Threadbound, p.33
Threadbound, page 33
“Huh.”
“I wouldna try to eat them, though. If you swallow a cracked seed… well, it willna be pleasant. You’ll survive if you’re lucky and dinna eat too many. Probably.”
“No yew-berries. Got it.” Jamie studied the anail an duine mhairbh for another minute or two. “But you make it into wine?”
“Only for rituals and spells. It’s verra time-consuming.”
“And potentially deadly if you miss a seed.”
“That is why it’s verra time-consuming.”
Jamie’s lips quirked, and Bran couldn’t help the answering tilt of his own in response. Then Jamie’s eyes narrowed. “How did you do that at the last minute?” Jamie asked, searching Bran’s features.
Bran let out a long breath. “I dinna,” he replied. “I had it with me.” His brow furrowed again. “In the event that it became… necessary.”
“Because of the war?” Jamie’s question was soft.
“Aye. Although we werna quite certain if it yet was war.”
“I suppose that was your answer,” the half-breed murmured.
“Aye,” Bran confirmed.
Then Jamie looked back at the plant. “Do you think I could…” He let the question trail off.
“Aye, but we’ll have to go back to the Court for the proper tools so you don’t burn off your skin.”
The look Jamie turned on him made Bran want to do just about anything the man asked. “Really?”
He didn’t want to, but he found himself unable to say no to Jamie. “Aye.”
Chapter
Thirty-Nine
Jamie had been allowed in what he’d come to think of as Bran’s lab—although Bran referred to it as his workshop. There had been any number of books that Jamie’s fingers itched to explore, but he’d asked politely for anything more on the anail an duine mhairbh and what it could do. Bran had obliged, even trying to help, although neither of them had been able to find the recipe Jamie remembered.
Jamie was sitting at the heavy wooden table, the base dug into the ground as though the piece of furniture had been grown out of a living tree—which, for all Jamie knew, it had—staring into the flickering flames of a fire, trying to summon up anything that would be useful. He was absently doodling on the paper beside him, his hand automatically sketching out the lines of the other plants illustrated in the manuscript.
“Are these also in the recipe?” Bran’s voice asked from behind him, making Jamie jump a little.
“Oh! Um. Yeah.” He sat up, then rubbed at one tired eye.
“Ach. You’ve smudged—” Bran didn’t finish the sentence, but leaned forward, using his thumb to wipe charcoal from Jamie’s pencil off his cheek.
Jamie felt his cheeks flush. “Thanks.”
Bran nodded, his expression unreadable. Then he reached out, one taloned finger pointing to one of the plants in Jamie’s drawing. “This is a ite a selchidh. A selkie’s flipper. And this”—His finger pointed at another drawing.—“is seudan a ainnir, or maiden’s jewels.”
Jamie looked up. “What do they do?”
“The selkie’s flipper is a binder—when you pulp it, it becomes sticky and thick. It would make the mixture spreadable—more like a poultice than a liquid. Maiden’s jewels is used as an antidote to several poisons.”
“Like the…” Jamie paused, unable to remember the name Bran had used for his troublesome plant. “The dead man’s… whatever?”
“Dead man’s breath,” the fae supplied. “No. There is no antidote for that.” Bran pursed his lips. “None I know of, at any rate.”
“Could this be?”
Bran was shaking his head. “No. Maiden’s jewels is useful for most bites and stings, including the bite of the Cu Sith, and the venom of several other creatures, but I havena seen it used on plant-based poisons.”
Jamie didn’t ask what a Cu Sith was, mostly because he didn’t want to know. He was sure it was something dangerous and unpleasant, especially if you needed an antidote for its bite. Most things in Elfhame, as far as Jamie could tell, were dangerous and/or unpleasant, or at the very least terrifying.
Jamie had always imagined, when he’d been a child, that the fairy realm would be full of flowers and butterflies and delightful creatures—tiny little perfect people with gossamer wings, soft and fluffy rabbits, birds with long tails that shimmered in the sunlight.
