Fire Forged - Part II
Part II
He dreams, and in the distance he can hear the crackle and hum of a small fire.
Warmth.
Comfort.
The sound of someone moving nearby.
He knows almost instinctively that he’s among friends.
His wrist hurts, still. A sword from nowhere, a shocked look in Jean’s eyes, flash of her running towards him, and then the bright cold strike. Pain. He remembers closing his bloodied fingers into a fist. A scream, and seeing his attacker’s face. The final instant before the punch. The man freezing, flashing white, crumbling into ash.
His sister and her sword, standing over Summers, who has fallen to the ground, and defending him and Jean both. Attack, defense, a sweep of her arm, a man stumbling away from her, pawing at the blood all over his face. She’s almost cut him down. The challenge burning in her eyes. Determination, skill, everything she’s been learning, everything embodied in the writing on her arm. His sister the fighter, now and always.
Himself, on the wing at last, after all these years. A song in his ears, a melody on the wind: power and anger. He’s missed it so badly.
The inn under attack. Tattered banners and men and women covered in dried and fresh blood. Frenzy, blades slashing with murderous intent. They’ve come here for a reason, and this isn’t the first place they’ve tried. There is so much evil boiling around the inn.
In the dreams, he remembers and at the same time he forgets that he knows exactly who the reasons for this are.
He strikes his enemies down easily, one after the other. There is a certain irony in being able to apply the techniques he’s been learning from the tower - and he relishes the pride he feels. The challenge of refining an ability intended for mass destruction such that he can use it on one of a pair of combatants, take out his actual target and leave the other person completely unharmed.
He’s dividing his strength a handful of ways - a wall of flames to protect Summers and Jean, a thread of fire ringing Raven’s sword, the continued attacks on the enemy forces. The inn is ablaze, and he’s gradually pulling at the heat, absorbing it into himself, leaving cool smoke in its wake. He watches from on high as the innkeeper looks for his lodgers, as he herds them slowly away. Charles works to keep a clear path for them.
What energy he takes from the inn he unleashes upon its attackers. What he carefully pulls away from walls and rooms, he throws with a roar at his enemies. Charred piles of armor and bone, weapons melting, falling harmlessly into the ashes.
Their guards are gone, lost in the smoke, but he can sense them, a flash of hope in Summers’s mind, Jean calling out again, but this time there’s no alarm in her voice. People coming to their aid? Here?
But he can’t spare them another thought because Raven is shouting at him, her smile a bright beacon in his mind. “Fly, dearest!” Waving her arms in encouragement. A brilliant flash of light - the silver cuff - and then her exultant voice cutting off, a quiet gasp. He can hear her even from here. A shadow falling over her, a quick glance at a pleased sneer.
Charles doesn’t think, doesn’t stop to consider what’s going on. He flies straight up, as high as he can - and then he stoops, screaming for blood, out of the sky. Three or four enemy fighters surrounding his sister.
He strikes cleanly. He catches the first man with the edge of a wing, sends his head flying. He drives a handful of fiery darts through the woman’s chest, so quickly she doesn’t even draw breath to cry out. The next two soldiers he simply snaps his fingers at, and they’re engulfed in flames, screaming all the while.
The fifth man is the biggest of the entire enemy group. A number of scars running over his skin. A massive pair of fists, clutching a sword and a staff.
Charles’s eyes are drawn to the marking on his opponent’s left wrist, and he’s not surprised that he can read it. The same letters spelling out Outcast. The man’s blue eyes.
Something hotter than blood ringing his wrist. Silver cuff. A broken clasp. How? He remembers. He doesn’t want to remember.
In the dreams, he falls to the ground and he begins to keen. A shadow standing over him to share his grief. Summers leaning heavily on Jean, just barely able to walk.
Raven is missing.
They have taken my sister.
And Charles opens his eyes.
“Don’t get up,” someone says nearby.
He tenses, but he doesn’t move. He grinds his teeth for a few moments. “I thought I was among friends.”
“You probably are, but your body is not your friend right now.” Someone is standing over him: a face full of lines and hollows. Blue-green eyes. A thin mouth, curved in sympathy.
“What happened to me,” Charles asks.
“Fought a rogue mage.” The man counts on his fingers. “You were targeted, you and your sister both. Nearly overwhelmed that inn - Summers knew nothing, by the way, sheer damn accident, I’m sure he’s unhappy about that now....”
“I know it was an accident,” Charles growls. “What happened!”
