Wolf's-own: Weregild

by Carole Cummings

"Say it,” Malick breathed against his temple, sped his strokes on Jacin's erection and twisted his hips, growled a little when Jacin couldn't hold onto a whimper. Wrapped Jacin's unbound hair in his fist and gave it a sharp tug. “Tell me."

  "Here,” splintered from Jacin's throat, and it burned this time, seared down to his gullet, and oh fuck, it wasn't going away, this wasn't what he'd bargained for. “Malick.” Too soft, too hoarse, too broken, and he couldn't keep it back: “Help."

  "Fuck,” Malick rumbled, his rhythm picking up pace, driving what breath was left in Jacin's lungs out into harsh little pants that heated the stone against his cheek. “Here, Fen. Not a ghost.” His head dipped down to Jacin's shoulder, the linen of his tunic damp and scrip-scraping along Jacin's back, more sensation, more friction and heat, overpowering. “Fucking... shit, Fen, love you.” So soft it was almost nothing more than heat against Jacin's skin. “Fuck... love you, love you.” Thick with emotion unanticipated, almost unwilling, and the shaky tone of confession slid a hot knife through all the knots tangled in Jacin's chest. That cool, calm wind inside him that said Malick to him, like even the physicality of Malick himself couldn't do, skimmed through every sense Jacin owned, took him.

  Orgasm clamped him in a hard fist, wrung him and flung him, until everything inside him jinked and snapped, tore him loose and sent him spiraling. Whited him out, took everything out of him in a long, sharp, jacksaw wave of searing hereness. Shoved his face in it until he couldn't breathe.

  Silence—absolute and profound. Stillness so complete he could feel the sweat drying on his skin.

  Inescapable knowledge.

  Gold hair stained crimson. A tiny, dimpled fist curled loose in a lake of blood.

  Failure.

  Thwip-thwip-thwip.

  He came to still in the shower-box, still slumped against the wall, Malick still a swath of heat at his back, panting now, shaking from his own release, but everything inside Jacin had altered and shifted about in a jumbled welter of... everything. All the things that had been hovering at his edges before now bunched tight in his chest, knotting and wedging behind his breastbone, spreading out like a fist uncurling. Feeling, agonizing life, terrifying reality, and it all caved inward, striped his soul like welts from a whip and strangled him. He couldn't push it away this time, couldn't unfeel it. It shot him up, sucked him down, and he had no choice but to let himself be battered in the rush.

  Unraveling.

  Shattering.

  Undone. Unmade.

  Pressure—inside and winding out.

  It was too much. He couldn't keep it in.

  Jacin's head fell back to Malick's shoulder, breath curling out in a long, winding whimper that grew too fast into a moan then a sob. Pressing him down, crushing him with grief and rage and too much, too much, too much.

  Long, strap-muscled arms wound about his chest, tightened—"It's all right, Fen, you're not alone, let it come"—and it all clustered together, built and built and built inside him, hurt him, burned him, scraped him raw and too open. That great, unfeelable ball of agony locked in his chest gathered into itself, burst, and splintered. Rumbled up his throat, wound through, and shoved out his mouth in a deep-dark, soul-scouring scream.

  It drove right down into Malick's soul, wrenched it and twisted it. He'd never heard anything like it—the agony inside it, the betrayal, the deep-deep shocked misery of someone who'd been striving, waiting, waiting for something, anything, to be better, trying to fix it, make it better, when it just... wouldn't. Wouldn't get better, wouldn't be fixed, would only keep getting worse and worse, no matter what he did, how he tried. Wanting, wanting something that was gone forever, and holding himself responsible for failure because he couldn't take the entire world back in time and keep it there. It was all there, inside the scream that wound from Fen's mouth and curled its desolation into the stone all around them, gained emotion and momentum as it gained volume, encircling them in despair as Malick's arms encircled Fen and he lowered them both to the floor.

  Ear-ringing; soul-wrenching. Lashing out at nothing and accomplishing nothing in return. All the loneliness, all the devastation, all the anger and hurt-grief-guilt, bleeding from Fen in useless shouts and shrieks ‘til it sounded like he might rupture his throat.

