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Julien catches Thaisha’s eye from across the clearing, and nods, trying to convey without any unnecessary hand-wringing that he wishes her well on her quest and will watch over the other two. He is surprised, then, when she corners him while the others leave.
“I know Thimble did what she could, but would you like me to perform what rites I can for your father?”
The question catches him off guard, and his hand tightens on the hilt of sprezzatura on some painful instinct. “If you can without a body.” He tries to sound steady, fails miserably. “There will be an empty grave in what’s left of the Orchard, if you ever—”
The Davinos are not buried in crypts like that accursed undead mansion. Somewhere in Telmora, not far from the Orchard proper, there is a plot of land that has always awaited his father, just as one awaits Julien now. He has always known this, but now, he thinks of his own limbs and flesh torn asunder like the monster he saw a glimpse of in the manor, and his stomach twists into knots.
“I’ll say a prayer tonight,” Thaisha says gently, breaking him free of the vice grip of his worst fears. “And bless the ground when I join you at the Orchard. How does that sound?”
Julien nods, unable to find the words to thank her for it, and Thaisha seems to understand that he isn’t trying to be rude.
“Keep an ear out for news of Alogar, please?” she asks, as if he would do otherwise. “And give Nessa my best.”
“I will.” Thinking of Aranessa would normally bring some comfort, but now all Julien imagines is what she will say about his shadow, and it makes him sick. “Don’t do anything stupid out there.”
“I could say the same to you.” She gives him one of those looks of hers, the kind that seem to pierce through every armor and see right to his heart. “Until next time, Julien.”
“Until next time,” he echoes, and is surprised to find that he is sorry to see her go.
Once Thaisha leaves, Julien finds the darkest corner of the cave and slides to the floor with his back pressed against the wall. He is drunk enough to be unsteady, but not drunk enough to block out the night they have had, and he knows even before he falls asleep that he will not rest until morning.
He dreams of shades chasing him in the dark, of turning corners that stretch into darkness and bony hands closing around his throats, of closed doors and muffled screams, and warm blood spattering against his face. Of his father, his smile stretched beyond possibility, his flesh hanging free from his bones as he stretches too-long arms towards Julien. Tripping in the dark, fabric smothering him, and then—
“Julien. Wake up.”
He comes to with a scream already halfway up his throat, and nearly crashes into Vaelus as he shoots upward. He buries his fist into his mouth and bites down until he is certain he will not make a sound. She steps back, grey eyes peering out from beneath her veil in the shadows of the campfire.
“What.” He needs her to leave, needs to not be watched so that he can stumble off into the Tintazi and find some tree to retch under. “I’m fine.”
“You were having a nightmare,” she observes, voice as quiet and level as ever. “I thought you might want to be awoken from it.”
“And now I am awake.” He should thank her, he knows, for getting to him before he did wake himself screaming, but the gratitude feels like lead in his mouth. “I’m going to walk.”
“I will walk with you.” She does not ask for permission, and when he gets to his feet on shaky legs and stumbles forward, she simply falls into step behind him. “I do not think Thaisha would like it if I let you go alone.”
He wants to snarl that Thaisha isn’t there, but he knows Vaelus will not be dissuaded, so he lets her follow as he blindly picks a path through the wood. When he finally stops, tripping over a tree root and falling to his knees, he forcefully empties the contents of his stomach into this new fairy haven. Behind him, Vaelus says, “I walked here with Hannan just hours ago.”
Julien is on the walls of Obrimus Manor, watching a man die, and he is here on the forest floor, his knees aching against the packed soil. He looks up at Vaelus, only just able to see her eyes glowing in the light of embers from her censer. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he means it. “I wanted to go to him.”
And that is the thing he cannot tell anyone else without being assumed selfish for it—that he would have gone back for Teor and Cyd if not for his sister’s soul, that he would have jumped off the wall and joined Hannan if not for a terrified Occtis beside him. That there are reasons he must learn to stop running towards the nearest cliff, but that he does not know how, because no one has ever taught him.
He must be imagining it, but Vaelus’ gaze seems to soften, and she holds out a hand to help him up. “I am very glad that you are still here.”
Julien does not know how she says such things so easily, but he lets her haul him to his feet and offers a small, quiet truth in return. “Sometimes I have to remind myself that I want to be.”
“I understand,” Vaelus says softly, and she is perhaps the one person here that he believes actually might.
They say no more of it on the way back to camp, and upon their return, Vaelus does not follow him back to his dark corner. Julien watches her return to her meditation, and stands the late night watch alone.
Somewhere in the pre-dawn hours, when Julien is so exhausted that his eyes are barely open, he hears footsteps. For a few moments, he finds himself certain that they are nothing more than a hallucination, something conjured up by his frayed nerves, but then Azune steps into view, and Julien almost wishes they were.
