Trust - Chapter 12

She was LeFaye, and she had always thought of herself as strong, even during that terrible time when she'd been sent away from Mermorgan and out among the English. All her life she'd practiced the disciplines of her family, and excelled in those disciplines. The customs of the outside world disgusted her, and she'd felt contemptuous of the Morgana Moira for embracing them, resentful that she'd tried to alter the path the family followed, and had always followed, as if their power wasn't rooted in adherence to those ways.

Yet, for all that, she'd loved Moira, loved her beyond anything she felt for rest of her family, for those emotions were more an admixture of loyalty, duty and need than true affection. She'd loved the way, of all of them, Moira would smile, and laugh, and she'd loved it most when Moira touched her, those delicately strong fingers lighting for an instant on a shoulder or an arm, the brief flaring within the bond that told her Moira cared for her, as well.

That love had been enough to carry her away from home, for the second time in her life.

Just now, as she lay half-drowsing in her strange bed in this strange land, far from anything familiar or comforting, she'd thought she heard her name, "Briony, Briony," called out to her in Moira's voice.

"Morgana?" she answered, sitting bolt upright, her heart pounding suddenly. Briony wasn't afraid of ghosts, but Moira, she knew, should not be dead, and the wrongness of her death grated on the edges of all she felt as a LeFaye, like a rusty key scraped along a stone wall. There was darkness out there, and wrongness, and she wanted it to end.

No answer came to her and, truly, none was expected. The voice that had spoken was not Moira's voice, not really, but it had not been a dream, either. Slowly, she rose, listening. No other call followed.

Briony dressed herself in the clothes she had been given, odd, uncomfortable garments that would nonetheless allow her to blend in with the humans of this place. Her green robe she carried bundled under her arm, to be donned once she achieved the boneyard where Moira's body lay. Three more nights, after this one, to sing the death songs. Three more nights, and then it would fall upon her to exhume the corpse and carry it down to the bier she'd laboured on, that whole day long, beside the sea. There the body must burn until only soft dust remained, not the merest sliver of tooth or bone left behind to be conjured upon by the unscrupulous.

The ashes she would scatter upon the living waters of the ocean. This was her duty. She'd tried to explain as much to Moira's son--the word, the very concept made her shudder inwardly, though even in private she gave no outward sign--but he, the priest of the Hanged God, would not listen.

She'd thought, briefly, of performing a spell to unstopper his ears, but at the last, relented. In truth, in her sorrow, she hadn't the heart for such a piece of magic.

Now Briony padded soundlessly along the corridor, and down the six flights of stairs, leaving the House of Many Locked Doors so quietly she doubted the dull-witted man who watched the entrance so much as noticed her shadow. Outside, the air felt unnaturally warm, over-fragranced with summer blossoms. The wind carried a scent of the sea, but it was not the sea of home, and its smell only added to her loneliness. She extended her senses to feel the beings that moved around her: a hungry dog-like creature there, rooting through refuse; a man and a woman with the lightness of strong wine singing in their veins; other things, dark things that could not show their faces by the light of day, wandering, hunting. Dangerous they might be, but they would not harm her.

The boneyard wasn't far, not when she went as the crow flew, vaulting fences and hedges until she found herself at the place. Once inside, however, Briony walked with care, conscious of the remains beneath her feet, until she came to the narrow space where Moira's body lay.

There she knelt, at the grave's foot, and dropped the robe over her head, its thick folds too warm for the soft air, but comforting, nonetheless, in their familiarity.

Quietly, so that she would not be detected, Briony began to sing, eyes closed, her hands making gentle passes over the mounded soil. Not until she could no longer move them did she notice anything amiss.

Briony's eyes flew open. Strong green vines entangled each of her wrists, their leaves whispering against her skin. Even as she watched, more vines shot from out of the grave to twine her ankles, her legs, her waist and chest, springing forth with a quickness too great for even her sharp eyes to follow. Tightening, ever tightening, they pulled at her, and she fought them with every bit of her strength, a sudden fear of being dragged down beneath the earth and into darkness bursting within her. Already, her body bent, unable to resist for all her struggles. Desperate, now, she began to chant a spell, willing the leaves to shrivel, the vines to grow brittle and break, pouring more and more of her magic into the words as the terrible pressure continued.

At last, unable to hold out longer, she crashed forward, grass and soil filling her mouth. She'd vines in her hair now, and round her throat, abrading her skin, the green loops constricting until she lost the power of speech and spots of fire-edged blackness flashed in her sight.

