Exile to Érenn - 14. Chapter 14

Aiden came downstairs to find the kitchen already occupied and already strange.

Rowan was at the Aga, which was normal. The porridge was on, which was normal. Declan sat at the table with his coffee and his notebook open in front of him, which was normal, a bowl and coffee mug sat in front of his chair which was also normal. What was not normal was the way Rowan kept glancing toward the kitchen doorway every few seconds. Or the way Declan had written nothing in the notebook despite having sat there long enough to fill a page. Or the way both of them looked up when Aiden walked in with identical expressions of careful, studied composure that convinced nobody.

“Morning,” Aiden said.

“Morning,” they said together, a fraction too quickly.

Aiden looked at the empty chair where Cianán usually sat. He looked at the window. He looked back at Rowan and Declan, both of whom were now doing an excellent impression of two people who had not just been caught doing nothing while pretending to do something.

He poured himself coffee, sat down, and waited.

They lasted approximately four minutes before Rowan started reorganizing things on the counter that didn’t need reorganizing, and Declan opened his notebook to a fresh page and immediately closed it again.

“You know he’s the same person he was yesterday,” Aiden said.

“We know that,” Rowan said, from the counter.

“He just healed Declan’s leg with ancient water and confirmed he’s been alive since before recorded history,” Declan said, without looking up from the closed notebook. “We’re aware he’s the same person.”

“You’re both being weird.”

“We’re processing,” Rowan said, with great dignity.

Aiden drank his coffee.

Cianán arrived at eight, as he usually did, staff in hand, hair damp from the morning air. He appeared in the kitchen doorway, took one look at the room, and stopped.

Rowan straightened. Declan’s hand moved toward his notebook and then retreated. Both of them arranged their faces into expressions of complete normality that were, if anything, less convincing than the expressions they’d been wearing before.

Cianán looked at them. Then he looked at Aiden.

Aiden pressed his lips together.

“Good morning,” Cianán said, with the careful tone of someone testing the structural integrity of a bridge before putting their full weight on it.

“Good morning,” Rowan said warmly, with the particular warmth of a man who was very consciously treating someone exactly as he always had and wanted to make sure everyone knew it. “Sit down. Porridge is nearly ready.”

Cianán sat. He looked at Aiden again, a small questioning tilt of his head.

“They’ve been like this since I came down,” Aiden said, just loud enough for the whole table to hear. “I think they’re afraid of you.”

“Aiden,” Rowan said.

“I’m not afraid,” Declan said at exactly the same moment, which rather undermined the point.

Cianán looked at Rowan. Then at Declan. Then back at Aiden. A warmth moved across his face, uncertain at first, then more settled, the way the sun came through the window in the morning, gradual and then suddenly present.

“I am still the same,” he said to the room at large. “I have not changed since yesterday.”

“We know that,” Rowan said firmly. He brought the pot to the table, ladled porridge into bowls, and sat down with the air of a man who had decided to take charge of a situation even if he wasn’t entirely sure what the situation was. “Nobody thinks you’ve changed. We’re just—”

He looked at Declan.

“Recalibrating,” Declan said.

Rowan pointed at him. “That. Yes. Recalibrating.”

Cianán turned the word over with the careful attention he gave to things that were new to him. ”Like a stone,” he said, “that has been turned to face the light it was always meant to face.”

Rowan stared at him. “That is exactly what it’s like.”

Aiden looked at Cianán. Cianán looked back at him with the small, private smile that meant he was pleased with himself.

Declan had been watching Cianán since he sat down, the expression on his face balanced somewhere between the look he wore at the cairn when a new layer of soil revealed something extraordinary and something altogether more personal. He cleared his throat. He opened his mouth. He closed it again.

Aiden watched this happen twice.

“Maybe you should just tell them more about it,” Aiden said to Cianán. “I think they’re confused.”

Cianán glanced at him. The look asked a question. Aiden gave the smallest nod.

Cianán set his spoon down. He was quiet for a moment, his hands flat on the table, his eyes on the middle distance. When he looked up there was something in his face that was older than the room, older than the farmhouse, older than the hills that the kitchen window looked out on. His voice, when he spoke, was simply the voice of a boy at a breakfast table.

“Cianán is not truly my name,” he said. “I took it to honor my brother Cian, and to protect myself from my father’s anger. My true name is Miach.”

The kitchen went very still.

Declan set his coffee cup down with extraordinary care, the way you put something down when your hands have suddenly become unreliable. He looked at Cianán across the table with the expression of a man who had spent forty years studying a subject and had just been handed the primary source.

“Miach,” he said. The word came out differently than anything else he had said that morning. Quieter. More precise. “Son of Dian Cécht.”

“Yes,” Cianán said.

Rowan looked between them. “I’m sorry, who is Dian Cécht?”

Declan turned to his husband, and Aiden recognized the expression that arrived on his face. It was the one he wore at the cairn when something needed explaining and he was genuinely delighted to explain it, the scholar in his element, except that this time the delight was threaded through with something rawer and more complicated.

