War Between Four Walls - Parts Five and Six
Five
“Order,” Summers snaps, and the low buzz of conversation filling the smithy abruptly dies.
“Effective,” Erik drawls into the startled silence. He surveys the table: eleven other men and women. Many of them wear officers’ ranks on their sleeves and on their coats. Scarred faces, two or three with blue-in-blue eyes.
Sitting next to Jean, who is at Erik’s right hand, is a young man who looks exactly like Summers, except for his dark blonde hair and the white scar that pulls the corner of his mouth down into a permanent near-grimace: Alex, Summers’s brother. “A neat trick,” he says, mostly under his breath. “Never worked on me, though.”
“Obviously not,” Summers snaps back, but he’s smiling as he says it, and the tension lightens, a little.
“You have permission to do that whenever you want,” Erik says.
“Even to you?” Summers asks, and next to him, Jean snorts and looks down at her feet in amusement.
Erik shrugs. “Even to me, yes, if you must. Though I trust you will not often find a reason to do so.”
“We’ll see,” Summers says. And then: “Back to the matter at hand. I’m surprised by this question. Why are we talking about conscripts, again? Have we suddenly turned into the tower’s army?”
Several people at the table shrug; Logan makes a derisive sound and props his chin up on his hand. “I’ve been thinking we might have to, no matter how we might abhor the idea. Because you know the tower fights with nothing but conscripts. You can’t tell me there are people in there who joined up of their own free will. Hard to believe that. We’re still picking up runaways, aren’t we? And we look after them and make sure they can get back on their own two feet.
“Not a single one of them has ever asked to be returned to the tower.”
Erik narrows his eyes as Eliszabeth and Charles exchange long, resigned looks, and he clears his throat and says in their direction, “By the way, this discussion includes the two of you; we asked you to be here, and it’s not because it’s warmer to have twelve people here instead of ten. If you have opinions - and I certainly hope that you do - then please speak up. There may never be another group of people in greater need of your unique perspective on this matter.”
A murmur of agreement follows his words, and then Jean adds: “To be blunt about it, we’re not going to make it to the tower, much less back home and alive, without you. Without your knowledge. We need your help.”
Alex mutters, “Hear, hear.”
Eliszabeth opens her mouth, and then shuts it, and then she looks at Charles and shakes her head and leans her forehead on his shoulder; the expression on her face can only be described as imploring.
Their silent conversation goes on for a few more moments and then Charles is sighing, and the sound is loud enough to be heard over the crackling of the smithy’s fire. He gets to his feet and carefully surveys the circle of men and women gathered around the worktable, one of the few places in the village large enough to seat the entire gathering and the only one to be under a roof.
Erik nods, encouragingly, when Charles’s eyes find him.
And Charles sighs and begins. “Some people who are taken to the tower...do choose to stay, even with the way it treats its inmates. For all of its faults, for all of the horrible things it does,” and he bares his wrist, his nearly-obliterated brand, and smiles his apologies around the table, “it is also the one place where the hatred and the fear dissipates, insofar as it can dissipate. The one place where one can learn to tolerate the black looks and the fearful mutterings.
“After all, inside the tower, if one learns to ignore the guards and the scullions and the man with the eyepatch, it can almost be like home. One can immerse oneself in one’s studies. One can be in the company of those who are like oneself. For as long as one’s comrades can survive or remain in the tower.
“It is certainly not an option that can easily be taken by those who find themselves outside, although I do not count and neither does Eliszabeth.”
“Is this man with the eyepatch the leader of the tower?” Orro asks. She is seated about halfway down the table from Erik.
“He says he is,” Charles says, “and he certainly acts as though he were. But he is not one of us.” He points to his own eyes. “Rather call him our jailer. At least, he was mine and Sean’s.”
“Mine, too,” Eliszabeth says quietly. “Keeper of the keys.”
Even seated across the table from her, Erik doesn’t miss how her hand shakes as she places it over her heart. She wears bandages on that arm at all times, wound from wrist to elbow - covering the brand that names her Outcast.
Eliszabeth was the first mage they’d managed to rescue from the tower. He still remembers the pure insanity of the mission: the passage they’d used to enter the tower, festering with blood and bones. The tower guards, fighting like beasts even in the choking black of the corridors. Eliszabeth with her hands over her eyes as they battled their way out. Three people, and one of them refusing to fight, against wave after wave of defenders. The pure shock of escaping, and the horror of the great gaping wound across Jean’s face.
