by S. M. Beiko
“Your mastery of the English language never ceases to amaze,” he muttered, long legs eating up the distance between him and the ring of rocks he was headed for.
The wind was so hard that it pushed me after him. “Bloody —” I cringed, following with the gust at my back. At least I was still able to feel some things, like exasperation. And Eli could deliver that in spades.
He led us to a sheltered space where the rocks seemed to rise and curve. The rain had let up and, remarkably, the sun was creaking through. The hills shone bright despite the dark clouds above us.
I let out a long, ragged sigh. “This place is beautiful. Can’t say you don’t have taste.” I now faced a jutting rock pile that bore a striking resemblance to a tower, and I leaned back to take in the top.
“Up here.” Eli had climbed another rise, which had some small switchbacks that seemed to lead directly to that tower. I scrambled after him but obviously not fast enough, since I felt his fingers gripping my forearm and basically dragging me behind him.
“Jesus!” I staggered, and he shoved me lightly to keep me upright. “All right! I’m going.” Maybe killing him at the end of this wouldn’t be such a bad call . . .
After a bit of a climb and a struggle, we made it to the top. Eli brushed past me impatiently, then scuffed his shoe on the ground and crouched down to smooth it with his palm. I looked down at a sheep bleating across the verdant green, joining the group that seemed to be gathering curiously around Saskia. We were at least twenty feet . . . well, high enough off the ground to bring up the vertigo. I pulled away from the edge.
“Come here.”
I turned. Eli was seated with his body facing the wind, his hand out towards me but his eyes elsewhere. When I didn’t come, he waved like he was calling a dog. “Stop gawking. Let’s get going while we still can.”
“You really have zero people skills. Can’t you be nice?”
“Not to you,” he seethed as I came closer, and he pointed to the space in front of him, at the edge of the landing with my back to the sharp air. “Sit there, facing me.”
“Ugh . . .” I lowered myself carefully onto the dirt, bringing my legs awkwardly underneath me as he had. I glanced over the crest again, felt the sharp air at my back. How had I managed to get to the top of the Golden Boy last spring without hurling? I recalled, too late, that Eli had been there. “There, Captain. Now what?”
“If it’s at all possible, shut your howling screamer.”
“Hey —”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I need to focus. You need to focus. For the love of any god that is listening, just be quiet.”
“Fine.” I took a breath. The dark passenger riding stiffly in the coach of my soul hadn’t moved yet. I was getting anxious that if we started poking around in the Opal, it’d come back to bite me hard enough that neither of us could recover.
But at least some part of the real me was still alive? I couldn’t help blurting, “So you really think this will work?”
Eli’s eyes popped open, the hands he’d been holding in front of him stiffening into claws. “It will if you let me —”
“I mean, even if we get into the Veil, and link our stones, and try to sort through Cecelia’s memories, this thing inside me could notice. It could come after both of us.”
I was trembling, and it wasn’t because of the cold. I still couldn’t feel that, but I could feel uncertainty. Eli tilted his head, staring, his grey eyes changing over to gold.
Now I was getting riled up, and my mouth quirked. “Stop looking at me like that. You should take a picture. You like doing that, don’t you?”
As the feathers bloomed at his neck, they prickled. “Are you seriously going to bring that up n—”
I slapped his hands down, even as the gold rings shimmered beneath us. I couldn’t take it anymore. “Look, before we go any further, I really have to know. What are we?”
I’d never seen him look so downright terrified. “What . . . ?”
“I mean, are we friends? Are we enemies on a truce?” I sidestepped the implication on purpose, despite how everyone around us had been making it. I certainly didn’t want to get into that. Not right now, anyway. Maybe not ever, smug bastard. He seemed to relax but barely.
“You’re just a really unpleasant human at your base function, you’re always quipping inappropriately, you bring me out here but you say it’s not a rescue, but it clearly was, but maybe it’s just because you want to secure the Opal, or the Moth Queen sent you —”
Eli covered his changing face with his talon-tipped hands, and the groan he let out was definitely otherworldly. “Why in the gods’ names does any of that matter right this second?”
