Exile to Érenn - 18. Chapter 18

Breakfast was bacon and eggs and toast with marmalade, which Cianán had discovered early in the summer and approached with the same focused reverence he brought to everything Rowan put in front of him. Declan read the paper. Rowan refilled cups without being asked. The morning was ordinary and easy in the way the mornings had become.

Afterward, while Rowan cleared the plates, Aiden looked at Cianán across the table.

“Come up,” he said. “I want to show you my room.”

Cianán followed him upstairs.

The room was small and simple, the morning light coming through the thin curtains, the worn floorboards pale and quiet underfoot. Cianán stood in the doorway for a moment taking it in the way he took in new spaces, that particular attentiveness that missed nothing.

He looked at the desk. The unmade bed. The hoodie on the back of the chair. The charger snaking from the wall to nowhere in particular.

“What is that?” He pointed at the charger.

“It charges my phone. And my iPad. You plug it in.”

Cianán looked at it for a moment with the expression of someone filing away information they don’t entirely understand but accept as part of the world they’re moving through. Then he moved to the desk.

The Sligo folklore book was there, a folded piece of paper marking a page somewhere in the middle. He picked it up and turned it in his hands. Then he opened it.

He was quiet for a moment, reading. His eyes moved slowly down the page and then stopped. He turned back a few pages. Stopped again.

Aiden watched him from the bed where he’d dropped, arms folded behind his head.

Cianán turned another page. His finger traced a line that Aiden had underlined in pencil, pressing slightly into the paper. He read it. Then he looked up.

“You read this,” he said.

“Yeah. During the three days you were gone.”

Cianán looked back at the page. The underlined passages, the margin notes in Aiden’s handwriting, small and cramped. He turned to another marked page and read that too. His expression was private and careful, the look of someone encountering something unexpected about a person they thought they knew.

He closed the book gently and set it back on the desk.

“You were trying to understand,” he said.

“Yes, I was trying to understand … you,” Aiden confessed.

Cianán came and sat on the edge of the bed. Not beside Aiden, just on the edge, his hands in his lap, looking at the window and the thin curtains and the light coming through them.

“There is something I should have told you last night,” he said.

Aiden waited.

“If you had crossed,” Cianán said. “If I had let you.” He paused, choosing words with the care he always brought to difficult things. “A mortal in the Otherworld does not die. Not immediately. Not in the way you understand dying.” Another pause. “But you would lose your connection to this world. Gradually. Time moves differently there. What felt like weeks would be years here. Your mother. The person you are becoming. Everything waiting for you on the other side of this summer.” He stopped. “You would fade. Not the way my people fade. A different way. But the same result in the end.”

The room was quiet. Outside the window the garden was bright and still.

“You’ve seen it happen,” Aiden said.

“No,” Cianán said. “But I have felt the pull of the Otherworld on things that don’t belong there. I know what it does.” He looked at his hands. “I know what it would have done to you.”

Aiden stared at the ceiling. The old beams, dark and worn, the same beams he’d stared at on his first night in Ireland wondering what he’d come to find.

“That’s why you stopped,” he said.

“That is why I stopped.”

Aiden turned his head and looked at Cianán’s profile. The line of his jaw. The scar just visible at his collar. The boy who had been alone longer than Aiden’s world had existed, sitting on the edge of a single bed in a small Irish farmhouse on a bright summer morning, telling the truth as simply and directly as he always did.

“Okay,” Aiden said.

Cianán looked at him. “Okay?”

“I mean—” Aiden paused. “Thank you. For stopping. And for telling me now.”

Cianán held his gaze for a moment. Then the small real smile appeared, the one that arrived before he could compose himself.

“You are welcome,” he said.

They came back downstairs to find Rowan in the garden deadheading the lavender with the focused attention of a man giving himself something to do. He looked up when the back door opened.

“We’re going to the lake,” Aiden said.

Rowan looked at them both for a moment. Not long. Just long enough. “Take the water bottles from the fridge,” he said. “Don’t be too late.”

He went back to the lavender.

Aiden grabbed the water bottles. Cianán held the gate open. They went down the path without looking back.

Inside the kitchen Declan appeared in the doorway from his office. He looked at Rowan through the window, still bent over the lavender, and then at the two figures moving down the hill toward the lake.

He went back to his office and closed the door.

They took the path down to the lake without discussing it, the way they’d started doing things this summer without needing to plan them.

Cianán led them past the gravelly cove and further along the eastern shore, past the reeds and the low hawthorn, to a place Aiden hadn’t seen before.

The boulders here were large and flat, pale limestone worn smooth by centuries of water, angled into the lake at a shallow pitch before dropping away into deeper water. Three sides were sheltered by rock and low scrub, the fourth open to the lake itself, the Bricklieve Mountains reflected in the still surface beyond. It was the kind of place you wouldn’t find unless someone showed you.

Aiden looked at it. “You’ve been here before.”

“Yes,” Cianán said. “A long time ago.”

They left their things on the flattest boulder, the ring and Aiden’s phone set carefully aside. Aiden stripped to his boxer briefs. Cianán stepped out of his trousers, the linen braies pale in the afternoon light.