Briony spat out dirt, hoping to gasp at least a little air into her tortured lungs, but that was not to be. Instead, a tendril penetrated her opened lips, her throat, spreading and growing within her body until the pain was terrible and she tensed into a scream that had no sound, that would never have any sound.

The last thing she saw, before darkness claimed her, were the silhouettes of two women, there by the side of the grave. Briony felt the bond within them, the LeFaye blood that called out to her, like to like, and her lips moved, praying for aid, for mercy, for life. The smaller of the two reached down, touched her, her fingers sliding inside the flesh of Briony's chest. Blinding light exploded, and everything she was, everything she'd ever been was gone: her magic, her connection with the family, the last vestige of her strength.

She tried to call out again--not so much from the agony of her invaded body, but because she had never, in all her life, expected to die so horribly, or so horribly alone.

Who will sing my death songs? she wondered, even as a cold voice answered, within her mind,

There is no one left to sing them, Briony St. Ives.

Sebastian awakened with a shout, sitting upright in bed, his heart pounding, his body drenched in sweat. Beside him, Celeste stirred sleepily, murmuring. "Hmn? What is it, Bastian?"

A second or two passed before he could catch his breath enough to answer her. "Nothing, love. Only a dream."

Celeste's hand emerged from beneath the covers, reaching for the light. Sebastian blinked in the sudden brightness, although his wife did not. Instead, her dark eyes regarded him steadily, with some concern.

"Must have been a bloody awful one, to make you shout like that."

Sebastian laughed a little. In retrospect, the dream seemed ridiculous: he'd dreamt of being strangled by the overgrown aspidistra that had stood atop the old-fashioned upright piano of the woman who'd given him lessons when he was very young, before he'd gone off to school. What had been her name? Ah, yes, Mrs. Pike. She was a widow, and smelled, always, of lavender-water, the sweetness overlaying, but not quite covering, a slight suggestion of gin.

"It was nothing, truly. I'd a dream about my old piano teacher." Sebastian laughed again, forcing himself to throw off his panic, to lie down again beside his wife. Already, in the light, Sebastian's sense of horror was fading as if it had never been. It was all just chemicals anyway, wasn't it? The mind dredged out things from one's past and the synapses, or neurons, or whatever one called them, fired away at each other and were bathed in all manner of strange substances. In this case, the chemicals had been those that produced the sensation of fear, and so, harmless Mrs. Pike and her even more harmless houseplant had been transformed into objects of primal terror.

Though, come to think of it, Mrs. Pike had struck his knuckles a time or two with a ruler, once when it was only too plain that he'd neglected to include so much as a moment of practice into his week, the second time when he'd been eating chocolate, and smeared his messy fingerprints on her pristine keys. Both times, he'd taken the punishment as richly deserved, and he'd always liked Mrs. Pike, the way, in his childhood, he'd liked most everyone he met.

"Not the end of the world, then?" Celeste asked, smiling her sleepy, contented smile. She'd removed the dressings from her shoulder and throat, and the scar, though pink and a bit sore-looking against the silken golden-brown of her skin, was far less than he'd imagined. As she did most other things, Celeste healed well: the gash she'd received on their way to Mermorgan Hall looked months rather than weeks old.

Sebastian ran his fingertips lightly over the mark. "Does it hurt, love?" he asked her.

"Very little," she answered, sighing happily as Sebastian continued his exploration, stroking her breasts and the small mound of her belly. Her hand covered his, and her smile turned inward. "D'you know, I can feel her now, a bit. Like a butterfly inside me. So odd to think, now, that at Christmas we'll be three instead of two."

"Up all night," Sebastian laughed. "Changing nappies. Our shoulders permanently marked with baby spit-up, or drool."

"I can't wait." Celeste laughed with him, but after a moment her look turned serious. "Sometimes, Bastian, I'm afraid--oh, not of the things we've spoken of before, the dark things, but of the everyday circumstances of this world. Up 'til now, since I've been grown, I've only had to be pretty and charming, and to make things lovely, but soon...soon I shall have the future of another person in my hands. Will I be patient with her, and kind? Will I be able to let her grasp hold of life with her own two hands? My own mum and dad...honestly, Bastian, I don't remember them very well. Livvie tells me they were good people, that they loved me, but I can't even picture their faces now. When I think of them, it's only a photograph I see. And I can't understand why they would send me away. They weren't very poor. I was wanted, once. They might have kept me."

Unshed tears shone in Celeste's dark eyes, and Sebastian could not think what to say in order to comfort her. Truly, he'd never considered before how his life and Celeste's had run parallel, yet so far apart. He'd been only a tiny baby, placed from his earliest hours in a home that was warm and loving, full of laughter and light and all good things, while she had been old enough to know of the change in her circumstances, if not to understand a single reason for the alteration. She'd been sent far from her tropical home to a strange, cold, grey land full of people who did not look like her, did not understand her, brought her up with one purpose in mind: to fight, to slay and, only too soon, to die.

