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The lessons with Fionnuala gave Emrys a headache and he could not tell if he made progress or not. After a week holed up in that room with her made him long for anything or anyone else. She fussed at his wound, prayed over it, bled it, scraped away the scabs until no trace of the lord of bone’s touch remained, and Emrys slept and ate and, in between, tried to make sense of the riddles Fionnuala told him that she called explanations.
The air of dusk filled his lungs. Though it had only been a week since he went to Chalon Forest, his entire world shifted and appeared new. Even his body felt strange. His flesh melted away from him while he recovered. Always thin, his skin now felt stretched tight over his bones, his veins ridging his arms and hands. The cloak Ariana gave him at the year’s turning remained lost in Chalon so he stood wrapped in sheepskin.
The flocks of sheep roamed all of Matauc land, patches dyed red or blue or yellow depending on which family they belonged to. Never mattered to him or his father, since all the sheep ultimately belonged to Owain. As long as he remained laird.
As long as his children remained atop the clan.
Emrys looked down at his bony hands and all the magic that didn’t flow through them. Fionnuala told him to be patient, that it took time, but he didn’t have time.
That was the feeling forever in him. That he was behind. That others were always ahead of him in learning, in practice, in knowledge, in intelligence. His ambitions bloomed and flooded through him but he struggled always to bring forth his dreams. To make all the visions and ideas bursting to life within him come out into the open.
Winter’s chill reached for his bones and he pulled the skins tighter and turned away from the wind and walked from his father’s longhouse and past the skinning shack to Ariana’s home.
A small, solitary structure where he’d grown up. If anywhere had ever been home since his mother died, it was Ariana’s house. A fire burned within and her shadow flickered against the windows. Though he’d lived there for years, he felt awkward returning after all that had happened.
He nearly abandoned her without saying a word.
Instead, the lord of bone nearly killed him.
Couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone so long without speaking to his aunt. Without seeing her. He turned back to his father’s longhouse, some hundred feet away. Hadn’t seen anyone but Fionnuala yet he’d been there at the very heart of Matauc. Hadn’t seen Alwyn or the Lyr sisters or Cerys. Didn’t even know if they remained in Matauc land. A sharp pain pinched his heart at the thought of Cerys leaving without saying goodbye.
It was only one night. He snorted. Like his father. Like all of them. Yet he was none of them.
One night. But a night was enough to change a life.
His mother told him as much.
His mother’s face.
Everything twisted so strangely after that. Twisted away from all he planned. The intrusion of the fantastic, the magical, the uncanny into his dull life as an outcast in the family he was born to yet always denied.
But Ariana never once denied him. Fondness for his aunt swelled within his chest before rippling out to his limbs, his fingers and toes. He pushed open her door.
She turned sharply and for a moment Emrys thought she’d attack. Her eyes wide, the metal ball glinting in her skull, she held a knife in her living hand and her clawed metal hand seemed poised to shove those five fingers through his neck.
He swallowed to warn her, to stop her, but as soon as it flashed over her face, it dissipated. “Sweet rotting god.” The words sounded scraped out of her and she was upon him. Her metal claws dug into his back as she pulled him close. “Dear god, son. What made you run to the forest?”
The words did not come for he had no explanation, no guard for the emotions ripping through him. The burn of tears behind his eyes and the strain of the undeniable, irresistible smile powering over his face.
She grabbed his shoulders and leaned back, watching him at an arm’s length. Her eyebrows low and her eyes sunk deep in her head, she looked him up and down. “You crying or laughing?”
He didn’t know. A sob caught in his throat but it became a giggle while tears rimmed his eyes.
“You look insane, Emrys.”
Laughter won out, then. Rising up from his stomach, from the well of terror and pain and sorrow and fear that filled inside him since he last lay eyes upon his aunt. She smiled and clapped him on the shoulder and led him to the table—that old battered table her grandfather carved—where a still hot kettle of water steamed. She poured him and herself a ceramic cup of tea.
“These are nice,” Emrys lifted the cup. Yellow enamel painted with blue flowers that seemed to flow and reach across the face of the cup. The handle was thin and curved, imitating the shape and feel of twigs still holding a single leaf.
She snorted. “Got them from downriver.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Wouldn’t have guessed you’d be the type for such finery, such ornamentation.”
