by Daryl Banner
“Do you remember this man?” asks the priest.
Link is so annoyed, his fingers twitch and his mouth screws into a frown. He’s never met this weird, limping man before. “Why the hell would I?”
“You put your blade to his back, poor child.” Link stares at the man’s legs, unable to meet his eyes. “You broke his back and, unless we’ve the fortune of a person whose Legacy is healing, he will not walk proper again. Repent, you say?”
Link finds himself glaring at the one called Baron. He feels nothing but seething anger—perhaps because he does not want to acknowledge the pang of guilt that just snaked its way through him, finding a cramped home in his belly.
Suddenly, Link lashes out, leaping to his feet. Does he plan to attack the priest? Is he going to break a broken man? It doesn’t matter his intention, for he hardly makes it to his feet before the crippling pain finds hold of his every muscle, dropping him to the floor, his face pressed against the cold concrete. He wails out, sickened, angry, shivering.
The voice of the priest seems to smile piteously, Link can hear it from the ground, even through his own sobs and rasps. “Repentance,” murmurs the priest. “There is no gold in your heart, and thus, no gold for The Brae.” He moves to the door, his robes sweeping. “Only gold in the sky,” the priest mutters, and when the door shuts, Link is cast once more into darkness.
“I repent,” chokes Link, but it’s no use. Oh, if he had anything in his fingers but colors, he’d scale the walls and slip from that hole in the ceiling of the sanctuary. He’d be Shye, forever flying. Escaping the law and the King himself and all his stupid men. The stuff of legend. Oh, to live on the excited whispers of school kids in the yards. Even the Screaming King fearing him … Dran, admiring through those raccoon eyes … Even Tide couldn’t touch him. “I’ll never repent,” he promises as the morning sunlight breaks through the roof, kissing his face.
0060 Ellena
The last hour of work is always the longest, and as she combs for seeds, she reflects on how the boss has been heatedly interrogating all the mudders—and even the florists—on who dumped the keg of andragora seeds. He’s dismissed utterly the notion that it might’ve tipped over on its own, preferring far more to blame someone for the major setback. Really, Ellena thinks bitterly, if they were so important, why keep them in a number of easily-accessible kegs outside your office? The boss isn’t known for his smarts.
It was such a rash, fun, even exhilarating thing to do in the moment, but now she’s just filled with guilt and dread. Yes, even in front of her heavy-eyed, hyper-critical boss, she feels guilt. The last time she left his office, she stared at the spot where the seeds spilled. It’d been cleaned up, the majority of the seeds scooped and returned to the keg, but several remained, and in the patch of dirt, tiny andragoras are sprouting defiantly. They grow so fast and with no regard to how well they’re cared for, growing despite all odds. Even in a mound of shit, the pretty little things grow.
After the train ride home, she moves down her street bathed in the burn of a setting sun. The streetlamps buzz as they come to life, and by the time she’s made it to her front yard, dark has hugged the planet. Lionis is up in the tree again. She gives him a smile on her way in, gently closing the door behind her.
When she peeks into Anwick’s room, she finds Athan curled up next to him. The sight crushes her with a sweetness. So adorable. Athan peers up at her, obviously not asleep, and he smiles back. Such a handsome boy, that one.
Athan slips his arm out from under Anwick’s head and joins Ellena by the door. “I still can’t get used to it,” he admits to her in half a whisper. “The sleeping. It’s so …”
“I know.” She shakes her head, observing her son fondly. “Even seventeen years later, I’m still not used to it.” She studies the face of Athan Broadmore, who’s staring back down at Anwick with his own sweet expression. I knew Anwick would find his first love. It’s the most important one of all. I should know; Forge is mine. “You take good care of him, don’t you?”
Athan looks at her, concern crossing his face. “Yes, of course. I wouldn’t … I wouldn’t let anything happen to him.”
“Of course you wouldn’t.” She pats Athan on the face, gives his cheek a pinch. He chuckles softly. “Of course, of course.” She looks back at her son, overcome. The world begins to blur, and she realizes there’s more pesky emotion trying to come out of her eyes.
