Chains and Memory

by Marie Brennan

  “We’ll just have to persuade him,” I said. “And by ‘persuade,’ I mean ‘browbeat.’” I’d managed to push him into giving us information and assistance before, but not by using sweet reason.

  That we needed the help of the sidhe, I had no doubt. No one in the mortal world had the first clue how to lay a compulsion of that strength and durability. What were the odds we could take it off again? Oh, sure—maybe if we just whacked at the thing with the psychic equivalent of a hammer until it cracked. But that was guaranteed to kill the target. Even if we were more careful, we’d lose gods knew how many people before we figured it out.

  I tried not to think about whether any wilders would volunteer as test subjects, for the sake of the other Fiain.

  I tried not to think about whether Julian would volunteer.

  His silence made me fear he might be considering it. Late one night, when I was curled up tight against his side in bed, I ventured to ask, “What’s on your mind?”

  His stomach muscles tensed beneath my arm. A year ago, I never would have voiced this kind of question. I’d spent most of our time at Welton striving to respect Julian’s privacy—perhaps too well, given his isolation there. Now I felt like I at least had leave to ask, if not the certainty of an answer.

  This time he did answer me. It took him a moment, but when he spoke, he didn’t brush me off with a noncommittal response, the way he would have done before. “The geas. It has me questioning . . . everything.”

  I raised my head to look at him. “What do you mean?”

  His gaze was on the ceiling, as if he needed that point of stability. “Not the Seelie. At least, not in the way she meant. But—” His lips thinned. “My whole life, I’ve taken pride in being one of the Fiain. After First Manifestation, the wilders who survived the onslaught of their gifts worked to restore order. They were the first Guardians, before there was a name for it. They founded the Corps, and their successors have been its spine ever since. You’ve seen the wall at the Corps headquarters, the names of Guardians who have died in the line of duty. How many of the names there are green, for a wilder? We’ve given our lives and our deaths for the greater good.”

  He stopped, and I realized it was a reflexive pause, allowing him to make certain his composure wouldn’t slip. “I should have seen it sooner,” he whispered. “The Seelie admitted the geas compels us to protect others against magic. But it wasn’t until today that I realized . . . that thing I’m so proud of—our history, our tradition—how much of that is us? And how much is the geas?”

  I tightened my arm around him, as if a mere hug could push those questions away. I wanted to reassure him, tell him he was being foolish and nothing had changed.

  But any such easy reassurance would be false. Instead I said, “One soldier is drafted for war; another volunteers. They both die defending their cause. Should we value one sacrifice less that the other?”

  “It isn’t about what we’ve done,” Julian said. “It’s about what we are.”

  Their culture—their identity. The selfless, driven protectors who gave up so much of their own freedom and happiness for the rest of us.

  I was thinking of wilders as them, not as us. And that was part of the answer right there. “If it were all the geas talking, then I should have changed a lot more when my Krauss rating went high enough for it to kick in.”

  Julian laid his cheek against the top of my head. “You wanted to be a Guardian even before you were a wilder. How much of a change could there be? And besides . . . even if part of it is learned, something we get from our training and our lives at the Center, all of that ultimately has its roots in the geas.”

  I squirmed away until I could rise up on one elbow and look down at him. His eyes were pale in the light from the window. “Julian Fiain,” I said, “I do not believe the only thing that makes you who you are is the geas. Not even indirectly. I think that if it were gone tomorrow, you’d still risk your life to help other people. And I think a lot of the other Fiain would do the same. Maybe not all of them — and sure, forty years from now you’ll have some wilders who would rather pursue careers as florists than throw themselves into the line of fire. But I think most of them will still want to help. Because you’re human, and one of your gifts is empathy. You won’t stand idly by and let people suffer. Not when you could help.”

  His eyes glimmered. Then he reached up and took my face between his hands, holding me there for a silent moment before drawing me down for a kiss.

  ~

  We didn’t talk about Julian’s fears after that.