  There was nothing for Malick to do but hold on, nothing for him to offer but inane platitudes just to give something voice, give Fen some kind of anchor on which to latch. So he kept rocking, kept whispering through the unending unholy howling—I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm here, it's not your fault, not a ghost, not a ghost—wondering how there could be so much, so much, inside one person. How had Fen survived all this time with so much pain and rage and grief choking him? How had he kept his mind inside it, and with the Ancestors shrieking at him through it all?

  And how had Malick ever, ever looked at the surface of the passion that bubbled beneath everything that was Fen and thought he wanted to watch as it all snapped its traces?

  He'd thought it might be all right. Fen had been so calm, so focused—saw to Asai, took the amulets from the hunters, kept the Doujou from an attack before Malick had even thought to have Husao tweak them, because he couldn't bring himself to ask Shig. Malick had seen the storm twisting inside that gray gaze, but he hadn't suspected its violence. Not until Fen had shut down, gone silent, peered out blankly from a soul that was teetering. He hadn't even seemed to recognize Joori.

  Drowning in the seductive numbness of shock. Steadily losing himself inside the beguiling void of nothing at all.

  It took perhaps a second for Malick to see it, decide to get Fen out of there, get him somewhere quiet, somewhere private, wash the blood from him. And when Fen did start talking again, it had been to Asai.

  Giving up, giving in, submitting completely with one simple turn of his body and a desperate plea. Malick saw it, understood it... couldn't stand it.

  Fen had some not-very-healthy ideas about what sex was for, and the plea had nothing to do with the things people usually sought it for in too new grief. Please could just as easily have meant beat me, rather than help me. Malick would not be used as a tool for self-punishment, nor would he yield to being a stand-in for the man who'd taught Fen he had to earn love through impossibility and submission to another's will.

  "Love” had merely seemed like something else to offer, something to say, something to give Fen because it seemed like he'd needed to hear it. Malick hadn't expected to actually mean it. Hadn't expected the sharp twist in his chest when he'd realized perhaps Fen wasn't hearing it from him.

  Malick held on now, because there was nothing else he could do. Let Fen scream until his throat bled because he thought, vaguely, that explosion was somehow better than implosion.

  Dimly, Malick noted Samin bursting through the heavy door of the bath, sword drawn and face set in the same grim lines they'd taken on since their comfortable little world had slipped and skewed. Drawn by Fen's screams, no doubt; on alert and assuming attack. Malick merely leaned himself a little backward out of the shower-box, and gave Samin a small shake of his head. Samin's shoulders slumped, and his eyes shut tight for a moment, before he tipped a jerky little nod and backed out the door again.

  Malick watched the door settle firmly into its frame, curled in more tightly around Fen. Rocked and stroked and murmured through the keening that was less piercing than it had been, but Malick thought it was likely due to exhaustion, rather than a mellowing of the sharp emotion that had borne it. “You're alive, Fen,” he whispered. “Alive, not a ghost, and I know it doesn't take away the pain of losing your sister, but your brothers are still here, and they need you."

  He hadn't meant to appeal to guilt or responsibility, and the second it left his mouth, he wanted to bash himself in the head for it. Still, it seemed to force calm where even the most tender, soothing words had been failing since he'd sunk to the floor with Fen a shuddering, wretched heap on his lap. The shivering kept up, the lurching breaths didn't subside, but Malick almost felt the shift in attent
ion, the lift of a thin layer of haze.

  "I thought....” Fen's voice was harsh, hoarse, hardly even there, and no wonder. He wrenched in a choppy breath that ended in a strangled sob, breathed, “I thought I was... I tried to... save... but I—"

  "You did save them, Fen."

  Malick had to clench his teeth, had to pause for a moment to consider what he needed to say here, because one couldn't speak to Fen like one would speak to any other—there was too much muddled inside him, too much ground in from a father who pretended he didn't have a son, and a “mentor” who fed on the self-hate and confusion it had wrought. And that wasn't even counting everything that came along with trying to keep his sanity through the desperate shrieking of the Ancestors. I won't swear an oath of protection to one who takes his own knives to himself so casually, Umeia had told Malick—bloody hell, had that only been a few days ago?—and Malick should have told her at the time, but there had been more pressing things to say then: there was nothing casual about Fen's pain, or his self-inflicted sanity. Fen thought his failings and weaknesses through very carefully.

