I'm losing him.
The road stretched on ahead, a morass of mud and grey haze in the heavy, chilly morning rain. The horses hated such weather. They trudged along with their heads low, barely picking up their hooves, as if the prospect of lifting their feet from the mud only to have to put them back down again was too depressing to contemplate. Kei felt scarcely better, but it had little to do with the weather.
He glanced over at the other horse and its rider, making out Gateau's broad-shouldered figure as little more than a sodden mass astride an equally sodden horse. Gateau did not lift his head. After a moment, Kei looked back at the road.
Gateau.
He closed his eyes, feeling tears threaten, and forced them back. Self-pity was foolish---the weakling's route. He'd already chosen to face his fate like a man, no matter what that fate turned out to be. He would not crawl away from this humbled and forsaken. He would leave on his own two feet, of his own volition, while he still had some vestige of his pride left.
But not yet. Not while Gateau still needed him.
Even if he doesn't realize it.
He had known it couldn't last. These weeks of travel had been only the eye of the storm: pleasant, calm, and deceptive. It had been, for just a short while, like old times. Better than old times. It was the first time Kei had seen Gateau as he must have once been. As perhaps he was now only when he was out on the road, living the warrior's way, Sorcerer hunting. It was the first time he'd gotten a glimpse of how good things could have been, between them. If.
But then had come yesterday. Kei had awakened pleasurably, anticipating another day of travel, another day of banter and camaraderie and the sort of warmth Gateau usually never shared with him except by accident. But when he'd turned over, Gateau had been there, awake, beside the fire. His eyes, full of the old darkness and pain, had been turned inward, like his thoughts. They had not emerged since.
He didn't know what had caused the change, but this Gateau was nothing new. This was the Gateau of Oregano. The man whose smiles held only bitterness and whose tenderness was little more than desperation. The man Kei had hoped never to see again.
Ah, but you knew better, he chided himself. Until this is over, that's all you're going to see. You were lucky for the respite.
He sighed.
Two years ago, they had met. A lonely night in a bar. The glimpse of a man so magnificent that Kei had been enraptured, unable to do anything but stare. A body like an artist's study of masculinity made flesh. A face that belonged better on a god. Eyes... ah, but his eyes had been the warning, hadn't they? And Kei had chosen not to heed his intuition. And now...
And now I'm on a horse in the middle of nowhere, helping the man I love dump me.
He closed his eyes, letting the horse walk; the creature was so inured to the routine that it needed no guidance.
Eyes like hell. Blue as the heavens themselves, but so full of loss and anguish and bitterness that he should have known, he should have known the moment he saw them that Gateau was unattainable. Oh, he had responded readily enough to Kei's blatant flirtations. Had taken him that very night, all animal and hunger, rough rutting in a smelly, dark room. But there had been nothing to their encounter but lust.
Kei had yearned for more even then. Even afterward, as they lay recovering and licking their wounds; something in the warrior's quiet manner had intrigued him. The challenge, perhaps. He'd always been stupid over things like that. He hadn't even known Gateau's name.
He was never mine. He'll never be mine. Not wholly.
It was only fair, he supposed. He'd broken his share of hearts in his lifetime, and given no second thought to the consequences. When one played with fire, et cetera. Kei had prided himself on burning brightly. Only now his past misdeeds had come home to him with a vengeance, and it wasn't fire that had burned him, but ice. Great, long icicle shards of it, growing from Gateau's heart into his.
I could leave. Anytime I wanted.
Right.
Gateau probably wouldn't even miss him. He could stop his horse now, tell Gateau sayonara, and head back to Oregano. Spend another week sleeping off the effects of his travels, get a haircut and a much-needed manicure, go back to the theater and charm his way back into the company. Find some other lover---someone with hands that gripped like Gateau's and a tongue that plundered like Gateau's and maybe a few other parts like Gateau's---and drown himself in forgetfulness for a few weeks. His heart would stop hurting eventually. He could move on.
I should. I really should. This hurts too damn much.
He didn't even know why he felt so certain that Gateau needed him. It made no sense. He had no magic, couldn't fight, had only the most vague understanding of what was going on. And what was his own role in all of this? To help Gateau try and convince a madman to stop being mad.
Best case scenario: Marron would recover whatever sanity remained to him, realize he was madly in love with Gateau, and the two of them would ride off into the sunset together. Worst case scenario: they were all going to die a horrible, violent, miserable death. Either way, not much in it for him.
But I love him.
Gods damn it.
He sighed, and drew his cloak a little tighter about himself, and hunched a little lower so that the icy droplets of rain wouldn't find new ways to slither down into his saddle and freeze his balls off. Not that they'd seen much action lately, anyhow.
"I've traveled this road before. There's a good place to camp for the evening, nearby. A hot spring. Let's stop."
"There's still an hour or so before nightfall."