How had they gotten out alive and mostly unscathed? How had they survived?
Erik doesn’t know.
He remembers discovering Eliszabeth’s ability. The thoughts that had been predominant in her mind at that moment, and the ringing that was purely within his own mind - a reaction to how loudly she had been sending her thoughts and her feelings. Faces like hers, other men and women with blue-in-blue eyes; the image of the man with the eyepatch. Impossible shadows rearing up, locked in battle with soldiers and mages alike. Appearing again and again in her memories. Fear and terror, books and cells walled in stone.
“I have never known the man with the eyepatch to have a name. He did not bother to know any of ours,” she says with a shaking voice, and Charles nods, eyes pinched closed. “He was only interested in knowing what our abilities are, and so he named us with epithets instead, or called us all the same thing: wild mage.”
“He controls the bulk of the tower’s resources and its defenses, and he is the ultimate master of its armies,” Charles says. “Defeating him will be a crucial step in freeing the mages in the tower - but it is not the final step.”
Erik starts when he realizes that Charles is now openly shivering, despite the body heat of eleven other people and the warmth of the forge.
“Freeing the mages is the easy part. What comes after...what comes after, that’s when people could die, that’s where we face true peril.” He covers his eyes with his hand. “How many of you have fought monsters? Things that should not exist. Creatures that come out of nightmares. Creatures that lay waste to entire towns.”
Orro and Logan and Summers raise their hands.
“I hadn’t thought there were others like me,” a woman with very short brown hair and golden-brown skin says, and puts up her hand as well.
Logan smirks. “I told you and I told you and you wouldn’t listen, would you, Rahne. Not alone. Not in this group.”
Erik tosses Rahne an informal salute, and she drops her eyes and blushes.
“So few,” Charles says, and perhaps a little of the color has come back into his face. “And the tower is the reason why people do not even know that these creatures exist. For a long time now, perhaps even for its entire existence, the tower has been waging war in the shadows against these enemies. Using the most powerful, and only, weapons it has to hand: mages. People like us. And so the tower is always searching for new recruits.
“Now you know the fate of every mage who is sent to the tower. We receive an education, we hone our abilities - we are turned into weapons, and we are collared and forced to do battle with enemies that entire armies cannot conquer.
“I no longer know what to feel about the tower. On the one hand, it makes sure that people with these eyes,” and again Charles points to his own, “are hated and feared and shunned, and it spreads the lie that mages are dangerous and unstable, because the tower gains an advantage if it has more inmates.
“An advantage over worse things. The only weapons that can be used against darkness and death.”
Silence once again descends on the smithy. Logan just looks resigned, as he did three nights ago. The others slowly recover, and just as slowly exchange looks of horrified understanding. Summers is now standing over Jean and Alex, his hands on their shoulders; Erik looks away from their conversation of furious, rapid whispers.
Charles has gone back to Eliszabeth’s side, and Erik watches as she takes his hands, as she touches her forehead to his. He watches as Charles’s eyes slide slowly closed.
And then, she whispers to him: Come here, please?
Eliszabeth, Erik thinks back, and he rounds the table and the officers as they begin to talk quietly among themselves. Do you need my help?
“I think we both do.” Charles sounds wry and exhausted. “I - that did not sound convincing at all. I may have actually put your officers off the idea of attacking. If I have, and they decide to mutiny, please accept my apologies.”
Erik shakes his head and he touches Eliszabeth’s shoulder, pulls her to her feet and then embraces her. She is still trembling, but seems to have gotten herself under control. “I’ll be fine,” she says, quietly, and she puts her hand on his shoulder and squeezes. “It’s just difficult, remembering what happened when you rescued me.”
“Put it out of your mind immediately. That’s an order.” Erik kisses the top of her head, and nods when Eliszabeth smiles - it is a shaky smile; she still seems like she could cry at any moment, but she looks him right in the eyes, and Erik lets her go easily, watches her sit down next to Summers and Jean.
Jean takes both of Eliszabeth’s hands in one of hers, and places her free hand on Eliszabeth’s dark hair.
Erik sits back down and looks over to where Charles has his hand cupped around a tiny flame. “I wonder how I would have fought,” Charles says softly. “I wonder if I could even have lasted long enough to be thrown into the battles.
“Erik. Do you think I’d have survived?”
