Exile to Érenn - 19. Chapter 19

The morning of August sixth arrived clear and warm, the sky a pale and cloudless blue that stretched from the ridge to the horizon without interruption. Aiden was up before anyone else.

He stood in the garden in the early light, the dew already burning off the grass, and looked at the ridge. The specific point on the Bricklieve Mountains was exactly where Cianán had shown him weeks ago from this same spot, his arm alongside Aiden’s, his finger tracing the line. The sun would reach it tonight. They both knew it. The whole summer had been moving toward it.

He went back inside before Rowan appeared, before the kitchen filled with the smell of coffee and whatever was on the Aga, and before anyone had to pretend the day was ordinary.

He got his phone. He queued up Francesca. He propped the phone against the garden wall at what he hoped was the right angle, stepped back, checked the frame, adjusted the angle twice, stepped back again. He stood there for a moment looking at the empty garden in the little screen, both of them not yet in it.

Then he went to wait for Cianán.

Cianán came through the garden gate a little after eight, the way he always did, the way he had done every morning since the beginning of June. He stopped when he saw the phone propped against the wall, the screen showing the queued video, Hozier’s name visible.

He looked at Aiden.

Aiden shrugged, aiming for casual and not quite achieving it. “I thought we could make a TikTok.”

Cianán looked at the phone. Then at Aiden. Something in his face understood more than the words accounted for. He knew why the phone was there, why Aiden had been up before anyone else queuing the music and adjusting the angle. He stood with that knowledge for a moment, quiet and still in the morning garden.

Then something shifted. The understanding settled into something lighter, the way it did when Cianán decided to be present in something rather than above it. He looked at the phone again with an expression that was moving from careful, toward willing, toward something that might, given enough failed attempts, become genuinely entertaining.

“Show me what to do,” he said.

Aiden had found a dance on TikTok the previous evening, something simple enough that Cianán could learn it without three weeks of practice, involving a step-touch sequence and arm movements theoretically synchronized with the music. He spent five minutes repositioning the phone against the garden wall before he was satisfied with the angle, during which Cianán stood to one side and offered suggestions.

“If you moved it to the left the frame would be wider.”

“I know.”

“We would both be fully visible.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Also it is tilted slightly.”

“Cianán.”

“Yes.”

“Stop helping,” he laughed.

Cianán stopped helping with the expression of a man who had been helpful and was not being credited for it.

When the phone was finally positioned Aiden demonstrated the dance twice. Cianán watched with the focused forensic intensity of someone committing a military maneuver to memory, which was already slightly alarming, and then attempted it.

He was not terrible. He was something worse than terrible. He was technically correct in a way that was completely wrong with each movement precise and slightly too late, his natural grace present and entirely misapplied, ancient dignity intact and profoundly inappropriate for the context. He looked like someone performing a sacred rite that happened to involve a step-touch.

“You’re doing it right but wrong,” Aiden said.

“Those are contradictory statements.”

“I know. That’s the problem.”

“Explain the difference.”

“The difference is …” Aiden stopped. “I can’t explain it. You have to feel it. Stop thinking about it.”

Cianán looked at him with the expression that meant he found this instruction philosophically unsatisfying. Then he tried again.

On the third attempt they tried it side by side and something loosened in Cianán’s approach. The formal precision relaxed into something more spontaneous, still wrong but wrong in a way that had its own internal logic. He had decided, apparently, that if he could not do it correctly he would do it with complete commitment, which produced a version of the dance that bore only a passing resemblance to what Aiden was doing but had a conviction that was almost impressive.

“That’s not the right version,” Aiden said.

“It is my version,” Cianán said.

“There isn’t supposed to be a your version.”

“There is now.”

The lip sync was its own category of disaster. Cianán mouthed the words to Francesca with complete earnest commitment, getting approximately every third word right, the rest replaced with something that was either Old Irish or pure invention. When Aiden pointed this out Cianán’s response was to commit harder, which resulted in increasingly elaborate wrong mouthing that bore no resemblance to Hozier but had tremendous conviction.

