Sons (Book 2)

by Scott V. Duff

  “Kieran, what do you have in mind once we join hands?” I asked in hopes of persuading the boys.

  “Just a bit of gindag with the Lord of the Realm,” he said with a gleam in his eyes. Guitar and Gibson giggled and darted around to my sides, one between each son, and looked on excitedly. Coulter grinned at Connor and together they placed their hands in Kieran’s.

  “I’ll bite. What’s gindag?” I asked.

  “It’s a game,” Kieran said cheerfully. “Boys, would you like to start?” A pink glow suddenly surrounded my feet and tickled ferociously. I jumped about a foot backward, laughing and pulling the twins with me. Breaking contact with Kieran was enough to stop the glowing tickles, but I still let go of the boys.

  “What was that?” I asked, laughing. The twins laughed and pointed at me, chanting “You lose!” over and over again. Kieran sat back in his chair smiling as if he created a miracle. Clearly I wasn’t going to get an answer soon from those three. Glancing down at Guitar on my right, I asked him in his native tongue, full of chirps and whistles, to explain gindag to me. This being the first time I’d spoken the Brownie dialect directly to either of them, he was delighted to respond in kind. It surprised the boys into silence as they watched our two-minute conversation. It was a deceptively simple game of faery energy manipulation on the nervous system. Deceptive in that it depended on the mental states of the contestants. Apparently the boys had chosen their goal and their target and how that changed into bonding with Kieran, I don’t know.

  “Whoa, Dad, what was that?” Coulter asked as I reached out again to take their hands. “Were you understanding each other, Dad?” Connor asked right after.

  “I was just speaking to Guitar in his language, so yes, we were understanding each other,” I said, smiling again but mischievously now. “Now let’s play this again. Guitar gave me some instruction, and I think I can give you a run for your money.”

  “You want to run?” Connor asked, looking up confused. “What’s money?” Coulter asked.

  “Well, it took me a minute to get used to the idea, and I was Seth,” Ethan whispered behind us. Peter snorted, then burst out laughing. Ethan cackled a moment later. This was a night of firsts for a lot of us it seemed, since this was the first time Ethan made a reference to the time before his Naming.

  “We’ll talk about those things later, sons,” I said giggling, “I just meant I could play a little better now, I think. Want to try again, brother dear?” I gave Kieran my most innocent look and I saw the boys’ heads turn and knew they were doing the same. Three perfect angels standing in a row asking to play a power game that would likely end in tickling.

  “No,” Kieran said, low and rumbly. “I don’t trust you now, little brother. Your grin is too big. Just admit that I got you when you least expected it and I showed your sons how to do it in a heartbeat. Score one for Uncle Kieran.”

  Peter and Ethan’s laughter choked off behind me suddenly. “I didn’t realize the Master was playing the apprentices’ game,” I said smirking. “Boys, I think you’re getting the best of a lot of different worlds here. As twins, you get that special brotherhood. As my sons, you’re going to be constantly drawn into my life with my brothers and our relationships are nothing like yours. We have a very interesting life ahead of us.

  “And now you guys need rest,” I said quietly and firmly. “Come on, off to bed. Peter?” Peter came around us and gave the boys their toys along with another quick hug, then we started out again before the boys made another detour.

  “Good night, Uncle Kieran,” they squealed, letting go of my hands to hug him. I was flabbergasted, not seeing what Kieran had done to earn their trust. But the gifted horse was there and I wasn’t about to tug on its lower lip.

  “Good night, boys, maybe your dad will let us join you tomorrow for swimming,” Kieran said warmly.

  “You sure? They’re pretty dangerous in the water, big brother,” I said jokingly. “Little otters nearly drowned Pete and me earlier tonight.” The boys grinned predatorily and proudly, as if patricide was truly a goal.

  “I’ll take my chances,” Kieran said chuckling. “Besides, I think we’ll all have a better target than me in the lake.”

