Threadbound, p.13
Threadbound, page 13
“I can help,” Jamie offered, and then the half-breed’s face and ears flushed a bright pink, no doubt because he’d just realized that helping Bran bathe would mean that Bran was likely to be nude.
The fae wasn’t sure if he should be flattered or insulted. Humans tended toward the prudish, that much he knew, although he really didn’t understand the strange combination of repulsion and fascination that they had with nudity. He’d seen enough photographed and painted nudes in the museums to know that plenty of people spent plenty of time staring at depictions of human nudity. And yet the prospect of being in the room with him naked had caused a clearly uncomfortable reaction in Jamie.
“I—I mean—”
“I would like to be clean,” Bran answered. “But I’m afraid I don’t feel very… steady.”
Jamie nodded, his cheeks still flushed. “I can put the folding chair in the shower?”
“The folding chair?”
“Yeah.” Jamie pointed across the room at something wooden. “It’s bamboo and cheap, so it’ll be fine if it gets wet.”
He wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but now that the prospect of hot water and soap had been offered, Bran really wanted it. “Okay,” he agreed. “I’d like that.”
Jamie smiled, a slight rosiness still on his cheeks, and stood up, stepping away from the bed. “I can put some fresh clothes in there for you? And I’ll set out a towel.” Then he grabbed a stack of cloth from the side table and disappeared into a small room near the door—the bathroom, presumably.
Bran very cautiously pushed himself up with his good arm, breathing through his nose in order to keep moving through the pain. It honestly wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, although he definitely wasn’t enjoying it. But he thought that maybe, with Jamie’s help, he could make his way into the bathroom.
Looking down, he noticed that he was still wearing the papery blue things the nurses had put him in at the hospital, and he wondered what had happened to his clothes—not that it mattered. He’d easily be able to spin more when he needed them.
Then Bran frowned, realizing that he probably shouldn’t do that around Jamie, because the half-breed was almost certainly going to notice magically appearing clothing. Bran didn’t inherently object to being unclothed, given that it was plenty warm and Jamie’s bed had blankets if he did get cold at night. However, the color that had come to Jamie’s cheeks at the thought of Bran naked probably meant that even if Bran was okay with it, Jamie wasn’t going to be, and it would be unforgivably rude for Bran to make his generous host any more uncomfortable than he already was. He sighed.
Jamie returned from setting up the bathroom, then smiled when he saw Bran sitting on the edge of the bed. “You’re sitting up! That’s great!”
Bran looked up at him with what he knew must have been an incredulous expression. He was sitting—not even in an entirely upright position—on the edge of the bed. The idea that he’d accomplished anything at all by getting to that position was completely pathetic. A warrior of his caliber should not only have been able to sit up, but blithely walk across the room. And shift his sorry Lugh-cursed ass back into bird form to fly out the damned window.
Not for the first time, Bran wondered if he’d done permanent damage to himself by refusing to complete the threadbond for the past two years. Longer, really, since it was possible for the threadbond to be completed even in childhood, although that often made the magic more unpredictable and dangerous. The Wyrthings preferred to complete the bonds after both participants had harnessed their magic. Assuming both participants had magic, of course.
Being near Jamie was helping to keep Bran’s magic calm, but he still felt like absolute crodh mara dung, and he was afraid that it wasn’t all from the beating he’d taken from the geàrd soilleir.
“Do you want help standing?” Jamie asked, and while Bran most definitely did not want help, he knew he probably needed it, so he nodded.
Jamie crouched down enough to put an arm around Bran’s back under his good shoulder, his hand resting on Jamie’s surprisingly muscular bicep as the half-breed half-lifted Bran to his unsteady feet. As Jamie was helping him through the doorway of the tiny bathroom, something elsewhere in the apartment started beeping.
Bran looked up at Jamie.
“I’ll deal with that in a sec,” the bigger man told him. “Once you’re all set.”
“What is it?”
“Dinner.”
Bran’s mouth watered at the very thought of food. “You made dinner?” he asked, trying not to sound too eager or greedy.