She hears a tapping downstairs. Excusing herself, she hops down the narrow stair and answers the door. The panicked face of her neighbor Auleen meets her, a woman whose dark skin gives her beseeching eyes twice the urgency. “She’s in labor!”
Ellena blinks. “But it’s early,” she complains.
Auleen grabs Ellena’s hands with her bony ones. “I know you’ve been banished, I know you aren’t allowed to anymore, but please … you gotta help my wife give birth! Only you can. Please.”
The two women have lived next to the Lessers for years, twice as long as they’ve been married. “You called the hospital, surely?”
“Everyone’s phones are down. Not a car on this street.” Her breaths are jagged. “Even Auna’s husband raced to the hospital on foot for us, but he’ll take too long! Please deliver our baby!!”
Ellena notices Athan at the foot of the stair, a look of concern having struck his pretty eyes. Just the same concern strikes her own. “I’ll be right out,” she tells her neighbor, closing the door on her. “Athan, stay here with Anwick.”
“I can help,” he insists. “I can—”
“You can’t. Sweetheart, no one can know you’re here. Don’t forget where you are, or who.” Suddenly overcome, she gives Athan a smack of her lips on his forehead. “My son’s first love. Stay here with him, will you?”
He smiles, his cheeks flushing red. “I can do that, Miss—er, Ellena. I’ll stay.”
She beams. “Ancients once believed in angels with wings that lived up in the sky. You are one of those angels, I do swear it. Thank the Sisters for you, Athan.”
To the front door, her voice sharp and businesslike, she calls out, “Lionis, come!” She moves into the yard, slaps a palm against the trunk. “Down! We’ve a job!”
Fifteen minutes later, Ellena’s got herself braced between the woman’s legs in the den of Auleen and Iranda Penling. She’s made do with the only supplies they could manage between their two houses, Lionis having fetched the most of them, and now the wicked process of screaming and heaving and shoving and body-breaking agony has commenced.
“OUT!” screams Auleen, gripping her wife’s hand. “OUT, YES! AGAIN!”
Iranda, with a mess of curly hair plastered to her forehead by the sweat of labor, groans and howls like an animal. Lionis holds her other hand, letting her squeeze it with all her might.
The labor is short and Ellena recalls how to do everything as though she’d only just yesterday worked at the hospital. The searing memories of men and women in sickbeds, of the digital bells and signals that rang over intercoms, of the sterile aroma and the scents of sanitizer and the sourness of vomit. Ellena clutches the head, which gives to ears, which gives to a healthy baby boy.
“A boy,” she whispers, thinking of little Anwick, and the music of a newborn fills the room.
Not four and a half seconds later, two hospital officials fly through the front door to take over, Auna’s husband, Auna, and their little dancer daughter hovering nearby to appease their eager curiosities. “We’ll get it from here,” says the stuffy man in a blue uniform named Jorde, whom Ellena recognizes from the hospital. She’s quite sure he recognizes her too, but makes no mention of it, his only efforts spent on gathering Iranda and the baby to take to the ambulance parked out front.
“Please come with us. Please,” Auleen begs as she tears out of the house in wild pursuit of her wife on the gurney.
Caring not to touch anything, she hurries out to the ambulance with Lionis at her side to accompany her.
The ride is long and the night si
ngs a song of reminiscence and pain. Ellena wonders if she accidentally took on some wounds from the delivery, as she feels half the health she was ten minutes ago. It’s the plague of hospital memories, she realizes, her stomach turning. Iranda and Auleen are exchanging words, the baby being cared for by the nurse and the man named Jorde. How an act of kindness can look so different at two angles, she thinks ruefully. Either I compassionately took the wounds of old lady Jule so long ago, or I cruelly betrayed my superiors with an act of rebellion. Either perspective bore the same outcome: a grumpy woman found a speck of peace.
But where’s my peace?
The hospital hasn’t changed. As her neighbors vanish down the hall with a slew of doctors and a newborn, Ellena pulls away and discovers that other eyes have found hers. The man at the welcome desk with the funny beard and thin glasses recognizes her all too well, smirking haughtily. A pair of darkly-glaring nurses by a sliding door know exactly who she is, them and their matching yellow shoes. Another nurse further up the hall, a sassy heavyset nurse with a ring of hair about his crown, even he’s stopped to stare Ellena down, a chart hanging from his hairy hand.
