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Emrys couldn’t look away. His mother’s face there on this vast beast. Though it had been seven years since she died, he still remembered the way she looked at him. It was the face he saw when he closed his eyes. A face that had looked down upon him with joy and pride for all his childhood. Not this slack, grey face.
Even when he gazed upon her in death, she didn’t look like this.
And yet.
Owain said, “Go on, Ari. No point hiding this.”
Ariana limped to him and sucked in a breath just as he had. She spat and hissed, slashing her hand of flesh and blood and bone through the air, as if the holy gestures and the wards against curses could mean anything. “What is this?” She spoke through clenched teeth and though Emrys knew her expression was a mix of horror and anger, he could not bring himself to care.
His mother’s face. She had been beautiful.
Owain sighed. “I did love her. You must know that.”
Emrys stretched a hand towards that terrible face. Dead and slack and inhumanly large, yet placid. Peaceful. The way she hadn’t been when first she died, after the agonized gasping, the thrashing, the vomiting blood.
“Would have even married her had things, well—” Owain leaned into the table. “Those men and women pissing in my hall, do you know where they’d be had I taken your mother as a bride? The moment I made her anything but a slave, I—” He broke off and then said nothing more.
Ariana said, “What’s it mean, brother?”
Emrys touched its cheek. Skin, not fur and hide. Skin but not like hers. Soft and lifeless and slack. He cupped her cheek, as if she was there. As if she could be there. As if the years could roll back and she could be his mother once more.
Owain spat. “I’ve called for Berit to return.”
“Your druid,” Emrys said, his voice hazy and far away. For he was far away, even as he stood there with his father, his aunt. The monster. “She’ll burn sage and kill a goat and—"
“Enough, boy.”
Emrys held his mother’s face in his hands. His fingertips brushing the reddish fur at the edge of her face. It formed almost a seam, like his mother’s face was sewn into the monster. Or like the monster slowly swallowed his mother from the toe up, and all that remained of her was her face. Moving closer, he examined it.
“He’s mad,” Ariana whispered, stepping back and away, hissing.
Emrys knew she flailed her arms in wards. The seam was not a seam. Rather, her flesh emerged from the monster. Not separate from it but also seemingly not one. Buried. His mother was buried inside the beast. The thick neck of the monster held his mother’s body. If he dug into the beast, cut open its body, he would find his mother.
He snorted, like his father, his aunt. Like so many. He traced the edge of her face and brought his hands to the base of the antlers. Lifting it to level his mother’s face with the rest of the monster’s body, he rested her face against his shoulder and let go with his left hand, raising it to one of the broken antler branches and the thick blackred liquid seeping down the antlers like sap.
“Don’t,” Owain said. “Please, don’t.”
Emrys ignored him and touched. Thick like molasses, it clung to his finger. Pulling his hand back to his face, he stared down at the blood, if that’s what it was. He pinched it between his finger and thumb, then ran them together. Sticky and fetid, he slowly lowered his mother’s face once more to hang off the table. Crouching down, he rubbed his finger and thumb off in the dirt of the skinning shack. Only then did he turn to look at his father.
Owain’s slumped shoulders revealed his age, but his eyes remained hard. A permanent scowl formed the shelf of his brow. “Best wash, boy.”
“Where did you find it?”
Owain blinked at him, then threw back his head and laughed.
Ariana scowled at Emrys and the carcass.
Emrys moved to the otherside of the table and picked up the ancient flint blade. He had not touched it since he was a child. Like the years never happened, he ran his thumb carefully against the blade’s edge. The first layer of skin parted and then the second. Almost, he smiled at the memory of this same action done a decade gone. Then, he’d released a torrent of blood that left him screaming until his mother came running.
He brought the knife to the other leg of the beast and slit a line around the beast’s ankle.
Owain coughed. “Nearly choked,” he wiped at his eyes brimmed with tears. “Put that down, boy.”
Emrys sighed and let the knife drop from his fingers onto the table. “I dreamt of that blade for a long time.”
“Was never yours,” Owain said. “Couldn’t be.”
Emrys nodded. “Could’ve told me.”
Owain snorted. “You’ve always been too proud, boy. You took my kindness as recognition.”
When Emrys turned back to his father, Owain was shaking his head, eyes hard. He continued, “You’re my son, aye, but not to them.” He didn’t gesture to the longhouse. Didn’t have to. “Son of a slave. Could have made you a slave. Had every right to. My father demanded I throw you off the Gwraidd to the rocks below. Leave you to the crows, unless you survived the fall. Some do.”
“Then to the druids,” Emrys said.
“Just so. Holy luck, like, to survive. But I didn’t. I kept you to me, but not as an heir, boy. Never as that. You have no claim. No land. No name, even, for I’ll not give you mine, no matter what they whispered. Look at me, boy.”
Emrys took a breath. “Say her name.” He remembered the day she died and all that came after.
“That what this is about for you?” He snorted. “I loved your mother more than any will ever know. Even god may doubt me,” he beat his fist against his chest, “but I’ve kept her here. Secret. Safe. She is not for any but me, you understand? Her name’s tattooed in woad upon my beating heart.”
“Say her name.” Emrys spoke slow, trying to hold down his anger.