The man merely lifts a corner of his mouth. A strange little flash of a smile. “The group that attacked the inn - they are corrupted, down to the last swordsman and the last mage. Looking for people they can add to their ranks. An army of everything that’s wrong. Malice incarnate. They don’t take people for ransom, they only take prisoners, and those they intend to destroy, to corrupt them utterly. Your sister could join them, or she could not. It is a matter of how long she can resist - but you should know no one has ever escaped them. Death will be a mercy to her, if you should find her again.”
Charles pulls himself upright, feels every bone and muscle scream with pain, feels the fire within his heart blaze up in protest, and he shakes his head. Denial and worry sinking their claws into him. “You don’t know her, or you wouldn’t be speaking like that. I do. She is dear to me, and she’s so strong, so strong. I’ll find her again. And she will still be Raven.”
He says it to convince the man, to convince himself. Until he can dream of the future again, until he can stop dreaming and reliving the past.
A hard hand, warm on his shoulder. He slumps, suddenly, tired again and dizzy. “I believe in her, I believe in my sister,” he is whispering, and he goes without protest as he’s lowered into the bedroll again. He catches his breath, asks, faintly: “Who are you?”
“A friend.”
“Mages are not allowed friends,” and he’s falling asleep again, and the man is chuckling darkly.
“So you think,” and there is so much old pain in that voice, such a deep wound, and Charles would get up and try to find some way of helping it heal, if only he could stop the voices in his head, the slow and inexorable slide down into sleep. “How little you know, you and your forsaken tower.”
This time, he doesn’t dream.
When he opens his eyes again, he grapples with confusion: guilt and gratitude vie for his heart. He needs to remember that people have been lost, that he is missing his own other half, that there are people out there who are worried for him.
How can there be people who are concerned for him? How can this man care, this man he has only just met? For as long as Charles has lived with the shouts of fear and hatred, with the pointing fingers, there has only been one person who truly cared for him.
And now she is gone.
Charles dashes the tears from his eyes, buries his face in his hands. He’s never had any use for the rites and litanies of religion, but he sends up a prayer all the same, for the first time in years, to whatever could be listening to one such as him. A prayer for his sister and for her sanity.
When he looks up, he is seeing the campsite for the first time.
A canopy of trees overhead, tall and rustling, full of birdsong and the tiny scratches and calls of animals and insects. Weak shafts of sunlight struggling through the branches. A bedroll beneath him; the earth where he has been sleeping is still warm. Within arm’s reach is a small circle of rocks around a pile of ashes, the remains of a fire that has been dead two or three hours.
There are no other bedrolls, and there is no sign of the other man.
The wind moving through the trees, a comforting kind of whispering, words in no human language. Charles rearranges himself, sits carefully on his heels. He has long since become comfortable in this position, something to help him think and concentrate during the long hours in the tower, whether in lessons or, every now and then when he’s been extremely unlucky, locked in the collar - without his powers, feeling cold and half-blind.
Here, he can feel everything, and it is a soothing place, if remote. There are shadows dancing, a soft trill of distant birdsong, and he closes his eyes. He reaches out with his heart, with his senses.
Water gurgling, a sizeable current nearby, rocks on the shore and the gentle splash of waves on gravel and sand. A mother bird clucking fretfully over her nest: three - no, five - hatchlings, each one crying louder than the last. The rush of wings as the father bird lands suddenly, hopping back towards home, and the hatchlings greeting him, a chorus for the food he’s brought back. The ashes of the fire smell like wood sap and bread. Metal, warming at one wrist; his shirt now full of ash and blood. Cloth wrapped around the other wrist, freshly reapplied, a thin salve cool against his skin.
He doesn’t have to look to know that the wound is the one he’s been expecting from his dreams. When it heals there will be a rough scar, the skin jaggedly knitted back together, and it will write a wide line over the brand that says Outcast, almost obliterating it.
A faint scent of pine, nothing that grows here in the plains. A fresh wave of memories: playing string games with Raven, watching her gorge herself on fresh berries, their first experiments at cooking meat over a fire. Some of the scent is coming from the salve spread over his wound, but the rest of it is mixed with sweat and a faint tang of burning salt.
A smell that is getting stronger now, and undercut by other smells: the fresh scents of fruit and river and earth.
“Hello,” Charles says toward the sound of the other man’s footsteps. He clenches his hands into fists, once, twice, then relaxes. He dispels the pain, the happy memories, and the dark dreams. “And thank you. Whoever you are. A friend, you said.”
“Erik,” the man says. “My name is Erik.”
Charles takes that name in, recognizes that voice. Today it sounds almost relaxed - but he now knows that he didn’t dream the words from the first conversation.
He suspects he will be hearing that thread of pain and regret for a long time.
“Charles,” he says, finally. He’s about to say something else.
“You can open your eyes.”
He does, and he blinks in surprise.
