by K. C. Lannon
Iain nodded. “Probably.”
James felt a twinge of guilt. “The Iron Wardens—that meant a lot to you, didn’t it?” He exhaled. “Growing up, that’s all you talked about, joining the Iron Guard.”
Smiling faintly, Iain said, “Yeah, the Iron Infantry. That’s where all the action is. But I didn’t mind being a warden, helping in a small way. Wasn’t very good at it though. But it felt like… being a part of something greater, you know?”
James frowned at him, still confused. “Why did you join the wardens then, if you wanted to join the infantry instead?”
“Well, someone had to stay and look out for you,” Iain said like he was stating the obvious.
“I don’t need to be looked out for, you know,” James reminded him. “I’m not a kid anymore.”
“I know that, but I wanted to do it. I’d do it again, if I had the choice.”
James gaped. He hadn’t known that. He hadn’t even considered that Iain would have stayed because of him. It went against what he thought he knew, but it rang true. “I-I didn’t realize…”
So what if he didn’t use Pan because he was sick of me…? He still did it. That doesn’t really change anything.
But James felt some of his anger dissipate, like releasing a pressure valve and letting some of the steam out.
“Don’t worry about it.” Iain folded his arms again, then unfolded them once he realized what he’d done. He grimaced at his arms as if accusing them of acting on their own.
“At least you won’t have to break up pub brawls anymore,” James offered.
Iain managed a laugh. “There’s the bright side.”
“And now you’re like a rogue drifter or crusader or something,” James suggested, almost smiling. “I can’t believe you did something that cool—defying the Guard, I mean.”
He saw the flash of his brother’s smile. “You think I’m cool, yeah? Well, it’s about time, little brother.”
James rolled his eyes. “Now that you’ve acknowledged it that cancels it out. Don’t you know anything?”
Iain deflated, his shoulders sagging. “Well, that was short-lived,” he grumbled. “I enjoyed it while it lasted.” After a while, he added, “And anyway, I don’t consider deserting very heroic even if it is for a very good reason.”
Quiet settled over them again. There was still something James needed to know: “So why’d you take the faery fruit this time?”
“After Philip—” Iain sucked in a breath. “After it happened, I had a moment of weakness. Just one selfish, stupid moment. And I regret it, James, but I can’t undo it. I wish I could.”
James began to calm down, his breathing slowing with his heart rate. He went over and sat at the edge of the other bed, facing Iain, suddenly exhausted. “Well, what was I supposed to think? Deirdre and I didn’t know how else to see it.”
Iain’s eyes widened. “You told her.”
“What does that matter?”
“She’s just— She’s a nice person,” Iain murmured. “I didn’t want her to know that about me or think that I’m… still like that.”
He wants Deirdre to like him?
James supposed that made sense, and hearing his brother awkwardly admitting it almost made him smile. Having Deirdre as his friend was definitely something special and fun and exciting. He didn’t blame Iain for wanting the same thing. After all, they’d had very few friends growing up and none of them close—none of them quite like Deirdre.
James eyed his brother, feeling like he was beginning to see a glimpse of him he hadn’t seen in a while—his simple brother, one he had looked up to, one who had gone out of his way for other people. He had thought that version of him lost—gone after Boyd had worn him down or after the faery fruit had made him numb and careless.
“Do you think you can forgive me?” Iain asked.
“I don’t know.” James frowned. “You never apologized for any of it.”
Iain leaned down to meet his gaze when James looked away, his dark eyes imploring. “I’m sorry, James. I mean that. I won’t let you down again. And if you can’t trust what I say, then I’ll just have to prove it to you.”
“How can you prove it?”
“I’ll figure out a way. I’m stubborn like that.” Iain smiled. “Remember that leaf I got for you?”
Recognition flashed in James’s mind, bringing images of fall in Neo-London, playing in the park every evening until curfew or until Mum came calling for supper. “I remember,” James said. “The last leaf of autumn…”
“Are we good?” Iain questioned after a while.
“I guess.” That was all he could offer, and he didn’t exactly mean it.
Maybe Iain could sense that, because he did not seem relieved. Then Iain leaned back against the headboard, pointing to James’s pack on the ground, and said, “Why don’t you start reading those other letters, yeah? Maybe you’ll find something useful.”
James switched on the lamp on the nightstand between them for some more reading light. The lamp, of course, was shaped like a cat and the pull chain like a little porcelain mouse. He rummaged through his bag for the letters.
He had ordered the letters the way Marko had stacked them, leaving the first one in the bag. There were four more letters to look through, so James got to work. It helped to have something to read in his hands—it helped him focus and keep his mind off everything else.
“Dear Marko,” James read. “You asked me many questions, none of which I will answer. Instead, I will tell you about my day, and you can tell me about yours when you reply. First I want to thank you for the update on Brishen and Jal—”
“Keep going. Skip to her day.”
“—Some days I am allowed to go to town, like today. Those days are as good as I can get, so far from home. As I walked, I took notice of the heather; it is a lovely purple this time of year and quite beautiful. I passed by a couple of red grouse nesting. I think Jal would’ve liked to see such a bird—”
“Keep reading,” Iain said.