Azune is already dressed for the day, the uniform of an Arcane Marshal polished and out of place in the wildness of the woods. Notably, he is not carrying the axe that Julien gave him mere hours ago, though he does have his warhammer strapped to his back.
“Bit early for the others to be awake,” Julien says, once Azune is close enough that they can talk quietly. “Though I expect Thimble will stop letting anyone have a moment of peace come sunrise.”
“I didn’t come to see the others.” Azune holds out the bag he is carrying. “Bolaire and his things.”
“You’re giving them to me?” Julien’s thoughts are still sluggish, but he is surprised. He had expected Azune would prefer one of his rebellious friends for the task.
Azune raises his eyebrows. “You swore to protect him, didn’t you?”
It is as simple as that to him. Julien wants to mock him for it, ask him how easy it has been to get people to keep their promises, but he just gives Julien a level look with those sunset-golden eyes, keeping the bag held out as if he anticipates no other outcome but for Julien to take it.
Julien does.
“You don’t want to say goodbye to the others?”
“I already did.” Azune says it steadily enough, but for just a split second, Julien catches him glance over at where Thimble and Kattigan sleep with a look of hopelessly unguarded longing. “I don’t think I could do it a second time.”
That is startlingly honest of him to admit, but Julien is starting to realize that Azune treats honesty like a weapon and uses it to his complete advantage. “I’ll tell them you wished us luck.” That should be Azune’s cue to leave, but he lingers, and Julien is far too tired to guess at what—if anything—he is waiting for. “My shadow won’t wave goodbye, if that’s what you want.”
Some expression Julien cannot quite read crosses Azune’s face, and he nods. “I know. I’m sorry the others were— I understand, that it’s complicated.”
“You understand nothing,” Julien snaps. “Do not pretend you sympathize when you and your ragtag band of fools was ready to risk everything on some ridiculous scheme to let him escape.”
Azune does not flinch in the face of Julien’s temper. “If Thjazi had escaped, I would have died, and I would have done it gladly knowing that he would have benefitted from it.”
There is no indication of feeling in his voice as he says it, but for a split second, Julien finds a mirror of himself where he least expected it: in the law abiding, even tones of a rebel-turned-marshal that seems to be just as much a tool in the hands of his betters as Julien is.
“Maybe when we come back,” he says slowly, because it means he has to come back, that he cannot die on the road of a careless mistake. “You and I can talk about what you think you know.”
“I will see you again, Sir Julien.”
Azune does not make promises, but to Julien’s exhausted, sleep-addled mind, there is still something reassuring in the firmness of his belief.
The others wake up not long after Azune leaves the next morning, and though they are all practiced enough travelers to be on the road quickly, Julien is sick of their chatter by the end of the first hour. In a distant sort of way, he recognizes it for what it is—coping, badly, with a loss they did not anticipate having to face—but he is only just awake enough to put one foot in front of the other, and their voices grate on his every nerve.
When they stop for a short rest, he makes it a point to settle himself on the outskirts of the group. It is better for everyone that way. They can pretend he is not there, and he can pretend that he is keeping watch, when in truth, he is far too distracted to be doing anything of the kind. Julien drifts in that strange place between sleeping and waking, trying desperately to shake off the sickening feeling that has made its home in his bones, but it is of no use. The sun is high and bright above them, and every glimpse of his shadow is a reminder of the worst.
A rustling nearby makes him open his eyes. He almost misses the fox at first, but when he flinches yet again at the movement of his own shadow, Pin dances across it in an instant, as if to break up the image. Julien absently scratches the fox behind the ear, glances across to where Occtis sits glassy-eyed on the opposite end of their camp, and mutters, “If you want my attention, you don’t need to send your fox to get it.”
Occtis startles, looks up, and then to Julien’s horror, dusts himself off and picks his way across their small campsite to join him. “I couldn’t tell if you wanted company.”
“I don’t.”
Occtis ignores him and sits down, Pin immediately crawling into his lap. “Well, Pin wants to stay here.”
“Doesn’t that fox have to listen to everything you say?”
“He is.”
Occtis does not elaborate, just runs his fingers through Pin’s fur and sits in complete silence, as if they didn’t just get into a screaming match less than a day ago. As if they didn’t watch his father kill a man. As if Occtis didn’t almost keel over from the pain of that blasted stone.
“Are you alright?” he asks, and he tells himself that he only has to care because Thaisha is not here to do it. “Being on a fairy road isn’t hurting you?”
“It’s fine.” Occtis’ hand goes to where his heart should be, though Julien cannot tell if he realizes as much. “We’re with Thimble.”