"Yes, and my old bones will feel every minute of it if you don't let me have a soak."
Silence.
"Don't look at me like that, damn it. You know full well I'm a hedonist and proud of it. And right now I'm wet and cold and look like a drowned rat and I swear before every god I can think of, Marron, that if you don't stop here for the night, I'll complain all the way to Carunirian's."
A heavy sigh. "Very well."
"Bless you. It's wonderful to know you still have some vulnerabilities."
They came for him at dusk.
This time, he lacked even the strength to crawl away, and could only mewl feebly as they approached. Please, he tried to say. No more. But they had torn out his tongue the day before, and he would never speak again for the rest of his life.
The guards said nothing as they picked up his broken limbs, carried him so that his smashed feet dragged on the floor. They didn't look at him. Perhaps they'd carried too many other poor, broken souls down this corridor, too many times, and had learned not to grow attached to those whose lives were on limited time. Or perhaps they feared the whim of their lord, who would be just as quick to use them for his pleasures if they caught his eye---which they would, if they showed any undue attention to his latest work of art. Whatever the reason, they carried him efficiently, professionally, and without compassion, from the relatively safe misery of his holding cell and down the short, dim corridor, to the room where he had already left so much of his mind and body. There was nothing left of him now, he cried, silently, desperately. There was nothing more that they could do to him. Nothing but let him die.
Oh, please, gods, let that be all they did.
Then the heavy stone door scraped open and he was in the room again, bathed in the warm, bright light that somehow offered no comfort. And he could hear them again, the voices that he hated and feared, the voices that had whispered or purred or murmured, thick with arousal, while his own voice had been scraped raw with the effort of screaming. He whimpered and let his head fall to his chest, strengthless, filled only with a kind of weary, bitter satisfaction. He could scream no longer and lacked the strength to struggle or react to pain. Whatever they had planned for him this time, they would take little pleasure from it.
The voices, however, were oddly distant. He rolled his eyes, struggling to focus in the light after so many hours of darkness, but could not detect their source.
"He's still lovely." Desire and admiration in that voice.
"Yes, isn't he? It's always difficult to retain enough of their beauty to make them alluring rather than simply pathetic. I should have kept him in the cell longer, though. He's not pale enough. Che... I found him on a farm. What can you do?" A long-suffering sigh. "Saa. He'll do, for this test."
The guards dropped him in the middle of the room, letting him fall into a heap. It hurt, of course; broken bones scraped together and abused tendons cried protest. He ignored the pain. This was nothing. Pain, he had discovered, lost its power when one no longer cared.
"You must be silent, now, Oparu-san. Kinjyu rarely attacks its controller, but it might consider you fair game, and I wouldn't want that." The sound of a smile. "So don't disturb me."
The guards left, and the doors ground closed once more, the hollow boom of their contact echoing dully in the chamber. He closed his eyes in the silence.
Silence that lasted only a moment. Then he could hear something, faint and rustling, like leaves blown by autumn wind. In the corners of the chamber now, but getting closer. He would have closed his eyes and ignored it---he had grown used to rats---but for the instinct which gently impinged on his consciousness, pulling him from the comforting stupor into which he'd fallen. Danger, that instinct warned. A chill tremor of slowly-building menace. Skittering through the room from shadow to shadow, coming ever closer to him. Eagerly.
He had thought himself beyond fear. But the spark of life that still lingered in him, keeping his heart beating and his sanity unfortunately intact, was not as far gone as he'd hoped.
Life yearns, always, to continue living. Self-preservation is an instinct so ingrained that no torture, no matter how depraved, can fully extinguish it. Even the suicidal man fears death, on however distant a level.
So as the skittering, whispering sound reached him and quick, dark flickers darted across his vision, as something slipped under him and something else into him and he tasted coldness and bile and new, terrible pain, he was afraid. But blessedly, the pain, while intense, was fleeting. He still welcomed death, when it came.
They reached a sparse, rocky region around sunset, by which time the rain had ended and a tentative warmth had finally penetrated the low-hanging clouds of late winter. When they found a trail leading up into the rocky hills that nestled at the foot of an old dormant volcano, Gateau knew that had found the place. It was marked by a sign that directed them toward the West Highland Onsen.
There were campgrounds adjoining the hot springs, a short ways down the trail that led up to the spring plateau. Some enterprising soul, perhaps with an eye to developing the area, had terraced each level of the main hill's elevation, allotting each campsite its own separate area of ground and a bit of privacy despite the few scraggly trees that adorned the hills. The trail was clear and also terraced neatly, if a bit overgrown, and so they were able to bring the horses with them up to a site about halfway up the mountain. Here they made their camp.
Kei looked around, thoughtfully, as he gave the horses their daily rubdown. "Nice. Must be popular when the season's a bit better, and people have free time after harvest. With this winter muck, though, I wouldn't be surprised if we're the only ones on the mountain."