Celeste rarely spoke of her own childhood, though she seemed, at times, almost greedy for tales of Sebastian's own. He'd shared many happy years with Gemma and Clive Delacoeur and then, when they were old, had discovered his second set of parents, young and strong and full of affection for the child they'd lost. Whereas Celeste's mum and dad had both died before they'd ever known she'd been released from the destiny to which they'd committed her life.

God did, at times, move in mysterious ways.

"Perhaps they believed so strongly..." Sebastian began, feeling, even as he spoke them, the weakness of his words.

"I would never give up my child for anything I believed. Never," Celeste answered, and Sebastian knew that was true: she would guard their child more fiercely than any mother tiger. She paused. "I've always hated the story of Abraham and Isaac. How could God ask that of a father, Bastian--that he sacrifice his son?"

"Isaac wasn't sacrificed in the end," Sebastian answered, feeling even more useless than before. "He was spared."

"I wouldn't do it." Celeste slid upward on her pillows, glaring into the darkness that lay beyond the soft glow from their lamp. "I wouldn't do it for anything. I'd say no."

Sebastian sighed, sitting up beside her, rubbing her shoulders gently until some of the tension left his wife's body. "It won't come to that," he told her. "You'll be a lovely mum, and I'll be...um...a slightly befuddled but well-intentioned dad, and we will have many, many years together. You'll see, love."

A few moments passed before Celeste sighed again, softly, and more sadly than before. "When I was small, and I couldn't sleep," she said, with one of those swift changes of subject that always left Sebastian feeling as if he'd been left several miles behind on a forced march. "Your dad would sing to me. In the night. I'd be lying there alone in my bed, shivering, trying to be still so that the monsters hiding in the dark wouldn't notice me, and he would pull up the chair from my desk, and he would sing."

Sebastian laughed, suddenly--though he knew such a response was completely inappropriate, he couldn't stop himself. "My dad. Celeste, love, you can't be serious. My dad doesn't sing. I can't even imagine."

"He sang at your mum's funeral," Celeste answered, and, of course, she was perfectly correct. Rupert had sung. He'd borrowed Celeste's guitar. "And after."

Sebastian was left with a feeling of confusion. He hadn't remembered. Honestly hadn't remembered, until she'd said. What on earth could be wrong with him?

"Bastian?" his wife asked, with the slightest trace of a scowl on her lovely face. "Bastian, what is it?"

"I don't know. I don't know." Sebastian pressed his fists against his temples, as if he could somehow grind that bit of slippage, that bit of forgetfulness, out of his mind again. He'd given away his magic, all but the vestiges, the things set into his blood and heart and bone, and it was there he felt the first signs of warning, a jangling along where his strongest connection to the LeFaye bond had been. "If I could just..."

"Just...?" Celeste echoed.

"I don't know!" he cried again, clawing his hands back through his hair. It was almost there. Almost. So close.

Then Sebastian did know two things. The first, that his dream had not been a true dream. It was a vision, and some part of it--the fear and the pain, no doubt--were only too real. For the second, he felt, as he hadn't before, even when he'd worried and fretted, that his dad was in terrible, terrible danger now.

And so, though he'd no idea how, was his mum.

The vast cave they'd entered into from the outside world swiftly gave way to a narrow corridor that continued to lead them ever downward. At places their path was wide, easy enough to follow, despite their exhaustion. Other sections, however, narrowed until it was all they could do to inch their way painfully through, at the cost of greatly frayed tempers and much lost skin. They'd become smeared with the phosphorescent stuff that clung to the cave walls and glowed, even in the bits where none of the strange substance grew, like three man-shaped beacons in the darkness.

Wesley remained blind, his vampiric vision no longer able to detect even the shadows he'd perceived when first their underground wanderings began. He'd fallen silent, as well, and Giles worried for him. He did not experience the younger Watcher's emotions with the same clarity with which he felt Xander's, yet every now and then he'd catch a ripple of something that approached panic. He could hardly blame Wesley for that--had he been sightless in this terrible place, he'd might well have been nearly overcome with terror himself.

Giles stopped them at a place where the corridor let off to a bit of a cul-de-sac. He hadn't liked to interrupt their journey earlier, despite the fact that Xander had been stumbling badly for what Giles guessed had been the last half hour, and Wesley's anxiety beat upon him, a dull, steady throb at the back of his skull. This little underground pocket appeared, at least, semi-defensible, and Giles feared attack, even though they'd seen nothing, so far, that seemed to present a direct threat. The small rustling noises and flittings of colour and shadow at the edges of his vision might well have been nothing more than fungus-inspired hallucinations, or merely the products of his own overtaxed perceptions.