  “You’re welcome to join us, about three hours after sunrise,” I said laughing lightly. “Ethan, clothing is optional since we’ll be closed off. No nymphs in the lake this time.” I started walking off with the boys, but before I got out of earshot, I muttered, “You boys notice Kieran’s bravado at the end there? When he’s got Ethan and Peter and you two on his side, then he’s all about dunkin’ me in the lake. We’ll see…”

  “Don’t worry, Daddy,” Connor said slyly, glancing back over his shoulder. “We’ll help you get ‘im!” Coulter added with a giggle.

  “Hey! Not fair!” Kieran shouted with fake annoyance.

  Then we heard one of the brownies chitter something and a burst of laughter from my brothers before the forest of my room swallowed up their sounds. Even after such a short trip, the boys were already losing their energy and getting sleepy. Deciding that they could skip brushing their teeth tonight, I called the entrance to my bedroom that the brownies used–the only other way in–and led the boys through.

  “All right, boys, get ready for bed and I’ll get you some water, just in case you want some during the night,” I said quietly, patting their backs as I turned to the den for glasses and a pitcher. When I came back, they were under the covers, watching me. I climbed onto the massive bed on my knees, crawling in between them and putting the glasses on the headboard before settling in with them.

  “I’ll stay for a few minutes, but I’ve got to talk with my brothers for a few minutes before I come back to bed,” I said quietly as they snuggled in closer to me. It felt strange to have company here. “If you need anything while I’m gone, just call out. I’ll hear you in here always and tomorrow I’ll show you how to call me wherever you are.”

  “Okay…” Connor said, sleepily, and Coulter finished with “…Daddy.”

  “Did you enjoy meeting all those people today?” I asked quietly.

  “We’ve never met people before,” Connor said. “It was scary.”

  “Mommy and… Eliot told us to stay away from people,” Coulter said. “They said other people would hurt us.”

  “Well, considering where you were, they were likely right,” I said nodding sagely. “But you are much safer here with me. No one on Gilán will hurt you intentionally. But let me tell you both something about Eliot and me. I am not the least bit jealous of his relationship with you. You can call him ‘Daddy’ or ‘Dad’ or ‘Father’, too, and you won’t hurt my feelings at all, I promise.”

  “Truly?” Connor asked, teary-eyed. Coulter didn’t say anything.

  “Yes, of course,” I said as genuinely as possible. “Eliot lost his life protecting you. What kind of man would I be if I made you forget him? Lowest possible scum, really. You should remember him–he was your father. And if, for some reason, you need to tell us apart, you can say something like, ‘my natural father’ or ‘first daddy’ or something like that, but never be afraid to talk about him around anyone or they’ll answer to me.”

  They both latched onto me, hugging me tightly. “Thank you, Daddy,” Coulter said sweetly, followed by Connor’s sleepy “We love you, Daddy.”

  “And I love you, too, boys,” I said softly. And I realized I did, too, and far too quickly. Damn, was I a sucker, or what? I steeled my resolve to stay away from women. I was too much of a sucker for that to end well.

  The boys fell asleep in seconds and, if I couldn’t hear their hearts beating and see their lungs pumping, I swear they were dead. I’d heard that children slept like that but never experienced this side of it. I stayed for a few moments to just enjoy the sounds of their breathing before shifting to the alcove entrance. I sparked the Road back to life for Guitar and Gibson’s sake, since I’d teach the boys how to use it in the morning anyway. Otherwise we’d lose an hour in walking to the lak
e.

  Time to confront Kieran.

  Chapter 79

  When I entered the alcove, I found Peter boisterously describing destroying the mountains, complete with a 3-D animation on the table. Kieran and Ethan stood back with beers in their hands, listening and watching intently as lightning started striking both mountains furiously as their final destruction began by the Hinterlands itself. Peter fell back in chair, grinning, and his animation froze as the plateau fell and crumbled.

  “That must have been a hell of a story!” I said, startling them.

  “Seth!” Ethan called, grinning at my sudden, but expected appearance. “Yeah, it was quite a story.”

  “How did you slow the crawler down?” Kieran asked. “Peter, could you roll this back to the beginning, please?” I helped myself to the brandy while Peter worked his magic.

  “Boys asleep already?” Ethan asked, sidling up beside me.

