Exile to Érenn - 11. Chapter 11

The morning of the third day arrived gray and still, the kind of stillness that felt less like peace and more like waiting. Aiden was downstairs before seven, which was unusual enough that Rowan looked up from the Aga with mild surprise.

“You’re up early.”

“Couldn’t sleep.” Aiden dropped into his chair at the kitchen table and folded his arms on the surface, staring at nothing in particular.

Rowan turned back to the stove without comment. The kitchen smelled of coffee and butter browning in a pan. He was occupied with something Aiden didn’t recognize, something that involved the box of Quaker Oat Squares and a level of concentration that seemed excessive for seven in the morning.

“What are you making?”

“American cereal French toast,” Rowan said, with the confidence of a man who had committed to a questionable decision and was seeing it through. “I found a recipe online. Apparently you crush the cereal and use it as breading.”

Aiden stared at the back of his head. “That’s not a thing.”

“The internet disagrees with you.”

“The internet is wrong.”

Rowan flipped something in the pan. It sizzled aggressively. “Declan said the same thing. He also said I was banned from experimenting with breakfast. He’s up at the cairns today so I’m choosing not to remember that conversation.”

Despite everything, Aiden almost smiled. He watched Rowan plate two thick slices of eggy bread crusted with crushed Oat Squares, dust them with icing sugar, and set the plate in front of him with the expression of a man presenting a masterpiece.

Aiden looked at it. “It looks insane.”

“Try it.”

He picked up his fork and cut a small piece. The outside was crisp, slightly nutty from the cereal, the inside soft and custardy. He chewed slowly.

“Well?” Rowan asked.

“It’s actually not terrible.”

Rowan sat down across from him, pleased. “I’ll take it.”

They ate in comfortable silence for a few minutes. Outside the kitchen window the hills were invisible behind low clouds, the garden soft and gray in the early light. Aiden kept glancing toward the window without meaning to.

Rowan noticed but didn’t comment immediately. He poured them both coffee, pushed the milk across the table, and said casually, “Third day.”

“Yeah.”

“He said three days.”

“I know what he said.”

Rowan wrapped both hands around his mug. “He’ll come.”

Aiden looked down at his plate. The certainty in Rowan’s voice helped more than he wanted to admit. He nodded once, said nothing, and ate another piece of French toast.

They were still at the table when Rowan, apparently feeling the need to fill the silence, leaned back in his chair and said, “Declan told me once about the time he got into an argument with Father Michael at their school graduation.”

Aiden looked up. “What happened?”

“They were eighteen. Declan had written his graduation speech about the Iron Age ringforts in the Sligo hills. Father Michael, who was giving the blessing, took exception to what he called Declan’s excessive enthusiasm for pre-Christian monuments. They argued for twenty minutes in front of the entire school. The principal had to separate them. Declan’s mother was mortified. Father Michael’s mother thought it was hilarious, or at least that’s how Declan tells it.”

“Who won the argument?”

Rowan considered this. “Declan, probably. But Michael had the last word because he gave a very long blessing afterward. Very long. Deliberately long. The whole school was standing for eleven minutes.”

Aiden laughed, short and genuine. It felt strange in his chest, like a muscle he hadn’t used in days. “They’ve been arguing ever since.”

“Forty years and counting,” Rowan said. His smile softened then, settling into something more careful. “Though it wasn’t always just the archaeology. There were other things. Later, after school. Declan went through some difficult years, figuring out who he was, and Michael had his faith pulling one way and his friendship pulling another. He made his choice.” Rowan turned his mug slowly in his hands. “I don’t think he’s ever stopped regretting it. And I don’t think Declan’s ever fully stopped missing who they were before.”

Aiden was quiet for a moment, looking at the table. He didn’t ask what the difficult years were. He didn’t need to. “That’s sad,” he said finally.

“It is,” Rowan agreed. “But they’re still here, still arguing. That counts for something.”

Aiden looked toward the window again. The cloud over the hills had shifted slightly, a pale brightness pressing through from the east.

Rowan watched him. “Go outside if you need to. You don’t have to sit here pretending to be interested in my cooking.”

“I am interested in your cooking.”

“You’ve looked out that window nine times in the last ten minutes.”

Aiden opened his mouth to deny it, then didn’t bother. He pushed back his chair, carried his plate to the sink, and pulled on his hoodie from the hook by the door.

