Chapter 17- Whispers of the Dark Beast

The song does not stop.

I lie on my bed with Aodh curled next to me. Every note I hear hums behind my eyes, every cadence a reverberating throb inside my head. The song doesn't stop. It hasn't stopped since yesterday evening when I returned.

“You need to rest,” Aodh says.

“I cannot rest. It is too loud.”

“I hear nothing.”

“Then be grateful that you can't,” I snap with frustration. “It is behind my eyes, Aodh. Not in my ears. I covered my ears. I have been covering my ears all night, and now that it is morning, it has still not gone away. For hours and hours I hear it.” My own voice quivers as I speak. “I can’t make it stop. I try to hum but it does nothing, it is behind my eyes, and I cannot cover the inside of my own head.”

“Breathe, Bree.”

“I am breathing! Breathing is not the problem!” I shout and curl in on myself.

It has been getting worse since the wood. Not louder, exactly. Closer. It has moved in the way a guest moves in, a little further into the house each hour. A song threaded through everything, under the crackle of the fire, under Aodh's voice, under the guards' boots in the corridor, and in the wind at the glass.

I try to drown out the haunting sound, but no matter what I do I can't stop hearing it. I have not had one moment of true quiet since I put my hand on that tree, and I am starting to understand that I may never have one again.

That is the thought that does it. That I may never have peace and quiet again.

I can feel a sharp wet burn behind my eyes, like a flickering wick, some invisible flame wavering as tears spill from them and fall like hot rain. Something in me, some last thin rope that has been holding since the wood, simply gives.

“Aodh.” My voice cracks. “Aodh, I cannot. I cannot, I cannot do this, it will not stop, it will not stop, it will not—”

“I am here.”

“It will not stop.”

I don’t know how I get from the bed to the corner of the floor. I am simply there, wedged into the angle where two walls meet, because the walls are solid and cool and they press against my back, and I need something to press into. My hands are over my ears though I know it is useless.

I'm so jittery with nerves that the only way I can soothe the ache is by rocking. The song is too close and too loud, and I curl in on myself as I used to do when everything became too much. Tears fill my eyes and keep coming, blurring my vision, and the world around me. I feel like I am drowning, the panic rising in my chest, and I struggle to breathe. I can’t even feel my limbs. The song rings behind my eyes as I clutch my ears and try to will it to stop. The sound clashing against the roar of blood in my ears, the heaviness of my breath, a grinding melody that I can't seem to escape from.

Aodh does not grab me. He does not tell me to calm down. He does not ask me what is wrong, or what I need, or any of the questions that would need words I do not have.

He simply comes, and presses his small warm weight against my chest, over my hammering heart, and stays. A heavy, warm, steady thing that does not move, does not speak, and does not ask anything of me at all.

I'm not sure when I began to cry, but I remove my hands from my ears and hold onto Aodh as I rock. I close my eyes and come apart quietly, completely, the way I have not let myself come apart in front of another living soul since I was a child. The song presses in, like it's cornering me, trapping me, as the tears come with it, and fall from my face onto his fur.

“It's alright, Bree,” Aodh says gently. “Just breathe.”

I clutch him tighter as more tears spill from my eyes. They fall onto the torn place in his side where the black corruption has been creeping since the wood.

I do not know how long it takes. Time does not work as I'm lost to the overwhelming sensations and noise. But eventually the rocking slows, and the words begin to come back. The song is still there as I sniffle, but I am on the other side of the wave now, wrung out, hollowed, my whole body aching as though I have been beaten.

It is not until I see little wisps of smoke plume up that I realize Aodh has gone still.

“There she is,” Aodh says softly.

“I am sorry.” It is the first whole sentence I can manage. “I am sorry you had to—”

“Stop that.” For once there is no lightness in him at all. “You will not apologize to me for the shape of your own mind. Not to me. I have lived a very long time, Bree, and I have never once thought less of a creature because the world became too much for it. That is not a weakness. It is only a sign of a heart that feels everything at full strength.” He shifts in my lap. “Besides. You have just done something remarkable.”

“What?”

“Look at my side.”

I look. And for a moment I do not understand what I am seeing.

Where Aodh was scratched, there is a wound, small tendrils of black smoke creeping from it, but now... it is gone.

“You're healed,” I say with quiet amazement. The wound that was there before is now closed and clean. Even some of Aodh’s fur had grown back over it, as if the black scratches from those horrid branches were never there.

Aodh hums in agreement and nods.

“That’s not possible,” I whisper.

“You truly must find a new phrase,” he says gently. “Your tears, Bree. You wept on the wound and the rot went out of it. Do you understand what that means?”

“No.”

“No,” he agrees. “Not yet. But you will.”

