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The sun has only risen twice since their departure from Dol-Makjar—that’s two days and a night since the swarm of shadows and wraiths, since the slash of ghoulish claws, since the fall of House Royce.
To Occtis, it feels like forever.
He does wonder if his own death somehow affects, or distorts, his perception of time. Beyond the veil of the palazzo, how long did he wander in those dark woods? Were the visions amongst the trees, did he see them carved into twisted black bark, did they fall as rotten leaves? Did the seasons change? He wasn’t dead long enough to retain all that.
Correction, technically he still is dead. That’s going to take some getting used to. He’s up tonight again, pondering the intricacies of his condition to the point of insomnia. In fact, he hadn’t slept the night prior, either.
How he would love to return to the Penteveral’s vast libraries for a candlelit night of research instead of laying wide awake in the inn’s narrow berth—or, oh, maybe Bolaire’s magical library holds answers to these hypotheses he has about himself:
He is ceaselessly tired, though that predates the dying. He can’t sleep by himself, but could magic put him to sleep? If so, would he dream, or was his latest dream, lost to some morning, his last? He hasn’t eaten since he died. He should be starving, but obviously, he’s not even hungry. Can he eat, though? Will food make him sick? Will the sickness be worth it—can he taste anything more than his tongue in his mouth, the blood on his lip he keeps chewing? He can bleed, but can he bleed out?
Can he die again? And if so, what would it take to kill him?
Aside from a dagger to the navel, ripping him apart.
He shuts his eyes tight and tosses. Pin’s weight between his legs in the blankets is like a rock tied to his ankle. A reminder he’s drowning in his own viscera, but he’ll never drown.
There has always been something wrong with you.
It’s funny. Those are his brother’s words—the last words Occtis heard alive—but that’s not his brother’s voice. Instead, Occtis hears Julien. Sees moonlight refract off the tip of that rapier.
This one who walks from the realm without a heart, he had spoken, a storm of black curls matted with sweat and blood. His family have always been nightmares.
Julien’s not wrong. They took his heart. They took him apart. They’re nightmares. Occtis wasn’t there for the worst of it, from what Vaelus and Thaisha had told him.
They weren’t there for the worst of it.
The Gods are gone, but maybe his house have harvested them too, and this is divine intervention into the raising of their black sheep. A divine comedy, even, about a dead necromancer, a student of the arcane, brought back to life by magic he can’t comprehend. A stone in place of a heart, too still. And now a nothingness, somehow so less still than the stone of Nightsong was.
Occtis clutches his chest, feeling for a heartbeat he knows isn’t there. His fingertips slip between the buttons of his shirt and he feels for an ice-cold sternum, skin smooth where it should be risen with goosebumps. He presses two, then three fingers down, then shoves his fist under the fabric, button popping, and he pushes his palm into his bone. Beat. But it doesn’t. Beat. He’d break his own ribs for his heartbeat to return. He bruises them. He claws at the scar that tore him in half, scratches at the red ribbon, wills the stitches to rip. He has no heartbeat, but maybe if he’s wide open once more, he can have his breath. He wants his breath. He wants—
Pin paws at him.
The claws of his snow-white limb are short and curled, dull and filed on dirt. Though they scratch at Occtis’ skin, it’s the ember orange paw that breaks through to blood, claws straight and razor-sharp.
“Okay,” Occtis whispers. Somewhere in the pitch-black room, Thaisha’s breath is steady. Like it mocks him. “Okay, I know.”
Occtis knows he won’t sleep. Not even when the bedroom at the inn is darker than the dying woods.
He scratches Pin between the ears as he sits up. At least his favorite fox seems—sounds—cozy in the sheets, purring into Occtis’ wrist.
His bare feet touch the floorboards like dipping into a lake in the earliest spring, and he braces himself for a shiver that doesn’t come. He steps into his boots, zips them up. “You can stay,” he murmurs. “I’m just going to... get some air, I suppose.”