“Dian Cécht was the great physician of the Tuatha Dé Danann,” he said. “The healer of the gods, if you want to use that language. In the old texts he’s one of the most powerful figures of his people. He created the Well of Sláine, gave it its healing properties, used it during the Battle of Mag Tuired to restore the Tuatha’s wounded so they could fight again.” He paused, collecting himself. “He also had a son named Miach who surpassed him. Miach replaced the silver arm that Dian Cécht had made for the king Nuada with an arm of living flesh and blood. Grew it back. Bone and skin and nerve, all of it, where there had been nothing but metal.” Another pause. “The texts say Dian Cécht killed his own son out of jealousy.”

He looked at Cianán.

“The texts are almost right,” Cianán said.

He reached up, not quite consciously, and touched his shoulder. The place where Aiden knew the silvery scar ran beneath his collar.

“He came close,” Cianán said.

Rowan’s porridge sat untouched in front of him. “Your father tried to kill you,” he said. It was not quite a question.

“He was not a gentle man,” Cianán said. “He was great and skilled and proud, and he loved his children the way that proud men sometimes love the people closest to them, fully, until the moment they became a threat. When I healed Nuada’s arm, gave him back living flesh where our father had given him silver, Dian Cécht came to me.” His hand dropped from his shoulder. “He struck me four times. The fourth blow was meant to be the last. It was not.” A small pause. “I survived. I changed my name and went into the quiet places, where he would not follow. And I had my sister. For a long time, that was enough.”

“Airmed,” Declan said, very softly.

The name landed differently than the others. Cianán’s expression shifted, something moving behind his eyes, old and private and not fully contained. “Yes,” he said. “Airmed.”

He was quiet for a moment. Outside the kitchen window the garden was bright and still, the apple tree casting its shadow across the lawn. When Cianán spoke again his voice was steady, but the effort of keeping it that way was just visible if you knew where to look.

“She was a greater healer than even our father, though she never claimed it. After I went into hiding she found me. She stayed.” He looked at the table. “She was the last of the Tuatha besides myself. She held on longer than the others because she still had work to do, she said. Herbs to tend. Knowledge to keep alive. She catalogued every plant that grew from the earth of Mag Tuired, knew what each one could heal.” A pause. “When she finally let go, I was with her. It was slow, and warm, the way I told you fading is. She was not afraid.” His jaw tightened briefly. “I was. I did not want to watch it happen. But she asked me to stay and I stayed.”

The kitchen was completely quiet. Even the Aga seemed to have stopped its usual ticking.

Rowan reached over and put his hand over Cianán’s on the table. It was the same instinctive gesture he might have offered anyone sitting at his table in grief, warm, uncomplicated, and entirely human. Cianán looked at the hand with a flicker of surprise, then at Rowan, and the surprise softened into something grateful and a little undone.

“I’m sorry,” Rowan said. “About your sister. About your father. About all of it.”

“Thank you,” Cianán said. Simply and completely, the way he said most things.

Aiden had been watching from across the table, his porridge growing cold in front of him. He looked at Cianán now, at the particular quality of stillness that had settled over him, and felt something shift in his chest. He picked up his spoon.

“I’m not calling you Miach,” he said.

Cianán looked at him. “No?”

“No. It sounds like something you’d say to someone when you’re annoyed at them.” Aiden demonstrated the tone. “Miach, get down from there. Miach, stop doing that. It sounds like a telling-off.”

Cianán stared at him for a moment. Then he laughed. It was the real one, the bright startled sound that arrived before he could compose himself, the one that always made Aiden feel like he’d won something. “It is a perfectly respectable name,” Cianán said.

“Cianán is better.”

“You are very stubborn.”

“I’m an American.”

Declan was smiling into his coffee. Rowan was making no effort to hide his grin. The strangeness that had sat over the kitchen since morning didn’t disappear, but it shifted and reorganized itself into something more livable, something that felt less like the aftermath of a revelation and more like the beginning of a new ordinary. The way a room felt different after you opened a window and let the air move through it.

Rowan looked at Cianán across the table. “More porridge?” he asked.

Cianán held out his bowl.

After breakfast Declan excused himself to make some calls about the cairn. Rowan disappeared into his office with two mugs of coffee and the slightly dazed expression of a man who needed an hour alone with his thoughts and wasn’t entirely sure an hour would be sufficient. Aiden and Cianán drifted into the garden without quite deciding to, ending up on the low wall at the far end, the hills rising green and sharp behind them and Lough Arrow a long silver line in the distance below.

The morning was clear and cool, the kind of day that felt like it was on its best behavior. A pair of crows moved along the ridge. The apple tree cast its shadow across the lawn behind them.

Aiden broke the silence.

“Are you all right? With telling them.”

Cianán considered this properly, the way he considered most things. “It felt strange,” he said. “To say those names aloud to people who are present in the world the way you are. I have not spoken them to anyone in a very long time.” He paused. “Airmed’s name especially.”

“How long ago did she fade?”

Cianán looked at the lake. “Time moves differently where I am when I am not here. I am not certain. It feels recent to me. It may have been centuries.” He was quiet for a moment. “The Otherworld is beautiful but it has no clocks. No seasons turning. No one to mark the days.”