  “Yeah, really rough day for them, losing their mom, home… everything really,” I said, sipping at the brandy. “I’m more surprised they aren’t screaming from the rafters.”

  “There!” Kieran said loudly. “Start there, Peter.” The animation was near the beginning and Peter had the perspective on the pass where one shuntok was walking slowly. “Seth, what did you do that made it walk slower?”

  “I didn’t. I made it walk farther,” I answered. “Why? Is it important for some reason?”

  “Well, no, it’s not really important. I just don’t understand,” Kieran said, waving his bottle at Peter’s display.

  “No, I can see why from here,” I said. “It’s not really Peter’s fault; it’s his perspective. He’d have to be looking from the shuntok’s perspective at some point to see it and he’d have no reason to do that.”

  “What do you mean?” Peter asked.

  “You remember the portal behind the garage door in the warehouse?” I asked. “’Member how the entrance was one direction?” He nodded in response. “Same thing here. I stretched one direction so they had to take more steps.”

  “But the portal was planar, Seth,” Kieran said.

  “If I made it planar, they might have seen it.” Ethan snorted into a laugh. Kieran looked at him and somehow got a better understanding from Ethan’s laughter than my explanations, but I’m certain Peter understood. “Gibson, do we have any whiskey? I feel like I should be drinkin’ whiskey, for some reason.”

  “I’ll get it, Gibson,” Peter said, moving into the hall behind me.

  “Were the second set of druids as bad as the first set?” Kieran asked idly while we waited for Peter.

  “Not that I could tell,” I answered. “I didn’t go into it with the mind to investigate them, but to visit with Sara, so I could easily have missed a lot. They didn’t seem as cohesive as the Hilliards as a grove and their trap was almost provocative in its immaturity. By the same token, I did only give them an hour to come together and barely a few minutes to produce the cell. Maybe it was the best they could do on short notice.”

  “What did they do to you exactly? I think I missed that part,” Peter asked, setting my drink on the table and disrupting his animation. He pulled his chair closer and sat down with a similar glass of brown liquor with a few cubes of very cold ice. As a Canadian, I was fairly sure Peter leaned toward certain premium blends from his neck of the woods. What he poured would be smooth and smoky, unlike my one previous taste of the whisky of the Southern Gentlemen–the Tennessean, to be exact.

  “I was on the other side of Ohio from them, so I asked them to chant a simple prayer to the Earth. That would send a small spike of druidic power into the Earth that I could see while I stood in the Weird watching for it. It took them a few minutes to do and when they did, it sounded garbled.”

  “I watched Simon do those about five times the other day with different groups of people,” Ethan said, looking suspicious. “It’s only twenty-three words and takes forty-two seconds. It’s an easy benediction that acolytes often do, as I saw it.”

  “That’s why I chose it,” I said, shrugging, then taking my first sip of whiskey. Oh, yeah, I was in a whiskey mood. “Anyway, it made me suspicious enough to look before I leaped so I saw it. We took the car instead. We went through the front door, which I pointed out to Ryan was the perfectly correct thing to do since that was where we were actually invited. Followed the Rules of Hospitality for a Lord of Faery to the letter, having been forewarned.”

  “Did you tell them you’re an Archdruid,” Kieran asked, smiling slyly.

  “Not at first, at least, not in so many words,” I said with just as sly a smile.

  “How many words, Seth?” Peter asked quietly.

  “One,” I said. “But it was a good one! It created a sheer wall of force that encircled the house, the trap, and all druids, but with a gap right beside the house. They’d have to come right past me to leave.”

  “What was better, though, was the setup for breaking the walls down,” I said, taking another sip. “I’d refinished this rocking chair for Mrs. White and Sara had fallen asleep there in Mrs. White’s arms and there were tears and sappy crap, so I pushed everybody outside. We talked for a few minutes and Mr. White went to the druids and I ported everyone else up to the trap. While I was pulling the trap out of the ground and suspending its operation, I showed Ryan where the instructions for breaking up the wall were. He balked at them. Balked!”