His brain knows better than to mistake midnight breeze for breath, but he hopes his dead lungs do.
The creaking staircase screams as he descends into the dark of the inn. Streaming in through the window, Occtis follows the moon’s silver glow to the inn’s back garden. Hinges cry.
The veranda is overgrown in Thaisha’s power—sun-gold poppies, fleeting orange hibiscus, dandelions yellow like a sickly babe. In full bloom, swaying on the wind to a familiar rhythm, the flowers on their branches and the roots and the leaves all breathe, like Occtis can’t. As he steps out onto the moonlit planks, one by one the flowers stop breathing, too. The poppies close up; the hibiscus shrivels. Dandelions pale and blow away. The leaves yellow too, like he makes them ill. The same way he’s been making Thaisha ill.
Fixing the buttons on his shirt, wearing nothing but that as well as boots and breeches, he wraps his arms around himself as he braves the night. In a hopeless attempt to warm himself he rubs his shoulders, but he’s not even cold. Nothing changes. This undead body can’t tell the temperature anymore.
Where the inn’s overgrown veranda ends over a pond in red moss and crawlers, someone sits gazing at the rippling reflection of the moon.
Occtis halts at the sight of him, stormy black curls cascading down his back. His quilt-lined jacket is nowhere in sight, cloak wilting beside him off the wooden edge, its reddish detailing mimicking the wet moss, like the inn’s gardens have taken root in the fabric. He wears only his figure defining black high-neck. The back of Julien Davinos looks broad as his shoulders lift and fall, ribcage shifting, blood no doubt raging through him in a river’s course.
And just like Vaelus said—his shadow is the blackest black in the night, a drop of ink so thick it sinks through the page, softens it to tear.
Occtis’ steps don’t creak on the wood. It’s like he’s a ghost, not a hollowed out other thing.
“Can’t sleep?” he asks, more to warn Julien of his approach than to make small talk. In fact, he hopes there’s no small talk. He’s not very good at it, and as far as his research goes, death doesn’t positively affect a person’s charisma.
Understandably, Julien doesn’t entertain him with an answer.
Occtis could turn back now. Crawl back to bed, or maybe light a candle at some corner table and... do what, without his books or research? Anything but this.
Something, however, is drawing him to Julien, much like his father’s hand drew him toward the edge of death. This is heavier than his father’s hand, though. And it thrashes where his heart once was.
Guilt?
He creeps to the veranda’s edge. His reflection ripples in the silver pond, which is proof enough he’s physically here, and not an incorporeal creature. Carefully, at a distance far enough they couldn’t touch unless they both reached out for one another—and they never would, never will—Occtis folds beside the knight.
They haven’t exchanged a word since that night. Occtis only found out the full extent of what transpired from Vaelus, last sleepless night over a fireplace. Pin had been fast asleep in her lap, long fingers gliding from the top of his head down his spine to the very end of his tail, a slow motion, steady, monotonous.
She had said: Sir Julien Davinos does not hate you. He grieves.
He’d have expected Thaisha to give him that talk, but then again, if it was Thaisha, he might not believe her because that’s who she is. She draws from an infinite well of kindness and understanding. And she always tells Occtis people don’t hate him.
Except Occtis is convinced even she hates him now. She was the one who told him to go back, but that goes against everything she’s ever believed in, doesn’t it? It goes against nature.
Occtis goes against nature.
Only Vaelus doesn’t hate him, he thinks. But whatever she feels about him, it makes him uncomfortable. It makes him feel farther and farther from the humanity his brother carved out of him.
He shakes himself off, drops his legs off the veranda. The soles of his boots just barely touch the wet stones which encircle the bottomless pond, slippery and shining. He steals a sideways glance at Julien, who stares at the sky.
Vaelus had told Occtis that Julien tried to stay. To fight the specters haunting his palazzo, even when there was nothing, no one, left for him to save. He doesn’t care much for his life at all anymore, does he?