  We went back to training with Grayson—and if I thought I’d seen Julian’s capacity for monomaniacal focus before, now I discovered just how far he could go. He woke before me, sometimes to the point of leaving the apartment before I even opened my eyes; now that we had access to the Aegis Building, he had exactly the kind of practice space we’d been lacking beforehand, and he didn’t hesitate to make use of it. It crossed my mind that he was trying to prove to himself that this was something he chose, not something pushed on him by the geas. But I was wise enough not to say it.

  In a sense, he and I were both holding our breath. Sooner or later we would have to act on what we knew . . . but first, we had to know whether that Unseelie woman had told the truth about lying.

  I chewed on it from every angle during that time. Even if it was true that lying hurt them, the effect clearly wasn’t obvious: they didn’t wince or cry out in pain or anything. Otherwise Grayson would have known something was amiss, back when the Seelie claimed to have rescued me from the Unseelie ambush at Welton. So that woman could have told us the truth in general, but still been lying in specific, when she claimed the Seelie were behind the attacks on me.

  The more I thought about that, the more plausible it seemed. The best way to hide a falsehood was to wrap it in a covering of truth.

  I thanked the gods I’d thought of the geas as the root of the shield before she said anything. Had the idea come from her first, I would never have trusted it. But I was willing to take her comment as tentative confirmation—which meant we needed to plan how to proceed.

  “I’m inclined to tell Grayson first,” I told Julian a few nights later, over takeout curry. Neither of us had the energy right now to deal with even the easiest of meal prep.

  Chewing and swallowing gave him a moment to think. “From a protocol standpoint, that isn’t the right course.”

  “I know. This is a wilder thing, not a Guardian thing, so we should be talking to someone in the DSPA. But we’re probably going to get her busted as soon as we do anything about this, because we can’t just wave our hands in the air and pretend we figured out the shield kills all by ourselves.” I dumped another spoonful of rice onto my plate. In the normal way of things stress might have put me off my food, but the energy I was burning these days demanded a steady supply of fuel. “Besides . . . I trust her. She’s helped us over and over again, here and at Welton. I’ll feel better taking this step if I know I’ve got her at my back.”

  “Don’t say anything until we know for sure,” Julian said.

  Meaning, until we knew what effect lying had. It might turn out to be very relevant when we asked the Seelie for help in removing the geas. “I won’t,” I promised.

  The problem with that was, it seemed increasingly unlikely that we would get a clear-cut answer. But as Julian had said to Nantakarn in the aftermath of the riot, evasion was a kind of answer in its own right.

  He got the message eight days after the riot. “They haven’t openly refused,” Julian said as we headed for the Metro. “But they won’t bring her out, either.”

  Shard. I’d never met her in person; all I knew was that she was a seer, and the one who had foreseen what would happen to me, though not in its specific details. Of all the sidhe, Shard was the closest Julian had to a friend. “I’m sorry,” I said, and threaded my fingers through his.

  He held on tight the entire way home.

  ~

&
nbsp; Julian was already gone by the time I got up the following morning. There was a nine a.m. meeting at headquarters, a riot post-mortem; our higher-ups had finished their analysis of the events and were going to tell us in detail how we’d screwed up. I didn’t blame Julian for wanting to get some practice in before lining up with the rest of us for the firing squad.

  Reluctance made my own feet drag, almost to the point of making me late. When I slipped into the auditorium, Sarabhai was already at the microphone, and we’d run out of seats; I had to stand along the back wall between people I didn’t know. By craning my neck, I was able to find Neeya, Toby, and Inola, but not Julian.

  Before long I was cursing whoever had thought we could all fit in the auditorium—or maybe people had shown up who didn’t have to, in which case I cursed them instead. My annoyance was equal-opportunity, though; I also cursed myself for not getting out the door faster, which at a minimum would have gotten me a seat, and probably would have meant I could sit with Julian. I dearly wanted to scan for his mind and send a few choice comments his way, but I didn’t stand a prayer of hiding that in a room packed full of professionally alert psychics.