“I’ll just be in the garden,” he said.

“Of course you will,” Rowan said pleasantly.

The garden was damp, the grass silvered with dew. Aiden stood at the low wall at the far end, looking up toward the ridge. The cloud was breaking apart now, slow and reluctant, letting through thin blades of morning light that moved across the hillside like fingers searching for a catch.

He thought about the basin. The silvery light rising from the stone. The way Cianán’s outline had softened and then simply wasn’t there anymore.

Three days. Wait for me.

He’d waited. He’d worked the dig with Declan, eaten Rowan’s cooking, lain awake listening to the house breathe. He’d read half the Sligo folklore book Rowan had bought him in town, more out of restlessness than genuine interest, though he’d found himself underlining passages without meaning to. Pages about the sídhe, about the people of the mounds, about the old belief that the boundary between worlds grew thin at certain times and certain places.

He’d thought about Cianán every hour of every one of those three days.

He was thinking about him now when he felt it, a shift in the air, a change in the quality of the stillness, the way the garden seemed to hold its breath.

He turned.

Cianán stood at the garden gate.

He looked restored. His auburn hair caught the morning light and burned copper and gold, vivid and warm. His skin had lost the translucent pallor of those last days in Dublin, replaced by a faint living glow. He stood straight and easy, the weariness gone completely, his blue-green eyes bright and steady and fixed on Aiden with an expression that made Aiden’s chest feel suddenly too small for everything inside it.

Aiden didn’t decide to move. He was just moving, crossing the garden fast, the wet grass soaking through his trainers, not caring, not thinking about anything except the fact that Cianán was there and whole and looking at him like that.

He stopped a few feet away.

Then, without warning, all the things he’d been carrying for three days hit him at once. The relief, the joy, and underneath both of those, the knowledge of what Cianán actually was pressing against everything he thought he’d understood. He’d had three days to sit with it. Three days to read about the Tuatha Dé Danann in a folklore book with shaky hands, to lie on his bed staring at ceiling beams thinking, he’s real, they’re real, it’s all real. Three days to feel the ground shift permanently under his feet.

He stood there, three feet away, and suddenly didn’t know what to do with his hands.

Cianán crossed the distance between them without hesitation. His arms came around Aiden, warm and certain and strong in a way that hadn’t been there at the end of the Dublin trip, and he held on. Aiden felt the solidity of him, the realness of him, and the knot in his chest that had been pulled tight for seventy-two hours finally let go.

He hugged back. Hard.

They stood like that for a long moment, neither speaking. The garden was still around them, the birds starting up somewhere in the apple tree, the morning light going gold at the edges.

Then Cianán pulled back just enough, and before Aiden could say anything, before he could be awkward or overthink it, Cianán kissed him.

It was soft and unhurried and it lasted just long enough to be unmistakable. Aiden felt his heart do something complicated and then settle, like a compass needle finding north.

When they separated Aiden looked at him. His face felt warm. He had absolutely nothing intelligent to say.

“Hi,” he managed.

Cianán smiled, that small, real, unguarded one. “Hello, Aiden.”

From the kitchen window, Rowan watched the two boys in the garden with a mug of coffee halfway to his lips. He stood very still for a moment. Then a slow smile spread across his face.

I’d better keep an eye on those two, he thought, with absolutely no intention of doing anything of the sort.

They walked to the farmhouse hand in hand, which felt both completely natural and slightly terrifying, and Aiden decided not to examine it too closely.

Rowan was at the sink when they came through the door, apparently very interested in washing a single mug. He turned with an expression of complete innocence that convinced nobody.

“Cianán! You look well.” He crossed the kitchen and pulled Cianán into a quick, warm hug. “We missed you around here.”

Cianán accepted it with surprised pleasure, the way he always did when Rowan’s affection caught him off guard. “I missed this house,” he said. Then, with complete sincerity: “I could not stay away long. I need a bowl of your oatmeal.”

Rowan laughed, delighted. “Sit down. Both of you. I’ll put the pot on.”

Aiden sat beside Cianán at the kitchen table, their shoulders touching. Under the table, Cianán’s knee pressed lightly against his. Aiden pressed back and said nothing and felt the warmth of it move through his whole chest.

By mid-morning the cloud had burned off completely and the hills were sharp and green against a pale blue sky. It was Cianán who suggested Lough Arrow, almost shyly, as though he wasn’t sure the idea would land.