On the fourth attempt Cianán stopped mid-sequence, arms still extended, and said with great seriousness, “What does it mean, the bones of what you believe?”

Aiden stared at him. “It’s a line in the song.”

“But what does it mean.”

“I think it means the essential thing. The core of something. The part that doesn’t change.”

Cianán was quiet for a moment, arms still extended. Then he lowered them. “Again,” he said.

Rowan appeared in the kitchen window somewhere during the fifth attempt. He stood there with his coffee and watched for approximately thirty seconds, his expression moving through surprise, delight, and carefully maintained neutrality in quick succession. He caught Aiden’s eye through the glass. Aiden shook his head once, emphatically. Rowan withdrew.

On the sixth attempt they were side by side, Cianán’s version of the dance proceeding alongside Aiden’s increasingly approximate version, when their feet found each other at exactly the wrong moment.

It was nobody’s fault. It was entirely both their faults.

Aiden went left. Cianán went left. Their shoulders collided first and then their feet and then they went down together into the lavender in a tangle of arms and laughter, the camera still running faithfully on the garden wall, capturing everything.

They lay there for a moment, sorted out enough to breathe, Aiden on his back in the lavender and Cianán half beside him and half on top of him, both of them laughing. Not the polite kind. The kind that keeps restarting every time it seems like it’s finished, the kind that doesn’t require any particular reason beyond the fact that they had just fallen over together in a garden in the Irish summer and it was extremely funny.

Cianán pushed himself up on one elbow and looked down at Aiden. His hair had acquired a comprehensive selection of lavender sprigs. He looked at Aiden for a moment with that expression, warm and specific and entirely focused, and then leaned down and pressed a kiss to his cheek. Easy and unself-conscious, the way you kissed someone you’d been kissing all summer.

Then he sat up and looked at the camera still running on the garden wall.

“Is it still recording?” he asked.

Aiden looked at the screen from the ground. “Yeah.”

“Good,” Cianán said.

Aiden lay there for another moment looking up at the sky, the lavender fragrant around him, the laughter still moving through him in small aftershocks. Then he got up.

They watched it back on the small screen, heads close together. The fall was spectacular. The tangle was worse. The kiss on the cheek was there, easy and natural, and Aiden watched it on the small screen and felt something he didn’t entirely have a name for.

“The lavender,” Cianán said.

“Your entire head.”

“I did not know it was there.”

“It’s there.”

Cianán studied his reflection in the screen with complete equanimity. “Post it,” he said.

“The fall is in it.”

“I know.”

“And the …” Aiden gestured at the kiss moment.

“I know.” Cianán looked at him. “Post it.”

Aiden posted it.

The comments started coming in before they’d finished breakfast. By midmorning there were hundreds of them. Aiden found Cianán in the garden after and held out his phone.

“You should see this,” he said.

They sat on the low wall together, Aiden scrolling slowly, Cianán reading each comment with the careful attention he brought to new information.

omg who are these two

the one on the right is so cute I’m going to cry

okay but the tall one’s commitment is everything

they are literally adorable someone help me

the lavender in his hair I cannot

Aiden glanced at Cianán. “You’re very popular.”

Cianán read the next comment without looking up. “They are talking about you as well.”

“They think you’re cuter.”

“Several of them appear to find us both appealing.”

“Yeah well.” Aiden scrolled further. “Don’t let it go to your head. You already have enough in your hair.”

Cianán’s mouth moved. Not quite a smile but in the direction of one.

They kept scrolling. The comments kept coming, the particular mix of the internet being its best self, enthusiastic and warm and slightly unhinged in the way of people responding to something that made them feel unexpectedly good.

Then Aiden stopped scrolling.

this found me at the right time and I don’t know what to do with that

They both read it. Neither of them said anything for a moment.

Then further down, from someone with a username that was just a string of numbers:

idk why but watching this made me feel like everything is going to be okay

Cianán was quiet beside him. Aiden could feel him reading it, the particular quality of his attention when something was being absorbed rather than processed.

“They seem to care about us,” Cianán said finally. “People we don’t know.”