  “What did he have to do?” Ethan asked, sounding almost as swamp-rat as I did.

  “All he had to do was,” I started, standing up and away from the table. The pose was preposterous when Ryan did it and it wasn’t any better now. Balancing on the balls of my right foot and holding both my left arm and leg back, toes pointed, at the same angle, I waved with just the fingers of my right hand, held high in the air. Then I took a deep breath and shouted in my highest, natural falsetto, “Yoooo-hoooo, wwee’rree hheerree!” Four men never made such noise laughing, never. We all needed the release.

  “Gibson, Guitar,” I called, leaning over the side of my chair, and waited until they appeared in the hall of the alcove. “I’m going to put up some soundproofing. If the boys call or something happens and I don’t notice, would one of you walk through the field and let me know, please? It won’t hurt you at all, but you might want to be ready to duck, or jump, or something, just in case.”

  “Yes, Lord,” they chimed together, smiling and cheerful, even with what could be a blind kamikaze mission ahead of them. I grinned at them as the inch thick cylinder of energy, nearly thirty feet wide, rose quickly from the floor to the ceiling. The sound quality in our small but tall room changed, but we wouldn’t mind that.

  “We’ve got some problems that need addressin’,” I said to start our “meeting.” I wasn’t sure where to begin so I suppose chronologically was best. “The boys are going to keep me pretty much isolated until they’re ready to be introduced to the rest of the Giláni. After that, they’ll still need my time daily, but not like right now.”

  “Does it always take this long?” Peter asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said, sipping at the whiskey again. “I feel like I could speed it up, but I think that would affect them in ways I can’t project. And I want them to remember Eliot. If I rush them, they won’t. I’m sure of that. The biggest and best reason for letting the Hant run its course is that once I see the results, I think–no, I know–I can heal Dad within a few days instead of months.” Kieran and Ethan sat up quickly at that.

  “That’s great, Seth!” Peter said, excited. “What makes the difference?”

  “The Hant spell is designed to be used on children and on memory, so it’s both extremely delicate and extremely thorough. It can affect nuances that I can sense but not exactly recreate directly. At least in Dad’s case where it has to align perfectly and there’s so damned much of it. The mechanisms in the Hant can be used to different purposes and re-blend everything properly. I just want to see the one true form work properly first.”

  “Makes sen
se,” Kieran answered nodding. “How does this affect the boys? Are you modeling their personalities or something?”

  Shaking my head, I answered, “No, and even more interesting is their personalities are fusing together with their preferred state of mixed breed after being long separated. Their joys are real, but they’ll still grieve for their mother for some time.”

  “How much time do you think they’ll need?” Kieran asked.

  “Actually, I’m thinking they’ll ask about it on Sunday,” I said. “They’ve already seen the sprites in the valley, so they know there are others. As soon as they ask, I’ll have Ellorn begin arrangements, so ‘bout half an hour after then.”

  “Oh, that’s not bad at all. I was thinking weeks, not days,” Kieran said. “How long will the spell take to make once you have the time?”

  “Well, Mioreala did hers in seconds,” I said, wistfully. “But it is also well within her natural abilities and she is an extremely powerful Wylde Fae. Oh, and she is also very old, as in ‘saw the Accords written’ old.” I saw a lot of Kieran’s eyeballs and tonsils about then. “Close your mouth, Kieran. She’s not the only faery around who are older than the Queens, surely.”

  “There can’t be many left after twenty-three millennia,” Kieran said, rightly disturbed at the thought. “And that’s just our best guess.”

  “And speaking of the Queens, I’ll need to send an emissary to them to set up a meeting next week some time to discuss what happened in the Hinterlands today. They definitely know who was there creating a ruckus. Pete’s simulation didn’t do the noise justice.”

  “Didn’t want to wake the boys up screaming, did I?” Peter asked, scoffing condescendingly.

  “Thank you, Pete, that was very courteous of you,” I said quietly, smiling, then changed faces as I turned back to Kieran. “Unfortunately, this has to be done soon, so can I ask you to go to the Crossroads tomorrow and set up a meeting between the two of them with me sometime after Monday, please?”