“Yes,” Erik says, simply. “You would have fought and lived. You would have survived. Again and again, as many times as you needed.”
“If I fought now and was still standing at the end of it, it would have been because of you.”
Erik raises an eyebrow.
Charles smiles, tentatively, and taps his finger against the pommel of the knife riding his own hip. “You and Summers, anyway. You were patient enough to teach me something about tactics. You taught me how to fight not just with my powers, but with my mind.”
“It was something you already knew,” Erik says. “You just needed someone to guide you.”
“And I would never have had you or him to guide me, if you’d not taken me out of the tower.”
“Believe what you want, Charles. I merely state my observations, which to me are as true as the fact of the sun rising in the east, and of your eyes being blue-in-blue.”
That makes Charles laugh - and Erik thinks, at last.
When the discussion starts up around them once again, the officers talk about practical matters. They talk about armor and supplies, the number of healers they can afford to take along and consequently to protect, the types of weapons that could be used in an attack on a stronghold such as the tower. Logan spreads out a map on the table, and everyone chimes in with suggestions for approaching the tower and its defenses, including Eliszabeth.
Erik is soon as absorbed in the discussion as his officers - but he stays by Charles’s side, now, and the flame in the mage’s hand burns with a steady, clear light.
///
Six
Distant winter stars in a sudden, deep night.
The lantern in Erik’s hand burns just brightly enough for him to pick out the path that he has to follow.
Logan’s soldiers are camped in a wide circle just below the village, and he has spent the whole day working among them. Men and women, armor and weapons, horses and boots. A small group of men and women in black cloaks huddled in a circle.
Erik nods to them as he passes them, and one of them raises her hand in response. Fine white hair spilling out of her hood, stark contrast to her youthful face. Not for the first time, Erik wonders if it’s possible to find some kind of material that could be forged into armor for mages - and not for the first time, he wonders if the tower has this knowledge secreted away somewhere.
He wants to protect that gathering. He wants to protect people like Emma and Eliszabeth.
He wants to create armor that would allow Charles to use his flames in battle, and walk away alive and unharmed.
The quiet buzz of soldiers working follows him back to the village. Shadows moving everywhere. The children have long since been sent to bed, but their parents and their friends remain awake. The air all around him hums with readiness, with anticipation.
Erik can almost taste the heavy undercurrent of caution on his tongue, like sharp wine and the smell of hot copper.
Tomorrow they set out for the tower.
Someone is calling his name.
“Summers,” Erik says, and he’s being welcomed into the house, and he leaves his lantern outside the door.
“Erik,” Jean says, and she holds out a hand to him. Rachel is sleeping in the crook of her other arm.
He takes her hand and presses it gently in both of his. “You should be resting. Both of you.”
“We’re still trying to decide which one of us is going,” Summers says as he sits down at his wife’s feet, and holds his hands out to the blaze on the hearth.
“We made a mistake, last time,” Jean says quietly. “One of us should have stayed behind when we went to fight that rebel mage.”
“We would both have died on that battlefield, if Charles hadn’t been there to protect us,” Summers says. “He keeps saying he owes us his life - well, now, we owe him ours, several times over.”
Jean nods. “We’ve been talking about it, and - Erik? Promise me something.”
Erik looks at the two of them, at Jean’s hand tight on Summers’s shoulder, at Summers’s eyes fixed on Rachel’s peaceful face. And he nods, and clenches his hands into fists, because he thinks he knows what he’s being asked to do.
Jean says in a quiet and compelling voice: “Promise me that from now on you’ll make sure one of us always stays behind. We can’t go out together on missions any more.”
“We work very well together in a fight, Jean and I,” Summers says, “but now we’ve Rachel to think of, and neither of us can bear the possibility that she might be left alone in the world, if the two of us went away to war. No matter what happens, one of us has to stay alive for her sake.”
“I can’t stand the thought of being parted from Summers for any amount of time,” Jean says, and there is a suspicious hitch in her voice and in her shoulders, “and neither will he be parted from me - but there is something bigger than just the two of us, now.”
“Someone more important,” Summers says.
Erik nods and reaches out very carefully to the sleeping Rachel, strokes two fingers over her smooth forehead. He looks up at his friends, at her parents, and says, “I will. Give me any oaths you want, and I will swear them. To both of you, and to Rachel, if I must.”
He watches a tear slide down Jean’s cheek and he smiles and kisses her forehead.