The moment he called the halt, Xander flung himself down on the rocky floor, his entire body trembling with weariness, his breathing harsh in the still air. Although it felt almost cruel to do so, Giles crouched beside his young man, shaking his shoulder to rouse him once more.

"Unh-uh, Giles," Xander responded hoarsely, a negation of whatever was wanted of him.

"Xander, get up a moment." Giles pulled at the boy's arm, himself scarcely capable of the least act of strength. His young friend did, in fact sit up, though he slumped back almost immediately against the stone wall. Carefully, his hands feeling useless as gardening gloves stuffed full of wet sand, he turned Xander's head to the side, checking the gash in the young man's throat. The cut wasn't deep, certainly not deep enough to have struck any major blood vessel, but already, as much as Giles could tell by the yellow light, the wound looked angry. Small wonder, considering the nature of the creatures that attacked them.

"Only a minute more, and I'll allow you to rest," Giles said, trying to make his own voice sound comforting. "I want to clean this cut. No sense risking infection."

"Don't care," Xander told him, and his eyes, when they opened, looked exceedingly bleary. "Doesn't hurt."

"Better safe than sorry, yes?" Giles responded, sounding to his own ears rather like one of those nurses who spoke to one in an excessively cheery voice directly they performed some unpleasant act upon one's person. Xander made vague noises of protest when Giles sprayed the wound with antiseptic and covered it over with a sterile dressing. "There, that's done," he continued. "Feel up to a bit of water now? Perhaps a bite of something to eat?"

Xander protested again, but did in fact manage several swallows from the canteen, followed by one of the energy bars in its entirety. Whatever poisoned the air above ground seemed less virulent here below, and Giles was glad to find his young friend capable of taking some sustenance. He himself felt entirely incapable, though he did force down a mouthful or two of water. It sat uneasily in his stomach, like a small ball of coldness.

Last of all, Giles took the pullover from his carryall, forcing the garment over Xander's head. He could not have borne the weight of it on his own shoulders, and his young friend would rest better for the warmth.

"Sleep now?" Xander asked, scarcely awake even as the words left his mouth.

"Yes, son," Giles told him, touching the young man's cheek lightly as Xander lowered himself to the rocky ground, snuggling into its dubious comfort as if the unforgiving soil had been the softest of feather beds.

"G'night," he said softly, watching Xander for some moments before he rose once more, settling himself just inside the doorway, sword in hand.

Wesley, crouched a little further in, glanced at him sharply, and even though Giles knew his companion to be sightless, the look still unnerved him. "Wesley, what is it?"

"Nothing," Wesley answered softly. "The dark. I've had enough of the dark, I think."

Giles gave an equally soft laugh. The action hurt him. "As have I. I quite believe, when we're out of this, I'll leave the lights burning twenty-four seven, as Buffy might say." The thought of his young love fell as a heavy weight upon his heart, and in his mind's eye he pictured her moving golden and graceful through the soft shadows of his flat. Had she found the sphere he'd left for her? Did it bring her comfort--and would she ever be able to forgive him for this escapade, for leaving her?

"I can't help but think..." Wesley fell silent.

Giles waited for him to continue.

"What if this all comes to nothing? What if I've killed you, the two of you, for nothing? A vague hope. A dream that can't ever come true."

"We'll come out of this," Giles said, trying to make his voice kind, comforting, even as he understood the unvoiced something Wesley was trying to tell him. Neither he nor Xander could last much longer in this place, and no doubt the vampire could smell upon them the failure of their bodies. Wesley, without magic, feared being left, alone and blind, maddened by his need for blood, in the dark.

"We can hold out a bit longer," Giles told him.

"I n-need to drink," Wesley answered in a flat voice, made even more unlike itself by the presence of the long fangs within his mouth. "I've never gone so long before. I... That is, I can't..."

Giles studied him, taking in the near-constant tremours in Wesley's hands, his more-than-usual pallor, the slight hitchings of his voice. An image of Deirdre, in those last days of the terrible house in Whitechapel, came to him.

"I understand," Giles answered gently, then, "Not from Xander."

The younger Watcher's yellow eyes turned upon him, and Giles knew, with sudden certainty, they were not sightless anymore.

"Will you...?" he began, dismayed by the shaky quality of his own voice. "Wesley, tell me, once you've begun--will you be able to stop?"