Threadbound, p.19
Threadbound, page 19
He also had to hope he was the only one attempting to make the crossing. Weak and still sick as he was, Bran knew that if he encountered the geàrd soilleir or any other agent of the Sidhe king, he was liable to end up dead or dying—imprisoned if he was particularly unlucky, although his magic was just as likely to kill him at that point as any torture inflicted on him by Darach mac Craobh-na-Beatha or the members of the Sunlit Court.
Truth be told, Bran wasn’t actually sure how many members of the Sidhe were truly loyal to their king. In name, of course, but his own siblings were Sidhe, and they had made it clear that their loyalty was to their family first—to Cairn mac Darach and Gaotha nì A’Mhuir. Bran’s mother had chosen to make her life in the Court of Shades, and so all of Bran’s brothers and sisters—Sidhe and Sluagh alike—had followed her example, even if a few of them had chosen not to literally live in the Court of Shades, their fealty was to their father and great-uncle, Cuileann mac Eug, the Sluagh King.
Perhaps there were other Sidhe outside of the Court of Shades who felt the same—whose families had both dark blood and light, or whose view of the world was not as clearly cut as that put forth by Darach mac Craobh-na-Beatha.
So much of Bran’s life had been dedicated to the Court and to his father, as Neach-Cogaidh, that Bran hadn’t had the time or energy to think deeply about the lives of the Sidhe beyond the Sunlit Court. But, he supposed, if the Sidhe King truly was the tyrant his father believed him to be—and Darach was Cairn’s own father—then would it not be likely that there were Sidhe who also disliked the way their king chose to rule the day?
Bran sighed. His life had been much simpler as Neach-Cogaidh, sworn to protect the Court of Shades, sworn to obey his father and his father’s guard, including his own elder siblings.
But it was clear to Bran that his days as Neach-Cogaidh were over. Even if he managed to salvage his magic, he had neglected his duties and his studies. Yes, Cairn had given him leave to deal with the ravaging effects of his incomplete threadbond, but Bran could no longer pretend—even to himself—that he was in any state to go back to the fulfillment of his oath to the Court. He could only beg his father’s forgiveness and his great-uncle’s dispensation.
Both of which he had done in the letter he’d left behind on the table in his rooms, along with an apology to Maigdeann, asking her to please convey his regrets to the rest of their brothers and sisters, as well as their mother.
Bran paused at a break in the trail, an evened-out portion of the pathway before it resumed its climb to the grove surrounding Carraig Gate. Around him, wind pushed its way through whispering grasses, delicate blossoms in bright pinks and yellows and purples splashed through the strands of green-gold-silver. It was beautiful. Day or night, the fields surrounding the Courts were stunning in their celebration of both life and death.
The danger of those grasses was unapparent to the untrained eye, but the quicksilver edges of the sgian feur would cut open exposed flesh, and the roots of the purple-painted fuil-freumh would drink it as quickly as the grasses spilled it. Life, for all its vivacious beauty, was as dangerous as death.
Bran resumed walking, wiping the sweat from his forehead, the heat and his own traitorous body making him dizzy. Not dizzy enough to stop, but enough to remind him why he was climbing toward the Gate to begin with. Why he had to return to Dunehame and to Jamie.
Because of his magic.
Definitely not because he was becoming attached to Jamie.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
It was cool—almost chilly—when Jamie finished lacing up his running shoes to head out to the crags, his knees almost completely healed from his fall a few weeks ago. Just a few tiny pink marks from where some of the bigger stones had bit into the skin. He’d been running even more than usual—he was restless and irritable, his muscles tense and his skin too tight. Not unlike the night he’d found Bran under attack.
Except Bran had gone back to his world, and Jamie was stuck in this one, at odds with himself and stressed about the fact that he wasn’t able to make progress with his research.
Or his social life.