She snorted, sliced her metal hand through the air. “Reminded me of someone is all.” She cleared her throat and avoided his gaze for a moment.
He set his cup down and understood it was for him but was not sure how or in what way.
She sipped at her tea and nodded at him. “Before it’s cold.”
Still hot, he barely tasted it. Bitter from being oversteeped, the way Ariana liked it. That harshness to the flavor always felt so right. Looking upon his aunt sitting so casually across from him, he tried to see her the way others did. He caught a glimpse upon entering.
The vicious, brutal warrior who took no prisoners, offered no terms, accepted no surrenders. Lost an eye and an arm for her brother and spent all these years watching over his rejected son. She had no children and took no lover or fosterchild who she could give her name to, who would inherit from her.
Emrys wasn’t even certain she had anything to pass on.
She reached behind her and grabbed the thick wooden gameboard and set it on the table. “Care for a game?”
He went quickly to his room and gathered the stones she’d gifted him when he was still a child. A set of onyx with an ivory Mountain piece. He turned around and took in his room. It seemed so small. The only place he’d ever felt belonged to him and him alone. It was, perhaps, the greatest gift Ariana had given him.
She sat sipping tea, like they had on so many nights, and arranged the board with her pieces. Emrys sat and did the same. It surprised him to find his aunt’s home so unchanged, them falling back into such familiar rhythms. Only these new teacups. Perhaps the finest thing she owned except for her weapons. “Auntie, do you remember when I first came here?”
She sipped the tea and nodded and leveled her living eye upon him but hid the metal one behind her eyelid and opened the game. “I remember all of it. Every moment you’ve been here. I’ve counted your breaths while you slept and I’ve held you through your fevers. I remember it all, Emrys.” Her voice quaked with emotion.
He swallowed, the tears rising once more. Seeing her so vulnerable threw him. He had expected teasing and had intended to tease her but the words fell from him. He swallowed again and made his opening move and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Ariana.”
She nodded, made her move. “Nothing to be sorry for.” She stretched her living hand across the table and gripped his wrist, squeezed gently. “You’re alive. You’re home.”
“Am.” He wiped at his eyes, sipped his tea, made his next move.
She let go and brought her hand back to her own tea while she made an early strike towards his shieldwall. The game progressed as it so often did. Ariana hurling attacks and Emrys trying to hold on for dear life while twisting her own stabs forward to his advantage.
She beat him in ten more moves. Hadn’t even touched her Mountain and his remained trapped behind his shieldwall that she had so effortlessly pushed to the side.
He shook his head and leaned back. “Do you still have all those weapons?”
“Course.”
“Was just thinking of the day you found me and Alwyn and Aeronwen playing with your knives, your sword.”
She snorted. “Not my sword.”
“Oh?”
“I look like the type to wield a sword?” She smiled, shook her head. “An axe for me. Was always more of a smash and thrash. Get in the thick and kick and scream and bash through a shield or dent in someone’s chest.”
“Not cut through?” He darted his eyes to the board, which was a pure distillation of this theory of combat. She’d smashed through his lines unrelentingly, never allowing him to gain footing or even balance.
“Well, was the idea. Wasn’t always how it went. Messy work, fighting. A sword was for types like Owain. Elegant and dangerous and precise. Nah, not for me. Way you can tell a sword belongs in your hand is if it feels too light.”
“Who’s sword is that, then, in your trunk?”
She shrugged. “Won a lot of swords. Was just the finest looking. Guess that makes it mine more than anyone else’s but I don’t know how to use it. About as useless in my hand as a bow is now.” She tapped her metal claw against her metal eye. “Truth is I’m worthless in a fight without this eye. Don’t let that be known though.” She smiled.
“You never taught me to use an axe.”
“Look at your hands, son. Was clear from the morning you were born that you were Owain’s son. You got my grandfather’s long fingers and his fine voice. Giving you an axe and sending you afield would be like burying your gold in the sea.”
The mention of his father cooled the comfort of the room. Ariana never denied Emrys and so she never shied away from the truth of his parentage or her own kinship to him. But it chafed him. The absence of Owain. His rejection. “Know what he means by me being a shadow son?”