Aiden looked at the screen. All those strangers who had watched two boys fall into a lavender bush in an Irish garden and felt something warm toward them. They didn’t have any idea what day it was. No idea what the evening held. Just … caring. From a distance. For no particular reason.

“Yeah,” Aiden said. “The internet’s weird like that.”

Cianán considered this. “I don’t think it’s the internet,” he said. “I think it’s the people.”

Aiden looked at him. Then back at the screen.

He put the phone in his pocket and they went inside for lunch.

Declan lit the grill in the garden after lunch, something he did rarely enough that Rowan emerged from his office with the expression of a man who had been given an unexpected gift. He produced a potato salad from the kitchen with the efficiency of someone who had been planning it quietly all morning, and there was brown bread and butter and cold drinks and the four of them settled around the garden table in the full warmth of the afternoon.

The Bricklieve ridge was sharp and present above them. The sun was still high but moving, the way it had been moving all summer, each degree of its descent carrying the day closer to the evening. Nobody looked at the ridge directly. Everyone knew where it was.

Declan cooked with quiet competence, and at one point Cianán leaned forward and asked him something about the smoke and the heat that sent Declan into a genuine explanation of the Maillard reaction that nobody fully followed but that lasted ten minutes and ended with Declan laughing at himself, a real laugh, the one that arrived before the scholar could reassemble himself.

Rowan looked at Declan laughing and then at Aiden and the look that passed between them contained everything that didn’t need saying.

Cianán ate with the focused pleasure he always brought to Rowan’s cooking, and he asked for more potato salad twice, and somewhere in the comfortable drift of the afternoon he turned and looked at Aiden, just looked, nothing said, and Aiden looked back and said nothing, and Cianán’s hand found his under the table and held it for a moment before letting go.

That was enough. That was everything.

The shadows lengthened. The light on the ridge changed quality. The specific point on the Bricklieve Mountains caught the evening gold in a way that made it unmistakable.

Declan cleared his throat. “We should go up.”

Nobody argued.

They walked the path to the cairn in the long golden light of the evening, the four of them, Aiden and Cianán side by side and Rowan and Declan just behind. The heather was warm and fragrant, the air carrying the particular stillness that the hills took on in the last hour before dark.

Aiden and Cianán were holding hands.

They had been holding hands since the garden gate. Nobody commented on it. It was simply the right thing and everyone understood it.

Aiden looked up once and saw a single bright streak cross the sky above the ridge, there and gone in less than a second. He watched it fade without speaking.

They reached the cairn. Rowan and Declan stopped a few paces from the entrance, close enough to see, far enough back to give the boys the space they needed. Declan stood very still, his eyes moving over the mound and the entrance stones and the carved spirals with the expression of a man seeing something he had spent his whole life preparing to understand and was only now, at the last possible moment, fully understanding. His hand found Rowan’s at his side.

Aiden and Cianán stood at the entrance together.

The sun touched the specific point on the Bricklieve ridge.

Cianán looked at Aiden. Aiden looked back at him.

Then Cianán ducked his head and stepped into the passage. And Aiden, their hands still joined, stepped in with him.

The passage was narrow and low, the stones close on either side. The darkness was not complete. A faint luminescence rose from somewhere ahead, silvery and still, the same light Aiden had seen twice before and recognized now the way you recognized the voice of someone important to you before you saw their face.

They walked the passage together, hand in hand, the silvery light growing around them with each step. Neither of them spoke. There was nothing left to say that hadn’t already been said, and everything that mattered was in the joined hands and the light and the ancient stone around them and the fact that they were walking this last part of it together.

Two steps from the basin Cianán stopped.

He turned to face Aiden. His eyes held the silvery light, ancient and entirely present, looking at Aiden the way he had looked at him since the beginning, as though Aiden was the most significant thing in the room, in the landscape, in the century.

Their hands separated.