There is a quiet cough at the door. Charles is smiling, apologetically. “I am sorry, I should have come back earlier, but Emma and then Raven were fussing about tomorrow, and I could not get away.”
“No matter - come in, please,” Jean says, swiping furtively at her face. “If nothing else, because I need someone to hold my daughter right now, and that cannot be me or Summers or Erik.”
“Certainly,” and as Erik watches Charles hurries forward and takes Rachel from Jean’s hands.
Rachel wrinkles her nose, once, twice, and her little hands close into fists - but she settles back down nearly instantly, and she gurgles herself back to sleep as Charles rocks her back and forth, as he presses a kiss to her cheek.
Jean nods in approval as Charles moves away to give them some privacy, and then she takes her husband’s hand. “This has to be the most difficult decision we’ve ever had to make.”
Erik smiles. “You still have time to decide. Sleep on it if you must, and come to me in the morning.”
“No,” Summers says. He puts his arm around Jean’s shoulders and his free hand on Erik’s shoulder, and Erik shifts closer to the two of them. “We’re deciding now.”
Jean smiles and kisses Summers’s forehead, and says at last, “It wouldn’t be the first time that you’ve had to leave me behind, beloved.”
Summers doesn’t reply, only pulls her close, and Erik nods and leaves them to themselves.
Crossing the room to Charles, Erik stands protectively at his shoulder, and he says, quietly, “I of course cannot ask you to stay. This is your war as much as it is mine - but even if it weren’t, we would need you there. I need you there.”
“I have to fight if it means there’s a chance for me to help my friends, my fellow mages,” Charles murmurs. “And so, please, never ask me to stay back from a fight. I think that I would refuse you, every time. Save yourself the trouble - don’t ask, never again.”
“That would not be the first time anyone has told me that. Although your words are different from hers.”
Charles casts a sad smile at him over his shoulder. “Are they? I imagined that your wife would have simply gone on - plunged into the heat of the battle, whether you wished her to or not.”
“Yes. It was never a matter of my wishes,” Erik says, and he cracks his own slight smile, self-deprecating and a little wistful. “Rather it was a simpler matter, of being swept up in her wake.”
“And what of now?” Charles turns around and looks up at him.
“Now?” Erik closes his eyes. “You once asked me to approach you as an equal - well, now I understand you, and now that is what I want. I don’t want to lead you into battle or follow you into it. I want to walk and fight and live at your side. I want to be there when you fly and fight and set the world on fire. I want to be the person who helps you carry your secrets and your faults and your burdens. I want to be the person you fly back to; I want to be the person who watches your back in a battle. I want to be the person who catches you if you should fall.”
There is a hand cupping his cheek, and Charles whispering, “Open your eyes.”
“I can’t.” Fear and hope warring for control of his heart, the heart he wants to give to the man standing before him, if only he could find the courage to look.
“Are you afraid of me?” Charles asks.
“Never. Certainly not when I first looked up to you in the night sky over that inn, screaming bloody murder against that mage’s army. I watched you fly, watched you fight - you struck down your enemies without remorse. You helped Summers and Jean and your sister in their own battles. You made sure that those who were not part of the battle remained safe and unhurt.”
“If you’re not afraid of me - then look at me.”
He takes a deep breath, and opens his eyes.
There is a high, hot flush in Charles’s face; a strange light in the depths of his blue-in-blue eyes.
Erik draws a breath and bends down to him, hardly daring - and Charles smiles, suddenly, and Erik kisses him.
The kiss lasts for a fleeting moment. Long enough for Erik to see stars.
Charles laughs, ruefully. “I would ask you to hold me, but.”
Erik looks down at Rachel in his arms.
He doesn’t look away, but he does call, quietly: “Jean. I think you need to come and rescue your daughter.”
Summers’s watery laugh, Jean’s brilliant and relieved smile as she takes Rachel - it all fades away.
Erik stops thinking, and now he simply exists.
He holds out his arms and as soon as he touches Charles’s shoulders he gathers him in, close against his heart.
Charles burns beneath his hands, and he cries, quietly, into Erik’s shirt.
Erik doesn’t realize he’s crying, himself, until Charles looks up again and touches his cheek. He is smiling through his tears - and that makes Erik smile back.
The hand that lands on his shoulder makes him jump, and he looks wild-eyed at Summers. “What?”
“Excuse me for interrupting,” and Summers grins, and reaches out to ruffle Charles’s hair. “Go home, both of you. Get some rest. Lots to do tomorrow.”
