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Rhian stroked his face while the greenblack man sobbed on the living table and the rest of them watched. Sian’s mouth became a line and Rhosyn’s a puckered point while Cerys and Alwyn’s mouths hung open. Emrys swallowed and time dripped on past them in the stunned silence that followed Rhian’s awakening.
The smell of plants filled the room. A humid, mossy stink.
Rain pattered gently against the living roof and wind rustled the leaves and Emrys turned from Rhian and the greenblack man to the others sitting at the living table but found no words to bring them past this moment. He turned to Cerys who stood behind the greenblack man. A slight furrow to her brow but her mouth had closed.
She approached the couple from her place at the wall and set a hand against Rhian’s back. “Cousin, where did you go?”
Rhian raised her face from the greenblack man to the ceiling, seeming to see none of them. “I have gone nowhere, cousin. I have arrived.” She nodded, liking the taste of her own words. “Yes. My soul was always here, waiting for this moment.”
Rhosyn said, “Rhian.” But no words followed her name.
“We must go home,” Sian said, her voice unsteady. She had lost her footing in the forest. All the confidence and swagger stripped from her by this place and its oppressive horror.
Rhian blinked slow as she lowered her face to her sisters. “I am home.” Then her gaze passed to Alwyn and she sucked in a quiet breath.
The two of them stared at one another and the rain pattered and the wind blew and Alwyn seemed more beautiful than ever he had before. Emrys saw him with new eyes there in the living home of this strange man, this rival to the lord of bones in this ghastly, inhuman forest. And Alwyn did not speak, nor did he need to, for all felt what passed between them.
And Rhian lowered her eyes and then her face to the greenblack man still shuddering in her lap, mouthing ancient words to his long dead lover returned in Rhian’s flesh. Rhian said, “I have dreamt of this place my whole life, sisters. This place. This room. I have known it all my life.”
“Madness,” Rhosyn hissed and reached for her blade but Alwyn gripped her swordhand’s wrist. She turned on him. “Let me go, boy.”
Nearly made Emrys laugh to hear his large cousin talked to that way but Alwyn took no notice of the insult. His eyes remained on Rhian, who avoided his gaze. He said, “We have been welcomed as friends into this house.”
“And had our sister kidnapped by this freak,” Sian said, reaching for her sword on her back as she made to stand.
From the moment she opened her mouth, Emrys moved quick and quiet. When she reached up to grab her sword, Emrys held her wrist down, pushing her back into her seat.
“You’ll regret this,” Sian didn’t turn around but stared at Alwyn, as if he held them both.
Emrys smiled, for perhaps he did. If not for Alwyn, he’d be far away, on his way to the university. He’d know nothing of this forest nor this greenblack man whose sobbing fell away to a gentle rhythmic breathing.
The sweet scent of vegetation blooming, rotting.
“He’s asleep,” Cerys said. This pulled her cousins from their hopes of violence.
Rhosyn ripped her hand away from Alwyn and her pommel. Standing, she grabbed Rhian by the wrist. “We’re going.”
Rhian only looked at her hand, no longer stroking the greenblack man’s face. “Let me go, sister. I will not leave him. Not again.”
“You don’t know him,” Rhosyn hissed, finding strength in his sleeping. “I’ll not leave you to rot here in this evil forest!”
Rhian raised her eyes to her sister and Emrys stepped back and away, letting go of Sian. A terrible fury and determination there. “It is not for you to choose.”
Sian was on her feet but took a different approach. “What about mother?”
Rhian did not soften but became harder. Her green eyes seemed to flash and glow in that living home in that deathly forest. She spoke with finality when she told them, once more, she would not leave him.
Cerys looked to Emrys as if he had some part in this or could change her mind but Emrys had no words inside him. He watched Rhian and memory flooded him. Memories he didn’t know he had. Memories of his mother holding him through the night while he cried.
A dream. He had had a dream. A dream of foxes stalking him in druid robes bearing lusterless swords of bone. A dream of the deep and the dark, of a night swallowing him, of the god wailing away, giving him up, casting him out. And then a different memory. A different night. He stood before his father and she stood by his side and told him to look upon her son, to give him a name, but his father would not be cowed, not even by her. His face set and he did not look at Emrys or his mother but stared at some point between them, past them. And he said nothing.
Could say nothing. For he could not say no to her.
Emrys said, “All of us house the souls of those who came before. I hold the soul of my mother inside me and perhaps all of her people. This place brims with whatever our souls are made of. What dreams may have been become realer here. The fabric of this place loosens our hold on ourselves. I feel it, Rhian. I feel the past bubbling to the surface, attempting to spill over. You must fight it.”
Rhian shook her head gently. “I am home.” Her eyes met Alwyn’s then.
“I do not know you, Rhian, yet I feel I have always known you. That’s what you feel tonight for this man, Goda the Cursed, the Black.”