Cianán turned to the basin. He placed both palms flat on the stones beside it, the way he had at the Well of Sláine, and stood there with his head slightly bowed. The light responded immediately, rising from the basin in slow certain waves, filling the chamber, throwing pale silver across the carved walls and the low ceiling and Aiden’s face and the ring on Aiden’s finger which had begun to warm in a way that was different from body heat, deeper and more specific, as though the metal remembered something it had been waiting to remember.

Cianán straightened. He turned back to Aiden.

For a moment they just stood there in the growing light. Two boys in a stone chamber. The most ordinary and the most extraordinary thing simultaneously.

Aiden reached into his jacket pocket.

He took out the Giants cap.

He looked at it for a moment, turning it in his hands. The orange SF faded. His father’s cap. His cap. His whole summer in a single worn object that smelled faintly of lake water and heather and everything that had happened since he stepped off a plane in Dublin two months ago not knowing what he’d come to find.

He reached up and put it on Cianán’s head.

Cianán went still under the touch of his hands.

Aiden straightened the cap. Then Cianán’s hand came up and turned it backward, the brim pointing behind him, the orange SF facing the wrong way above his face. Exactly right. The only way it had ever looked right on him.

Aiden’s throat had closed. He looked at Cianán wearing his father’s cap in the silvery light of the Otherworld pressing through the basin and felt the full weight of everything the summer had been press down on him at once.

“I don’t want you to be alone,” Aiden said. His voice was not entirely steady.

Cianán looked at him. His blue-green eyes were bright, brighter than the silver light behind him, and something was happening in them that Aiden had never seen before. A welling. A fullness. The ancient self-possession still present but barely, the way a dam holds water that is pressing very hard from the other side.

“I will be lonely without you,” Cianán said. “But it will be bearable. Because we will be together again at the solstice.”

Aiden nodded. He couldn’t speak.

Cianán stepped forward and kissed him. Brief and certain and complete. When they separated Aiden’s eyes were wet. Cianán’s were too, just barely, the welling having reached its limit.

Cianán looked at him for one more long moment.

“I will find you,” he said.

He turned to the basin.
The silvery light intensified as he stepped in, filling the chamber, flooding the passage behind them. The ring on Aiden’s finger blazed warm, gold against silver, the twisted spiral grooves catching the light and holding it. Aiden pressed his hand against his side and felt the warmth of it against his palm.

Cianán looked back once. The cap backward on his auburn hair. The scar on his shoulder catching the light. The face that had been the most important face of the most important summer of Aiden’s life.

Then he stepped fully into the basin.

The light rose around him, bright and total and ancient, and for a moment Aiden could see him clearly. Then the light softened and Cianán’s outline blurred, not dramatic, not violent, just a gradual dissolving, like mist at dawn, like a fire burning down to embers, warm and then not there.

The light faded.

The ring dimmed to ordinary warm metal against his skin.

The chamber was dark and still and empty.

Aiden stood in the chamber for a long moment. One hand pressed flat against the stone of the passage wall, the cold of it real and present against his palm. The cairn was completely silent. Outside the last of the sunset was bleeding out of the sky, the specific point on the Bricklieve Mountains dark now, the alignment done, the summer window closed.

He stood there and breathed.

The ring was warm and ordinary on his finger. Just metal now, just the twisted gold spiral Cianán had pressed into his palm on a canal bridge in Dublin what felt like a very long time ago. He looked at it in the near dark of the passage entrance and thought about the winter solstice.

Four months and fifteen days.

Rowan’s hand came down on his shoulder. Warm and steady and completely certain.

Aiden straightened. He put his hand briefly over Rowan’s and then let go.

They walked back down the hill together, the three of them, in the last of the evening light. Declan on one side of Aiden, Rowan on the other, close enough that their arms brushed with each step. The heather was soft underfoot and the sky above the ridge was deepening from gold to rose to the first blue of oncoming dark.

Nobody spoke for a long time. The path was familiar and the silence was the kind that didn’t need filling.

The farmhouse lights were warm and small below them. The same lights Aiden had seen from this hill on his very first night in Ireland, lying in bed staring at the ceiling beams wondering what he’d come to find.

He knew now.

Four months and fifteen days until the winter solstice.

He went inside.