He is quiet for a moment, and when he speaks again his voice has changed, gone low and careful, and under it, faint and threading, I hear the song shift too, as though leaning in to listen. “I think it is time I told you a story. I have put it off. I told myself you were not ready, and perhaps you were not, but readiness is a luxury we have run out of. If what you say is true, then the thing in the wood knows your name now. You should know your own before it finishes teaching it to you.”

I go still. “What do you mean that it knows my name, Aodh?”

“Sit back. Keep me close, if it helps.” He settles his weight more firmly against my heart.

“It does help.”

“Good, it helps me too, if I’m being honest. And I am always honest.”

I chuckle at that.

“A long time ago,” Aodh says, “there was no line between your kind and mine. The beasts wore human faces when it suited them and human hearts when it suited them less, and lived among your people. For a long time there was peace between us.”

“What changed?”

“One of us.” The song dips, cold, beneath his voice. “The greatest of the beasts, the oldest, the strongest. It looked at humankind and it decided the world had been better before you arrived, and that it could be better again if you were simply gone. Unmade. And this beast set out to see to the extinction of every human.”

“And the other beasts let it?”

“The other beasts went to war,” Aodh says, and there is old grief in it, ancient and worn smooth. “That is the part your histories forget, if they ever knew it. It was not beasts against humans. It was beasts against beasts. Some followed the great one into the dark, to unmake your kind. And some, some of us, stood with the humans against our own blood. That was the Great War. Brother against brother, the whole world of us split down the middle, and the humans caught in the center of it, fighting beside the beasts who had chosen them.”

“Who won?”

“We did. The ones who chose you.” A pause. “But winning is not the same as killing. The great one could not be killed. Its magic was too old, too strong; there was no blade and no fire that could end it, and gods know we tried. So in the end we did the only thing left to do. We could not kill it. So we bound it. We sealed it away, deep, under the roots of the world, and we set a watch over it. Four of us. Guardians, your kind would say, though we had older words. One for each quarter of the world.”

“And there were four?”

“Indeed. Each was made into a keeper of a thing the world could not do without. In the west, the Keeper of the Dead, who held the boundary between the living and those who passed on. In the east, the Keeper of Dreams, who watched the country of sleep, where the great one's whispers could reach if no one guarded the threshold. In the south, the Keeper of Knowledge, who held the memory of all of it, so that no age would forget what had been done and why.” He stops.

“And the north,” I say. My voice has gone very quiet.

“And the north.” Aodh does not look away from me. “The Keeper of Fire and Storm. The living flame and the wrath of the sky. The fire that burns a sickness out of a wound. The fire that does not burn the hand that is meant to hold it.”

The room is very quiet. Even the song has gone hushed, for the first time since yesterday as if also waiting.

“The binding cost us,” Aodh goes on, softer now. “The watch is not a thing you keep for free. It thinned us, over the ages, guardian by guardian, line by line. We gave our strength to the seal and had less to pass on, and each generation there were fewer of us, weaker of us, until,” he breathes in shakily, “until now. That is the part I have been afraid to tell you. This is not a story about long ago, Bree. The watch is failing. The guardians are almost all gone, dead, or dwindled. Ever since the War of Three our kind who once bled side by side were now seen as other. Many beasts that would have taken on the mantle have been hunted down over the centuries by the very people we bled to save, who forgot what we were and saw only beasts after a series of tragedies that sparked the war.”

“I don’t know of either of these wars. The Great War or The War of Three,” I say as I gently brush Aodh’s fur.

Aodh nods. "You would not have. It is not a war your histories like to tell." He is quiet for a moment. "You must understand something about my kind first, Bree, or none of it will make sense. We mate for life. When a beast takes a mate, human or beast, it is not a marriage the way yours are, a thing of contracts and convenience. It is a bond in the blood. Absolute. We would burn the world down for the one we are bonded to, and think it a fair trade."

I think of Theron, but I do not say so.

"So," Aodh goes on. "There was a war among the human kingdoms. The South, the East, and the West against the North, after the North uncovered the old art of alchemy and grew too strong too fast. We beasts fought in it, each bonded to the kingdom of our mate. And in that war, someone killed the human mate of the western beast."

"And the western beast retaliated," I say slowly.

"The western beast went mad with grief, and hunted down the human mate of the eastern beast, and killed her. To make another feel what it felt." His tail flame dims. "It did not matter that the East and the West were allies. It did not matter that it broke every treaty the humans had made. That is the thing your kind never understood about ours. Our bond is not loyal to your alliances. It is loyal only to itself. And when the humans saw that, saw that a beast would cross any line, spill any allied blood, for the sake of its mate, they stopped seeing us as their saviors." A pause. "They started seeing us as beasts."

"So the war among humans ended," I say.

