War Between Four Walls - Part Four
Four
Erik sighs and scrubs at his eyes, and looks out the window. The smithy is wreathed in shadows. The candle on the battered work table gutters fitfully in the gusting winter breeze.
“We’re never going to be completely ready for anything as mad as this, Erik,” Logan says. His many-times-broken fingers are steepled under his chin. “Not if we had years in which to plan. Not if we had our own company of mages. Not even if we brought the four armies together.”
“Waves against rocks,” Erik says quietly, “waves as red as blood, on rocks made of power and death. Yes.” He drains the last few drops from his cup of wine. “And yet here we are. Making plans to give up our lives and the lives of those we command. Here we are, dreaming our foolish dreams.”
Logan laughs like stones falling down, like lightning shattering a tree. “And all because we want something better, something greater. Because we want what is right. Because maybe peace between humans and mages is an option. I didn’t need the reminder. I see my own fair share of runaways with blue-in-blue eyes. I see children being snatched away. I see men and women being torn to pieces. But thank you anyway.”
“How are the two of you even able to carry on a conversation - much less one like this?” There is a step on the threshold, a flash of red hair. Jean leans on the side of the door, folds her hands across her bosom. “You are both too tired to be doing anything else, and you, Logan, someone was supposed to have come here and poured you into your bed hours ago. Give up for tonight. The humor will soon turn into horror if you keep going.”
Erik gets up and starts to fold the maps away. Interminable lists: men and materiel and magical abilities. Every single entry is a man or a woman, is a soldier or a mage, is someone under his command or Logan’s. Every single name and every single item is a weapon, now.
He knows that every soldier here is a volunteer.
It doesn’t stop him from lying awake at night, wondering about the rightness of what he’s doing.
Sometimes, even the memory of looking into his wife’s blue-in-blue eyes as she lay dying in his arms is not enough to convince him.
Sometimes, even the terrible shadows haunting Charles’s face cannot reassure him.
Logan falls into step behind him as they emerge from the smithy, and he wears the axe on his hip with deadly ease. Erik has never met a more ferocious fighter, and he often thinks he should be grateful this man is on his side. Logan can wield almost every weapon Erik knows, and several he doesn’t even think should rightfully exist - and when he fights with his bare hands Logan can lay a man out flat with a single blow.
The other man disdains strategy and tactics as a rule, has no tact and no respect for anyone or anything, chafes at being in a position of authority, and is the best commander Erik has ever known.
Logan is muttering about the cold and missing out on Midwinter Night and about how tired he is because of Erik’s insistence on speaking with him as soon as he’d arrived.
“Will you be quiet for a moment,” Erik says, but he’s smiling a little, he’s finally allowing himself some amusement. “You have given me a lot to think about, and I need to get started on that thinking.”
“Is he going to be like this again?” Logan’s question is ostensibly directed at Jean. “And here I thought he’d found himself some kind of friend or pet or blue-eyed boy of some kind. Firestarter, Shaw said.”
“Talk about him however you wish, Logan, so long as you show Charles some respect,” is her answer, steel in her voice and her eyes. “He’s no one’s pet and he’s everyone’s friend. Forget that, and you may need to deal with most of the people in our companies - not to mention all of the mages here, and Charles’s sister on top of that.”
Logan laughs, gruff and sincere. “So when am I going to get to meet him?”
“He is in a lesson right now, and we are about to join it.” Jean pauses. “Erik, he’s with Emma, and you might want to brace yourself.”
That brings Erik up short and he swings around to look at the sudden pinch of disapproval in Jean’s scarred face. “What are you talking about.”
Jean simply draws a line across her throat with her index finger.
“He isn’t forbidden from using that spell,” he says abruptly.
“Calm down, Erik,” Jean says. “Please. For his sake, if not for yours.”
He remembers what he’s just said and he thinks he’s never sounded both angry and afraid like that before. “All right,” he says, and he draws in a few deep breaths. “Tell me,” he says, when he feels he’s a little calmer.
“Emma wanted to be taught about the collar, and when I left them she seemed just about to wear him down at last.”
“Can someone tell me what’s going on,” Logan growls.
“You’ve seen mages in your time, Logan,” Erik says. “And when I sent Shaw back to you, I requested that he explain how collaring works on a mage.”
“He did. I remember. Mages turning each other into unwilling puppets, right?”
“You are right. And Charles,” Jean says carefully, “is the only mage we know who can resist it.”
“I understand knowing the spell; Shaw says a mage who was powerful enough was taught it by force. But I thought that meant total obedience at all times, until the collar’s taken away.”
“That was what we knew in the past. Before we rescued Charles and took him in, before we went to destroy the mage who’d abducted his sister,” Erik says. To Jean, he adds, “Why did Emma even think about it?”