There were birds with long tails, but Jamie mostly saw them at night, and they also had massive talons and a twisted double-beak that was clearly designed for predation, or at least ripping scavenged flesh off of bones. Patch was the closest thing Jamie’d seen to a butterfly, and while he’d grown fond of the gealach marcaiche, delicate and lovely Patch was not. Weirdly adorable, once you got over the creepiness of its six legs and fur and smushed face, but definitely not fairy-like.
It was pretty clear to Jamie that any human understanding of ‘fairy’ was horrifically flawed.
Or maybe it was just the Sluagh who were nightmarish. Bran had warned him that they were creatures of darkness and fear. Maybe if Jamie ever met the Sidhe, he would have a different view.
And that thought made him feel guilty, because he belonged to the Sluagh, for all intents and purposes. Or at least to Bran, who was Sluagh. Mostly. Jamie didn’t totally understand how that worked—Bran’s mother was something called a white lady, tall and ethereal, beautiful in a way that was almost painful. She was Sidhe, although Bran’s father, Cairn, was Sluagh, a wraith, his skin like stone.
Half of Bran’s siblings were Sidhe, and half were Slaugh, which Jamie supposed made sense, but only two took after their mother and another three after their father. The remaining five—because Bran had nine brothers and sisters—were other things entirely. Bran and his brother Iolair were both boobrie, Maigdeann and Iasg were finfolk, and Earrach was something called a ghillie du, a tall, dark-green and bark-skinned man who vaguely reminded Jamie of an Ent from The Lord of the Rings. Except a lot smaller.
But how a fair-skinned elven woman and a man built like a walking grave-statue genetically produced bird-shifters and tree-people and mermaids, Jamie had no idea. He also didn’t really want to ask, because either it was just overly personal and rude or not all of the siblings were actually related to their parents. Bringing it up would be horribly awkward no matter what.
“Jamie?” Bran interrupted his thoughts, and Jamie felt his cheeks heat.
“Sorry. Thinking,” he mumbled. “What would be an antidote to the dead man’s breath?” he asked.
Bran shook his head. “There isna one,” he replied. “Either you survive it, or you dinna.”
“Or apparently you’re dead already,” Jamie muttered.
“Aye,” Bran agreed. “Or that.” The matter-of-fact way he said it did not help Jamie feel any better.
But he found himself still deeply curious about the plant. About what it could do. What it did. What the author of the recipe book thought it did or could do. A few months ago, Jamie would have immediately dismissed the possibility of necromancy as fantasy or superstition. But that was before he watched a man turn into a bird, and that same man bring him to a place where nothing was quite right.
Including Jamie.
He sighed, his eyes staring half-unfocused at the doodled illustrations. “How did sketches of Elfhame plants end up in a recipe in Edinburgh?” Jamie asked.
Bran shook his head. “I dinna know,” he replied.
But Jamie was also shaking his head. “No, that’s the wrong question.”
“The wrong question?” Bran asked.
“Why did they end up in Edinburgh?”
Bran’s brow furrowed in a frown. “I dinna understand.”
“What was it that the recipe’s author was trying to do? Why did he or she choose dead man’s breath? How did they even know about it? And why are there also multiple antidotes?” Jamie was warming up to his subject now, drawn in by the intellectual puzzle, even despite the complexity of the fact that the plants in question were mixed across worlds.
Bran’s expression cleared, then clouded again, but the shadow on his features was thoughtful.
“Because,” Jamie continued, waving a hand with fingers darkened by charcoal, “I remember that there’s also ground pearl—which people thought acted as an antidote to various poisons.”
“Pearl?” Bran repeated.
“Yeah, you know, the little white gem—”
“Aye, I know what a pearl is,” the fae interrupted. “But why did they think it would cure poisoning?”
Jamie shrugged. “They also thought a stone from a goat’s stomach would work.”
“A bezoar?”
“You know about bezoars?” Jamie was surprised by that.
The smirk on Bran’s lips made Jamie a little nervous. “A bezoar is actually used to help cure several poisons,” the fae informed him, causing Jamie’s brow to furrow. “Including the poison that… forced you to send me back here.” Jamie opened his mouth to object that no doctors or scientists had ever discovered any such thing, but then the fae continued. “It just happens that they’re only useful against magical poisons.”