I don’t know who was more shocked — him or me — when I reached out and touched those feathered hands, and they lowered slowly, reservedly. I pulled back, frowning.
“Because this will go easier if you cut the crap and try to be authentic with me. I’d rather be doing this with a friend than whatever you’re putting on right now.” I bit the inside of my cheek. “I miss Phae. I miss Deedee. I tried doing this alone but I obviously can’t. So I know I need your help, but —” I looked straight at him “— you’re being a dick.”
His blink was slow. Owlish. Like I’d been speaking in another language. The rings beneath us rotated, and he folded his hands in his lap. Hands that had hurt me. Hands that had pulled me out of hell — twice.
“All right,” he said.
I made a show of cupping my ear. “What was that?”
“I’m sorry,” he hissed, definitely nonplussed I’d yanked it out of him. “A lot has . . . happened. Not just lately. Since we were both in the Bloodlands. Since Zabor. Shifting priorities . . . and I’m still not very good at this.”
My chest constricted. I cleared my throat. “Obviously.”
“I’m not sure if I’m your ‘friend.’ Or if I want to be.” His eyes cut to me with less malice and more amusement. “But I’m not the enemy. For better or worse we are connected. And I suppose I’d best come to terms with that if either of us is going to make it through to the other side.”
The rings flashed, and the wind picked us up in a torrent, pulling the Fairy Glen, and the world, away beneath us.
“Okay,” I managed, before our spirits crossed over.
~
Eli felt his spirit come away from his body, re-form in this space — this dark, hollow vacuum of in-between. The Veil. The place where only spirit existed. Memory and heartbreak, altered senses, the awareness of a dream. He could not see, only feel, insinuate, and draw images from that. Roan was somewhere nearby but getting farther away, as if they were both boats being carried across a windless sea.
“Wake up,” he said into the nothing, trying to direct it to her. The Moonstone lit the way for him, kept him grounded. He knew she might need help with staying grounded herself, as well as managing the corrupted Opal, so he cast out his mind, and his stone, with a tether of light.
It hooked onto something.
“I’m scared,” she said, grasping the line.
“Of what?”
A flicker. A spark. “Of what I might do with the Opal.”
Eli thought he’d just feel the same ruthless impatience as before, but all he could feel was Roan’s terror and sadness coming back to him along the cable. He grasped with his mind, as if it were his hand, and pulled.
“You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for,” he said, something bright on the other end of the line clarifying, along with his sense of sight, of tangibility, as it came closer. “And you know I’m loathe to admit that.”
He had been reeling in a flame. It was orange and white and purple and black. A twisted, confused shape trying to coalesce. Then a hand came into view, holding the line for dear life, and attached to it was Roan.
“I’ll help you as best I c
an,” Eli said, and the Moonstone and the Opal heard each other, and the space was bright.
Roan opened her eyes, wincing against the glare. “Thanks.” She peered around. The Veil shifted, trying to interpret their thoughts, their needs. It was a cacophony of sound and images and intent. A liminal space for the spirit to pass through any of the planes or the Realms of Ancient.
“And what realm are we going to, then?” Roan asked. Eli jerked; they were now truly riding the same wavelength, so his thoughts and hers were overlapping.
“We’re not going far,” Eli said, letting himself take shape with finer detail. Roan still looked like a smudge of fire and brimstone, but her face was becoming more recognizable. “The answers are in the Opal. So we will go inside it. Together.”
Eli knew they’d have to be careful. He could feel the vibration coming from Roan up the line, pinging back from him. They were an even match — capable, slightly foolhardy. And above all, vulnerable. There would be things that Roan would be privy to, inside him, that he didn’t want her to see, and vice versa. He put up walls around these secrets, and around his unvoiced intentions, but she couldn’t protect herself like that. She was trusting him, and he knew it.
She knew, too. She hesitated, drawing away.
Roan . . .