“No, wait.” James’s mind was working furiously. He grabbed his notebook, threw it open on the bed, and began writing down the details, his scrawl illegible he was scribbling so fast. “She’s nearly telling us everything we need to know!”
Iain stared at him, perhaps wondering if he was attempting to make a joke.
“Red grouse!” James shouted, like the answer was obvious.
“Yeah?”
“The red grouse is a bird that only nests in the heather in the moorlands! She must be near the moors somewhere!”
Iain’s eyes lit up. “That’s brilliant,” he said, beaming unabashedly. James was so unused to seeing his brother so ecstatic that he’d almost forgotten his annoying reaction of either shoving or lifting the unlucky witness to his excitement. Luckily for James, Iain was too tired to rush over and lift him, so he just leaned across his bed to give his shoulder a hard shove. “You’re both brilliant!”
“But, uh, that could mean Scottish heather or something…” James trailed off, frowning.
Iain shook his head. “She’s got to still be in England.”
“What makes you think that?” James squinted at him, wondering what his brother could have noticed that he missed and thinking how unusual that would be.
“Just a hunch.” Iain shrugged.
Fighting the urge to roll his eyes, James settled for a sigh and said, “Oh… so you don’t have any evidence for that beyond your gut instinct or whatever.”
Iain shrugged again.
James went on reading, but nothing else in the second letter told him anything new. Mum described going to a town to buy paper and ink and other items not specified, but nothing about it stuck out to them as important or a land marker.
Soon James was on the last letter, and they had no further clues as of yet. The moment he began to read, James could tell that there was something different about this letter. His stomach dropped.
“The writing—it’s all shaky—” James’s mouth was dry
.
Iain peered over at it, his expression sobering. “Oh no…”
The scrawl was more than shaky. A lot of the writing on Mum’s translated side of the letter was scratched out, blotted out with ink where she had started and stopped and removed parts of the letter. Marko’s translation seemed no less confusing.
“Sometimes—” James started, but stopped. His heart was racing.
Iain took the letter from him and began to read. “Sometimes I find myself forgetting where I am, what I’m doing here. How could I do that? What kind of mother forgets her own children or that everything she does is for them?” Iain stopped for a moment, swearing under his breath. “I have my own ways of remembering, but this place… it has a way of confusing the mind. The company I keep has a way of confusing my mind as well. I’m not alone here. Have I told you that? There is a girl who keeps me company. I think she’s a girl—sometimes I feel like she’s more devil than girl.”
James felt a chill roll down his spine that had nothing to do with the coolness of autumn outside the inn. He hunched his shoulders as if that would help, turning away from Iain for a moment.
“She serves a creature called—” Iain broke off.
“Called what?” James asked, whirling around, the mattress squeaking under him.
Iain was sitting still, unblinking, staring at the page. Then, without warning, he slumped forward onto the bed.
“Iain!” James reached out, taking his arm. “What’s wrong?”
Iain shook his head, looking dazed. “Dizzy,” he grunted. He straightened back up, looking at the letter in his hand like he’d never seen it before. “What was I just doing?”
“Reading Mum’s letter, of course.”
“Oh… right.”
“Um, are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
James took the letter from him, scanning it. “You left off here,” he said. “She serves a creature called—” All at once, James felt as if his brain had scrambled itself. His vision swam. The lamps in the room spun around him, trailing their lights like comet tails.
He doubled over, breathing hard. Blood rushed to his face. It took him a moment to realize what he had been doing.
Amazing. This is magic… real magic. James wished that he wasn’t experiencing and discovering magic he’d only dreamed about at the expense of his mother.
“I think there’s a spell on the letter or on the name, at least,” James explained, his pitch rising with interest. “That’s why we can’t read it. Maybe Mum’s side is different since we were reading Marko’s translation.”
“I’ll do it.” Iain took the letter from his grasp. He flipped it around. His mouth formed the Romani words as he read it under his breath, and then he went cross-eyed.
James snorted a giggle, still a little dazed. He peered over Iain’s shoulder at the letter, and then laughed riotously as the strange feeling struck him again.
“Stop it!” Iain barked. “You’re probably losing brain cells doing that.”
Iain crumpled up the letter in his fist and made to toss it in the nearest rubbish bin but stopped, seeming to regret it. Instead, he placed it back on the bed. Then he sighed, looking James in the eyes. “This isn’t good, James.”
“We knew already there was magic involved.”
“I know, but—” Iain’s expression hardened. “If she’s in danger, or forgetting, we need to get to her. Now.”
“That’s what we’re doing.”
“No stops to the cave, no detours,” Iain said.
James frowned, not liking that at all. “What about Alvey? She needs stuff from the cave, and we told her we would go with her.”
“I know. We’ll just have to convince her to look elsewhere, or some other time.”
After a moment of quiet, Iain said, “I’ve been thinking”—when James feigned shock, he continued pointedly—“about the Peak District, yeah? How will we even find the right community or know where to look?”
“I told you before,” James said. “I have it all mapped out—”
“Yeah, but—” Iain sighed, carding his hands through his hair. “Even if we do find them, we’ll probably have to go through the Rom-Baro, the head of the community there, to even see our family, and we don’t know if that will even happen.”