Julien lets out a long-suffering sigh. “She will not let me forget it.”
“I don’t think she’s mad at you about wanting to leave her, you know.”
Occtis offers this as if Julien had been worried about Thimble’s opinion at all. “I know.”
“Are you mad at her for not bringing your dad’s body?”
Julien shudders, the kind of full-body tremor that he cannot even pretend to hide. He clenches his hands into fists to get them to steady, but it doesn’t work. The exhaustion of the night has caught up to him in its entirety all at once, and even being awake is not enough to keep the searing image of the monster that had once been his father at bay. “No.”
“Julien—”
“Stop it,” he snarls. “Stop pretending like you care, like it’s any of your concern what I think about anyone here when all any of them see when they look at me is the murderer of their precious Thjazi.”
The others have fallen silent now, and there is a look on Occtis’ face that says he has more to add, but Julien refuses to let him.
“Well, he’s still here— he’s still here, and I will never claw myself free of him, and all those who died for his scheming—”
He stops short, looks at the others, and cannot bear to stay. It is easier to storm away into the woods, easier to let himself find an unseen corner in which he can unravel. In a few minutes, he will walk back into camp like nothing has happened. In a few minutes, he will continue on a journey with those he is supposed to hate most. A few minutes pass, and he stays on the forest floor, his breath coming in short, shallow gasps. There is a tightness in his chest, and he is convinced that Thjazi is pressing down where his heart is supposed to be.
There is a soft yip behind him, and when he turns, Pin is staring at him with his head tilted in one direction. Julien beckons him forward, and Pin tumbles onto his side, ready to be soothed. He hears footsteps crunching through the brush a few moments later, purposefully loud, and is unsurprised to see that being yelled at has not been enough to deter Occtis from following him.
“What.”
“I’m sorry,” Occtis says quietly, sitting down in front of Julien and clicking his tongue at Pin. “I didn’t mean to— I shouldn’t have said all that.”
Julien shakes his head. “You, of all people, I think, have earned the right to say whatever you like.”
“Okay.” Occtis sounds a little nervous again, and Julien waits for him to find whatever words he needs, too unsteady on his feet to do anything but sit there. “Well, um, I know that you didn’t want to go back for Thimble in the first place, but um, I’m really glad— I’m really glad I wasn’t alone over there. And I don’t know if… I think maybe I would have hit your shadow even if I’d known it was Thjazi. If that helps.”
“Your father is a blight upon this land,” Julien says tiredly, but what he really means is thank you.
Occtis offers him a brief hint of a smile, but it falls away quickly. “Aren’t you terrified of him?”
He is far more afraid of Primus Tachonis than he wants to confess, but when he casts a sidelong glance at Occtis, he sees that fear mirrored back at him, alongside a surprisingly dogged determination to push past it.
“Of course I am.” Julien does not bother to share to his nightmare from the night before, but Occtis was at the Palazzo. “I have seen what he is capable of. Anyone with sense would be afraid. But I intend to succeed in killing him someday, and that requires me to bide my time. I’m not sorry I got us out safely.”
“You were right. Going back in was stupid.”
Occtis sounds utterly miserable about it, but when Julien claps him on the shoulder—his hand still trembling—he does not try to move away.
No one mentions Julien’s little moment of indiscretion when he and Occtis return from the forest, and Julien lets Occtis drift back to his place beside Thimble, content to keep his silence and bring up the rear. They travel quick, and though it is past sundown by the time they stop for the night, Julien picks a spot outside the radius of the firelight. He is fumbling with his things in the darkness when a green dancing light blinks into existence near him, though Occtis never turns around from where Kattigan is showing him how to build a fire without magic with no small amount of enthusiasm.
Julien finishes setting up his bedroll before the dancing lights wink out. The others discuss watches, and Thimble draws first. He does not volunteer, and they do not ask him to. The dancing lights wink out, the others settle in for the night, and Julien just sits there with the swarm of dread that shares his body on days like this, trying and failing not to think.
“Hey, Julien.”
He startles violently, hand reaching for where sprezzatura rests ready by his side, but it is only Thimble, zipping closer to him like an annoying, glowing gnat. “I am not in the mood for shadow experiments.”
“I don’t want to talk to Thaz.” Thimble switches to Sylvan, her voice going even more sing-song, but in a way that is not quite as irritating as usual. He appreciates the choice. It is hard to guess how clearly Thjazi can perceive Julien’s surroundings, but they both know that though Thjazi learnt the right Sylvan poetry to romance Aranessa, he did not speak enough of the language to follow a conversation. “I wish I could have done more for your dad.”
“You did what you could.” Julien does grip the sword then, and imagines his father’s hand falling into place exactly where his does. “I owe you for that.”
