Threadbound, p.34
Threadbound, page 34
“I—I can take you back,” the fae said softly, and the heaviness in his tone made Jamie wonder if maybe Bran actually wanted him to stay. Then the fae shifted, pushing himself to his feet. “Will tomorrow be soon enough?” Bran asked, and whatever Jamie’d thought he heard in Bran’s tone was gone.
“Yeah,” Jamie agreed, mingled excitement and disappointment churning together in his gut. “Yeah, that’s fine.”
Bran nodded once. “Verra well. I will see you after dark, then.” And the fae walked out, leaving Jamie to scribble down whatever other notes he could before heading back to his rooms to pull together the few things he considered his.
Bran led the way back down the pathway, trying to ignore both the weight in his chest and the sound of Jamie talking to the gealach marcaiche that he’d named ‘Patch.’ Bran hadn’t told him that no one ever named a gealach marcaiche, partly because Jamie seemed so fond of the damn thing, and partly because he’d never seen one actually attach itself to someone the way this one had. Maybe it liked having a name.
Bran also couldn’t blame the damn thing for clinging to Jamie. He’d done the same himself, and he hadn’t even wanted to. He’d tried his best not to be, and yet here they were, threadbound.
Then again, he was walking Jamie back to the Carraig Gate so that the half-breed could return to Dunehame.
Bran wasn’t surprised that Jamie wanted to go home. He wasn’t really disappointed, either—not about Jamie wanting to go back to Dunehame. He had been at first, of course, but it made sense that Jamie would feel more comfortable in Edinburgh. Now Bran was disappointed that Jamie hadn’t expressed a desire for Bran to come with him. Or even visit.
In fact, Jamie was saying more to the gealach marcaiche than he had to Bran. And that also stung. So did the fact that Bran was fairly sure Jamie would miss Patch more than the half-breed would miss him.
Bran had no idea what had gone wrong. He’d been over the past few weeks again and again, trying to determine when the magnetism between them had turned to repulsion—at least on Jamie’s side. It was still definitely magnetism for Bran, who found himself annoyingly tongue-tied when in a room with Jamie, caught up in the web of his own emotions and unable to find the words he needed to smooth over the roughness that marred the space between them.
Bran suppressed a sigh as he climbed the hill leading up to the Gate, trying to ignore the leaden feeling in his legs. The threadbond had gone a long way to improving things—his magic was much more stable and steady, and simple spells no longer left him shaking, but if he’d expected to go back to the way he’d been at twenty-five before the threadbond had started leeching away his magic, he was sorely mistaken.
It was also possible that the geàrd soilleir’s poisoned blade was responsible for Bran’s continued weakness, as his father and Maigdeann seemed to think. Bran wasn’t so certain. Yes, his magic felt more like it used to, but the magic still drained him far faster than it should have, and in addition to the exhaustion and weakness, he had occasional bouts of feeling feverish and dizzy, both of which he remembered clearly from before the geàrd attack.
And perhaps the symptoms only persisted because of the poison, where they would not have without it, but they had no way of knowing. Which also meant that Bran had no way of knowing if his current failures as a warrior and magus were to be laid at the feet of the Sidhe King or his own sharp talons. If he were being honest with himself—which he’d been too often in recent days—it was probably both.
Either way, Bran knew that he was failing not only his people, his father, and his family, but also Jamie. Because Bran was under no illusions that the Sidhe King was going to be dissuaded from his murderous intent where Jamie was concerned just because they had completed the threadbond. If anything, it likely meant that Jamie could be in even more danger.
Fear settled in his chest, hot and tight. He wanted to warn Jamie, to beg him to stay in Elfhame where he could be kept safe at the Court of Shades. But that wasn’t fair to Jamie. It was clear that the half-breed was still uncomfortable in Elfhame—that he felt as though he didn’t belong. And Bran wasn’t blind. He’d seen the looks that some of the other Sluagh at Court had shot in Jamie’s direction. Even the handful of Sidhe—like Maigdeann and his mother, Gaotha nì A’Mhuir—who lived at the Court of Shades were uncertain what to do either with or about Jamie Weaver.