But Jamie smiled again, that quirky, slightly lopsided smile that Bran found himself disturbingly looking forward to seeing. “Nothing much,” came the answer. “Casserole. There’s some beans and tuna and stuff in it. Just what was in the apartment.”
Bran drew in a deep breath, appreciating the smells of cooking, although he couldn’t identify much about the food in question. Honestly, he didn’t really care. He’d eaten all sorts of questionable things over the last few months, and the thought of having hot food that he hadn’t scavenged out of a summer trash bin was more than enough to make his stomach growl.
The sound earned another slightly crooked smile from Jamie. “Once you’re all clean, it should be cool enough to dig in.” He helped Bran into the shower and down onto the chair. “Uh… do you think you need help with…?” His ears and cheeks caught fire again.
“I—I think I might need some help with the arm,” Bran admitted, not terribly happy about it.
“Yeah, sure. Of course.” Jamie bobbed his head, clearly nervous.
Prudish humans. Bran wanted to shake his head, but that would be extremely rude, given the circumstances, so he kept the thought to himself.
Jamie couldn’t look at Bran’s face, but he tried to be gentle as he helped Bran work the crinkly blue scrub shirt off over his cast, trying not to jostle either his arm or his chest.
“Holy shit,” he breathed when they’d finally gotten it off.
Bran’s whole chest was a mottled pattern of red, blue, sickly yellow, and a purple so dark it looked black in the admittedly poor lighting of Jamie’s bathroom.
Bran looked down at himself, then winced a little. “It looks worse than it feels,” the smaller man said.
“Bullshit,” was Jamie’s automatic response, and it made Bran look up at him with an odd expression, his dark eyebrows lifted. Jamie felt his face darken even more. “I mean. It’s bad. It looks bad. You don’t have to pretend it doesn’t hurt.”
He especially didn’t want Bran to lie and say that it was okay if he was in a lot of pain, because the doctor had said something about watching for signs of internal bleeding, and the bruising was bad enough that Jamie was now legitimately worried that might be a real problem.
“I dinna say it dinna hurt,” Bran muttered back, his brogue thick. “Only that it dinna feel as bad as it looks.”
At Bran’s insistence, Jamie had left him alone in the bathroom while his scrub pants were still on, the door cracked to make sure that if he called out for help, Jamie could hear him. After some scuffling noises, Jamie heard the water turn on, and decided it was probably okay. At least for now.
He set another timer that he told himself was for the casserole to cool down, but was actually the point at which he was going to make sure Bran was still okay if he hadn’t already come back out or called for Jamie’s help.
At least, he reminded himself, Bran’s awake. It had taken him longer than Jamie was happy about, and he’d leaned on Jamie quite a bit on the extremely short walk to the bathroom, which was also worrisome. Maybe it was because of low blood sugar from not having eaten most of yesterday. Maybe the pain was worse than he was letting on, and he just didn’t want Jamie to fuss.
“And maybe I’ve got to let it fucking go,” Jamie muttered to himself as he cut bread into little squares and smeared margarine on the pieces. After all, he barely knew Bran. They’d eaten dinner together twice, that was all. Well, three times, if you wanted to call what they’d had brutally early this morning dinner.
They’d talked about Jamie’s work, a little about Bran’s, and exchanged small talk about the museum before Jamie had decided to open his big mouth and ask why Bran was interested in him, which is what had ended their non-relationship before it had even begun.
And now Bran was sleeping in his bed, using his shower, and about to eat his food.
And it definitely wasn’t under any of the circumstances that Jamie had fantasized about. Because at no point had he wanted Bran hurt—and he definitely hadn’t imagined either or both of them potentially being in danger of being beaten to death.
“Stoppit, Jamie,” he hissed at himself, sprinkling garlic powder on the bread, then putting the cookie sheet in the oven. And then he leaned back against the counter, covering his face with his hands. And then he jumped several inches when the timer went off. “Shit!”