Gateau nodded, pausing while laying the fire to look up toward the higher terraces. "Uhn." It looked as if Kei was right. None of the terraces below seemed occupied, although it was difficult to tell through the screen of trees and rocks that protected each. The upper terraces couldn't be seen at all, but he could detect no telltale campfire smoke.
But this was the place. Marron was here, somewhere. If his vision of Mirufi hadn't been just a midwinter night's dream.
He sighed, then straightened, idly popping joints as he stretched. "Kei. I'm going up to look around. You need anything?"
Kei's brush strokes slowed for a moment; he kept his back to Gateau. "No. How long will you be gone?"
There was an odd note in Kei's voice. Gateau turned to frown at him. "I don't know."
Kei looked down at the brush to pick hair from it with his fingers. "He's here?"
Gateau felt himself flush. "Yes. I... think so, anyway."
Kei nodded, and said nothing more. Gateau watched him for a moment before finally sighing and crossing the campsite to where he stood. Awkwardly, he put a hand on Kei's shoulder. Kei stiffened beneath his hand, and after a moment, guiltily, he drew his hand back.
"Just go, Gateau."
"Kei---"
"Just go, damn it. I'll be here when you get back. That's what you want to hear, isn't it? Fine, I've said it. Now go."
"I was going to say that if I'm not back by morning... you should leave."
Kei started and turned to him, frowning warily. "What do you mean?"
"I mean... I don't know what he'll do. If he kills me..."
Kei stared at him for a moment, then said softly, "Do you really think there's a chance of that?"
"Yes." He forced himself to admit it. "There's a chance you're in danger, too, Kei--- you said it yourself. Something's wrong with him. The Marron I knew would never kill in cold blood. I don't know what else he's capable of. So if morning comes, and I'm not here..." He sighed heavily. "Go home. Don't come looking for me. Just go home and... and find my sister. Tell Eclair what's happened."
Kei watched him, his eyes glittering for a moment. "Tell her you died at the hands of your old lover? Or tell her you've run off with him?"
Gateau turned away, sharply, before anger and guilt could get the better of him. "Tell her what you like," he said roughly, heading out of camp. "If I can, I'll be back in the morning."
Kei was silent behind him, and for a moment he almost stopped. Almost turned around to go back to him and hold him for a moment and apologize and reassure him that everything would turn out fine, he'd be back by morning.
But he didn't because he didn't know if it was true. So he left the camp and headed up the trail.
"Mirufi."
He turned, startled, lowering the cloth he was using to dry his hair. "I thought you didn't like using magic, Onion."
"I do it when I have to." The astral image straightened, and Mirufi sighed inwardly. For all that Onion had once been the youngest of the Haz Knights, he still looked like the oldest, and his years of raising four children had given quite an intimidating edge to his glower. It didn't help that he was large enough to cut an imposing figure, even now, in such an ethereal form. It was easy to see that he was furious. And it didn't take a genius to guess why.
Privately, he thanked the many gods that Onion wasn't here to conduct this interview in person.
"Why didn't you tell me my son was alive?"
Mirufi leaned his elbow on one knee and sighed aloud, not meeting his comrade's eyes. "Because we didn't want you to interfere."
" 'We?' So Mamu did know about this. Gods damn you both---"
"Onion." A log in the campfire popped, but Mirufi ignored it and looked up at him. "We didn't do it to be malicious. If we'd thought it would have helped, we would have told you."
"If you'd thought---" Onion took a threatening step toward him before recalling that he wasn't really there. He forced himself to relax, seething. "I've been grieving for my son for years, and you thought it wouldn't help me to know he's really alive? I should kill you for this."
"I wasn't talking about you. We knew it wouldn't help Marron. And if you'd come at him the way you're coming at me now, we couldn't have guaranteed that he wouldn't have tried to kill you."
Onion paused in mid-snarl and stared at him for a moment in silence. Mirufi offered him a tired smile.
"Why don't you sit down, Onion? I'll tell you what's going on."
"Is he all right?"
"In a manner of speaking. Physically, he's fine. I worked hard with him on rehabilitation, and he's as healthy now as he was three years ago."
"But otherwise?"
"Sit down, Onion."
"I don't want to sit down. I'm not even there. I want to know---"
"Then sit down where you are. Because I'm about to tell you that your kawaii, gentle little boy tried to seduce a man older than me when he was fourteen, that he's only an inch shy of being a complete madman now, and that I've been fucking him regularly for the last four months. And I'm about to tell you why all of this has been necessary, and that's going to take a while."
Onion stared at him. Then sat.
Mirufi sighed and ran fingers through his still-damp hair, then lifted a hand to point up the mountain, toward the plateau where the hot springs were located. "He's up there now. Gateau is on his way to see him. Everything depends on that meeting, Onion---if it goes badly..."