Trixie and Rob were being patient with him, but they were clearly both worried about him and frequently annoyed at his dour presence. So he’d been mostly avoiding them, except for at work and the occasional meal when he couldn’t come up with a plausible excuse or needed groceries anyway.
He was also running more without really eating more, because he didn’t have the money for it. Running didn’t cost him anything, but food did. So he was also losing weight—not a lot, not to the point where it was really a problem, but he also knew that what he was doing to himself wasn’t healthy.
But Jamie couldn’t figure out what else to do with himself, because he had too much energy and not enough focus to do anything else. He’d tied several impossible knots in his macramé, forcing him to have to start over on more than one project, which had only made things worse by adding frustration to his restlessness.
It wasn’t a good situation.
And Jamie had no idea what to do about it. He felt bad about the shortness of his temper, but he couldn’t help it.
He wasn’t doing any better finding that damn thistle-burdock-knapweed-sea-holly, either. He’d sent off a photo of the stupid thing to medieval medical and herbal scholars all over Europe, and had gotten through three botany textbooks on Scotland, one on Wales, two on Ireland, and was working his way through the fourth on the whole of Great Britain, and so far had no luck.
He’d taken the drawing to the botany department on campus, and they’d only been able to give him the same recommendations he’d already found, but the shape of the blossom—if that’s what it was—was wrong in one, the leaves were wrong in another two or three, and the root system was wrong for something else.
Jamie was starting to think the damn thing didn’t exist. That the author of the herbal was insane or hallucinating or just making up plants because they could.
He’d even tried a paleobotanist, thinking that maybe the stupid thing was extinct now, but had existed in the fifteenth century, but he’d been told that wasn’t likely.
So he was agitated, hadn’t gotten a decent night of sleep in he didn’t know how long, wasn’t really eating right, and couldn’t make headway on his dissertation project.
Which meant he was spending far too much time running. Even as he took the stairs down from his floor, he could feel the fatigue in his leg muscles.
It was a bad idea, running on tired legs and not enough food. But he’d learned that it was a worse idea not to run, because then he practically bit people’s heads off at work or in the library.
So he ran.
Down the slope of the Royal Mile, around the corner at Holyrood, and up the path that led to Arthur’s Seat, his eyes peeled for any more sightings of whatever-the-hell that laughing creature had been.
Jamie wasn’t looking at the sky, and he didn’t notice a shadow pass over him—it was overcast, the cloud cover heavy, but not with rain—yet. It would before the day was over, Bran could tell that by the thickness in the air and the feel of water reaching from the sky to the earth below.
Bran knew better than to fly along with Jamie on his runs when the sun was out, so he was taking advantage of the grey day to follow the half-breed as his feet pounded up the gravel path.
Bran had no intention of letting Jamie know he was there.
He couldn’t help himself—he was drawn to Jamie Weaver like the proverbial moth to the flame—but he also wasn’t about to force Jamie into anything. He already owed Jamie his life. Twice. He didn’t think he would ever be able to repay that debt, but he also had the feeling—a premonition, almost—that if Jamie knew he was there, Bran would end up owing him so much more.
Because Jamie wouldn’t be able to stop himself from helping. And the only thing that could help Bran now was to complete the threadbond.
Which he was not going to do.
Not if it killed him, which it probably would.
Jamie’s heart was in his throat, pounding both from the run and from having noticed the black shadow high in the sky and a little behind him. Too big for a common crow, the wrong shape for a vulture or an eagle.
It had to be Bran.
It was clear that Bran didn’t want Jamie knowing he was there.
Jamie almost hadn’t seen him—just a glimpse in his peripheral vision as he rounded the curve at the top of the crag. But he couldn’t look, because if he did, then Bran would fly away.
Jamie didn’t want him to do that.
It was stupid, Jamie knew that. Stupid that he was invested in Bran being near him—if anything, it should have been creepy. The notion that he was being followed, or stalked, if you asked Rob, by a fairy should have bothered him. Scared him, even.