He sucked in a breath to slow his racing heart and aggressively thumbed the button on the timer to shut off its incessant beeping. Then he took a couple more breaths, bent over the sink, his palms on the edge of the counter.
Jamie was exhausted, scared, and a little sore himself, although nothing like what Bran must be feeling. That, and Jamie was used to having bruised ribs. It had been a while, but the feeling was depressingly familiar.
He also had no idea what was going on or what to do about it.
“Jamie?” Bran’s voice startled him again, and he whipped around, sucking in air.
Bran was standing just outside the bathroom, which also put him just outside the kitchen, given the positively tiny size of Jamie’s apartment. Bran had his good hand braced against the wall and was wearing Jamie’s clothes, the pantlegs rolled up, Jamie’s t-shirt hanging halfway down his thighs.
“Um. Are you.” Jamie stopped, cleared his throat, and tried again. “How are you feeling?”
Bran didn’t answer him. “Is something burning?” he asked, instead.
“Oh, shit!” Jamie spun around again pulling open the oven to discover that the outside edges of his sad garlic bread were rather darker than he wanted them to be, although at least the middles looked like they were still edible. He grabbed the hot pad on the counter and moved the pan from the oven to the stovetop. “Damn,” he muttered down at the slightly-burnt garlic bread. “Sorry,” he said a little louder.
“For what?” Bran asked him.
Jamie looked over his shoulder at the smaller man. “Burning part of dinner?”
Bran shrugged, winced, then grimaced. “I dinna mind.”
Jamie was skeptical, but since he was already going to be stretching his monthly food budget to feed Bran to begin with, he wasn’t going to throw out the bread. He’d eat the pieces that were more burnt. It was still food.
“Have a seat in the recliner,” he told Bran. Jamie could sit at his desk if he moved the notes out of the way. “I’ll bring you some casserole and… toast.”
“All right.” Bran shuffled his way over to the chair, and Jamie watched long enough to make sure that he’d be okay getting himself settled—which he was, even though he was moving slowly—before dishing up bowls of casserole and sticking little squares of partially-burnt garlic toast in them.
Jamie brought one to Bran first, then moved his notes so that he’d have somewhere to eat before bringing out his own dinner. Jamie had been ravenously hungry as he was cooking, but now that he had food in front of him, he couldn’t find the appetite that had been gnawing at his stomach all day. He stirred the noodles in his bowl, then nibbled on a burnt end of toast soaked in the creamy sauce.
“This is good,” Bran said softly, a fork-full of casserole on its way to his mouth.
Jamie’s lips quirked in a weak half-smile. “Thanks.”
Bran suppressed the frown that wanted to furrow his brow, reminding himself that Jamie, even though he was a half-breed, didn’t live by the rules of fae society. To him, a thank you was polite, not rude. Bran forced a smile, instead, although he needn’t have bothered, since Jamie was staring down morosely into his noodles.
Bran did frown then, bothered by the fact that Jamie was clearly upset or worried about something. “What’s bothering you?” he asked.
Jamie looked up at him, his blue eyes soulful. “Other than the fact that someone tried to kill you?” he asked, and Bran felt the question like a hit to the sternum.
The fae wanted to say that he didn’t understand why Jamie was so bothered by an attack on him, but then he’d be lying to himself—it bothered him that Jamie had been put in harm’s way because of the vendetta between the Sluagh and Sidhe Courts. It also bothered him that he owed Jamie his life. That he’d had to owe Jamie his life.
Bran knew full well that the geàrd soilleir had been sent to kill him, most likely as a means of curtailing his father’s attempt to undermine the Sidhe King. Cairn mac Darach had been working for longer than Bran had been alive to keep his uncle, Cuileann mac Eug, the Sluagh King, from death. It was widely believed in the Court of Shades that the Sidhe King, Darach mac Craobh-na-Beatha, was responsible for his half-brother’s crippling sickness, a rumor Bran had no reason to think wasn’t true.