"And a quieter war began. Against us. The humans had alchemy now. They no longer needed our magic, and they had just been given every reason to fear it. Over the centuries that followed, they hunted us. The guardians who kept the watch were killed one by one, by the descendants of the very people we had died beside." His golden eyes find mine. “The line of these ancient beings are nearly gone, and soon there will be no one left to keep the watch.”

I think of the mountains of Nibheis, which has the greatest concentration of alchemic ore across the northern empire.

“And the thing in the wood.” My mouth is dry. “The thing under the mountains that you said knows my name?”

“The seal is old, and the beast locked away has begun to stir.” Aodh's tail flame gutters low. “It is not awake. Not yet. But it is dreaming, and its dreams are the sickness getting into the beasts, the rot in the wood, the wrongness at your Sabine. And it has started, very faintly, to sing. To call. To feel for anything left in the world that carries the old blood, anything that might be strong enough to matter.” He looks at me, and I have never seen a fox look afraid before. “And yesterday, a woman put her bare hand against a tree, and it felt her, and it has not stopped singing to her since.”

I cannot speak.

Fear, acidic and hot, steams in my stomach like a pot left too long over the fire. I have heard the song faintly since I was young. It wasn’t until I used the crystal that it became more common. I bite my lip.

“Are you sure? I have heard the song faintly since I was young. It wasn't until I used the crystal that it became more common.”

Aodh nods. “It is strange. I do not fully understand the properties of human alchemy myself. But I would not be surprised if it assisted the magic in your veins. While even the hollow and magicless can use alchemy, no one but descendants of the old ones should be able to hear the song.”

“Then why not my father?” I say rushed. “Why not Mikli or Mealla?”

Aodh tilts his head. “I do not know, and cannot say.” His eyes now hold an ancient sorrow but I still don’t understand.

“Why me?” I press.

“I already told you, that is not mine to tell you.” And it is the gentlest no I have ever been told. “That one you will have to arrive at yourself, in your own time, and I think it will be soon, and I think when it comes it will not be kind. I have given you the story. The story is a gift, and it is enough for one night, more than enough for a night like the one you have had.” He presses closer. “But you are not hollow, Bree. You were never hollow. You are the last warm coal of a fire the world tried very hard to forget it needed. And something very old and very hungry has just remembered.”

-

Soon it is time for dinner. I finally feel well enough to head out of my room. I still hear the song again, faintly, since Aodh spoke to me this afternoon.

As I sit down with him, I do not tell Theron any of it.

I feel wrung out like an old rag, aching, and no less afraid. As promised, he has been at every dinner since I asked it of him. I know I missed dinner with him yesterday because by the time I came back to the castle I was too overwhelmed with the song.

He rises now, and I can see the cold gaze he wore when we first met.

“You left the fortress yesterday and returned after nightfall,” he says. It is not a question. “Against my asking. I told you to stay and rest, but later learned you left on a stable-hand's horse, dressed like a servant. And you came back looking pale as death.”

“Yes,” I say, because I cannot lie to him, and I will not try. “I did.”

He waits. He gives me the whole silence to fill, and it is a generous silence, an open door, a chance to hand him the truth and let him carry some of the weight of it. I can see him holding the door open. I can see him wanting me to walk through it.

And I cannot. Because the truth is a talking fox and a sealed beast and a fire in my blood and a song that will not stop, and I do not have the words for it yet even in my own head. Every one of those secrets is a stone I would be setting on this fragile new thing between us, and some cowardly, protective, exhausted part of me cannot bear to.

“It was something I needed to do,” I say. “I cannot tell you what. Not because I do not—,” my voice catches, “Only because I cannot. Not yet. I am asking you to trust me that it was not against you. It will never be against you.”

Something closes in his face. Not slammed, this time. Just, quietly, drawn shut, a degree of the warmth I fought so hard for pulling back behind the old cold, and it hurts more than the throat and the ice ever did, because this time I am the one who put it there.

“I see,” he says.

“Theron—”

“Eat your dinner, Bree.” He says firmly. That is the worst of it. He is only careful again, the way he was before, before the ride together in the woods and my name in his mouth. “Cassius will see you have an escort, going forward. For your safety. Since the empress is so fond of walking into danger and leaving the palace without telling her husband.”

And he gets up then.

“Where are you going?”

“Since you did not tell me you would be missing dinner yesterday, it seems only fair that you should dine alone this evening.”

He strides off without another word, and I sit alone at a table set for two, with a song only I can hear ringing under the silence. I do not know how to even process all of the information given to me today.

That the beasts might be sickening from the same song I hear?

Is that even possible?

The unknown builds behind my ribs and makes it hard for me to speak. But one thing I do understand: with each secret I keep, I will lose another of the warm things I have found here, one step at a time, unless I figure out what to do next.