  So I had to stand, on feet that were going increasingly numb, while Sarabhai outlined all of our mistakes. Nobody had yet determined what effect the Unseelie used to hide their presence before they reached the stage, but we’d mostly shielded ourselves against straight-up attacks, rather than the more insidious forms of influence. The problem with shielding against the latter, of course, was that it interfered with sensing other people’s emotional states, which would have hampered us in other respects. But, as Sarabhai pointed out, we should have divided our preparations, leaving a few people heavily sealed and ready to alert the rest of us if we fell under an enchantment.

  “Or bring along a few baselines in iron necklaces for comparison,” the man next to me muttered under his breath.

  At least there was no evidence to suggest any sidhe had been involved in the attack; that was one piece of good news. The ringleaders had been evicted from the other march for overstepping their bounds, and our forces on watch there had conducted a quick divination to check the odds of them causing trouble elsewhere. Unfortunately, since every man jack of them was sporting at least three pounds of iron jewelry, the results weren’t very reliable. The best guess had been that they wouldn’t do anything serious, and since they couldn’t be locked up just for being assholes, they’d been left to roam the area on their own. They’d found a bar, found some friends, and the rest had snowballed from there.

  The debriefing lasted until nearly noon. Grayson found me after I left the auditorium and said, “You might as well get lunch now. We’ll pick up again this afternoon.”

  “I’ll let Julian know,” I said. With the meeting over, I was free to scan for him—but I didn’t spot him anywhere in the Guardians and trainees streaming out into the halls. “Huh. Did you see him in there?”

  Grayson shook her head. “He may have been called away to speak with Nantakarn or someone else about his encounter with Falcon.”

  If so, gods alone knew when he’d be out. I went out to a food truck rather than stand in the enormous line forming outside the Corps cafeteria, and ate my lunch in the basement room where we’d been training with Grayson. Julian didn’t join us all afternoon, which I found ominous. After Grayson released me, I went upstairs to get signal and called Julian’s port. It went straight to voicemail.

  I stood in the lobby, tapping my port against my other palm, trying to decide what to do. If he’d been called away, he might not even be in the Aegis Building anymore. I wished he’d sent me a message before vanishing into thin air; it would have gone a long way toward reassuring me that he hadn’t been kidnapped by the Unseelie or something.

  Well, I had at least one way to check on his whereabouts. I went to the lobby and asked the security guards whether Julian had left yet.

  One of the women there consulted the logs and shook her head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Julian Fiain has not registered here today.”

  It took me aback. “What? You mean he never came in this morning?”

  “That’s right, ma’am.”

  Where the hell had he gone?

  My fears, which had been nebulous and silly-seeming before, suddenly got a lot more solid. I walked away without thanking her and pulled up a new number on my port. “Grayson? Sorry to bug you; I know you’re on your way home—but I’m worried Julian’s gone missing.”

  A brief pause. Then Grayson said, “Are you still at headquarters? Wait there.”

  She must not have gotten on the Metro yet, because she came back into the lobby only a few minutes later. I gave her a rundown on the situation, including the last time I’d seen Julian, the night before. “I went to bed before he did,” I said—leaving out the comments I’d made at the time about Grayson’s determination to find out just how many quick-fire shields I could build before I died of exhaustion.

  Grayson, thank all the gods, neither dismissed my concerns as foolish nor fed them into a blaze. “It does seem out of character for him to wander off like this. But I think it’s unlikely that anyone attacked him. We have no reason to think Julian went anywhere after leaving your apartment except toward here. No point along that path is very secluded; if there had been trouble, someone would have noticed. And it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone managed to take him without a struggle.”

  “Unless they gutted him first,” I said in a low voice.

  She put one hand on my shoulder, which startled me out of my funk. “Kim,” she said. “Go home. I’ll pass the information along; if something has happened to Julian, we’ll find out. But more likely he simply went somewhere and didn’t tell you.”