She turns away, putting it all at her back, and throws an arm over her son Lionis’s shoulders. Together, they stroll down the blinding white hall to the waiting room.
It’s a boy, it’s a boy. She thinks of Anwick, of Link, of Lionis, of Halvesand and Aleksand … it’s a boy, it’s a boy, it’s a boy …
The pair of them seated against the wall, blood decorating the fronts of their clothes, Ellena surrenders to her thoughts and makes a story of them for Lionis, who listens. “It’s so strange, the insanity of a pregnant mother. Five times I suffered the joy of it. They say that only some mothers—not all—channel their baby’s Legacy, even from the womb. I was one of them. I figured it’s just the nature of an Empath. When I was pregnant with Aleksand, I felt the gravity in my feet. I thought I was crazy, until he was born and the feeling left. Halvesand, I felt a … magnetism when I touched things. It was as if no momentum could stagger me … as if I could stop the world itself from spinning, had I a wide enough palm.”
“And me?” asks Lionis with a suspicious squint.
“Yes, Lionis. Even you. Though, with you, it was that my hands kept sweating profusely. Not hot enough to cook a bird, but sweaty. Couldn’t keep hold on a thing. And then there was Link. While I carried him, I only discolored objects I held whenever I got too emotional. Otherwise, I noticed very little. But it is not these things that I find curious, no … it’s something else.”
“What is it?”
“It’s Anwick.” She shifts her feet, her gaze drifting, lost in the thought. “When I carried him … I felt many things. I felt sick. I felt scared. I felt strong. But it isn’t so much what I could do … it’s what I didn’t do that perplexes me.”
Lionis frowns. “What didn’t you do?”
“Sleep.”
0061 Wick
He wakes to the face of Athan washed in bright yellow sunlight pouring in from the window. His eyes glow a piercing grey-blue in the morning sun, and Wick answers those eyes by drawing his face close and planting lip against lip, tongue against tongue, and it’s not unlike returning to the dream he’d just ended.
When their mouths part, Wick finds Athan smiling. “You missed out on an eventful night. Your mom helped give birth to your neighbor’s baby.”
“What?” He sits up fully now. “Auleen’s? I missed it?” When Athan nods, Wick can only laugh, shoving palms into his eyes and wiping away the sleep. “I was so backed up on sleep, I doubt I could’ve stayed up for it anyway.” Wick pulls on a shirt that rests on the floor nearby, then slips his legs into a dark pair of pants.
“No need to get up just yet.” Athan pushes him back into the soft clutch of his mattress on the floor. “Now that you’re awake, I can grab at you without fearing to wake you up.”
“How considerate.” Wick grabs the chest of Athan’s shirt, pulls him in so fiercely they’re close to smashing each other’s noses together. Their mouths start working, lips in a constant struggle to wrap one about the other, the tongues wet and playful and getting in the way. Athan’s hands slip off the clothes he took such mind to putting on, because who the fuck cares; they’re just in the way too. Their firm legs tangle. Athan’s head bangs against the wall. Wick’s back thrusts into the floorboards. He’s sure if anyone were to pay witness to them, they wouldn’t be able to identify whether they’re sweetly kissing or wrestling for dominance.
This is the far more preferred way to have his sleep disturbed. Not by angry fathers and nightly training. Not by fear. Not by a wind at the window or a splinter of lightning in the sky … but by a boy’s warm mouth … a firm pair of thighs and a smooth, smiling face … a brush of jagged breath on his cheeks.
When they pull apart, Athan complains, “It’s kinda hot up here, isn’t it?”
“We can’t afford AC. What’s this look like to you? Sixth ward?” Wick gives a little smile. Poor Sanctum boy … so out of his element. “If you need a cooling off, you can open the window. Or I can fetch my servant to come fan you.”
Athan laughs, wipes a flick of sweat off his brow. Then he leans into Wick’s ear and whispers, “I want to try something.”