“No you don’t.” Thimble stops floating overhead, and flies down to sit directly in front of him. She is too small to cast a shadow this way, and that is too intentional a choice for Julien to be anything but reluctantly grateful. “I would have done it for any of us. And anyway, I liked your dad. He was nice to us pixies.”
“He would have been.” Julien wonders how many of those pixies survived the fall of the Orchard alongside Thimble’s sibling, and how many of those who survived grew up overnight. Maybe it is that shared loss, or maybe it is simply because he has no one else to ask, he says, “Aranessa was talking about the golden boat story. Is it—?”
He cannot bring himself to entirely voice the question. It is childish enough that he has alluded to it in the first place, as if some boat to a land no longer accessible can do anything to help their losses in the present.
“I don’t know,” she says softly. “But if there is a boat, he’s probably telling Lord Callowyn to wait for it and not ford the river on his horse.”
Julien laughs despite himself, and then chokes on it, another weight of another loss that does not seem real stacked upon his already precarious heart. “My mother said— he willed me his horse, like I give a fuck about that stupid horse and not— fuck. I don’t even know what happened.”
Thimble does him the courtesy of not drawing attention to his wavering voice. “Do you want the bracers?”
For a moment, Julien wonders if she is trying to tease him, but then he really looks at her, at the hurt written all over those small features, and decides that she means it. “No, they’re yours. You’ll do right by them.”
“I’ll try.” She lets out a sigh far too big for her tiny form. “I wish I’d been there.”
Julien tries to imagine her zipping through the hordes of shades, battling forces several times her might with her usual fearlessness. It is easy to picture, but it is just as easy to picture her crashing to the ground from a stray blow, dead in a single strike. Frustrating as she is, he would not wish that upon her. “I’m glad you weren’t.”
“Thanks.”
Her wings are drooping, and Julien does not have to know her well to see the melancholy weighing heavy on her shoulders. “I’m sorry about Teor and his brother.”
“Yeah.” She wipes away a few tears, and makes no secret of it. “Julien— can I ask you something?”
Julien swallows the urge to tell her that she already has and nods.
“What happens once we’ve killed all the Tachonises? Except Occtis, obviously.”
“Yes, they already took care of that for us, didn’t they,” Julien says dryly, and is pleased when she lets out a watery laugh. From anyone else, he would wonder if the question was the usual kind of challenge to his resolve, the sort of self-righteous drivel that was meant to prompt him to consider letting go for his own good. Thimble, though, seems to be staring down the very same path that he is. “But I don’t know.”
He does not say that he has never imagined himself alive that far ahead into the future, and though she does not say so, he thinks she understands. They are not the schemers, after all, but the blades. They will break doing the work they are meant to, and it is not a sacrifice they will regret making.
“I don’t either.” Thimble floats up then, so she can look him in the eye. “Can you promise me something?”
“A promise to a fairy is no small thing,” he quips, but when she rolls her eyes, he nods. “If it is within my power, all you ask of me is my best, and it does not require me to harm those I consider kin, then I will consider an oath when I hear your request.”
Thimble scoffs at the disclaimer, but does not forfeit the deal. She bobs in the air, a little unsteady. “If I die fighting them, will you make sure I’m put to rest?”
“I swear it,” he says solemnly, and does not say that he would have ensured it without any oath, because he has already proven otherwise. “If I may beg a promise of you to do the same in turn, and bring what you can of me to my mother?”
“The deal is done,” Thimble intones, and there is an almost invisible sparkle of fairy dust in the air, the magic of a bargain settling between them. She loses the formal register in an instant, expression shifting into an impish grin. “Though your mom is scary, so you’d better not die.”
“I’ll do my best to spare you her wrath.” Julien is aware that he has been less than fair to her thus far, and he is a little too Orchard-raised to take seemingly unconditional kindness from one of the Fair Folk lightly. He inclines his head to her, which is about as much of a half-bow that he thinks she will take seriously. “Thank you, Thimble.”
She huffs, clearly pleased despite herself. “Get some rest, okay?”
“Wake me if you need to.”
Thimble gives him a knowing look. She knows what he is really asking—that she wake him from a nightmare before he wakes anybody else, but she nods. “Occtis has the next watch. I’ll let him know. Goodnight, Julien.”
There is more he could say to her, but the feelings catch inside him in a tangled, suffocating mess, and he is too tired to find the right words for them. “Goodnight.”
She sends another burst of fairy dust into the air as she flies back to the fire, leaving him blinking against the sudden drowsiness that follows the settling of glitter on his face. When he falls asleep this time, he dreams of the Orchard as he remembers it from his childhood: glowing, warm, and safe.