They slipped into the water from the boulder’s edge. It was deeper here than the shallows of the cove, cold enough to take the breath for a moment, the bottom invisible below them. They swam out a little way and then floated, the sky above them and the mountains reflected around them, the afternoon unhurried and warm.

For a while it was simply that. The water. The light. The particular ease of two people who had stopped needing to fill silence.

Then Aiden swam closer.

Not rushing. Aware of everything, the cold water, the warmth where their skin was close, the way Cianán turned toward him without surprise, as though he had been waiting for exactly this without knowing he was waiting.

Aiden reached for him.

It wasn’t tentative. And Cianán’s response told him everything he needed to know. The slight catch of breath. The way his hands found Aiden in the water, steady and certain. When Aiden kissed him Cianán kissed back without hesitation, and they were close enough in the water that there was no mistaking what the moment had become or that it was wanted equally by both of them.

Neither of them entirely knew what they were doing and neither of them cared.

The afternoon had moved on by the time they pulled themselves out of the water and lay on the warm flat limestone, side by side, the sun drying the water from their skin in slow degrees. The lake was still around them. Somewhere above the ridge a hawk turned in a slow circle and descended out of sight.

Neither of them spoke for a while.

Aiden looked at the sky. He felt different. Not dramatically, not in a way he could have described to anyone. Just settled. Like something that had been slightly off-center for as long as he could remember had quietly found its place.

He turned his head and looked at Cianán beside him. Cianán was looking at the sky too, his profile clean and still, the scar on his shoulder catching the afternoon light. He looked, in this moment, exactly his apparent age. Not ancient. Not mythic. Just a boy on a warm rock by a lake, unhurried and present.

As though he felt Aiden looking he turned his head.

They looked at each other for a moment without speaking.

Then Cianán said, very quietly, “I was waiting for you to be ready.”

Aiden held his gaze. “I know,” he said. “I know you were.”

They lay there a while longer, shoulders touching on the warm stone, the lake holding its ancient silence around them, until the sun began to drop toward the ridge and they gathered their things and started back.

They came back as the evening light was turning gold, quieter than when they’d left, walking close on the path up from the lake. Aiden’s hair was still damp. Cianán’s braies had dried unevenly in the sun.

Rowan was at the Aga when they came through the back door. He turned, took one look at them, and turned back to the stove.

“Good swim?” he said, with the careful neutrality of a man who had decided on his tone in advance.

“Yeah,” Aiden said. “Good swim.”

Rowan stirred whatever was on the hob for a moment. “You were gone a while.”

“The lake is is a ways.”

“It’s only twenty minutes down the path.”

Aiden said nothing. Under Rowan’s scrutiny his face was doing something he couldn’t entirely control.

Rowan glanced at him over his shoulder, and the corner of his mouth moved in a way that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite not one. “Dinner’s in forty minutes,” he said. “You might want to change.”

Declan appeared in the kitchen doorway. He looked at Aiden. He looked at Cianán. He looked at Rowan’s back. Something passed across his face that he converted, with visible effort, into an expression of complete neutrality.

“How was the lake?” he asked.

“Fine,” Aiden said.

“Good,” Declan said. “Good.”

A pause that lasted slightly too long.

“Right,” Declan said, and went back to his office.

Rowan made a sound that was almost certainly not a laugh.

Aiden looked at Cianán. Cianán looked back at him with the small private smile that meant he understood considerably more about what had just happened than he was letting on.

“Go and change,” Rowan said, still not turning around. “Both of you. And take a shower. You smell like the lake.”

They went upstairs. Aiden was considerably less modest then he was that morning.

After dinner Cianán left a little later than usual. At the door he paused and looked at Aiden for a moment, the way he sometimes did when something had happened that neither of them needed to name. Then he went out into the dark and up the hill toward the cairn.

Aiden stood at the door until he couldn’t see him anymore. Then he went upstairs.

He sat at the desk for a while, the folklore book beside him, the ring warm on his finger. He turned on his iPad.

He’d been trying to write this email for weeks. Every time he opened it he got as far as Hey Mom and then sat there looking at the screen for ten minutes before closing it again.

Tonight he wrote it.

He didn’t tell her everything. He told her enough. That Ireland had been different from anything he’d expected. That Rowan and Declan had been good to him in a way he hadn’t known he needed. That he’d spent the summer digging in the ground and learning things about the world that he couldn’t entirely explain but that had changed something in him he didn’t think was going back.

He told her he was sorry. For the Walgreens thing and the school thing and all the other things. Not in the way he’d said it before, automatically, because it was what you said. In the way of someone who had spent a summer becoming someone else and understood, from the distance of it, what the person he’d been had cost her.

He told her he missed Dad.

He almost deleted that line. Then he left it.

He told her he was okay. More than okay. That she didn’t need to worry about him anymore, or at least not in the same way. He didn’t tell her about Cianán. Not yet. Some things needed more than an email.

He read it back once. Then he sent it before he could change his mind.

He sat for a moment in the quiet of the room, the old beams above him, the ring on his finger, the window dark with the Irish night outside. Somewhere up on the hill the cairn sat in the heather, patient as always, the basin waiting inside it.

Lughnasadh was four days away.

He turned off the lamp and lay down in the dark and for the first time in as long as he could remember he fell asleep without thinking about anything at all.