the Unseelie?”

  “I do not have all the details,” Falcon said. Still in that even tone, but it was clear he didn’t consider the matter fit for discussion.

  It wasn’t what we’d called him here for anyway—though on the wall behind him, a whiteboard that hadn’t actually been there last fall appeared, with a note on it saying, follow up re: Shard later. I erased it hastily, hoping Falcon didn’t have metaphorical eyes in the back of his head . . . or literal ones. It was a dream; stranger things could happen.

  “Please send her our wishes for a swift recovery,” Julian said, and Falcon nodded acknowledgment. “As for why we called you here—you know about the deep shield.”

  He didn’t phrase it as a question. Both Courts of the sidhe had been elbow-deep in Julian’s mind at one point or another last fall; it was a fair bet they’d noticed the structure buried there. The Unseelie must not have figured out how to trigger it, though, or else they would have gutted Julian as part of their games with him.

  “What of it?” Falcon asked.

  I could have gone into a long explanation, but something—my own frayed patience; the unsettling effect of his presence in my mind; maybe both—made me blunt. “We want to get rid of it.”

  His eyebrows went up. It looked like a rote gesture, performed to indicate surprise, rather than a natural reaction. Maybe it was; we still didn’t really know the extent to which sidhe felt various kinds of emotion. “Is this not part of your defenses?”

  We had thought of it that way last fall, when Julian feared the Unseelie would be able to subvert him. Things had changed, though. “It has its uses,” Julian said. As declarations of support went, it was far less fervent than the ones I’d heard from him in the past. “But one of those uses is control—a way to keep the Fiain on a leash. They put the shield on Kim, Falcon.”

  His gaze went to me. I spread my arms wide. “Take a good look. This is what a wilder looks like when she’s been stripped of her gifts.”

  He took me at my word, pacing a slow circle around me. My skin crawled, and I couldn’t tell whether it was psychosomatic or not. Whatever he was doing, I didn’t have the senses to feel it . . . but at the same time, he was in my mind. It was impossible to think he could do anything here without me noticing.

  “We tried to get rid of it ourselves,” Julian said quietly. “But it’s beyond us. That’s why we came to you, to the Seelie Court as a whole. To ask you—no, to beg you—to free us.”

  All the yearning and determination of his lifelong crusade was in his voice. Julian even went so far as to kneel on the carpet, head bowed, the ritual pose of a supplicant. Falcon watched him, impassive, then looked to me.

  I thought about kneeling, but it wouldn’t add anything to Julian’s gesture, and might look fake. “Please,” I said. I couldn’t show my desperation, not without possibly driving Falcon from my mind, but I could speak. “It would be the greatest gift you could possibly give us. Anything you might want us to do in return—just ask.”

  So focused was I on my plea that our surroundings faded away, leaving us floating in the blank, formless space of pure thought. In that darkness Falcon glowed, his emerald eyes like two stars in the sky.

  “No.”

  A single word. One syllable, whose meaning killed all the hope within me.

  Falcon stared at me, at Julian. “We—” The next word was choked off before it could emerge. His image flickered briefly. “We will not help you do this thing.”

  Then he was gone.

  ~

  I jerked upright in bed, found Julian beside me doing the same. We stared at one another in the dim light filtering through the blinds, wordless, bereft.

  Our best chance: gone, in an instant. Without so much as a word of explanation.

  “I don’t understand,” I whispered.

  Julian shook his head slowly, not blinking. “Falcon. He’s never liked me — liked us. Maybe that’s it.” But the sidhe had said we.

  There had to be a reason. But sitting there in the darkness, with Julian at my side, I could not think what it might be.

  Chapter Ten

  The next morning we were like the walking dead, going through the motions of life without a trace of vitality. Julian ate breakfast; I didn’t. He had a lot more practice than I did at keeping to routine, no matter what happened.

  Eventually they would lower the shield, and I’d have my gifts back. If I was lucky and behaved myself, I might go the rest of my life without ever being gutted again; Julian claimed it was rarely done to adults.

  But the threat would always be there. All it would take was a single touch, and the cage embedded in my soul would slam shut once more.