“That is the other thing you need to prepare for,” she says, and she grimaces, and Erik looks sharply over his shoulder; her hands are shaking. “Sean is in that lesson with them; he - Erik, he acts as though he’s always waiting for someone to give him orders. It’s almost as if he doesn’t know what it’s like to be out of a collar. There is very nearly a physical scar on him, a thin line around his neck - ”
Erik swears and breaks into a run, and the door crashes open under his impatient fist and -
He skids to a halt right inside the door. The house is in order. The fire roars on the hearth; a gust of cold wind makes the flames shiver. Quiet voices murmuring and then coming to a startled stop. Erik opens his mouth, draws breath to shout.
“Stop, Erik,” Charles says, suddenly. His voice is quiet but it is laced with power. He holds up his hand, palm out. “All of you.” More quietly, he continues, “Emma? Stay with me. You know I won’t ask you to do anything. You know this is only a lesson. Breathe, little one. It’s me. It’s Charles.”
Erik blinks and takes the scene in once again. Tea things laid out on the table, including Jean’s special blend. Only one cup is in use, however, and it’s in Sean’s hands, and there is a patchwork blanket thrown over his shoulders as he sits on Charles’s pallet.
Charles and Emma are sitting next to the fire. One hand at her throat, and the other is gripping Charles’s scarred wrist with such force that her knuckles are showing, bone-white through her skin.
“I don’t know if I can resist it,” Emma whispers after a moment. She is shaking like a leaf in a high breeze. “How do I do that, Charles?”
“Try to do what I did. See it very clearly in your mind.”
“I can’t....”
“Charles,” Erik says. “Stop this.”
“One moment longer, please.”
Erik crosses his arms, apprehensive.
Jean is braced back against the closed door, and Logan is standing protectively next to her.
As they all look on, Emma steps away from Charles. Her hands clench into fists. Her face contorts through pain and concentration and desperation.
Charles whispers, encouragingly. “That’s it, you’re walking the right path, don’t stop - oh!” He just barely manages to stop himself from falling over backward; his eyes roll back into his head, eyelids fluttering. “Ouch,” he mutters after a moment, and he puts his hand over his heart. “That hurt.”
Erik’s standing over Charles before he even realizes he’s moved. “Charles. Listen to me. Release her already.”
“I can’t do that,” is the reply, and Charles opens his eyes wide. Bright hectic blush rising in his cheeks; his mouth has fallen open in shock and pride and surprise.
“Why not!” Erik nearly shouts.
And Charles smiles. “Emma?”
“I...I broke it. Charles, I broke the collar,” she says, pale with power and accomplishment. “Is...is that even possible?”
“It is now!” And almost immediately Charles claps his hands over his mouth. “Oh, oh dear. This is no shouting matter, is it?”
“It’s not,” and everyone jumps, and Erik looks over his shoulder, to where Sean is running the fingers of one hand over his ravaged throat. “It’s nothing to be happy about, not for you or for her. Not while there’s a tower around.”
Logan begins to swear, quiet and forceful, under his breath, and for once Erik doesn’t have the inclination to tell him to stop.
There is a hand sliding into his, and Erik looks down.
On his feet and seeming to vibrate with amazement, Charles looks torn between happiness and fear. His hands are trembling - flash of his silver cuff, the scar effacing his brand.
Erik starts again when he notices the third object that Charles is holding, the object cupped in the hand he’d placed over his heart: the bird-whistle.
“Erik. Please. Calm down.”
Erik closes his eyes and he sees death in its dark cloak striding toward him again, and he makes an abortive movement to gather Charles close; he just barely manages to stop himself.
Charles is speaking again. “Sean?”
“You know what this means,” the red-haired man rasps out, slurring his words. The sleepy cast of his face. “Weapons, now. The two of you. She wasn’t. Not before. Now both of you are. The collar is the reason the tower exists. The collar is the reason that mage you fought was left alive. I was there when they let him go. I talked to those he’d killed. Experiments. Mages as weapons.” Sean covers a yawn. “The collar is trigger and restraint at the same time. Without the collar, mages go free - and if the mages go free, the tower falls. And there will be no defenses left.”
“Defenses against what?”
“Against the monsters. Against the madness. That which festers beneath the tower.”
There is a soft sob, and Erik blinks and looks up, at the group still near the door. At Jean holding Emma close, at the murderous tension on Logan’s face.
“That which we were gathered for,” Charles says, and now he looks stricken, as well. “I...I had always thought those things were little more than stories. I was confined to the upper storeys of the towers, except when I was thrown into the dark cells.”
