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He slept in his father’s house for the first time in years. The day passed with fitful sleep and dreams of a bone. A sword. A blade in darkness. A blade of darkness. His mother’s voice. Calling to him. Beckoning him to come home. He followed her voice. Followed the trail of memories left like shredded paper leading him into the dark, into the deep, where a giant curled in on itself. Weeping. It cried. Its sobs shook the earth. And when he spoke to it, asked it what was wrong, it raised its great face. His mother’s face. That face dying. Leaking blood and all that remained of her life. And it called him still home. The darkness gripped him. Stuck to him like honey. Spreading, climbing over his limbs and though he struggled against it he remained trapped watching his mother wail for him to come home until the dark reached his lips and poured inside him while his mother's face sloughed off leaving only the massive skull of the giant and from the blackness of one of those gaping eyesockets reached the hand of a fox and in its other hand a sword of bone pierced the blackness as it slid to him and the darkness filled his mouth and lungs and stomach and he woke coughing and dryheaved over the side of his bed.
He'd eaten nothing since the previous night. Sweat coated him in a thin layer but his sheets were soaked in it. Cursing, he got out of bed naked. Didn’t remember undressing but didn’t worry about it either. He stripped the bedding and flung it to the ground, only then noticing the man sitting in the corner chair, shrouded by shadow.
His body recoiled but he tried not to show the stranger. If he wanted Emrys dead, he could have taken him in his sleep. For a moment, he believed the lord of bone’s emissary sat before him, watching, but he banished the thought.
There was nothing to be done about the lord of bone.
The thought brought his hand down to the scabbed over wound in his side.
It would never heal.
He dismissed that thought as well. Rhian couldn’t know. None could know what this wound meant. It may be a hurt like any other.
Still naked, he sat on the bed he just stripped and watched the stranger watching him.
The pale light coming through the window told Emrys evening approached. What Emrys believed was black clothing revealed itself as a deep crimson. Like dried blood. Tall black boots reached of to his knee, both planted firmly on the wooden floor. His dark hands gripped the arms of the chair. Veiny and thin. Skeletal, almost. A narrow chest and a face obscured by shadow but his hair draped his face in rolling reddish curls.
The two stared at one another, waiting. Dust drifted careless through the shafts of light and the fire burned low, nearly to ash. With the dream slipping from Emrys so too did the feverish heat. His sweat cooled against his skin making the room colder. He wanted to grab some clothes or to wrap a blanket round himself but he would not move or speak before this stranger.
The stranger’s presence demanded the question. He refused.
The stranger would have nothing over him.
And so they waited.
The light faded and the urge to piss began whittling away at Emrys’ desire to remain silent and impassive. He got up and stood over the night pale and pissed with his back to the stranger. If this was a test from his father, he knew he failed in that moment but he didn’t care. Hard to care about anything when emptying his bladder felt so good.
The stranger waited for him to finish before grabbing his hair and wrenching his head back and pressing a blade to his neck. “Fool.”
The harsh voice was not a man’s. Reminded him of Ariana’s caustic hiss but this stranger was too tall. Emrys stood on tiptoes to keep from slicing his own throat on the stranger’s blade.
His thoughts fled to Cerys. Her strong arms and powerful body. He said, “You’ve a stronger bladder than me, I’m afraid.”
She snorted in his ear and a thin burning sensation ran across his neck as she dragged the blade slowly across his throat. The gentlest breach of his flesh but it stung and he winced and jerking his head caused the blade to slice deeper. The bite became greater at the right edge of his neck and he clapped his hands over the wound as soon as the knife left.
“You would be dead a dozen times over.” She pushed his head away, releasing the fistful of hair. A strange accent colored her words, shortening the vowels and clipping the consonants.
Emrys staggered and turned into the corner, facing her. He looked down at his bloody hands and wiped them on his chest. “Tell my father I failed and bring me something to eat.”
Thin lips sneered and thin eyebrows lowered and pale skin shone in the darkness. Like Rhian. She snorted and kicked his right leg out from under him, sending him to one knee. “You are a fool.”
Emrys took a breath and stood once more. “Lesson taken.”
“No.” She shoved her blade hilt first into his hand. “Take it.” She closed his fingers around it. “They say you are unbeliever. This shall be your god now.”
A dagger like any other. No special marks or ornamentation on it. Only his own blood still on the blade. He made to slash at her. Not to kill her but to demonstrate he was finished with this.