“Magical poisons,” Jamie repeated.
“Aye,” came the response. “They work to counter the magic involved, not the toxic substance of a more… conventional poison.”
Jamie blinked. “So… magic can be poison?”
“Aye, of course. Magic can be anything, in the hands of the right magus.”
Jamie ran a hand through his hair, causing Bran to make a soft sound. “What?”
“You’ve put charcoal in your hair,” the fae informed him, sounding amused.
“Oh.” Jamie’s cheeks flushed.
Bran’s fingers flexed, and Jamie wondered whether the fae was suppressing an impulse to run them through Jamie’s hair, going after the smudges tarnishing Jamie’s blond waves. Jamie held his breath for a few seconds, his pulse speeding up at the thought of Bran’s talons scraping along his scalp. But then the moment passed, Bran turning away and disappointment flooding Jamie’s already hot face.
Jamie still didn’t understand what he’d done wrong. Or hadn’t done. He’d tried telling himself repeatedly that fae took sex much more casually than he did—that Bran had just done what he would have done with any other fae, if they’d been in that position.
It didn’t make Jamie feel any better. Not that he hadn’t enjoyed himself—because he definitely had—but because he wanted more, and Bran clearly wasn’t interested in more. Which meant that Jamie spent most of his time pining when he couldn’t manage to distract himself by trying to teach Patch how to fetch or tying knots—most of them intentionally chosen—in just about any material he could find.
Jamie cleared his throat. “So bezoars. Actually help against poison?”
Bran took pity on him, or so Jamie assumed, and returned to the conversation. “Aye, they do.”
Jamie suppressed a groan, rubbing his hands over his face, unknowingly smearing more charcoal across his features. It was nearly noon, sun filtering through the leaves and pane-less windows to paint shadows and light across the pile of books and papers Jamie had spent the better part of the last…
He squinted up at the light.
The last seventeen or so hours?
He sat back in his chair—which, while definitely more comfortable than the chairs he sat in at the university library, was not the most ergonomic thing he’d ever sat in—twisting a little to crack his spine and ease the tight muscles of his back.
Patch, lying on a pile of papers like an extremely deranged version of the Cheshire cat, looked up, blinking through slitted eyes at Jamie as though asking why on earth he was still awake at this time of day.
Even after weeks spent in the Court of Shades, Jamie still wasn’t used to a nocturnal life. He’d essentially given up, generally staying awake through most of the daylight hours, then trying to stay up as long as possible at night before crashing sometime around four in the morning.
It was wreaking havoc on his body—not enough sleep, mounting stress at the thought of a war he knew nothing about, more stress about the disastrous state of his not-relationship with Bran, and even more stress about the fact that he knew everyone at the Court thought of him as a freak of nature at best and an unwanted interloper at worst. He didn’t need to understand the intricacies of fae culture—which he definitely did not—to read the disdain in the glances cast his way.
Jamie really just… wanted to go home.
He sighed, then reached out and ran his fingers over Patch’s ears. The gealach marcaiche let out a soft thrum, and Jamie felt a little guilty. There was no possible way he could bring Patch home with him, and he’d grown as attached to the fluffy monstrosity as the gealach marcaiche seemed to be to him. But the idea of bringing it back…
If someone didn’t freak out and kill the poor thing, Patch would likely panic at the sights and sounds of cars, fly away, and get lost in Edinburgh. And if a person didn’t kill it, it might well die of exposure or starvation or—
No, he definitely couldn’t bring Patch back with him.
But he still wanted to go home. To see Trixie and Rob again, assuming either of them would ever forgive him for abandoning them without so much as a Hey, guys, I have an emergency to go deal with. He had no idea how long he’d been gone. What felt like weeks could be hours or days or years or even decades, if some of the texts he’d read about the fairy realm could be believed. Some could, he knew, while others got things horribly wrong, so he had no idea how time passed while he was here.