“The lake,” he said. “I’d like to go to the lake. With you.”

“Yeah,” Aiden said. “Let’s do it.”

He grabbed a towel from the bathroom and his dad’s old Giants cap from the hook by the door, jamming it on out of habit. Rowan handed them a small bag with water bottles and a packet of biscuits without being asked, waved them off, and went back to his office with the expression of a man who was very generously minding his own business.

The path down to Lough Arrow wound through the fields below the farmhouse, past the stone walls and the patch of wild fuchsia that had been blooming since Aiden arrived. It was a fifteen-minute walk at an easy pace, the ground softening as they descended toward the water.

Cianán walked beside him, close but not touching, taking in the landscape with that particular attention of his. Not the wide-eyed wonder of the Dublin trip, but something quieter and older, like a man revisiting a place that had changed while he was gone and finding it both familiar and strange.

“You okay?” Aiden asked.

“I am very okay,” Cianán said. He glanced at the Giants cap. “What is that on your head?”

“It’s a baseball cap.”

“What is baseball?”

“It’s a sport. American. You’d probably think it was weird.”

Cianán studied the cap. “It has letters on it.”

“SF Giants. It was my dad’s.”

A flicker of recognition crossed Cianán’s face, the understanding of what an object could carry. He nodded once, said nothing more, and they walked on.

Then, without warning, he reached over and lifted the cap from Aiden’s head and put it on his own, backward.

Aiden looked at him.

The cap was slightly too big. It sat tilted on Cianán’s auburn hair, the brim pointing backward, the orange SF logo visible above his forehead in reverse. He looked completely ridiculous and somehow still managed to carry it with a kind of accidental dignity that was deeply unfair.

Aiden burst out laughing. “You look absolutely stupid.”

Cianán touched the brim experimentally. “It feels important.”

“Give it back.”

“No.” Cianán started walking faster.

“Cianán—”

He broke into a run. Aiden ran after him, laughing, the path winding down toward the silver gleam of the lake ahead.

The cove looked like it had been waiting for them. A shallow, gravelly inlet where the water ran clear over smooth stones, the banks grassy and warm in the morning sun, sheltered on three sides by low rises of heather and rock. A heron stood motionless in the shallows twenty meters away, apparently unbothered by their arrival.

They stood at the edge, breathing hard from the run. Cianán still had the cap on backward.

“Right,” Aiden said, pulling his hoodie over his head. “We’re going in.”

He stripped down to his boxer briefs and waded in before he could think about it too much. The water was cold, genuinely, shockingly cold, and he gasped and swore loudly enough that the heron finally decided it had better things to do and lifted off with a slow, dignified flap.

“It’s freezing,” he announced.

Cianán stood on the bank, carefully folding his sweatshirt. He set the Giants cap on top of the pile, brim up. Then he waded in wearing his linen braies, and his sharp intake of breath at the cold was deeply satisfying.

“It’s freezing,” he confirmed.

“I just said that.”

“I didn’t believe you.”

“You never believe me.”

Cianán splashed him. Hard.

The next twenty minutes were loud and undignified and exactly what they both needed. They chased each other through the shallows, the cold forgotten almost immediately in the effort of staying upright on the slippery stones. Aiden dunked Cianán once, with great ceremony, and paid for it immediately when Cianán surfaced and tackled him around the waist with a strength that sent them both under. They came up gasping and laughing. The Giants cap got involved somewhere around the ten-minute mark, tossed like a frisbee, landing on the water, retrieved with dramatic urgency by Aiden who held it aloft like a trophy while Cianán tried to grab it back. At one point they were both waist-deep, hands locked around each other’s wrists, neither willing to be pulled off balance, both grinning too hard to maintain any real leverage. Their faces were close. Water ran down Cianán’s temples and dripped from his jaw.

Aiden let go first, stepping back, breathing hard. His heart was doing things it had no business doing, given that they were standing in a freezing lake in County Sligo arguing over a baseball cap.

“I win,” he said.

“You released first,” Cianán said. “That is not winning.”

“It’s a strategic retreat.”

“It’s losing.”

Aiden threw the cap at his head. Cianán caught it one-handed, which was extremely annoying, and put it back on backward.