The man is sitting right in front of him, their knees are touching, and Charles remembers those eyes: blue mixed in with green. The lines in Erik’s face seem to be even deeper this morning. This close, it’s easy to reach out for the details. Roughly-mended tears in his black trousers and in his grey tunic, a handful of knives up his sleeves and in the small of his back and down the back of his neck, gloves that are just a shade too small for him. His wrists turned down, so Charles can’t tell what his marking is.
“Hello, Erik,” Charles says.
“Good to see you awake and aware, Charles,” is all Erik says, the same rough voice and the same unflinching expression on his face, and he gets to his feet easily, dusts his hands off on his trousers.
From this angle he seems tall. Charles has never been any good at estimating height, but he knows Erik is taller than him. Taller than Summers, perhaps.
“You’ve been murmuring in your sleep.”
“I have disturbed you?”
An odd shadow appears in Erik’s eyes. “No. But you’re not the first - well, never mind.”
Charles winces. Is Erik from the tower? What does his marking say? “Will it help if I apologize?”
“Not really.”
Charles gets up, folds the bedroll into a neat little pile of cloth. “Then I won’t,” he says, and he catches the startled quirk of Erik’s mouth as he moves toward the river to wash.
Cold water, so icy it startles a gasp from him, and he scoops it up in his hands, alternates between splashing his face and drinking thirstily. There are some stray berries at the water’s edge and he dunks them in, crunches them between his teeth. Bright sweetness and cool water coating his tongue, and he washes up some more, runs his dripping hands through his hair and shivers as he finally gets up and walks back to the campsite.
Two plump fish are already skewered on sturdy twigs, and Charles watches attentively as Erik guts the third fish. He is rebuilding the fire, new branches mixed in with old.
Charles laughs when Erik sees him standing there, when Erik arches an eyebrow and asks, “Are you planning to help me?”
“Of course; I was just waiting for you to finish.” And Charles snaps his fingers, waves his hand once - and the fire crackles cheerfully into life, the new twigs popping and sending up a waft of fragrant smoke into the air.
He watches Erik arrange the fish on the upwind side of the flames, watches Erik pull a small knife from his boot and peel an apple, the golden-tawny skin falling in a single long spiral.
The same apple suddenly flies toward him, a few moments later, and when he catches it in his hands it separates neatly into two halves, the core already cut out.
He sits down on his heels again, an arm’s-length away from Erik, eating his half of the apple contemplatively. A drop of juice escapes his mouth and he catches it on the back of his hand, licks it clean.
This close, he can watch Erik’s movements, spare and unhurried as he eats the fruit and tends the fish - and now he can also see the skin of Erik’s wrists. Clean and unmarked; there is neither any sign of an old mark nor the scars that result from a mark being erased.
“I’ve never had a marking,” is all Erik says, never looking up from his work. He’s turning the fish this way and that, and the gloves on his hands protect him from the flames. “We never really lived in communities, we were always on the move...my parents never believed that the tattoos could do any good. They believed that the markings would only drive wedges, as well they should - and you can see how they were right.”
“Where are they now?”
“Dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Charles says.
“Don’t be. They died doing something right. They gave their lives for mine. I carry on in their memory.”
“As I do, after a fashion.” Charles sits quietly, thinks of Raven. “Raven is not really my sister,” he begins, trying to distract Erik and himself, and he looks up in surprise when he’s suddenly offered one of the cooked fish. A few bites, and he smiles and eats, and he keeps going, as quietly as he can and still have Erik hear him. “I never knew my father or my mother; I was raised by my mother’s sister. It was the only time I’d ever lived around other children.
“When I was eight years old I found out what my powers were: the dreams. Knowing that I had to leave that house and wander until I found Raven. And more importantly, the flames. I was climbing a tree, which started to bend under my weight, and when I got to the top it dropped me right out of the branches. I did not have far to fall, but both my body and my pride were hurt - so I glared at the tree and made it catch fire.
“It was beautiful.” There is a distant prickling all along Charles’s skin, as if the memory’s trying to burn its way out of him. He holds out his palm and a faint, flickering image in the shape of the tree dances on it. He watches it until the next thought occurs to him; he closes his hand and the flame dies quietly, flows back into him. “And I felt such pride in myself - here was something I could create. Something I could do well, without ever having to be taught. A thing of beauty, though it was always a beauty that needed to be controlled.
“But you know how mages are feared, and my kind most of all. Fire is never a good thing, not here, not in the vineyards, not in the mountains.