He was clearly a creature of daylight—his inability to adjust to the nocturnal schedule of the Sluagh Court, his squeamishness about the casual violence of combat training, and his overall discomfort with the darker magics of the Sluagh were testament enough to that. But the Court would adjust, as it had to Gaotha, when Cairn mac Darach had brought her home as his bride a thousand years ago.
Not that Jamie was going to want to wait the several centuries it would take.
Which was another thing he hadn’t asked and Bran hadn’t mentioned. Now that he was threadbound to Bran, Jamie’s lifespan would slow and move at the same pace as that of any other fae. He would watch the people he loved in Dunehame age while staying—to their short-lived eyes—exactly the same age. And he would watch their children, and their children’s children do the same, if he stayed close enough.
It was that, the change in time, that drove most human threadbound to return, in time, to Elfhame. To beg to be brought back to a place where the people they knew aged as they did, instead of growing old and dying in the short span of a century.
Bran hadn’t had the heart to tell Jamie that the people he was returning for would die long before he would—assuming he survived the Sidhe King’s next attempts on his life.
Bran was going back with him. Not right at this moment—Jamie would object, loudly, and Bran both didn’t have the stomach for it and wasn’t going to listen anyway. It was because of him that Jamie was at risk, and that obligated him to keep Jamie safe, whether or not Jamie agreed.
Legs and lungs tight, Bran crested the top of Carraig Cnoc, the hilltop on which the Gate sat that led to the massive gnarled tree in Greyfriars Kirkyard. He paused beside the archway, stone and moss and twisted vines, that would give Jamie passage back to Dunehame. He didn’t turn around, although he heard Jamie’s feet come to a stop on the pathway behind him.
“Will—Will you take him?” Jamie asked, and Bran swallowed back the knot that had formed in his throat at the first word, wanting the question to have been different. Jamie was holding the gealach marcaiche, looking over its head at Bran. The creature’s ears were back, and it was clearly not happy. As though it understood something of what Jamie had been telling it.
“Aye,” Bran answered, even though he had no intention of staying in Elfhame more than a handful of days after Jamie left. He had a few things to take care of—his father to convince, for one. Not that he thought the gealach marcaiche would need caring for, since he was fairly certain the creature would fly off as soon as Jamie was gone. If not—well, that would be something else he’d have to figure out.
So he let Jamie coax Patch onto his much narrower shoulders, where the creature huddled uncomfortably, making small cries that Bran wasn’t sure Jamie could hear, but which broke his heart. Or maybe his heart was breaking anyway, and the gealach marcaiche was simply voicing what they both felt.
“Ready?” Bran asked, unable to think of anything else to say.
“Yeah,” Jamie answered, then flashed a smile that seemed uncertain, but still genuine. “Ready to go home.” There was satisfaction in his tone. Anticipation. What Bran didn’t hear was regret or hesitation.
So, with a nod, he began the spell that would open Carraig Gate, drawing magic from the ground, the sky, the twisted vines and moss and stone of the Gate itself. It was more difficult than it should have been, but not so much that he wouldn’t be able to walk back down the hill, gealach marcaiche on his shoulders.
Within the frame of the Gate, the air shimmered, rippling like water, the crests and troughs of the waves undulating between the greens of Elfhame and the grey stone and brown grass of the Kirkyard in winter, glass and steel rising beyond the stone walls. A tingle started on the back of Bran’s neck, but it was bearable. It also might have been the gealach marcaiche’s fur, but he couldn’t let himself be distracted by it.
“Go,” he breathed.
His heart almost stopped when Jamie hesitated on the threshold, lower lip caught in his teeth.
“I—I’m sorry,” the half-breed said, the emotion in his voice regretful. “For whatever I did.” And then he was gone, and Bran’s speechlessness no longer mattered.
He answered anyway.
“You dinna do anything.”