“Not stories. Go deeper than the dungeons. All real. All evil,” Sean says. “The dead tell me, when I sing to them. I cannot tell them to stop. I cannot escape the screaming. I hear it all the time. Long gone from the tower, still the mages follow me. Never be alone again. Never know serenity again.”
Worry seizes at Erik’s heart and gnaws with sharp teeth, and he can hear it in his own voice when he says, “The two of you explain yourselves. Now.”
“I...no, I won’t be able to explain it,” Charles says after a long, long beat of fearful silence. “Not with words; I don’t think I can even think about it. But I can do this,” and he points at the flames. Image of a tower and the people within it, people marching away into a deep red void.
Erik blinks, and the red flames writhe into terrifying shapes.
“That one is real,” Logan suddenly says, and Erik peers a little closer. A long snake-like shape, crowned with three heads. “Helped fight it. Went down with both my legs broken. Half a hundred men dead in the attempt.”
“So is that,” Jean whispers. Four legs, a fan-like shape of blades around the neck. “Summers has vivid nightmares about it.”
He recognizes the next shadow - half a bird of prey, half a man-shape, and all teeth; he remembers his father’s voice, screaming: Run, Erik. His mother, pale and determined and her hands clumsy on the haft of a spear.
“That which exists in the darkness. Comes out of the depths of the tower. Mages are the first and only line of defense,” Sean says. “None but a collared mage would even have the courage. The stronger the collar, the more powerful the mage, the easier the battle. Only not always.”
And the worry in Erik’s heart draws blood at last, hard enough to almost make his knees buckle in shock, when Charles gasps out loud.
“That mage I - we - fought. He said he was perfecting the collar. The tower wasn’t going to stop him so long as he could keep experimenting with the collar - those people under his command - all the mages in his army!”
Erik thinks back to another image of Charles covered in ash, Charles alone in the center of a storm of war, mouth a tight line of silence. Fire on the battlefield, Charles’s fire, a weapon spiraling out of control.
Erik remembers the mage who’d killed his wife: the mage who yanked the knife out of her chest and plunged it into Erik, her blood dripping red down the blade.
The same mage who’d snatched Raven away from Charles, who’d violated Charles’s heart and tried to tear it and him into pieces.
Horror and fear crowding in on him from all sides. Erik looks around the hut: at Emma shivering and clinging to Jean’s hip, at Logan with his hand on his axe. At Charles, eyes so wide he can see white all around the blue; at Sean, paler than usual and now truly afraid.
It’s up to Erik to calm them all down, and he doesn’t know how it’s possible, because he knows what it’s like to fight beside a mage and he knows what it’s like when the mage is the enemy. But he doesn’t know how to use a mage as a weapon, even if the mage is the only weapon against something far more dangerous. The very idea sickens him.
It takes a long moment, and he doesn’t recognize his own voice when he says, quietly, “Charles.”
“Erik,” is the unsteady reply.
“This changes everything.”
“It does and it doesn’t,” Charles says. “It changes everything and nothing all at once.”
And that is hope, finally, rekindling in Erik’s heart. It’s a painful kind of flame, and it burns as hotly as the answering resolve in Charles’s eyes. “Because there are things that are more important than just our lives.”
“Peace,” Charles whispers. “Freedom. That which is larger than just a human life, or a mage’s.”
“You’re both insane,” Sean mutters, and he topples over, half-asleep on Charles’s pallet. “More than I am, even.”
“I’m with them anyway.”
Erik looks up and raises an eyebrow at Logan. “And here you were always objecting to me and my...crusades.”
“This is the one I’m on,” Logan says, and he looks away and shrugs. “I think we talked about that, just now.”
“Yes, we did, at that.” Erik nods and salutes him: fist over heart.
Next to Erik, Charles is holding out his hand to Emma. “It must be your choice,” he tells her. “We’re marching to war, now. Come with us if you wish. Or stay here, and know you’ll be protected. In return you must help to protect this village, this place of peace.”
Erik watches as Emma pulls away from Jean, and she draws near for a moment, just close enough to touch Charles’s fingers before she steps away, head held high. “I - I want to stay, but I’ll go. I’ll march with you. I’ll help. Any way I can.”
Jean clears her throat, and she says, quietly, “Let me speak to Summers. One of us must go with you, and one must stay here.”
“For Rachel,” Erik says. “I know. I would have you both stay back, for your daughter’s sake, if only it were possible.” He tries to be as gentle as he can when he says, “Tell me of your decision when you reach it.”
“Do you really think you’ll win?” Sean asks, suddenly. His eyes are still closed.
No one answers for a long moment, but Charles is the first to speak, at last. “That is nothing to me. If I had stayed in the tower, I would have been dragged unwillingly into the battle, again and again. But I am here, I am free, and I can choose how and where I make my stand. And that is what matters.”