“Despite her fear, despite her horror, my aunt still had some compassion in her, and instead of turning me over to the tower immediately, she sent me away into the mountains, into the wilderness. She told the other children never to talk about me and my abilities ever again and enforced that with terrifying beatings - I saw her strike the two boys who had seen me set the tree on fire, and they were so afraid of her and of me. They were crying when I left, but not because she was beating them. They were crying because I was being sent away. I don’t even remember who they are any more.”
Charles startles when a hard, heavy hand lands on his shoulder.
It’s a gentle reminder, and he turns back to his fish, still delicious though it is now cold. Charles bows his head and feels Erik’s hand squeeze, briefly. And then Erik is finishing his own meal.
Charles feels cold, suddenly, and he tries to ignore it by continuing the story. “Because of the dreams I already knew where to go, what I needed to do, when I was going to find my sister. But when I heard Raven crying, when I found her huddled in a bruised heap beneath a pile of leaves - I nearly set her alight too. I was angry, I wanted to kill the people who had hurt her, I wanted to know where her parents were. I wanted to scream at them, to shake them, for abandoning someone so good and so loving.
“And when she was done screaming in fear she screamed at me for the first time. She said I had frightened her, and that I mustn’t do it again.” Charles laughs, but it is a bittersweet thing, to be telling this story and not have its subject within arm’s reach. To tell this story and not have Raven snickering and interrupting. Not that they have had many reasons to tell others about themselves, but it is still their past, the beginning of their lives together.
“So she is to you a star to steer by,” Erik says. He is on his feet, extinguishing the fire with water and earth, scattering and burying the rocks surrounding the fire.
“And more,” Charles says, and he stands up and looks for his cloak, pulls it on. He is about to draw the hood over his face when he is stopped. Erik’s hand on his shoulder, again. The unmarked skin of Erik’s wrists.
“No need to hide in that, I should think,” Erik says.
“I don’t know if we’re facing any danger here,” Charles says, as reasonably as he can. “I dreamed about the inn last night, nothing about the future yet. Until then, until I can think about being sure, I’d rather remain hidden.”
“That cloak is only an accident waiting to happen in this forest, and I intend for us to travel as fast and as far as we can,” Erik explains. “And you will walk and run and train better if you’re not confining yourself - but if you wish, perhaps we can compromise.” He pulls a long length of white cloth from his pack, long enough to serve as a scarf. “Wrap that around your head - there should be enough cloth to pull over your eyes if you need it.”
Charles folds his cloak away as neatly as he can, stows it with the bedroll. He winds the scarf a few times around his face and neck, and then tilts his head questioningly at the other man. “How do I look?”
When Erik walks up to him, Charles coughs in disbelief, in annoyance, and tips his head back a little further. Erik is taller, blast him, and by at least a head. He’s about to say something about when Erik ties the ends of the scarf into a neat knot. “I’ve seen worse, but that’ll do,” is all Erik says, though there is a spark of amusement in his eyes.
Charles coughs again and is grateful that he’s hidden most of his face because he’s sixteen, and he knows exactly what the heat rising in his cheeks means. Just because he’s been in the tower for years, doesn’t mean he’s ignorant about the needs of the body. He remembers walking in on hurried, heated encounters, and being chased out with either laughter or things being thrown at him. He remembers being asked to stand guard outside an instructor’s room, remembers ignoring the cries from within by burying his nose in a thick book.
He remembers Raven confiding in him on one of their birthdays, that she’d taken someone to her bed: that he had hurt her, a little, by accident, but that they had had a good time learning about each other. The idea of getting to touch someone else. They had been of an age, Raven and the boy, and she had mentioned wanting to write letters to him.
Charles thinks back to the last few nights. He feels a little guilty; he thinks he might have had a chance to ask her about that boy, but the dreams and the fight have taken away his chance for now. He remembers snatches of her excited descriptions: glossy black hair falling to his shoulders. Incredible skill with the sword. Loyalty and mischief. A badly-healed scar forming an arc over his left eye.
He remembers smacking Raven lightly on her shoulder because she had started to describe the boy’s body, and he remembers her smacking him back, and the ensuing wrestling match that ended up with Raven banging his head affectionately into the cobblestones. Bright laughter, their grins, and Raven declaring that “You will still always be my brother, you beautiful idiot.”
“Ready to go,” Erik says, abruptly.
His voice jolts Charles out of his reverie, the dark spiral into his emotions. Charles suddenly finds himself looking at Erik with wild eyes for a long, breathless moment. Regret like a deep wound in his heart, slithering cold down his nerves - and then he catches his breath, pulls himself back to reality. He says “Thank you,” and throws Erik a smile.
The corner of Erik’s mouth twitches and there is a strange, unreadable look in his eyes, but it doesn’t stay there for long - a blink, and he’s back behind his walls. “Come, the horses are this way.”