  "You were set up, Fen. Asai meant for all of them to die months ago, and you saved them then. You stole more time for your little sister, tricked a few more months for her out of a maijin, and Fen—she lived for those few months. She pushed new life into everyone around her."

  "And now she's dead.” Too weak and thready, but Fen was following Malick's words, he was here, and that was better than it had been a few minutes ago.

  "She is,” Malick agreed gently. “And I know it doesn't help now, but Wolf will take care of her, and you will meet her again. She's not really gone—she's just not here right now."

  Fen didn't answer, only pulled a defeated silence around himself that was disturbing, perhaps, but not actually distressing, like before. They were speaking two different languages, looking at it from two different perspectives, and though Malick had endured today's losses with what felt a little too much like a mortal heart, he also had the knowledge of an immortal. He'd seen souls come back, had seen loved ones find each other again. Malick's pain wasn't nearly so deep. And Fen knew it.

  He couldn't expect Fen to take any real comfort from it. Couldn't expect any mortal to take real comfort from it. Limited time and the non-remembrance of lives past were gifts, in their ways, but... not for something like this. Malick had jarred Fen back into here and now, except here and now, Fen had just killed the man he'd been in love with for years and torn his heart from his chest. Here and now, his little sister had just died horrifically in front of him. Even Shig—who regularly spoke to the spirits, who knew she'd see her sister again—was grieving and curled further into herself right now than Malick had seen her since she and Yori had first come to the Girou.

  Shig. Damn. He needed to see to Shig too. Fen's sanity wasn't the only worry right now, though Malick had made it his priority, and for reasons he knew but wouldn't even try to define. There just wasn't time. Husao had taken care of the Doujou, but he couldn't take care of the entire city, and the alarm had gone up. There would be an investigation, probably underway right this second, and sooner or later, the vague non-explanations and apparent blank spaces in memory—not to mention the sudden loss of three amulets—were going to result in at the very least an enquiry centered on the Girou. Husao could buy some more time, but not forever. Those Adan who gave the orders were all too familiar with what magic looked like, and they knew even better what the seemingly invisible traces of hidden magic looked like. They'd figure it out. Soon.

  Before Malick could come up with a gentle way to prod Fen into even a tenuous acceptance, Fen was pulling that iron control around himself again, stilling the shudders, settling his breathing, shoving everything back down to wherever it lived when he tried to deny its existence. Stiffening up, like he'd only just now realized where he was and the position he was in—that he was allowing it.

  He moved, trying to pull himself away and get to his feet, so Malick angled himself back and up then dragged Fen up with him. Gave him a brief once-over—some popped stitches on both arm and leg, but most of the wounds had already knit new skin anyway, so a few bandages would do. Fen had never entirely shaken the fever, but Malick had been in the closest contact possible for the past however long it had been, and he didn't think it was anything to worry about right now. Fen seemed to heal himself, whether he wanted to or not, by sheer force of subconscious will. It amazed Malick, because he knew damned well there was no magic involved, and he also knew that Fen would like nothing better right now than to be dead out on those cobbles with his little sister. And yet, he couldn't seem to let himself die, not until he'd finished what he'd set out to do, had practically begged Malick to bring him back from the void into which Malick knew Fen would give just about anything to fall.

  Malick didn't think about his own reasons for obliging. He told himself there were more pressing things.

  Fen was shivering a little, and his skin was mottling with gooseflesh. The hob hadn't been tended for too long, the uproar outside having drawn any who'd been bathing at the time to the alley, and Malick had had other things to worry about when he'd brought Fen here. The jasmine oil he'd snapped up with the vague idea of washing Fen's hair then combing it out for him, giving the braid a go—and which he'd ended up using for an altogether different purpose—had toppled from the bench and now mixed with the bloody water at their feet. The bathsheets Malick had retrieved from the cupboard had fallen over the drain, soaking up oil and too-red water so they looked like viscous clots on the floor. Malick merely grimaced, didn't even bother to inspect his own boots and trousers after having been kneeling in the mess; just made sure Fen was propped up against the wall before he left him there to get fresh bathsheets.