“I’m not sure I want to let him go,” Charles says, confiding, and the smile on his face is equal parts disbelief and joy and something warm that pierces Erik to the heart and to the bone.
“Who said you had to do that?” Summers says, laughing. “Wrap yourself around him if you must, but please, we also must turn in for the night.”
“Yes, all right, we’re leaving,” Erik mutters, and he turns to offer Summers his hand.
Summers takes it in a crushing grip. “It’ll be good to ride out with you again, Erik.”
“I look forward to it, Summers.” And to Jean, Erik adds, “I will need to give you just a few more instructions in the morning. But know now that it will be one less worry for me, if I leave the village in your capable hands.”
“Thank you,” she says, and she, too, wraps Erik’s hand in both of hers. “Be happy,” she adds, glancing in Charles’s direction.
“For however long we might have,” Erik says, and finally they’re walking out the door.
“That was a very strange thing to say,” Charles murmurs as they cross the village back to their hut. “But I think I know why you said it.”
“We ride into battle in the morning,” Erik murmurs back. “And I know, like many who’ve come here, that life and light and love can be lost on the instant, when they take place during a war.”
Inside the hut, Charles raises his free hand and snaps his fingers, and the neatly-laid logs in the fireplace spark and crackle into bright warmth.
Erik looks down helplessly at their still-joined hands, and he leans over and touches his forehead to Charles’s. Says, quietly, “Stay with me.”
“You say that as if you think I wish to let you go,” is Charles’s equally soft response, eyes falling closed.
Erik smiles, hearing the thread of steel in his voice. “I assure you I’ll fight to the last drop of my blood before I release you. To my dying breath. To the last ounce of my strength.”
“Then I’m glad we agree.” Charles squeezes his hand, once.
They settle together in Erik’s pallet.
Charles smiles and huddles in on himself - but he takes Erik’s hand and holds it over his heart, and slowly his breaths even out and deepen into sleep.
Erik kisses the top of his head and curls around him, and follows him down.
In the morning Erik opens his eyes, and knows what he must do next.
He watches as Charles wakes up. For a long moment they smile at each other, and then Erik steels himself and says, “There’s something I need to do before we leave.”
Those blue-in-blue eyes darken knowingly. “She’s here, isn’t she.”
Erik nods. “She has been here all along. Here, in the place where we lived and laughed together. Here, in the place where I loved her.”
“Will you want me to leave you to it?”
That spurs him into action, and he pulls Charles down into a kiss, and murmurs against his mouth, “No. No, I want you to come with me. I want you to see her, and to be there for what I need to do.”
They eat and they dress and they pack, and then they climb up to the clearing that serves the village for a burial ground, hand in hand in the cold daylight. Silence between them, Erik leads Charles straight to the grave marker: simple miniatures of his wife’s sword and knife, dulled blades crossed and struck point-down into a bare patch of earth.
Charles smiles sadly and throws back the hood of his black cloak. He gets down on his knees, sweeps the wisps of fallen snow away. Hands to his mouth, a murmur on the cool air, his blue-in-blue eyes closed. And then he kisses his fingertips and presses them to the hilt of the sword, to the pommel of the knife.
Erik wipes away his tears, and leans over and whispers a name into Charles’s ear.
Charles nods, places his hand on Erik’s armored shoulder, and steps aside. He is far away enough to leave Erik alone at the grave, near enough for Erik to still see him out of the corner of his eye.
Erik has been looking for the right words to say, ever since that unexpected glimpse of his wife on Midwinter Night. How to describe Charles to her? How to explain how his heart feels? How to reconcile their past and his present and a new and unknown future?
In the end, however, he bows his head and murmurs, “Thank you for coming to me, for teaching me and for being with me. How short a time we had together, beloved, and how much I’ve learned from you. Thank you for everything.”
Erik clasps his hands behind his back and thinks of his wife. Her rare and fleeting smile. The distinct way in which she wore her long hair, the colors of a faded sunset. Her hands on his as she taught him her sword forms. The cadence of her voice, rough and low and loving and powerful.
The understanding in her eyes on Midwinter Night.
He thinks about mages and their dreams, and he thinks about his wife and wonders, not for the first time, what she’d seen of her future and of his.
In the end - at last - he turns away, and holds his hand out to Charles, and doesn’t look back.
To Parts Seven and Eight