But Jamie felt calmer than he had in weeks, his gait evening out and the breath coming deeper into his lungs as his whole body relaxed, just from knowing Bran was there.
Jamie didn’t understand why—no, that was a lie. He did understand why. He understood that this feeling of calm was the result of having his crush—because that’s what it was—notice him and be interested in him. Because he wasn’t just pining for someone who didn’t know or care about his existence.
Bran cared. Why, Jamie had no idea.
It probably wasn’t for a good reason, or at least not a reason that would end up being good for Jamie.
In between bouts of banging his head against the wall that was the thistle-burdock-knapweed-sea-holly, Jamie had tried to learn as much as he could about fairies. He’d looked in old folklore books—with the ostensible excuse that his thistle-burdock-knapweed-sea-holly might show up there somewhere—and online, trying to find out anything he could about fae, fairies, and shape-shifters.
What he’d learned was that there were a whole lot of contradictory stories about them.
Bran had used the words Sluagh and Unseelie, so that’s what Jamie had used in his searches, but that had really only led him to a lot of fantasy novels and a few folklore sites. Fairies had been more productive, particularly in the archives, and that was the word his momma had always used. It got him lots of names of creatures—pixies, brownies, red caps, and so on—and he’d even come across a mention of bookas, which were apparently more or less friendly domestic creatures who could either help around the house or, if they didn’t like you, break or hide things.
The one thing that nearly every place he looked said was that fairies, especially the Sluagh or Unseelie, weren’t to be trusted, not as far as you could throw them, but that they were also bound by rules.
You had to invite them in—like vampires. Well, Jamie was pretty sure he’d already botched that one by literally bringing Bran into his apartment. But an invitation to one fairy wasn’t an invitation to all of them. At least… he didn’t think so, although maybe the dish of milk and honey counted as an invitation to the bookas? At least bookas were supposed to be helpful, or at least harmless unless you did something to make them angry.
Shape-shifters, not so much. Although he hadn’t really been able to find any mention of bird-shifters, the few he’d found—dogs and cats and wolves, mostly—were predatory and highly dangerous. In fact, pretty much everything under the category of Sluagh or Unseelie was dangerous or downright evil.
Of course, Jamie knew better than anyone that you had to take anything you found in folklore with a liberal dose of salt, given that they also thought that bathing in the moonlight would either give you or cure you of warts and that bleeding was the ideal treatment for pretty much everything else.
But all the books and pamphlets and websites agreed that fairy shifters were definitely not to be trusted and would probably steal your infants. Jamie didn’t have any infants, so he was pretty sure that’s not why Bran was interested in him, but he hadn’t been able to figure out what it was Bran wanted.
He wasn’t a virgin, so the idea of being a virgin sacrifice was out. No kids, so Bran wasn’t looking to exchange Jamie’s child for a changeling. Jamie didn’t have any goats or sheep or horses. He definitely wasn’t a maiden. And he didn’t have a hoard of silver and jewels hidden away under the floorboards of his apartment.
He also wasn’t a witch.
Jamie’s best guess is that Bran was interested in his research—that Jamie had found some book or recipe, maybe even the thistle-burdock-knapweed-sea-holly recipe, that did something the fairy wanted or needed. Or maybe the book itself was even from fairyland, which might explain why Jamie couldn’t figure out what the stupid recipe was even for. Then again, there wasn’t really a point in having a fairy recipe book in the human world—and several of the other ingredients were definitely things that Jamie could identify and access. And that made him wonder if things like hyssop and elderflower also grew in fairyland.
He could ask Bran—but he was pretending that he didn’t know Bran was following him.
Jamie continued on the path, turning away from the part of the crag that overlooked Edinburgh Castle, perched on the edge of the cliff above the rest of the city. As the sun rose higher, it painted the windows of the surrounding buildings—simple houses, apartments, and castles alike—a rosy gold. It was beautiful, in an odd, post-industrial kind of way. Especially surrounded as Jamie was with grasses, stones, and soil.