Erik sets a fast pace through the woods and Charles is preoccupied with staying on what little path there is, and it takes a few hours before he finally has enough breath to ask, before he finally draws level with the other man. “Please do not think me rude, but may I know what your plans are? For me, I mean. I need to find my sister; I want to know if you will go with me, or if I must follow you elsewhere, or....”
Erik reins in and motions him off the path, and they walk slowly among the trees.
Charles meets his eyes as best as he can.
“Charles. You’ve lost your sister because I failed you,” Erik says. Shame, rasping on the edges of each word. “I was supposed to have gone on that mission to escort you two, away from the tower and away from the army. The whole thing was my idea....” Charles watches his hands squeeze into fists, white-knuckled around his reins. “Because I have failed in that, I am at your disposal. It’s my responsibility now to keep you alive until you can find your sister.”
Charles swallows and stares, and his horse comes to a slow halt. Some distant part of his mind is roaring in fear and anger, some kind of emotion he can’t completely name. His heart stuttering in his chest, worried for Raven’s safety, shaken by Erik’s declaration. For the first time in years he feels like he wants to lash out at someone, at something - at the man who has just admitted his sin. A horror he’s always fought against. His skin prickles. His horse whinnying in fear beneath him.
And all that comes out of him is a shocked “What?”
And he watches Erik as he hesitates, and shrugs, and then holds out his hand. “Forgive me, or not, as you wish. But know that I am yours to command, now. I don’t know if that will help you. But I am here.”
Charles turns away; he drops his reins and slides off his horse. He mumbles his sister’s name. Can this pain really be only a few hours old? He blocks it, blocks the memory of Raven’s smile, the fear and the horror that she must be feeling now. He blocks the feeling of betrayal that he already knows she must be feeling, blocks the too-sharp edges of anger and hate.
The silver cuff around his wrist, its jagged edges still cutting into his skin. Blankly, he takes it off. He calls up a tiny, intense flame in the palm of his hand, and he lets it burn hotter and hotter - of course it doesn’t hurt him, not at all, but it makes his eyes water to look at it - and then he passes the broken ends of the cuff through the fire, again and again. The acrid smell of melting, the terrible heat, and when he’s mended the cuff - the ends are rounded and smooth now - he simply clenches his fist, and the flames die into his skin. Slowly, slowly; his body remembers how to work with his own powers.
His mind is completely blank as he puts the cuff back on, as he senses Erik walking up to him.
He looks up, and the sky broods and darkens above him. He’s missed the sunset.
He squeezes his eyes shut and his thoughts are a loud clamor. He’s only met one telepath since he’s been confined to the tower, and the boy died before that year was out. Shaking in his thin robes, wracked with pain, lying in Charles’s arms as he choked on his last words. Now Charles thinks of that boy’s anguished expression, the messages he told him he was sending out to friends and family. Messages of love and fear, his emotions in a snarled knot. The messages that had claimed his life, in the end.
And now, though he knows he doesn’t even have any similar abilities, Charles tries to do the same: he thinks of Raven and he sends her his love, his worry. Raven. Please, please, do not give in. Wait for me, dearest. It might take me a long time but I am coming for you, and I don’t care who gets in my way. I will burn the whole world, reduce it all to ashes if I must. For you.
He opens his eyes and he suddenly feels the sting of tears sliding down his cheeks.
Please be my sister when I find you, Raven.
He doesn’t flinch when something rustles behind him. He doesn’t flinch when Erik walks around to face him. He doesn’t flinch when Erik gets on his knees before him and places a sword at his feet.
He has never even noticed that Erik carried a sword; he only remembers the knives.
He looks at Erik, at his mournful and guilty eyes.
Charles picks up the sword and with difficulty he draws it from the sheath. As he pulls at it, he knows with near certainty that he’s going to drop it. He’s so inexperienced with ordinary weapons, and the blade is so heavy. He shakes his head at himself, at his unpracticed awkwardness. A strange thing in his hand. The metal scraping loudly in the hush of the forest. His draw is nowhere near as elegant as Raven’s.
He holds the sword up between them, sends a crackle of his power into the metal, so the blade burns with a faint fire. The evening is falling; the sword lights up his face, his eyes.
Charles speaks, quietly, the flames crackling around his voice. “Erik.”
“Charles,” comes the quiet answer.
A deep breath. “I accept.”
He looks up, startled, when Erik rises and places his hands around his own on the sword. “Then the first thing is to teach you how to handle a weapon. Not this, but something you can use, if you cannot use your abilities.”
Charles nods, his lips pressed tightly together. “All right.”
To Part III