James frowned. “What do you suggest then? How else will we find Mum if we don’t go to the last place she was?”
“I don’t know.” Iain shook his head. “I think Mum’s sister would be the person most likely to help, if we can somehow find her on her own.”
“How?” James asked.
Iain shrugged. “I just know that they think we’re outsiders. We can’t trust the rest of our family will help us or even talk to us…”
“Do you trust anything?” James asked him, leaning back and appraising Iain coolly.
“I just think it’s good to be cautious sometimes,” Iain finally said, his voice almost too quiet to hear.
“Like, um, overly cautious to the point of paranoia.”
“James—”
“You don’t even trust the microwave!”
“Microwaves are evil,” Iain said with great conviction.
“What is your reasoning for a nonsentient object being evil?”
“Because it changes the structure of the food.”
“That’s what cooking is!”
“It’s different!” Iain insisted passionately. “Besides, you can always tell if something has been microwaved because it gets all spongy and soggy. How isn’t that unnatural?”
James was about to argue but stopped, baffled by how they’d even gotten to this topic of discussion. “Well,” James started, “um, so we know Delphina is an artist… last we heard. But, uh, that’s kind of old information—”
“Can you remember anything else?” Iain asked. “My memory isn’t… great.”
James sighed. “My brain is too full right now.”
Iain nodded in agreement.
As they sat there, James flicked his gaze to the crumpled letter on Iain’s bed. He reached out and took it in his hand, turning it over, wondering what kind of magic had caused their confusion, and who or what had the power to do such a thing.
“Don’t, James,” Iain warned, reaching out.
“I’m not going to read it again…,” James murmured. “But maybe it could tell us something—something we missed. What do you think it could be?”
Iain leveled him with a look after a moment. “Whatever this creature is, it clearly has a lot of power.”
“Uh-huh…” James looked up from the letter, tilting his head. “But what could it want with me? Why am I marked?”
His fingers twitched for his books, for his notebook. His mind began to buzz with possibilities and burn with questions—his need to know the answers so persistent it was almost maddening.
What are you? James pondered, asking the well of information in his mind. What do you want with me? What have you done to Mum?
“Whatever it is, it’s evil,” Iain said, his expression grim. “So it can’t want you for anything good.”
James nodded frantically in agreement, yet… he did not feel concerned like he knew he ought to. He had been afraid when he’d first seen the words marked in ink, so permanent: Dark magic. But now, if anything, he felt exhilarated.
That’s a good thing, James assured himself. One of us shouldn’t be worried. One of us should be thinking clearly.
They agreed to think on it more in the morning, but as James settled down to sleep, his mind was buzzing with thoughts of magic and how he might figure out this mystery. It was almost exciting, being on this creature’s trail, finding clues no one else had found. He would figure it out, and he would bring Mum home, and everything would be as it should be.
* * *
Iain stared at the ceiling and the walls in the dark, finding patterns in the mildew and in the awful cat-themed wallpaper, willing sleep to come.
I see a cat… and another cat… and
more cats…
Maybe I could count the cats…? Cats are filthy creatures. Who would design an inn around cats anyway? That grumpy, impolite innkeeper, that’s who. Figures. Maybe she’s actually a cat in disguise or several cats standing on each other…
Speaking in tongues? Pah! I should have said something to her…
He rolled over, checking the alarm clock on the nightstand. He’d been awake a few hours now after James had gone to sleep, and he was seriously considering waking him up and asking him to knock him unconscious. That, he thought with a delirious amount of amusement, would be the only command he’d ever given James that he might be glad to follow.
After another thirty minutes passed in which he thought of nothing but cats, Iain eventually got out of bed and retreated to the toilet where he could at least have some light. He took his pack with him, deciding to use his insomnia to be productive. He shut the door and sat on the edge of the tub, then busied himself with organizing his items from his pack.
Even while sleep deprived, Iain found he could dismantle his firearm and put it back together again in a reasonable amount of time. After he was finished with that, he went to work spot cleaning his uniform. He’d folded his warden jacket in his bag once he’d changed into his civilian jacket. The bloodstains were faint but still visible to anyone who knew where they were, what had happened.
During his first week or so of training for the Iron Wardens, when he’d received his uniform and his identity tags, he’d been rather obsessive about keeping his uniform in perfect condition—so obsessed, in fact, that James and even Philip Prance had teased him about it relentlessly.
He remembered when Philip had taken him aside one day and pretended to scold him in front of the rest of his peers in training for having a single crease in his uniform. It had taken him a while to realize he was part of a joke, and the other wardens had gone absolutely bonkers over it. Once he’d realized, it had actually helped break the ice, made him more comfortable.
For one small, fleeting moment, Iain allowed himself to mourn for the life he’d thought he’d had for that brief time. He had imagined a simple but pleasant future for himself as a soldier in the Iron Guard, with a simple relationship with his father, in a version of Neo-London that no longer existed, with his brother safe and happy and pursuing his education, not marked by something evil. It was gone now—all of it.