For all he knew, they’d declared him dead, or at least missing, he’d lost his apartment, his place at the university, his job at the Surgeons’ Hall Museums, and Rob and Trixie had completely forgotten he’d existed.
Jamie must have made some sort of noise of distress, because Bran stirred in the chair where he’d curled up an hour or so after dawn.
“All right?” the fae asked, his brogue made thicker by sleep. Jamie found it disturbingly adorable, but he set his jaw against the smile that tried to reshape his features. He needed to go back to Edinburgh, and he couldn’t let himself get distracted by a fae who clearly didn’t think of him the same way.
It would be easier just to rip off the proverbial bandaid.
“I—want to go home,” Jamie answered, opting for brutal honesty.
Bran sat up a little more, blinking dark green eyes as though he hadn’t quite processed the words. If Jamie had wanted him to object, he didn’t, although he didn’t look happy about Jamie’s pronouncement, either. “You dinna like it here?” Bran said, finally, although the tone of the question was more of a statement than an interrogatory.
Jamie shrugged, his cheeks heating again as he toyed with Patch’s soft ears. “I like it fine,” he answered, knowing he sounded sullen. “I’m not sure it likes me back, though.” I’m not sure you like me back, he thought, although he didn’t have enough courage to say that part out loud. “I don’t belong here,” he said, instead.
Bran pressed his lips together, but he didn’t argue. Jamie couldn’t decide if he wished Bran had, or if he was relieved that the fae seemed to agree with his assessment.
“I need to go back to my work,” Jamie continued. “My research. My job.” He sighed. “If I even still have a job.”
“You dinna find what you need here?” Bran asked him.
“I—don’t actually know,” Jamie admitted. “I can’t remember all the details of the recipes. I need the book, or at least my notes, and I don’t have either here. This is—” He gestured around the explosion of books and papers. “This is honestly fantastic, but it doesn’t mean anything without the original.” He sighed again. “And there’s nothing for me to do with it here. It’s not like the fae have peer-reviewed journals.” Jamie narrowed his eyes at Bran. “Do you?”
“No, we dinna have… peer-reviewed journals.” The fae’s lips twitched. “At least I dinna think so, but I dinna actually know what that means.”
“It’s… researchers. Other people who research the same thing, those are your peers. They read your stuff, and if they think it’s good enough, then they publish it.”
“So you share your knowledge with others?”
Jamie frowned. “Don’t you?”
“Oh, aye,” the fae replied, sitting up straighter and rubbing the sleep from his eyes, his feathered hair shimmering with slight iridescence in the sunlight. “We share recipes and lend books and work together over the pestle and cauldron.”
Jamie nodded. “That sounds…” He struggled to find the words.
Bran arched elegant eyebrows, waiting.
“Nice?” Jamie finished, color suffusing his cheeks again. It wasn’t the right word—inadequate to what he imagined was a joyful camaraderie shared over herbs and fire and dusty tomes.
“Nice,” Bran repeated.
“I mean—I wish that was how it worked in my world,” Jamie blurted. “But we—you have to make money, so you need a job, and to get a job in academia you have to publish, and…”
“So money is the problem, then,” Bran remarked, sounding mildly amused.
Jamie wasn’t sure what to say to that. Bran wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t like Jamie had a choice, since he lived in the world… Well, he supposed now he did have a choice. He could go back to his own world, with its capitalism and poverty and violence, or stay here, in Elfhame, where money meant nothing.
Put like that, it was tempting to imagine staying, studying potion recipes and herbal remedies here in this room full of books and dappled sunlight, never having to worry about his precarious finances ever again.
And never see Trixie and Rob again. Never see Billy or Nora or Ginny or Tommy. People who cared about him. Who needed him. Because it wasn’t just about him. It was about everyone else who relied on him.
He did want to go home for himself, too. Because Edinburgh was the first place he’d felt like he could belong—and Elfhame definitely didn’t feel that way.
“There are always problems,” is what he finally said out loud. “No matter where you are. But at least that’s home.” And then Jamie cursed inwardly as Bran’s expression clouded.