They climbed out eventually, breathless and waterlogged, and flopped onto the warm grass above the waterline. Aiden spread the towel between them and they lay on their backs side by side, staring up at the sky while their breathing slowed. The sun was warm on their skin. Water droplets caught the light. The lake stretched out before them, silver and vast and still.

The Giants cap sat between them on the towel, damp at the brim, the orange SF faded from years of use.

For a while neither of them spoke. The silence was easy, the kind that didn’t need filling. A pair of swallows cut low over the water. Somewhere up on the ridge a sheep called once and was answered.

Aiden picked up the cap and turned it in his hands.

“My dad wore this to every home game,” he said. “He’d take me sometimes. We’d get hot dogs and he’d explain the game even though I already knew the rules. I think he just liked explaining it.” He paused. “He died two years ago. Heart attack. No warning. He was forty-one.”

Cianán was quiet for a moment. “I am sorry. Forty-one is very young to leave.”

“Yeah.” Aiden set the cap down between them. “He would have thought this whole summer was incredible. He was into history. Not like Declan, but he read a lot. Books about ancient stuff.” He almost smiled. “He would have lost his mind over the cairns.”

“He sounds like someone worth knowing.”

“He was.” Aiden looked at the lake. “I keep thinking about how he’ll never get to know the person I’m turning into. Whatever that is.”

Cianán turned his head to look at him. “He would recognize you,” he said. “The good in you was always there. It was just buried under the anger.”

Aiden didn’t answer. His throat felt tight. He nodded once.

Cianán looked back at the sky. After a moment he said, “In the Otherworld everything is beautiful. The light is always golden and the music never stops and nothing decays or breaks or dies.” He paused. “But it is still. There is no one to throw that cap at my head and call me ridiculous. No one whose laugh sounds like yours.” He paused again, his voice dropping. “When I go back, I will miss this. I will miss you.”

Aiden turned his head. Cianán was looking at the sky, his profile sharp and clean against the blue, the copper tones of his hair bright in the sun. The silvery scar on his shoulder caught the light.

“How long do you have?” Aiden asked. The question he’d been afraid to ask for weeks.

Cianán took his time answering. “The light along the ridge is already shifting. You can see it if you watch carefully. The sun moves against the mountains differently each evening. When Lughnasadh comes—” He stopped.

“When is that?”

“The sixth of August, by your reckoning.”

Aiden did the math. Five weeks. Maybe six. He looked back at the lake.

Cianán’s shoulder pressed against his. Then his head came to rest, gently, against Aiden’s shoulder. Aiden didn’t move. He just let it happen, the weight of it warm and real.

“I’m not going to pretend that’s enough time,” Aiden said.

“No,” Cianán agreed. “It isn’t.”

They sat like that for a while longer, the lake reflecting the sky, the Giants cap damp between them on the towel. Eventually Cianán lifted his head and they began gathering their things in easy silence.

“Come on,” Aiden said, picking up the cap and jamming it back on his own head. “Rowan’ll think we drowned.”

Cianán stood and looked down at him with that small, real smile. “You could not drown in that lake. It is barely up to your waist.”

“Tell that to the heron we terrorized.”

“The heron left of its own choosing.”

“Because we were obnoxious.”

“Because we were happy,” Cianán said simply.

Aiden looked at him. His chest went very full and very still at the same time.

“Yeah,” he said. “We were.”

They started back up the path hand in hand, the towel over Aiden’s shoulder, the damp cap on his head. The farmhouse was visible on the rise above them, warm and whitewashed in the afternoon light.

Aiden glanced over. “Hey Cianán.”

“Yes.”

“Why does the Otherworld smell like old socks?”

Cianán blinked. “It does not smell like old socks.”

“Are you sure? Because you kind of smell like old socks right now.”

“That is the lake.”

“Is it though?”

Cianán shoved him sideways, not hard, just enough. Aiden laughed and shoved back and they were still arguing about it, laughing, when they came through the garden gate.

Inside, the farmhouse smelled of turf smoke and whatever Rowan had started for dinner. Aiden dropped the damp towel over the back of a chair and set the Giants cap on the kitchen table. Cianán looked at it sitting there between the salt cellar and Rowan’s reading glasses, ordinary and out of place and somehow exactly right.

“You can borrow it again,” Aiden said. “Anytime.”

Cianán looked at him. “I know,” he said simply.

Rowan appeared in the doorway, looked at the two of them, and said nothing. Just smiled and went back to the stove.