  We hadn’t said a word all morning. When I went to sit in the living room, though, Julian followed me, and stayed in the doorway while I sat. Eventually I looked up and met his gaze.

  “I’m not giving up,” he said.

  Of course he wasn’t. He didn’t know how. He’d made a promise to Neeya, a promise to me—a promise to himself. Maybe it was the geas mixing with his training, or maybe Julian would have always grown up to be the sort of person who would do everything he could, and more.

  A spark flickered in the gloom of my mind.

  My gaze settled on my hands, resting atop my knees, and stayed there as if moving would be too much distraction, would make me lose my train of thought. Everything he could, and more.

  “Julian,” I said slowly, working my way through one careful step at a time. “We’ve done everything we can think of to get rid of the shield. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything except the sidhe, because they weren’t here before. Now they are, so we asked. And they—they refused.” Even saying it hurt. I’d thought . . .

  That was a distraction, and not one I could afford right now. The next bit couldn’t be delivered to my knees; I had to see his reaction. I lifted my chin. “There’s another option.”

  “No.” He spoke without hesitation, iron-hard. “I don’t care what they said. We’re not going to the Unseelie.”

  I spread my mouth in something like a smile. “I’m glad we agree. But it proves my point: we haven’t done everything. Only the rational things. The sane ones.”

  He went very still.

  It was a knack I’d never learned; I got up and started pacing instead. “For example: have you tried asking?”

  “Asking who?”

  “There are doctors who put these fucking things on wilders. Surely they could take it off again.”

  I heard the sharp exhale, turned to see him staring at me. “Kim, there’s no way they would do that.”

  “Then we make them.”

  He put one hand on the door jamb, as if my words had staggered him. Julian was staring at me like he’d never seen me before. And maybe he hadn’t: the Kim who existed before the shield, before Falcon’s refusal, would have never contemplated anything like this.

  But she was gone.

  Julian shook his head, a faint motion at first, then a forceful one. “No. For the love of—you can’t be serious.”

  “Why not?” My hands sought out my elbows, clamping down on them, arms hard against my body, as if to hold something in. Or to keep myself from lashing out. “I know it’s crazy. That’s the point. Julian, your entire goddamned life they have trained you to be disciplined, obedien
t. To sacrifice yourself for others, but never to ask for anything from them. Maybe you’ve been holding the keys to your own prison this entire time, because they knew you would never think to use them.” My eyes burned with the threat of tears—but not because of misery. Not this time.

  He tried to come close, to take my hands in his, but I shied back. It left him alone in the middle of the living room, hands mid-air, silently pleading. “Kim . . . this isn’t you. Threatening a doctor, hurting one? You wouldn’t do that.”

  “Wouldn’t I?” The question ground from my throat, harsh and raw. The tears would become misery, if I let them. “Julian, this thing has made you insane. You went berserk last fall because of it, attacking doctors, nurses—remember that?” His flinch said that he did. “You think I’ll survive it any better? It’s killing me. I can’t think about anything else. There’s a hole inside me and nothing can fill it. You thought it might be different for me because I didn’t grow up this way? It is. You know how to live with the shield, even if you hate doing so. I don’t. I can’t.”

  I felt it then, in a weird, half-numb way: not the sensation itself, but its effect, and logic told me the cause. Julian was trying to enfold me in love and support, using his mind because I had spurned his arms.

  I jerked upright, hands coming loose from their death-grips and slapping the wall behind me. I hadn’t realized I’d retreated so far. “Don’t,” I snarled. “Don’t you fucking take this away from me, when I’m helpless to stop you.”

  “I’m not trying to take anything away,” he whispered. Bright light slid down his face: the track of a tear. “But I don’t have any other way to reach you. Kim . . . I can’t let you do this. Not because I’m afraid of the risks, and not because of my training. Because I would lose you.”

  It was too much. The cracks had been growing, though I tried desperately to hold them shut; the anguish in Julian’s eyes broke them wide open. I sagged against the wall, slid limp to the ground. The sound that came out of me was as much a scream as a sob.