The contrast between the city built up over centuries and the rough and unrelenting grace of stone and earth made Jamie wonder what Bran thought of the contrast between human development and the natural world. It made him wonder whether the fae had built up their world—whether they had skyscrapers and factories that churned out strange mechanical monsters the way that humans did.
It was actually a little annoying how many questions Jamie had about fairies, or whatever they called themselves. About magic. About what their world was like.
And he couldn’t ask, because he was fairly certain that the minute he turned around and even looked at the raven carefully pacing just behind him, Bran would fly off. But Jamie drew a certain amount of comfort from the fact that Bran was there. He knew that was completely irrational, since Bran’s presence could actually be putting him in danger—or, hell, Bran could be a danger to Jamie, depending on what he needed or wanted… especially since well more than half of the things Jamie had found about fae suggested that whatever Bran was up to was probably going to end with Jamie dead, maimed, enslaved, trapped, or otherwise filled with regret about whatever it was that Bran was going to do to him.
But he felt better with Bran as his aerial shadow, more grounded.
It should have bothered him. Jamie knew that—he should be more worried about the fact that he seemed to need Bran’s proximity in order to feel normal. Like he’d been cursed or something.
Up until a few weeks ago, Jamie wouldn’t have even thought such a thing—he didn’t believe in things like curses or magic or fairies, even if he found some small sense of superstitious comfort in repeating the rituals his momma had done. To his mind, they were things that provided psychological comfort—a kind of behavior-based psychosomatic effect. Nothing more.
And now he wasn’t so sure.
Fairies were clearly real. By extension, magic was real. It had to be. There was no other logical—if you could even call it logical—explanation for how Bran had moved from this world to his own. And if magic that could move a fairy between worlds was real, then why not other types of magic? Curses and spells and…
And the recipes and spells in the books he’d been studying.
On top of that, now Jamie wondered whether magic could be real in both places—fairyland and the human world.
If that was true, though, why had people stopped using magic? Had they lost the ability? Or was it a cultural thing, where people had stopped doing it because of oppression, like the church? Certainly, Jamie was familiar enough with the Scottish witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Witch hunts that had ravaged most of Europe—although, weirdly, not England—and even spread into the Americas. He’d grown up learning about Salem and The Crucible in school.
What if witchcraft was real? What if Tituba and her husband John really had magical abilities, and later historians had just dismissed them as the result of rotten rye or group hysteria? Tituba herself hadn’t been killed along with the nineteen others, after all.
Jamie shook his head at himself a little as his stride lengthened out on the downslope of the crag’s pathway. All he could really do at this point was speculate—because the one person who might be able to answer his questions didn’t want to talk to him.
Bran obviously didn’t want to ignore him, but he clearly hadn’t reached out to Jamie. And while Jamie was glad that Bran was back—and alive—it kind of stung that the fairy didn’t actually want to talk to him. Which was completely ridiculous, given the fact that Jamie barely knew him—and he certainly didn’t know how much of what little he thought he knew was even real. Maybe Bran’s name wasn’t even Bran. Or anything that Jamie was capable of pronouncing.
Jamie shook his head again, trying to dispel the intrusion of his own scattered thoughts. Bran being with him might have been calming his agitation, but it wasn’t really helping his insatiable curiosity.
It did at least make him feel a little better about the state of his own sanity, though. Since Bran was back, that meant he was real…
Except that Jamie had no actual evidence that the oversized probably-raven following him was anything other than a really fat bird.
Nothing other than a feeling deep in his bones.
So either magic was real, or he was losing his grip on sanity and reality.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
Jamie had gotten in the habit of leaving out milk and honey whenever he left his apartment now—always on the ledge of the window that faced away from busy Nicolson Street, which seemed to be the bookas’ preferred location. The fact that every day when he came home it had been partially drunk helped to make him feel a little less like he might be hallucinating or delusional… although no one else had confirmed that the milk was missing.