That’s kind of unfair. Just wanting to throw that away.
There are so many things to be said between them, Occtis doesn’t know where to start. He’d already said he’s sorry for Julien’s loss. Then again, what he said was, I’m sorry about your family. There’s much more he’s sorry about.
He stares at their reflections in the water, backlit by moonlight. His face stares back at him pale, gaunt, ghastly. Julien’s beside him blooms full of color even in the night. The heights of his cheekbones are reddened like poppies. Bloodshot vessels take root in his eyes.
Occtis tests the water’s perfect surface with the tip of his shoe, and a small ripple rolls over the scattering moon.
The water swishes.
“I know you probably don’t want to talk to me,” he prefaces. “Which is fine. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either right now. I don’t even know why I’m talking, I just— I’m just going to say my piece, though, if that’s okay.”
Again, Julien doesn’t grace him with a response. Occtis dares only glance in Julien’s general direction, but can’t bring himself to look at the knight’s face. He might, if it weren’t for the gauntlet glinting silver light in his lap, and Julien’s white-knuckled grip on the metal.
General Raimond Davinos’ gauntlet.
“I’m sorry,” murmurs Occtis. “Not just about your family, and your friends. I know I already said that. I know it’s... it doesn’t matter, I mean, condolences won’t bring them back to you.”
Condolences from the only thing that made it out. The one thing in the palazzo that wouldn’t have made a difference to Julien if it died.
Which it did.
“But I’m sorry,” he continues, “that I laughed.”
That earns him a look. More than a look, Julien’s head whips his way in a fury of black curls. Occtis doesn’t dare meet his face. He focuses on their distorted reflections in the black water.
“It wasn’t—” Occtis grips the mossy edge of the veranda. “I wasn’t laughing at you, or at... the things that happened. It’s stupid, but it’s something that happens when I’m nervous. I laugh. And I was, uh, nervous. That’s an understatement.”
A metallic clank as Julien shifts. Occtis’ head whips his way now too, as he anticipates the knight to walk off. Or potentially to attempt to drown Occtis in the pond, which wouldn’t do.
But no, Julien stays, holding onto the one thing left of his father. Soundless until he’s not.
“I do not want your apologies,” Julien says, voice string-taut, fraying.
“Okay,” Occtis whispers. “I’m sorry.”
It’s a nice night to be alive. Or dead, but back. Silver stars blink distant like ships on the sea, and gold fireflies float over the shrubbery beyond the pond, blinking too. The sky is so vast. Only here, over the garden, dark clouds gather. And Occtis, stupid, stupid, stupid, holds on for dear life to a lightning rod.
“I really didn’t know.” He should know better than to speak. No matter how small he attempts to make himself, how he minces his words, how hush, hush—Julien will hear. “I mean, my family didn’t like me very much. Obviously.” He catches himself before he can let out a nervous chuckle. “Um, because I was born without magic—anyway, my point is, I left for the Penteveral when I was fifteen, and they didn’t care to find me until...”
Until six ghouls, black robes, split tongues, garrote around his throat. He shuts his eyes for a second, shakes his head.
Occtis tries to catch his breath to steady himself. Of course he can’t.
And then he says the stupidest thing of all. “What I’m trying to say is, I wouldn’t have even been at the palazzo if I hadn’t followed you there.”
Julien’s words are a storm brewing.
“You blame me.”
“No!” gasps Occtis. He turns, tucks one leg under the other, his hands in the moss between them almost reaching for Julien’s forgiveness. “No, what I mean is, I didn’t know. Like you didn’t know. We had no way of expecting them there. Or anywhere, really. I mean, my father came to the Penteveral for me and was allegedly perfectly polite about it, aside from the threatening to murder Murray thing. Why would he and Ethrand—”
“Tachonis.”
Salt in the ribbon-sewn wound. Tachonis, he says like a curse.
You should have welcomed the name alone as a gift.
Occtis straightens, mud under his nails. “Yes?”