Suddenly Wick’s pants are at his knees and the Sanctum boy’s lips are kissing down his body. This is the first time his mouth has gone so low. Wick’s pulse is in his ears, he feels his chest thumping with the panic of yearning, and Athan’s lips tickle down his chest, playing at his left nipple, a tongue, and then his right, hot breath, a gasp, and then his abs are explored one by one, lower still, lower, and when he feels the mouth wrap around his man downstairs, it takes everything in him not to cry out in a crazed, joyous moan.
The next while does nothing to help Wick’s goal of getting to school on time, nor does it serve in making them any cooler. In fact, by its too-soon end, both their heads of hair are sopping wet.
When they’re finally downstairs, Lionis is already serving breakfast to a slowly-eating mother. Minding the addition of Wick and Athan, he’s already set out two more plates and stirs oatmeal in a pan. The two of them take seats at the remaining stools, creaking under their weight, and talk about the exciting drama of last night’s heroism. His mother plays it off, detailing every little thing she could’ve done more properly while Athan assures her that she took quick action and made right a delicate wrong.
“It went well,” Lionis agrees, pushing the oatmeal around the pan with a spatula, “but the ideal setting for a birth is in a hospital. They’re Sanctum-regulated, and too many accidents could happen at home, not to mention—”
“Accidents happen in hospitals, too.” Wick retorts, annoyed at Lionis’s presumptive attitude. “You’re so quick to blindly trust authorities and big Sanctum-aided establishments like the hospital. They wouldn’t even let mom work there after she healed a person, just because she disobeyed them.”
“Well,” Lionis begins, always having a know-it-all counter to everything, “there’s a reason for rules and protocol. You can’t just push yourself around with no regard to the order of things. No offense, mom.” She quietly says, “No offense taken,” between her bites. “But the Sanctum doesn’t just sit over us to torment our lives. They give us shelter. They give us opportunity to advance, to grow, to prove our worth before the Royal Legacist by the age of seventeen-and-one-half. They give us food, clothing, places of entertainment. They’re responsible for everything we have.”
“And they’re responsible for everything we don’t,” Wick spits back. “And for every sweet luxury they make you think you have, the Lifted City’s got twenty more. For everything they give, they take tenfold. Look around you, Lionis. Wake the fuck up.”
His brother narrows his superior gaze, the spatula steaming in his heat-gaining clutch. “I’m not the one here who sleeps.”
“Please,” Ellena interjects, silencing them both. “Please, you two. Please … not today.”
I
t isn’t until Ellena has shut the two of them up that Wick even remembers Athan sitting right next to him. He’s instantly filled with shame. So often I remind myself that you’re a Son of Sanctum. So often, I forget. Maybe all the anger in his heart is for the two others who are not present at their breakfast table. A missing father, a lost brother. Maybe no one’s to blame.
“Sorry, Lionis,” he hears himself saying, his voice small and gone. “Sorry, Athan. Sorry, mom.” The fever eases from his face. The red feelings and the seething demons that were just stirred begin to calm. Even his own fork feels hot to the touch, gripping it so firmly as he was during the argument.
His brother Lionis does not apologize, continuing to cook breakfast in a silent, self-important cloud. And that’s okay, Wick decides. Maybe I don’t deserve your sympathy.
No one knows, even still, where his father has gone. He broods over it on his way to school. The mother keeps speculating, saying that though they’ve been estranged for over ten years, he might’ve gone to his brother’s, wherever he lives. No one except Halves and Aleks have even ever met Uncle Redge, and that was only when they were four and five years old, respectively.
Professor Frey still teaches. On his first day back—was it three days ago, or two?—she told him in private to mind his own life for now, to not bother with any worries outside his normal school schedule and, worst of all, to keep away from the Noodle Shop. “What about Rone?” he asked. “What about Tide? Cintha?” But she would not answer, her tone turning cold and, without words, suggesting for him to not ask further about it. They’ve been excused from school further, she told him. But not you. You must be home with the boy. Go about your life, do your day-to-days, and mind nothing else.
School is not the same without Rone or Cintha. Tide is likely unable to return indefinitely due to the glow; that neon will take months to fade away. The faint pink and purple lines on Wick’s arm are still there, but they no longer shine through his clothing. He now wears a shirt under his slim-fitting red jacket—as it has no sleeves—so as to cover his little luminescent parallel-lines secret.