They both turned towards the voice, but it was smoke in the ether, gone as quickly as it’d been conjured.
“She’s awake,” Roan said.
“She?” Eli cast his mind further into the mire of images skirting past their awareness; the voice had been familiar. He’d heard it before. It was similar to Roan’s, and he’d mistaken it for hers.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We came here for a reason.” Then she reached out for Eli and drew him down into the fire.
On the other side, their spirits’ impressions of their bodies were sharper, more defined. More like they had been when things were simpler. Were they ever? Roan thought, and Eli mentally echoed her sentiments. Roan’s image rippled with a flickering overlay of her ashen skin. Her eyes, however, remained the same — one hazel, one amber, piercing to the quick of Eli when they looked at him.
“Well?” she asked.
He honed his concentration, like a weapon. “You have to lead the way,” he said. “You’re the only one who can navigate the Opal’s memory. I’m only here to help direct your focus.”
She shut her eyes. “But how do I know what we’re looking —”
Suddenly they were falling. Fast. Smashing through space like the storeys of a skyscraper.
“Harken!” Eli shouted. “Focus!” He threw his mind into hers, tried to extinguish the growing panic.
They hit the ground; a jolt of pain went through both their minds. It was still dark all around them, like the rabbit hole Alice fell down, until, in smatterings of colour and sensation, it wasn’t dark at all. A woman with short-cropped hair was sitting in a beam of sunlight cascading through a window. It was cracked open slightly, letting in fresh air, the sounds of the road. She was bent over something, absorbed. When Eli got a closer look at her, he saw she was working at a huge mass of clay with her hands. And that she was blind.
“Ruo.” The name shot across his awareness like an arrow, splitting open a cask of the rest of what made this woman.
“Cecelia’s partner.” Eli nodded. And as if he’d conjured her by name, Cecelia came up behind Ruo, kissing her on the cheek.
“They’re beautiful,” Cecelia said. “You really can do anything.”
Ruo smiled, easing back and rubbing her knuckles. “It’s just memory in my hands, that’s all.”
Eli glanced at Roan. She was standing close enough to the women to be able to touch them. They did not notice her, nor would they. The pain in her face was a prism as she looked around the studio. The other sculptures were just as large and finely crafted — a seal, a rabbit, an owl, a deer. Delicate. Intense. The sculpture she had been working on was a fox.
Eli felt the shudder across their connection as something inside Roan clicked.
“A wedding gift, I think,” Ruo said, stretching. “I’m sure it’ll be soon. Don’t you?”
Cecelia moved to the window, arms folded, giving away nothing.
“You don’t think he’s good for her, is that it?” Ruo guessed.
Cecelia grinned. “You sure you’re not secretly an Owl now?”
But Ruo’s face wasn’t amused. “What has Killian done, Sil? And what did you have to get him out of this time?”
Cecelia’s smile dropped and she was grave. “He hasn’t done it yet. I don’t know. The Stonebreakers are getting more desperate. I joined them because I do agree with them in principle, but . . . the rituals they’re considering. Turning to darklings for aid? I’m afraid Killian’s going to do something stupid. Something he’ll regret. And Ravenna won’t think so highly of him for it.”
Ruo stood, fingers trailing around the edge of her worktable to join Cecelia at the window. “So why don’t you talk to Ravenna about it first?”
The pain Eli had seen on Roan’s face was now on her grandmother’s. “You know I can’t. We argue enough as it is. And she loves him. And . . . I’m trying to have faith that Killian will do the right thing and steer clear of the extremists if he really wants a future with her.”
“And you think you can convince him?” Ruo seemed dubious, but she slid an arm around Cecelia’s waist, and Cecelia put her arm around her in turn, drawing her close.
Roan grabbed hold of Eli, pulling him back, away, and the memory faded when Cecelia said, “I can only do so much.”