  "It doesn't end with Asai,” Fen said, hoarse and raspy, as he allowed Malick to wrap one bathsheet about his shoulders and mop at the miles of hair with the other.

  Malick's eyebrows rose, but he kept his gaze on his hands. “No.” He dropped the bathsheet to the already ruined heap on the floor then gently steered Fen out of the shower-box.

  "What will you do?” Fen asked, halting when they reached the door, his gray eyes, for the first time since the alley, peering straight at Malick, and there was no question at all that Fen was seeing him.

  Like he'd done several times today, Malick paused, thought carefully about what he wanted to say, what he should say, what Fen needed to hear. “What d'you want me to do?” he finally asked, because he really wanted to know, and he really wanted to give Fen whatever he wanted, if it was in his power to give.

  Fen didn't even blink, didn't hesitate. “I want you to do what you promised,” he said, his voice still low and so husky Malick wondered if he'd damaged his throat irreparably. “I want you to keep Morin and Joori safe and help me... take care of my mother."

  Simple and direct—no concerns about the Balance, no thought whatsoever to any orders given from gods, or vague permissions with no promises attached to them. Fen wanted what he'd always wanted, his focus jarred and taken from him forcibly for a time, perhaps, but unchanged: Save my family, kill Asai. He'd accomplished the second part, but the more important part had gotten mangled and skewed in terrible ways today. It wasn't surprising that Fen would merely shift that narrow focus and keep trying until he was dead or broken completely. Because Fen didn't seem to know how to quit. And after everything that had happened, after watching Fen drag himself from the abyss and force himself to sanity when the call of oblivious madness must have been so sweet and seductive, Malick had no real choice.

  All he could do was sigh, nod slowly, then lead Fen through the door of the baths and toward the stair. “Then that's what I'll do."

  * * * *

  So many people needed to die that Samin would have to spend his next sixteen lives hunting them all down. And unfortunately—or fortunately, he supposed, depending on one's perspective—most of the ones he knew were responsible for the current wrongness of the universe were already
dead. And he hadn't gotten to kill any of them. He couldn't remember the last time everything had felt so wrong. Everything.

  Samin shook his head, watched Joori methodically and gently try to peel the sticky, clotted clothes off his little sister's body, watched the tears flow steadily down his pale cheeks as he did it, watched him try not to wince every time his fingers glanced over a knot of bone or a gaping wound. Watched him try not to look at Shig doing the same for Yori, though Shig had stopped her weeping, gone silent. Watched him peer over periodically at the still-untended body of Umeia, who lay sheet-draped on one of the steam tables, where only an hour ago the kitchen boys had been preparing rice and setting up for supper.

  Samin hadn't known where else to bring the bodies. Upstairs hadn't seemed right, and the floor of the Girou had seemed too open. And he had no idea if they were going to have the time for a proper pyre. The practical part of him had remembered the cold-storage room, and so had brought them all to the kitchens, evicted any who were still lingering, afraid to venture into the alley, and any who'd wandered back afterward to try to make sense of it all and begin the mourning of their surrogate “mother” and patroness. Some had tried to flee after the blatant display of magic, but the man Malick had called Husao had corralled them back and that Xari from the Stallion was now keeping them relatively quiet, either up in their own rooms or congregated out on the floor.

  Most had stayed, gathered out on the floor where they made their living, getting slowly drunk and discussing the open secret of the Girou, which was a lot more open than Samin had known. Protected all this time beneath Malick's veil, hidden all this time by Malick's magic, but Umeia had been the face of it all. Umeia had been the one everyone had thought really in charge—even Samin. Even now, he couldn't tell how many of them were hiding magic of some kind, how many were just as shocked as he was at the number of those who'd somehow known to seek open refuge here, and how many had no magic themselves but had willingly accompliced those who did. Accompliced the woman who'd taken them in and sheltered them, and only now were they beginning to get the faintest clue that it had really been Malick all along. It had been his magic and his money that had given them new names, bought them new papers, helped some get out of Ada altogether, if that was what they'd wanted, and if they'd earned the help.