Aiden thought about that. The loneliness of it was a different kind than anything he had words for. Not the loneliness of being the new kid, or of losing your father, or of being shipped to a country you’d never seen. Something vaster and older and without edges.

“Do you miss your father?” he asked. “Even after what he did.”

Cianán took his time. “I miss who he was before the jealousy took hold,” he said. “He was extraordinary. His knowledge of healing, of the way life moved through living things, there was truly no one like him among our people. When I was young he took me with him when he went to tend the wounded. He taught me everything he knew, all of it, without reservation.” A pause. “And then I learned more than he had taught me, and that was the thing he could not bear. I think he loved me fully until the moment I surpassed him. After that the love became something else.” He looked at his hands. “I have had a very long time to make peace with it. I am not sure I have made peace with it entirely.”

Aiden nodded. He understood that particular kind of unfinished grief, the kind that didn’t resolve, that just became something you learned to carry in a way that hurt less. It never entirely stopped hurting.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

“You can ask me anything.”

Aiden chose his words carefully. “Before this summer. Before me. Were you afraid of fading?”

The question settled into the air between them. A bird called from somewhere in the garden and was answered from the ridge.

“Yes,” Cianán said. “Not of the fading itself. I have watched it happen enough times to understand it. It is not like dying, not the way your people die. It is more like a fire burning down very slowly to embers. There is warmth at the end. There is no pain.” He paused. “What I was afraid of was fading without having mattered to anyone. Leaving the world without anyone knowing I had been in it.” He turned to look at Aiden directly. “Airmed knew. But Airmed was gone. After her I began to think that was how it would end for me. Quietly. Without witness.”

Aiden’s throat had gone tight. He kept his eyes on the lake.

“And now?” he said.

Cianán’s shoulder pressed warm against his. “Now I have a reason to come back,” he said. “That is not nothing. After everything, after all of it, that is very far from nothing.”

They sat with that for a moment. The lake held the light below them. The hills were steady above.

“Lughnasadh,” Aiden said. The word sat differently in his mouth than it had when Cianán first named it at the lake. Heavier. More real. Six weeks suddenly felt like a very short distance.

“Six weeks,” Cianán said. “Perhaps a little less now.”

“And then you come back. At the solstice. Or the equinox. When the veil thins.”

“The solstices,” Cianán said. “Only the solstices carry enough.”

Aiden looked at him. “Only twice a year,” he said.

“Yes,” Cianán said. “Twice a year.”

“The cairn holds the alignment,” Cianán said. “It was built for exactly that. I will come back through it the same way I came through it the first time.” He looked toward the ridge, toward the place where the new tomb sat quiet in the heather. “You will be here.”

It was not quite a question.

“I’ll be here,” Aiden said.

Cianán nodded once, and something in him settled. The way a knot loosens when the tension is released.

Aiden looked at him. The morning light was warm on Cianán’s face, the copper in his hair bright, the silvery scar just visible at his collar. Aiden reached over without thinking and touched it. One finger, the lightest contact.

Cianán didn’t pull away. He looked at Aiden’s hand, then at Aiden.

“He hit you there,” Aiden said.

“Yes.”

“And you survived.”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad,” Aiden said. “I’m really glad.”

Cianán covered Aiden’s hand with his own, briefly, warm and certain. “So am I,” he said. “Now more than ever.”

They stayed on the wall for a while longer, shoulders together, the lake below them and the ridge above, the cairn invisible in the heather but present in both their minds. The morning moved around them, unhurried and bright.

Eventually Cianán said, “Your porridge was cold when you left it.”

“So was yours.”

“I ate mine.”

“You always eat everything.”

“The food here is very good.”

Aiden laughed, and the last of the tightness in his chest loosened. “Come on,” he said. “Rowan’ll make us something else if we ask nicely.”

They got up from the wall and walked back through the garden toward the house, shoulders close, the morning still and bright around them.

Inside the farmhouse Declan had finished his calls and was standing at the kitchen window with his second coffee, looking out at the garden. He had been standing there for several minutes without drinking it.

Rowan came in from the hallway, saw him, and crossed to stand beside him. He slipped an arm around Declan’s waist and looked out at the two boys making their way back across the lawn.

“Soon,” Declan said. “We need to talk soon.”

“I know,” Rowan said. “I’ve been thinking about it all morning.”

Declan was quiet for a moment. Outside, Aiden said something and Cianán laughed, the bright sound carrying clearly through the glass. Declan watched the two of them come through the garden gate, close and unhurried, and felt something settle in his chest. Not certainty. Something adjacent to it. The feeling of a man who had spent his life in pursuit of the past and had just understood, fully and finally, why it mattered.

“Cianàn’s good for that boy,” Rowan said.

“Yes,” Declan said. “And Aiden is good for him. I don’t think either of them entirely knows how much.”

Rowan leaned his head briefly against Declan’s shoulder. The coffee went cold in Declan’s hand. Neither of them moved from the window until the back door opened and the boys came in, bringing the morning air with them, and the kitchen filled up again with the noise and the warmth of the ordinary and the extraordinary business of being alive.