Eli and Roan fell backward through something fluttering — ink and paper. Letters. Roan seemed more mindful of herself now, her direction, and Eli twisted, trying to keep up. “Wait!” he called after her, and he reached out and grabbed her, but it wasn’t her panic he was feeling now — it was his own, and they went into a memory that didn’t belong to the Opal but to Eli.
“Why is she like this?”
They were back in the croft, in the narrow hallway that led to the small bedrooms. A boy sat on the floor, wrapped in a cabled fisherman’s sweater that was much too big for him, pulling it closer and closer as if he could disappear into it.
Roan looked up at Eli, concerned. “Is that you?”
Agathe, a much younger version, knelt down beside him, trying to get him to stand up. Behind the door were fitful cries. Little Eli wouldn’t move.
“Yer mum,” Agathe said, “was the smartest, bravest girl I knew. One day, she found a treasure she ought not to have, and when she refused to take it, it cursed her. But she made sure it stayed hidden, because it was a dangerous, precious thing, and she didn’t want anyone else to experience the pain it brought. So she has taken all the pain into herself. To protect everyone. Including you.”
Little Eli’s face twisted. “That’s just a story you made up. There’s no such thing as curses or treasure.”
Just misery, the thought escaped Eli’s mind before he could take it back, and Roan looked stunned.
“We need to focus,” Eli said gruffly, and he grabbed hold of Roan and steered them away, from one dark place to another.
When they touched down again, raised voices cut through like daggers, slicing away the croft and repurposing the jumbled images when the Opal took hold.
“— and you were there! You were involved! You knew.”
A woman with long red hair — Roan’s hair. And maybe her nose, twisted in fury. Cecelia was pressed into the room’s corner — a kitchen — her face in her hands, which were covered in blood.
“Please, Ravenna —”
“No. I don’t want to hear any more about it!” Ravenna was crying, face red and tears streaming. “You — you knew he was going to do this, and you didn’t stop him. I bet you were there to help him! You’ve been one of them, those fanatics, all along! My own mother!” Then
she whirled, finger pointing, to the other woman in the doorway even though she couldn’t see the gesture. Ruo. “And you still stand by her! After everything she’s done to you!”
Ruo’s head dipped, her milky eyes flickering as if they could see. “Ravy. I’m sorry —”
“Sorry?” she screamed. “Killian’s under tribunal review now. They’ll put him away for good, I’m sure. In one of those, those . . . Denizen vaults. And they’ll keep him there forever. And he deserves it! And what about me? He wasn’t thinking about me. No one ever does, I guess! And not just me but us.” She clutched her belly, and Eli realized that beneath it was Roan — the tiny spark of her. Roan watched this go on, expression dark.
The women were silent. Then Ravenna said, “I’m leaving.”
“Where?” Ruo took a step forward.
“Winnipeg,” Ravenna said, clutching her waist in her arms. “I have a few friends there still. They’ll put me up. And it’s far enough away from you.” She spat this afterthought at Cecelia, who still couldn’t look her daughter in the eye. Cecelia, who, for all her great height and bearing, seemed shrunken. Ravenna crossed the room and took Ruo’s hands. “Come with me, Mama Ruo. Then she can’t hurt either of us anymore. She’s just going to try to get you involved in whatever scheme —”
Ruo touched her daughter’s face. “I love you so dearly, Ravy. But my place is with Sil. And it always will be.”
Ravenna ripped herself away. “Fine.” And when she stormed out of the room, no one tried to stop her.
“My mother,” Roan said, the memory dissolving, leaving only the two of them behind. She looked at Eli. “I guess we’ve both got issues there.”
Eli held her gaze for a little while longer, then said, “We’re getting close, I think.”
Roan nodded. They ducked underneath a panel of shadow and came through over a bleak horizon. Beneath them, memories shifted like sand: Roan born, Ravenna trying to build herself a life, meeting Aaron Harken. Beneath that still, on a crimson layer, was the impression of Zabor, her mouth open. A moth drew itself across the image like it was water, scattering it. Roan was marked, and Ravenna stood on the Allens’ doorstep, beseeching them for help, but none was coming.