Chapter
Forty
Time apparently didn’t move any differently in Elfhame than it did in the mortal world—which Jamie supposed was probably a good thing, since his landlord hadn’t evicted him in absentia and taken his stuff, and nobody had declared him legally dead yet, although he had needed to spend the better part of an afternoon in the office of a very annoyed police detective trying to explain why he’d gone missing for seventeen days without saying a word to anyone.
He’d made up something about having lost his phone and being in a remote part of the highlands without reliable service, staying with a friend’s family who were off grid. It wasn’t exactly a lie, since you couldn’t get more off grid than Elfhame, but it wasn’t something the police could verify, either. Jamie was fairly certain they didn’t believe him, but there wasn’t really anything they could do about it, and Jamie absolutely wasn’t going to tell them the truth.
But since Jamie wasn’t dead and didn’t seem to have stolen anything or otherwise violated the law, the police let him go with nothing more than a strongly-worded warning to not do something that stupid again. Jamie said he wouldn’t, but some part of his brain couldn’t help speculating that he very well might. Especially since he missed Bran and Patch a lot more than he’d thought he would.
Especially Bran. He’d known he was going to miss Patch.
But it wasn’t like he could bring a gealach marcaiche back with him. A six-legged furry pug-faced moth-creature the size of a koala was not something you could just hide in your apartment. Or put in a cat carrier.
Was it?
Lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, Jamie was sorely tempted to buy a carrier and go back to the Kirkyard to see if he could ask Bran to let him bring Patch. Assuming the poor thing wouldn’t die of starvation or poisoning or something if he took it away from Elfhame. But it was hard not to lie there and think about how Patch must be wondering where he’d gone and why he didn’t come back. Which made him feel horrible.
Jamie sighed into the darkness.
He’d also had to do an epic clean-out of his fridge, and he’d had to grovel to his extremely nice and tolerant landlady while holding out a check that was at least only a handful of days late. And he’d done even more groveling to both Rob and Trixie, thanking Trixie for the tapestry of lies she’d told their boss at the Surgeons’ Hall Museums about a family emergency.
Jamie’d also told Rob and Trixie a lie—ish. He’d said Bran was really sick and that he’d asked Jamie to come back home with him, and that his family lived in the northern highlands off grid and that he’d totally forgotten his charger, not that they’d had power or internet anyway. It was roughly the same lie he’d told the police, so at least there was some consistency there.
The difficulty came when Trixie asked if Bran had come back with him, and Jamie’d had to admit that he hadn’t. And that he wasn’t going to. Or, at least, that Jamie didn’t think he was. Which led to Trixie trying to take him out for a consoling drink over his ‘breakup,’ which Jamie was doing his best to avoid because it only compounded his guilt. Because he and Bran hadn’t ever been dating, really, which made his actual upset about it even more ridiculous.
It wasn’t even like Bran had asked him to leave—that had been Jamie’s decision. It just… had been really obvious that Bran didn’t want his company. That whatever it was that had originally drawn Bran to him was now gone.
Jamie still kept an eye out for ravens, though. Just in case.
So far, not a one. Not even a normal-sized one, although Jamie felt compelled to look closely every time he saw a crow or a blackbird.
What he had seen were the bookas who lived in his apartment, one of which had come out to wave at him and make odd chirping sounds his first night back, and he’d apologized for having gone missing, which the creature dismissed with a wave. After throwing out almost everything in his fridge—some of which was disturbing colors and textures—he’d gone to buy the absolute bare minimum of groceries, but made sure to include milk. Thankfully honey didn’t go bad, so at least there was that.
It was a little depressing going back to his impoverished-student defaults of packet noodles, cheap bread, and a jumbo jar of peanut butter. It may not have been terribly Scottish, but peanut butter had a lot of calories.
Salty noodles and peanut butter toast was about all he could afford after having not worked for a few weeks, and it was a far cry from what he’d been eating in Elfhame. But he was home, and that was more important than some tasty-but-mostly-unidentifiable food.
Right?