It had been Bran’s duty to help to find a cure—or at least something more useful in slowing the spread of whatever poison it was that was ravaging the body of the Sluagh King. A duty he had been neglecting in his thus-far-futile attempts to find a way to stabilize the magic that would likely be required to both produce that cure and to protect the Court of Shades once the Sidhe King learned that his attempted regicide had failed once and for all.
If Darach mac Craobh-na-Beatha was sending the geàrd soilleir to kill him, it must have meant that something had happened. Either Cuileann’s illness had progressed, or perhaps Cairn’s healing was having a noticeable effect, or maybe something else had spurred the Sidhe King into action. Having been here, in Dunehame, Bran didn’t know. He only knew that whatever had happened would have left him dead if not for Jamie.
Given that, it was possible that the geàrd would now target them both. Which meant that not only did Bran owe Jamie his life, but he also would owe him an additional debt for the danger he’d put the half-breed in.
But there was no way Jamie could know any of that. And no way Bran could tell him.
He also couldn’t lie and tell Jamie that he wasn’t in any danger, because he almost certainly was.
Bran looked up and met Jamie’s beautiful blue-sky eyes with his own moss-green ones. “Aye,” he replied after far longer than was probably appropriate. “They did.”
“Why?”
Bran took another bite of the casserole, which was odd, but still fairly tasty, as a means of stalling while he tried to think of a way to truthfully answer Jamie’s question. “They want to get to my father,” he finally replied.
“So, like a mob thing?”
Bran’s fork paused again. “Mob… thing?” He had no idea what that meant.
“You know, mafia? Organized crime?”
Bran was starting to wish he’d spent more time paying attention to human history, or possibly television, since he wasn’t sure if this was one of those fictional things humans made up or an actual thing that humans had also made up.
“Gangs?” Jamie asked.
At least it was something Bran understood, even if it wasn’t quite the right comparison. “Aye, a bit like that.”
“But not actually?”
“No… Not exactly. We’re not trying to sell weapons or drugs, and neither are they, as far as I know.” He thought for a moment, trying to come up with a way to alleviate the obvious confusion on Jamie’s features. “It is… more ideological differences than territorial disputes.”
That had not helped, because now Jamie looked even more confused. “Ideological?”
Bran sighed. At least he was getting a sense for just how terribly any attempt to explain magic or the existence of fae and Elfhame would go. “About who is loyal to whom?”
“So… like the Yakuza? Except with fewer guns?”
Bran had no idea, but if it made sense to Jamie, he was going to go with it. “Aye, close enough.”
Jamie nodded, the confusion smoothing out of his forehead. “So they just want to kill you because of who your dad chose to follow?”
It wasn’t entirely inaccurate. “Aye.”
“What do they want your dad to do?” Jamie asked.
“Do?”
“Yeah. Like, if they’re trying to get to him, what do they think—what do they want from him?”
It was a good question, even if it was one that Bran hadn’t ever asked himself. Because why would he? The geàrd soilleir were trying to kill him to hurt his father, and they didn’t need a reason other than the fact that they were the geàrd soilleir and the Sidhe King commanded it.
But even if the geàrd were only acting on orders, it did cause Bran to wonder why, exactly, Darach mac Craobh-na-Beatha wanted his own son dead. It had simply been a fact his whole life—that the Sidhe King sought to kill the healer who could keep Cuileann mac Eug from death’s door.
“I dinna know,” he answered Jamie. “But they—or others like them—have been trying to kill him since I was a child.” His elder sister had been killed by the geàrd when he was seventeen, ambushing her without provocation. Others had died, seemingly of illness or accidents, and the geàrd had been suspected, but their guilt went unproven in most cases. Corraich’s death, unquestionably committed by the geàrd, was the beginning of more open and acknowledged war.
Not that there hadn’t been hostility between the Court of Shades and the Sunlit Court for many centuries—but before the attack that left Corraich dead, there hadn’t been obvious and direct violence for nearly fifteen hundred years. Longer than any of Bran’s siblings had been alive. Even now, skirmishes were waged on the fringes of the Courts, this agent or that soldier would be found dead, an enclave of Sluagh or Sidhe creatures utterly slaughtered.