He sighed and weighed the truth against Onion's likely reaction. Onion could be unbelievably irrational about his children---but he was not a fool. He had been a Haz Knight; he understood the larger picture. And Mirufi owed the man something, by the gods, for his three years of mourning.
"If it goes badly," he admitted, finally and heavily, "Mamu may have no choice but to order Marron's death."
Witchlight.
Glimmering across the dozen-odd pools of the spring-pocked volcanic plateau. Colorless but not white, illuminating and yet somehow transparent, it was stronger than starlight and weaker than moonlight and altogether more beautiful and haunting than either.
Beneath the pitch-darkness of the moonless night sky, the plateau was bathed in such light, courtesy of the half-dozen eerily burning spheres of mage-energy that hovered a few feet above the ground. The magical flames that gave off this light were neither a warm and comforting gold nor fierce blue-white, but black---darker than the night that enshrouded the mountain, and more absolute than the shadows under Gateau's feet. Black flames casting shadows without substance, burning with not heat, but a chill deeper than the most bitter winter wind.
He felt the chill as he passed under one of the ghostlights, but could not say whether his answering shiver was a reaction to the magic or to the stomach-clenching jumble of fears and hopes inside him.
He made his way across the plateau, walking along the sometimes-thin ridges of stone between pools that steamed with heat even in the night's deep chill. Near the center of the plateau, silver and black in the flickering unlight, he could see a single figure sitting at the edge of one spring, feet dangling in the steaming water, back facing Gateau.
Damp hair spilled down his back to pool behind him, but he was otherwise unclothed, his skin still steaming from the spring's heat in the late-winter night air. His eyes were focused on the water before him, and but for his taut posture Gateau would have thought him asleep. He made no movement or sound to indicate that he heard Gateau's approach, even when Gateau deliberately scuffed the grass with his boots to warn him, and finally Gateau stopped a couple of feet away, watching him and trying to remember all of the things he'd memorized to say in this moment.
But before he could marshall his courage, Marron moved. Slowly, as if thawing, he leaned forward and stretched out an arm, fingers uncurling and spreading, and touched the surface of the water. Lightly. Something flickered across the surface like the quicksilver passing of a reflection, and after a moment the steam hovering lazily above the water's surface moved.
Thickening, solidifying, it rose until it was a single opaque column jutting several feet into the air, never leaving the water's surface. A moment later, roiling, it began to form the familiar shape of a human figure.
Marron sighed, and the column shivered in response, coalescing abruptly into the ghostly, pale image of a man Gateau had never seen before, yet whose face stirred an odd sense of familiarity in him nevertheless. The man was tall and broad-shouldered but otherwise lean. Simply attired in the manner of a scholar, more for comfort than appearance. Young, to judge by his face and body. Perhaps no older than his mid-thirties---no. Not so young. Not with such eyes. Nor with such hair, a shocking white that contrasted sharply with the man's tawny skin---
Oh, gods.
He knew this man. The image of a body, tortured beyond recognition, flickered through his mind, along with its sole identifier: white hair matted with blood.
He inhaled sharply, and Marron started, the conjuration above the pool warping for an instant and then dissipating back into the mist from which it had come. The fingers that had touched the water so lightly clenched into fist that blazed suddenly with the same black fire that burned above the plateau. He raised the hand without turning, and for a moment Gateau was certain that he was about to die screaming---
And then Marron froze, and the sense of impending doom vanished as quickly as the mist-image had, a moment before. The black light faded away.
"Yahari. Mirufi finally got around to betraying me, then." He sighed, heavily; thin shoulders heaved beneath the curtain of hair.
"Marron..." All the diplomatic phrases he'd so carefully planned, all of the questions he'd decided to ask, all of it, had flown from his mind. He stepped forward, then stopped, too uncertain and unnerved to think of what to do or say next.
There was no need for more, it seemed. At just the sound of his voice, Marron hunched a little, as if cringing from a blow. In that instant he was no longer the powerful, emotionless, half-mad immortal wizard Mirufi had described. Suddenly he was just Marron, lonely and weary and painfully vulnerable, a sad remnant of the Marron Gateau had known and fought alongside and loved.
"I know better than to ask you to go away this time," he said softly, his voice no louder than a murmur. It carried easily on the empty plateau. "I won't make you sleep again."
"You shouldn't have done it before." He was surprised to find anger in his voice. "If you do it again, I'll just keep coming after you."
"I know." Marron looked down at the water and stirred it with a foot, sending ripples across its smooth surface. "I wanted you to come here, I think."
Gateau frowned, his anger dissipating; he took another step forward. "You did?"
"Aa." He turned at last, slowly, until he gazed back at Gateau over his shoulder. His eyes did not reflect the light at all; his face was expressionless.
"Please tell me you've come to kill me, Gateau," he said softly.
**End Ch. 15