  Robert had told me once that Julian vanished occasionally at Welton, without a word. It wasn’t as out of character as Grayson thought. But I’d never imagined Julian would do this to me—not anymore.

  Maybe I hadn’t read him as well as I’d thought. The shield, the geas, Shard’s apparent betrayal . . . it might be weighing on him even more than I’d realized.

  But if so, I wished he’d at least told me.

  “I’ll check around,” I said. “Maybe he went to Toby’s.” It didn’t seem likely. But right then, I would take a shred of hope over none at all.

  ~

  He wasn’t at Toby’s. Neeya, when I pinged her, messaged back to say she hadn’t seen him. He wasn’t at any of our usual haunts — not that we had many these days, apart from the Aegis Building and Toby’s house. And the apartment, when I got there, was as empty as I’d left it.

  I barely paused to drop my bag and flick on the lights before grabbing my tarot cards. My Piacenza was still in a shielded locker at FAR, but I had a backup Candleflame deck I’d bought when I came to D.C.; that would serve well enough.

  I wanted to know what had happened.

  First I had to meditate, clearing my thoughts as best I could of the fears and distractions plaguing me. To have any hope of a good answer, I needed to be as centered as possible. Then I spread a cloth over the carpet and began to deal the cards.

  This was not the time for a big, elaborate spread. I did a five-card reading, with the Knight of Swords to signify Julian; the traditional coloration of the card didn’t match him at all, but the personality it indicated did. Around it I laid the seven of swords, the Hermit, the Page of Swords, and the Ace of Swords, to give me the past, the future, his reasoning, and what he might achieve.

  Deception, enlightenment, curiosity, action. The Hermit drew me particularly. I lifted it by its edges, as if it were some kind of specimen I was studying, and tried to sort through what my gift was telling me. Questions, answers—whatever Julian had done, he was trying to get an answer.

  But what was the question?

  The last thing he and I had discussed, other than what to have for dinner, had been Shard. Maybe he’d gone to find her—to ask why she’d lied, what could possibly be so vital that she would destroy her gifts to keep
it hidden from our own people.

  “Oh, Julian,” I whispered, laying down the card. Could he get to the Otherworld? I summoned my port into my hand and tapped out a quick message to Grayson, asking her to check whether he’d registered with the people monitoring passage back and forth. My bet was that he hadn’t. Which meant he’d have to make his own gate—could he do that? If he drained his power reservoir, maybe. But that would leave him stranded in the Otherworld, with no backup and no protection against whatever the sidhe chose to do to him.

  Even though the Seelie were our allies, I doubt they would take kindly to Julian poking around in search of their crippled seer.

  Message sent, I gripped my port my fingers ached. It felt like last fall all over again, with Julian missing and me wishing like fire that I could go after him. I didn’t have the first bloody clue how to get to the Otherworld, though; the Unseelie had always taken me. And even if he was still in our world, I couldn’t find him without a hell of a lot more ritual prep than I could stage in my living room. I’d never thought I would wish so much for Welton’s sorcery labs.

  If the powers that be got worried enough, they’d find him for me. Hell, there was an entire section in SIF devoted to searching for missing people. Julian might have warded himself against scrying—it depended on how secretive he was being—but they had specialists for that kind of thing.

  My port beeped the arrival of Grayson’s reply. Will do. Get some rest, Kim.

  There didn’t seem much chance of that. But Julian had a near-miraculous ability to sleep on command, courtesy of his training, and I’d been trying to cultivate something similar. I put my cards back in their box, brushed my teeth, and went to bed, where I stared at the ceiling for a long time before sleep came.

  ~

  As with the Falcon dream, I knew immediately that my synapses were not firing at random. This dream was real.

  And Julian was there.

  “Gods and sidhe!” I swore, flinging my arms around him. It didn’t give me the reassurance I wanted; “real” or not, this was still a dream, and I had very little sensation of touch. But my mind recognized him, which in its own way was as good as a hug. If I’d been awake, relief would have made my knees go weak. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”