“Well said,” Erik says, softly.
“Not insane enough to tell people you’re taking your only weapons with you.” With an effort, Sean opens his eyes, and shakes his head sadly.
“That, at least, is something I can do something about,” Charles says, and he leaves Erik’s side again, half-falls gracelessly into one of the chairs at the table. “There are only a few people who know about my ability, and several of them are already here. My sister may have figured part of it out, I do not yet know - but in any case, I will speak with her, and with Azzel, and I will swear them both to secrecy. As for you, Emma, you now understand why I said what I said at the beginning of the lesson.”
“That it was as life and death to you,” Emma says. “Now I know.”
“Thank you.”
“Summers knows,” Jean says quietly.
“Shaw told only me.” Logan says. “Don’t think he’s up to telling anyone else; people don’t like him much.”
“I like him,” Emma says, shyly.
“And so do I,” Charles says.
Erik looks at the smile that passes briefly over Charles’s face, and he nods at him to continue.
“And now I must also swear everyone in this room to secrecy - but it will not be for my sake; I want everyone here to swear to keep Emma’s ability secret,” Charles says, quietly. “That includes you, Sean.”
Erik almost glares when the red-haired man responds with a sleepy, dusty laugh. “No oaths to the living for me,” Sean says. “Oaths to the dead are all I have. But I will keep your secret. I know what will come of it - I will not tell you - but you have my word. Such as it is.”
“I will accept that,” Charles says, and suddenly he sounds weary. “Jean?”
“You did not have to ask,” is the response. “I swear it on my heart and on my life and on my sword; and I will keep it a secret even from my husband if I must.”
“I would never ask that of you, Jean - you must tell him, and you must tell him to swear to me. And Jean - thank you.” And then: “I’ve only just met you, Logan, and already I have to ask you to do something like this.”
“Heard a lot about you from Shaw,” Logan drawls. “He seems to think you’re strange.”
That manages to startle a laugh out of Charles. “He thinks everyone’s strange except for himself.”
“Which is the opposite of the truth,” Erik says, smiling thinly at Charles. “As we all know.”
“Will you swear, then?” Charles asks after a long moment of silence.
“Of course I will,” Logan says. To Emma, he adds, “You’re not the only child I know with blue-in-blue eyes.”
Emma smiles, a little. “I’d like to meet them, maybe in the future - if we survive.”
“I’ll take you back with me to visit. If. That’s a promise,” Logan says.
Charles smiles and beckons Emma over, and she sits down at his feet, and they whisper to each other for a few moments.
When Charles looks up to him, Erik tries to smile, and tries to reassure him. “I will tell you the same thing Jean did. You don’t have to ask me to make that promise; it was done, I made it, as soon as you mentioned it.”
He thinks about the other secrets he’s keeping for Charles, and it only strengthens his resolve. Out loud, he says, “We will have to talk about this again, but not now. Go back to your quarters and get some rest, all of you.”
“When do you want to meet with my officers,” Logan asks.
“In three days. Let them have some time to recover from their journey.”
“Done,” and Logan nods and opens the door. “Everyone who’s leaving, follow me.”
“Take the rest of the tea if you want it, Sean,” Charles says, quietly, and Erik watches as Logan hauls the unresisting redhead to his feet. “If it affects you, let us know.”
When they’re alone, Erik looks down at Charles - and he blinks after a moment and then he smiles, despite the terror still gnawing at his heart.
Charles is slumped down over the table, shoulders rising and falling gently; his arms are folded neatly on the table and his forehead is pillowed in the crook of his elbow. Erik has only taken his eyes off him for a moment or two, but in that short interval the other man has fallen asleep, suddenly and completely. It must be an awkward position to sleep in - and Erik would know. It’s happened to him before.
With a start, Erik notices the lines of fatigue around the mage’s eyes, the tired droop of his shoulders. And not for the first time, Erik finds himself wondering what mages could possibly talk about, because it seems that half the time when Charles is conversing with Sean or with Emma or with Eliszabeth he often comes back vulnerable and quiet. Sometimes he withdraws into himself and sits quietly where he can’t bother anyone, and sometimes he spends the rest of the day following Erik around, tracing circles around him as he goes about his remaining tasks.
Erik sighs and shakes his head, and throws Charles’s cloak over him, as well as the blanket from his pallet, and he touches his forehead to the top of Charles’s head and murmurs, “You’ll always have me. Whatever you ask of me.”
He tries to hold this new and strange vow close to his heart, tries to shelter its tiny flame. Against memory weighing heavy on his heart, against the truth of long and difficult days to come.
“And perhaps someday you will stop asking, because by then you will understand that I will do everything you wish, with a light heart and with willing hands.”
To Parts Five and Six