She did not nod in agreement but only returned his gaze. Rhosyn scowled and opened her mouth to speak but Sian grabbed her hand, shook her head, and what words she had remained unspoken.
“I felt it tonight as well,” he continued. “Felt it the moment I heard your voice out on the moors. Your voice. I have always known your voice. When I heard it tonight, it was as if you dragged this memory from deep within me to the surface. All my life awash with mist and I would have remained always lost within the shroud of days had I not heard you. All the rest of my days disappeared in that mist and a new one dawned when I heard your voice. When I held you,” his voice broke and he swallowed and squared his shoulders, bit his lip. “When I held you in my arms, I felt at home.” His voice cracked and tears brimmed his eyes. He let out a quiet, tearful laugh. “I didn’t even know your name and yet I felt as if I’d known you my whole life. Like an echo in my bones calling me home, collecting some long forgotten part of me. Perhaps, like Birdie says, it was some sliver of soul of some past version of myself reaching up to the surface to take hold of you and flood me with memories of a time before, when our souls were one.”
Tears rolled down Rhian’s cheeks and fell to the greenblack man but he did not stir. Her voice came quiet, desperate, “I feel my heart riven in two.”
Cerys rubbed her back. Solid and real. Flesh and blood and bone, not dreams and memories and echoes of souls. Reminding her of the bonds that bound them all together.
Alwyn raised one of his large hands slowly. It hung there between them. Between Rhian and Alwyn, trembling with uncertainty, with the fear of rejection, the fear of hope.
Rhosyn, Sian, and Emrys watched him like this all happened far away, to someone else, and they were mere witnesses. Witnesses to some great magic, ancient and terrible, yet as common as love and tenderness.
Memories flowed freely through Emrys and he saw past lives flying over him so fast he could make sense of nothing but their texture, their howling hearts, and the man reaching through the darkness towards his mother who danced the moors bathed in moonlight. He gasped and fell to his knees, his vision tunneling while he bit down hard, grinding his teeth, and all his body shivered and shook and then he was nowhere.
Gone.
And when he opened his eyes, it was Cerys staring down at him. “He’s awake.” Her voice firm and then she spoke to him gently,” You all right?”
Emrys blinked and stared at her dark face and those black eyes that poured down into him. “You’re the most beautiful.”
She smiled and his heart beat so rapid he feared it would stop and he’d die there beneath her, where he longed to always be, if only he could look up to her face. Then her strong hands gripped him and pulled him up to a sitting position, his back against the wall. “Rest there a moment.” She turned back to the others.
Emrys blinked and tried to wipe the memories and ghosts from his eyes, tried to return to the moment. “What happened?”
“You fell,” Sian said.
“A fit, like,” said Rhosyn.
He saw them. Alwyn standing with his hand cupping Rhian’s cheek while she cried, the greenblack man still sleeping in her lap. Alwyn stood still and determined. The tears filling his eyes but unshed.
The pulsing magic of the place thrummed through him. Thrummed through them all. The choking fecund stink. Overfull with life, with bloom.
Rhian closed her eyes and nodded, pressed her face into Alwyn’s hand. “Yes.”
Emrys didn’t know what she agreed to, but she lifted the greenblack man’s head gently from her lap and, with the help of her sisters, slid out from under him. Still wearing only her nightgown, now filthy and torn, she took Alwyn’s great hand in her tiny, pale one, and he helped her to her feet.
Cerys said, “What of him?”
Sian snorted. “Who cares.”
Rhian didn’t look back. Emrys saw the effort spent in refusing to look back at the greenblack man. “Tonight may kill him.”
“Seems peaceful enough,” Sian said. With Rhian on her feet, the strength and power returned to Sian as well. “Come on, we’ll go through the labyrinth.”
Emrys, too weak to protest, laughed.
Sian turned to him, her jaw set. “You want to risk the lord of bones again?”
Emrys shook his head. “But the labyrinth? We may as well die here.”
“We won’t die tonight,” Cerys said.
“He might,” said Rhian, her voice cracking.
Alwyn pulled her close and held her while new tears flowed.
Sian snorted and Rhosyn said, “Carry her, if you must.” The two sisters pushed past the two lovers and stood beside the mouth of the labyrinth.
Sian nodded to the greenblack man. “He won’t let her die.”
Cerys turned to Emrys and offered her arm for him to hold. He took it. The heat of her, the smell of her, and the solidity of her flesh gave him new strength, though his head swam adrift and his steps slurred beneath him. She led him to the edge of the labyrinth and said, “You ready?”
Emrys snorted. “No.” And then he laughed and they laughed with him and he turned to Cerys, feeling, perhaps, the stirring of what Alwyn and Rhian found here in the depths of Chalon’s black heart.
She nodded and he nodded and the two of them stepped into the labyrinth.