Jamie sighed and prodded his noodles with a fork. The mortal world was not doing a terribly good job of recommending itself right at that precise moment. He’d gotten himself back on the work schedule—Trixie’s lie about a family emergency meant he hadn’t been fired, and he was absolutely going to buy her an amazing dinner anywhere she wanted… just as soon as he managed to save up enough money—so he’d be back to work in the morning.
It all felt completely ordinary.
And absolutely boring.
Nothing like discovering the existence of the fairy realm and spending weeks there surrounded by the beautiful and bizarre to make your mundane life seem extra dull in comparison.
Jamie sighed again, then forced himself to eat a mouthful of noodles. He just had to get back into his rhythm, that was all.
Bran had learned his lesson about following Jamie too closely. He knew he was successful at going undetected this time because no food had appeared on Jamie’s windowsill—or, at least, Bran chose to believe that no food had appeared on Jamie’s windowsill because Jamie didn’t know he was there, not because Jamie was upset with him. Bran was also fairly certain that Jamie wasn’t the sort of person to deliberately withhold food from someone just because he was angry with them—he was too generous and too kind. Although perhaps it was that Jamie knew Bran didn’t like owing him, so he was doing it for Bran’s sake…
The fae shook his feathered head, trying to physically force himself to stop running through all the possible scenarios of what Jamie Weaver might or might not be thinking. He knew full well he was terrible at understanding—much less predicting—Jamie’s thoughts.
Even though he had to keep his distance, Bran could read stress and disappointment in the set of Jamie’s shoulders, the rounded curve of his back, the shuffle of his steps against the cobblestones. The fact that he’d only been on one run in the past four days. And that wasn’t like Jamie at all. Even in Elfhame, Jamie had made a point of running—around the inner wall of the Court of Shades, outside the wall when he could get Eadar to go with him, through the halls when he couldn’t find anywhere else—at least every other day.
Not going for a run through familiar territory for three straight days meant something was wrong—and he didn’t seem sick. Worried, upset, unsettled…
Bran was also worried. Specifically, about Jamie.
Everything Jamie was experiencing, whether it was fear or sadness or something else, was Bran’s fault. The fae couldn’t decide if it would have been better to have just stayed away from Jamie altogether, letting the half-breed live his own life never knowing about Bran’s existence or his fae nature, or whether he should have just taken Jamie and bound them together when they’d come of age… He didn’t know what the right choice would have been—but he did know that the choice he had made had only caused both of them misery.
But it was what it was, and the least Bran could try to do was compensate for the chaos he’d caused. Even though Bran wasn’t human, he understood that Jamie had to work for money, and that without money, Jamie couldn’t afford food and shelter. While he’d been staying in Elfhame, Jamie had not been working, and that meant that now he didn’t have enough money to buy the things he needed.
What Bran couldn’t decide was whether or not Jamie would accept money from him. Or if Jamie would be more likely to take it if Bran delivered it himself or left it for him on his windowsill or doorstep.
But even above and beyond the guilt and obligation Bran felt for Jamie’s present circumstances, he really just wanted to see the old Jamie back—the bounce in his step, the half-curve on one side of his mouth when he ran, the sparkle in those brilliant blue eyes. The way he smiled when he liked something Bran said. The way his cheeks flushed and eyes widened as his skin shivered under Bran’s touch…
Bran shook his head again. This wasn’t a useful train of thought. A useful train of thought would be to think of what would make Jamie smile.
Even if he needed it, Bran was fairly certain that giving Jamie money wouldn’t make him smile—he would take it, because he needed it, but it would make him sigh, a furrow on his brow, as he tried to figure out how to repay it. No, that wasn’t right. Jamie would try to figure out how to be worth it.
Bran also strongly suspected that Jamie wouldn’t ever believe that he was worth it. Which changed his problem from how to make Jamie smile to how to convince Jamie Weaver that he was worth whatever good things came his way in life.
Because Bran knew that Jamie deserved whatever he wanted, even if that meant never seeing Bran again—although he really hoped that wasn’t going to be the answer. Because much as he didn’t deserve Jamie, Jamie was exactly what Bran wanted.