“No. Not to you. Not for you.” Owain shook his head. Standing to his full height again, he came to the table and picked up the flint blade. “You are to watch over your brothers. That’s why you live. My sons need the shadows.” His eyes snapped back to Emrys. “You are my shadow son, Emrys mip Neb.”
Ariana sucked in a breath. “Brother—"
Emrys smiled. “Son of no one.”
“Fool,” Ariana spat the word and limped over, pushed herself between them. She turned to her brother. “He’s a heretic.”
Owain cocked his head at Emrys. “That so?”
“Unbeliever.”
Owain’s scowl lessened for a moment and a smile crept over the left half of his face. “All is one, sister.”
“Brother,” Ariana’s voice whined in a way Emrys had never heard from his guardian.
“Don’t matter, Ari. He’s no man. Only a shadow. Let him and the god work it out among themselves.”
“I’m leaving,” Emrys said though he no longer felt the conviction he did upon the hill. He turned back to the beast with his mother’s face. “I’ll not stay here.”
“No,” Owain said. “Your mother returned. You’re needed.”
“Where’d you find her?”
“Didn’t,” Owain snorted. “She been hunting me for a year. Since last winter.”
Emrys turned back to his father. “But—”
Owain said, “Demon, boy. Not your mother. Had it been hunting Ariana, its face would have been yours.”
“Mine?”
Ariana spat and sliced her hand through the air once more. “Enough.” She turned to Emrys and then past him to the beast. “What is it, brother?”
“Berit called it the Fampyr. Drinks souls.”
“What,” Emrys began but stopped. He turned back to the monster. “You’re skinning it.”
“Aye,” Owain said. “I’ll take its head as I took Madoc’s.” He gestured to the severed elk head with his knife. “Then I’ll number its bones and we’ll feast upon it. You, me, everyone. We’ll burn the bones and offal where none will inhale the smoke.”
“Not eating that,” Ariana said.
“Will.”
Ariana spat.
“Are there…” The earth beneath his feet seemed to give way. Lost, even as he stood there beside his father and the beast with his mother’s face. “I still mean to leave.”
“Aye,” Owain smiled, “just remember to come back. Your brothers need you. Now go on, I have need of my sister.”
In a daze, Emrys left the skinning shack and his father behind and returned to the biting cold wind. The night settled upon the land. The smell of roasted elk from the longhouse pulled him from the skinning shack, from the cold and dark. The muffled singing and the flood of candlelight, the promise of warmth and mead enough to wash this all away.
His dead mother. His living father. Emrys, son of nobody. He smiled at the name. It was true. He had no father. Had never had a father.
Only his mother, and when she died, he had only his father’s people who saw him as a tool or impediment to power. Only Ariana bothered to take him in. To feed and clothe him.
A soft pain. He turned back to see his father and aunt talking. Owain’s face animated in a way Emrys could not recall. Eyes wide, mouth no longer a grim line or sardonic smile, but full of passion.
For his entire childhood, his father stood as a monolith. A mountain of a man. Near as to a god as Emrys had ever known or believed. He had read such words only a year ago: fathers are our models for gods. The lilting poem was childish in many ways, but that line struck him. It continued striking him in the months since.
He had no father.
Emrys mip Owain. His cousins had made a song naming him so, laughing as he howled after them. Everyone knew yet none acknowledged. In name, he was only Emrys mip Katrin. Not even given the name Matauc to shield him or to claim his bones if he died in some skirmish with one of the neighboring clans.
Ariana let her greenblack cloak fall from her shoulders, then pulled her arm free of her tunic, revealing the red puckered flesh at the seam of her metal arm. Emrys had never seen how high up the metal went and he shuddered to see that her entire arm, all the way to the shoulder, had been taken in that war to solidify her brother’s rule.
Owain touched his sister gently and spoke with an expression of sorrow and guilt. Ariana smiled at him, laughed, and Owain returned a halfhearted smile.
The easy intimacy between them. Emrys had never known his father capable of such tenderness. Owain said something and Ariana slapped him on the chest with her hand of flesh, and the two of them laughed.
Alone. Always he had been alone. Even among his cousins, his friends, he remained apart. Alone.
Emrys turned away and told himself the tears were the wind as he came to the wide wooden doors of his father’s longhouse and hesitated. He had no responsibility to the clan. His father may attempt to bully him, but he was not of the clan. Owain had made that clear.
Emrys mip Neb.
A bitter kind of freedom. Easier to have left without telling even Ariana. She had grown accustomed to his wandering and would not have suspected his abandonment until he was well on his way to the University.
He turned back to the night. Better to leave. They were not his people. Not his family. He was forever outside. An outcast.
Alone.
A shadow son. He nearly laughed.
He turned back to the wide doors and bowed, whispered, “Farewell, mother,” and turned to go, to escape into the night.
But the doors swung open, and his cousins poured out into the night. Aeronwen belched and said, “Need to piss.”
Her twin, Alwyn, laughed. “Careful where you squat. Might find the face of—Emy! We been lookin for you.” Alwyn, broad as an auroch but shorter than Emrys, came and wrapped his thick arms round Emrys, lifting him up off the ground. “There’s still liver and kidneys—saved some for you.”
And without another word, Alwyn lifted Emrys off the ground and carried him into the longhouse, into the singing and dancing.