“I know,” Julien says.
Julien is a tempest. He’s a war of clouds, a curdling mass of rageful mourning. He should not hear the howl of Occtis’ laments over his own grief, and yet—
He repeats, “I know.”
His voice moves the water’s darksilver surface. In Occtis, something stirs. A flutter, not like butterflies. A fox’s nose, pushing out from within. A silence inside. Stillness, round and heavy, a blood-splattered stone spreading its wings within his gut, furiously fighting against a brother’s blade.
There, on that table, in the Palazzo Davinos where Julien had brought him, promising safety. That’s where Occtis last felt cold, the steel of Ethrand’s dagger gutting him like an animal taxidermied, ice slicing through his organs where only heat should live, where nothing lives any longer. It’s where he last felt heat churning in his head, the burn of the garrote against his neck, the hot blood soaking his shirt and spilling.
Occtis’ voice comes as if not from his mouth, a mouthless echo of the moon.
“You know?”
Finally, and Occtis doesn’t know when this happened—they are facing each other. Julien’s features are carved marble, definite and certain.
Green eyes gaze back at Occtis, much like his own once were.
What does Julien see looking back at him?
“You are not the only one wide awake tonight, are you?” Julien asks, a rhetorical thing. Occtis’ thoughts rush like a flood.
Of course. It’s so obvious. He couldn’t have been the only one kept from dreams by the nightmare they’ve lived. Julien, too, has had hours in the dark, staring at the ceiling, at the sky, to think.
That pushing thing at his chest, that wriggle and writhe between his ribs. That’s hope.
“You don’t hate me?”
Julien leans back on his hand. Resting easy at his side is his rapier. The fingers of his other hand play with the guarded hilt, a non-committal flirt.
“What did they take from you?”
Not quite a question. More a demand that Julien’s own answer depends on.
You trust all so quickly. You’re so easy to call him a great gift from beyond. You call him a miracle.
“My heart.” Occtis’ voice echoes in the water like a skipping stone, and dies. “They took my heart. I don’t know why, so please—”
Is this miracle a way to gain more trust so we follow you even further into whatever their great plan is to guide us into what... meat shredder will make more of whatever it is that fucking kills everything that matters to me?
“—please don’t ask.”
He died that night, too. He’s dead. Just like that, in a matter of moments. For all the work it takes to bring something, somebody, back—death takes so quickly. And all at once not quickly enough.
It hurt so horribly.
He knows Julien will mock him. Which is fine, he can take it. He has no heart to hurt, right? Julien must have a heart, guarded as it may be. It’s only fair if he takes his feelings out on Occtis.
That’s the only fair thing about any of this.
Occtis flinches when Julien moves, though the knight only turns his head to look at the moon once more.
Occtis curls his knee to the chin and looks out to the skyline where Julien's green gaze is cast, at golden bugs like Lady Aranessa Royce's butterflies. She’s the only one who's been able to look at him the same. This light gilds the knight’s gauntlet; it rims his eyes in eternal magic; it, Occtis would swear, softens Julien’s features, as if he finds peace in the thought of the fae. In the thought of his lady.
At long last, Julien speaks.
“Then I suppose we shall take it back,” he says.
Wind brushes through his dark curls. The clouds blow away, and for a fleeting second as the gentle breeze of night flits by, Occtis mistakes it for breath after all.
Sir Julien Davinos is so very alive, in the same way fairies are. Like there’s more to him than the blood coarsing through his veins, than his steadily pumping heart, than his hot and heavy breaths. Like there’s magic. Infinity.
Occtis would bet he's warm.
He wonders who that warmth is reserved for—Lady Royce? And what does Occtis, who can't feel the temperature anymore, care for the scalding heat of a lightning strike?
They sit together in a silence that neither comforts nor disturbs. As the first of sunlight rises out of its coffin of darkness, without another word Julien gathers his bearings, and goes.
In the hollow of Occtis’ chest, warmth kindles.