She snorted. “Not done by most. Could say, in a way, that’s the final inheritance of our grandfather. Was a prodigious lover of women. Strong seed.” She smiled. “Lots of bastards running round the longhouse and no intention to give them his name. He fostered out a few. Most of them died in this raid or that, but there must’ve been a dozen bastards alongside his own dozen named children. Most of them, of course, died of the bleeding disease that took your mother. This was earlier, though. My father and his youngest brother were the only ones who survived to adulthood. Uncle Emrys was only a few years older than Owain.”
“How’d he die?”
Ariana leaned back and sipped her tea. “What’s your real question?”
He smiled. “Never heard you talk about your uncle. That who I’m named after?”
“Owain didn’t name you. Was your mother. Might be she named you after him, though I don’t see why she would’ve. Emrys is not so uncommon a name, son. Probably she liked the way it sounded.”
“What happened to him?”
“Gone. Over the sea, or so they say. Likely dead. We’ve not heard from him since he gave me my arm and eye.”
“He was a druid?”
“Are you a druid?”
“What?”
Ariana snorted. “Druids seek knowledge.”
“Of the god.”
“Of all. The skies, the stars, the seas, and the soil. Druids don’t—”
“They belong to the god. It’s not the same.”
“And what makes you assume your uncle was a druid? My arm and eye?” She smiled. “My uncle was a curious man. Maybe best to leave it there. You look like you’re going to fall over if you stand. Call it a night and get some rest.”
Emrys swallowed, took a breath, shook his head. She knew him so well. Knew how exhaustion gripped him even before he acknowledged it. But having her speak it made the pain and weariness settle upon him like a weighted fog. He had to know, though. Had to understand what this all meant. “You know Fionnuala.”
“Ah,” she tapped her finger against the table scarred by lifetimes of use. Running her living index finger along a long gash in the surface, she said, “I made this groove. Your grandmother thought I should learn to cook and clean. Wanted to find me a good and proper marriage. This was when I was still a child. Knew from the moment I saw warriors practicing in the hills that that’s where I belonged. Learned to sew and cook and everything Owain learned but didn’t learn a single thing else. If people thought a task was for women, I refused.” She cut her hand through the air. “I would be nothing that Owain would not be. Blodwen went along. Didn’t have the spirit of defiance in her.” Taking a sip, her eyes fell back upon Emrys as if to punctuate the point.
“Who is she?”
“Seems clear enough. His shadow.”
“I mean before. She’s an outlander.”
“Like your mother.”
“My mother was a slave.”
“Freed. Before that, a slave. Before that, an outlander. From Eire. Where your University grows, delving for giants in the earth.”
He’d never heard that before. No one ever spoke to him of his mother. And she had not told him of herself and he had not thought to ask until after she died. She was his mother and that was enough.
It was everything.
Emrys felt the way Ariana led him towards answers but he was blind. No footholds or walls to help him grope his way along. “She’s my aunt.”
Ariana raised an eyebrow. In surprise or expectance, he didn’t know. Couldn’t tell. Though she knew him so easily, so completely, he had spent too long believing himself an outsider, an outcast, to ever come to know her fully. She said, “They never said.”
Like a slap. Such simple words yet they astonished him. But he thought he knew. From the moment she sang to him, she had to have been at least of the same clan or of the same land. They shared a tongue, though Fionnuala kept her accent while his mother assimilated more fully. “They came together.”
Ariana nodded, her living eye roaming over his face. “I do not believe they were sisters. Kin, perhaps.”
“This doesn’t make sense.” Emrys leaned back and stared at the roofbeams. Thick wood taken from Chalon. Thicker than it needed to be for so small a structure. “How did she become his shadow? Why?”
“Her story to tell.”
He nodded. “You know.”
“Was there, yes.”
“Won’t tell me.”
“Ask her.”
“Is it real?”
She took a moment to respond and Emrys brought his gaze down to meet her eye. “The power.” She took a breath and sighed, shook her head, turned to her window. “That’s why Owain doesn’t care that you’re a heretic.”
“What is it?”
The scowl swept over and closed her face. “There are other gods. Devils. The druids shine a light upon the god but these others—” She broke off and didn’t continue. Didn’t even spit to ward off evil.
It buzzed through him. His head swam, light. Thoughts bubbling up and drifting away, caught in some other wind. He knew the answer but he asked it anyway. “Are all shadows capable of this?”
She sipped at her tea, draining it, and turned back to him. “Most people, shadows or no, are reluctant to give up their souls. Be wary of any so willing to sign it away, even for strength. Even for a power like that.”