She punched him in the elbow the moment his movement began. Numbness yanked the strength from his hand and the knife fell. She caught it and held it out to him. “Do not drop it again.” When he didn’t take it, she thrust it harmlessly into his chest, the blade and hilt stretched from nipple to nipple. “You will learn to pray to your god, fool. Now take it.”
“Pointless.”
“I assure you, the point is very sharp.”
Emrys couldn’t tell if she was an idiot, misunderstood him, or a zealot immune to sarcasm. “What does my father want?”
“Your brothers need a shadow.”
“Tell them to step out of the light.”
She struck him in the left temple. Light flashed in his eyes and his face smashed into the wall. “You are so clever, yes?” She snorted. “You are a fool. Do you know the dangers? They are your brothers.”
“Half brothers.” He straightened up and tried to sidle out of the corner but she blocked him with her arm.
She snorted. “Which half?”
“What?”
“You say they are half, but which half is your brother and which is not? What is a half brother but a brother you deny kinship?” She snorted again. “They are your brothers, Emrys the fool, and their deaths will be on your hands should they never see adulthood.”
“Who are you to my father?”
“His shadow.”
“His lover.”
“You are a fool.”
“Does Saoirse know?”
She snorted. “Closer than blood are we. You and I. Yet you ask after incest. You are a fool, Emrys mip Neb. But that is well and good. A fool I can use. A fool can be shaped.” She shoved the dagger back into his hand. “Your life is owed.”
“To the lord of bone.”
She winced, leaned away from him, measuring him with her eyes from toe to nose. “What a thing to say.”
Emrys tapped the knifepoint against the black gash in his side. “He’s marked me. Claimed me.”
She scowled and brought her face close to his hip and sniffed.
He had never been more aware of his nakedness than in that moment.
Recoiling, she wretched and spat, waving her fingers in a complex gesture. “How long?”
“This morning.”
Grabbing him by the shoulders, she tossed him into the bed and pulled a knife from her hip and climbed on top of him. In fear and panic, he raised the dagger she gave him to stop her but she slapped his hand lazily away and gripped his wrist so tight he dropped it with a slight yowl and she pinned that wrist to his side and prodded the black wound with the edge of her blade.
Breaking open the scab, foul blackblood leaked out. Cursing in her own language, she pulled a vial from a pocket in her tunic. She bit the stopper out and spat it away and used her knife to break open the scab. The stink of it filled Emrys and he coughed, his bile rising. It hurt but he didn’t fight her. More afraid that his movements might cause her to stab him on accident.
Steady hands. She cut away the scab to reveal red puckered flesh. Setting her knife down, she pressed on his flesh around the wound and more blackblood poured out of him, rolling down his hip to wet the bed beneath him. She kept muttering as she pressed on him, pushing out the foul, rotten blood.
He screamed but tried to remain still and she ignored his pain. Working at the wound, she pushed on him until his blood ran red and he swooned, his vision and thoughts swirling away from him and that moment until she dug her fingers into his flesh.
His hips rocked away from her and he howled, his vision going black, filling with blood.
“Got to open it wider,” she said but Emrys barely heard her. Didn’t care. He thrashed against her, trying to free himself from her healing, from this pain. Gasping, pleading, crying out, his blood pouring out of him, she finally pulled her fingers free.
His breath heaving, all thoughts fled from him. There was only the tearing pain of it.
“Sorry,” she said and then shoved the open vial into his wound and clapped both hands over it.
It burned. The strangest sensation. Feeling liquid poured into this hole inside him. Scalding like boiled water, it lit his flesh afire from within and he opened his mouth in a silent cry while his eyes leaked tears, his body rigid.
He woke sometime later. The room was black with night but the fire had been rebuilt. Warmth. Too warm. His body coated in sweat, his night clothes clinging to him. He tried sitting up, wondering where he was, how he got there, how he got dressed, but his vision blurred and he fell down once more.
“Rest,” she said from the darkness. “We’re exorcising your demons, boy.”
He tried to get up once more, the anger and frustration rising in him, but he only managed to tumble out of the bed, hitting his chin hard against the floor, his whole body rolling after.
Didn’t fight with him or admonish him. Just lifted him back into bed. “When you wake, we’ll begin. For now, you’re still with us.”
Emrys didn’t want to know what that meant or what the open-ended nature of the statement may imply about his future.
He tried to take a deep breath but his lungs hurt. Everything hurt. He turned to the window but saw only the blackness of night.
The University was out there. He could be well on his way had he just left. Gone. He’d be whole and himself, never knowing of the lord of bone or the greenblack man or these women from Clan Lyr. And he never would have met this terrible woman watching him.
And then he slept once more, fitfully, but for a long time.