The Sorcerers' Council had been chaos that day from the very beginning, Lord Paaru mused from his seat, and it looked as if the chaos might well continue on through the night. He sighed and banged his gavel again, knowing they wouldn't listen, but feeling obliged to do something. It was, after all, his job.
Prince Jaede scowled up at him from the podium, interrupted by the gavel in mid-exhortation. "Respectfully, Lord Paaru, I still have the floor."
"Respectfully, Prince Jaede, you have had the floor for over an hour. Your time expired twenty minutes ago." Paaru glanced at the line that had formed behind Jaede. "Let someone else have a turn." He rested his chin on one fist, wearily. "Although I'm quite certain that no one else is going to say anything much different from what you and the other nine distinguished members of this Council who have spoken so far, have said."
Jaede threw him an annoyed look, but turned and stepped down from the stand. Immediately, Baron Safire took his place. Inwardly, Paaru groaned. Safire was a podium-pounder, which meant that Paaru's headache was about to get much worse.
"Lord Paaru's said it himself---the time for talk is over," Safire said, his deep voice ringing in the Council chamber. "The time for action is now. The compact was founded on the principle that Sorcerer and commoner would keep to their respective places. If the agreement has been broken then there is no further---"
There was a sound of muffled protest from beyond the chamber doors, and abruptly they all felt a terrific surge of magic. Without warning, the heavy wooden doors were flung open as if by hurricane winds, although the old hall was as stuffy as usual.
Paaru stood, alarmed. "What is it?" he demanded, craning his neck and expecting to see the council's runner. "What's..."
He faltered and fell silent. It was not the runner.
Resplendent in white, Big Mamu strode gracefully into the center of the Council's circle and stopped, looking up at his stand from the floor. There was shocked silence throughout the chamber for all of a minute, and then a furious murmuring broke out; Paaru recovered himself after a moment of staring and banged his gavel for silence. When it fell, he arranged his face in what he hoped was a suitably formidable scowl. Although he had never been able to face this woman without feeling much younger than his fifty years and altogether inept.
"Mamu-sama. While we are honored by your presence, this unannounced visit is highly irregular. The Sorcerer's Council chamber is off-limits to anyone---"
She interrupted him. Interrupted him, the chair of the council! And he was most ashamed to admit that he did not dare do the same to her.
"Forgive me, Lord Paaru," she said, her voice clear despite its softness. "And I beg your forgiveness as well, distinguished members of the council. But I have information which may interest you, which could not wait until this gathering had concluded." She smiled, and Paaru swallowed against a throat that was suddenly dry.
There was something inherently terrifying, he decided, about a woman so beautiful, so ancient, and with so much power.
Onion stared at Mirufi for a long moment, silent and afraid, after Mirufi finished speaking.
"Is there anything we can do?" he asked, finally. Quietly.
"Us? Mamu? No." Mirufi shook his head, soft curls falling over his shoulders; he pulled the blanket more tightly about himself. "Even you can't do anything, Onion, much as you love your son. Love is a threat to Marron's goals, now---at least, that's how he perceives it. He destroys threats. Before mercy can intervene. I don't want you to make a patricide out of him."
Onion said nothing in reply, frowning, and Mirufi sighed, looking up the mountain toward the plateau. "Gateau is meeting with him now, after some prompting. There's a chance that he can make some difference. Out of all of the future possibilities that Mamu saw, this one was the only one that had any real hope of ending without Marron's death. In whatever manner."
"Then... that's it?" Onion leaned forward, the hope and desperation in his expression pitifully plain. "Gateau is the key? He'll be able to stop it?"
"No." Mirufi turned to gaze at Onion, bleakly. "Gateau might be able to stop it. But it's more likely that he won't." He sighed and looked up at the sky, closing his eyes. "I told you. Marron---or what Marron's becoming, rather---won't permit any interference with his mission. Even from friends and loved ones. Most of the possibilities that Mamu saw spreading from this point in time were... not positive. To be honest, in all likelihood..."
He sighed again, hating himself and trying to remember that the needs of many outweighed any single life, and wondering again how much he truly believed that.
"In all likelihood," he admitted, finally, "I've just sent Gateau to his death."
He suspected it was the beginning of the end when he heard Gateau speak his name.
He hadn't heard Gateau's approach, so intent had he been upon Zeii's image. Ah, but even that had been a sign, hadn't it? Six months of emptiness, of remembrance without reminiscence, and suddenly he'd felt the urge to see Zeii again, even if only in a shadow of the past. Sentimentality. It was a painfully normal, painfully human thing. It was yet another sign that all of his protections were unraveling, faster than he could restore them.
And now Gateau was here, to destroy the rest.
"I know better than to ask you to go away this time," he murmured to himself. He closed his eyes for a moment, knowing what had to be done, hating its necessity. "I won't make you sleep again."
"You shouldn't have done it before. If you do it again, I'll just keep coming after you."
Damn you, Gateau. Damn you for proving me right.
"I know." He looked down at the water of the spring and stirred it a bit, watching ripples spread outward from his movement. The truth, at least. Gateau deserved that much. "I wanted you to come here, I think."
A faint scrape of boots on stone as Gateau stepped closer. "You did?"
"Aa." He looked over his shoulder at Gateau, and felt it again---the sudden, painful wrench of emotion, pure and undiluted. It had been so long since he'd felt it, fully. What terrible irony that it had to be these emotions, under these circumstances. He sighed. "Please tell me you've come to kill me, Gateau."
So I won't have to kill you.
"Kill you?" Gateau stared at Marron, thunderstruck. "What--- Are you out of your mind?"
Marron laughed---a soft, bitter, humorless sound. "For lack of a better description." He turned his face up to the sky, toward the stars, his gaze almost thoughtful. "Mirufi told you, didn't he?"
"He... told me a lot of things," Gateau admitted guardedly, walking up to the pool to stand just behind him, gazing down at him. Marron didn't move. His eyes, Gateau saw from above, were closed.
"That I'm going mad? That my beloved died and the grief has overwhelmed me and so I'm turning into a monster? Was that it?"
"Close enough," Gateau agreed, gruffly. "Is it true?"
"Close enough." Marron sighed again and shivered a little as a brisk wind blew across the plateau, chilling his damp skin. Gateau shivered a little himself; the night was going to be a cold one. "Is that all he told you?"
"Is there more?"
Another laugh, strengthless and pallid. "It's all he knows. Or all he chose to tell you. Don't let Mirufi's ways deceive you, Gateau. He's a master of manipulation, well-meaning or not. Always sift through what he says to figure out what he doesn't."
Gateau frowned, unable to take his eyes away from that upturned face. No expression there, despite his words. No emotion at all. He swallowed. "It got me here. I don't mind being manipulated for that." He took a deep breath. "What didn't he say, about you?"
The dark eyes opened, clear and facetless in the witchlight. He gazed out over the plateau, and beyond. "That everything I've become so far is something I've asked to become." He sighed, looking down at the water, and stirred it again with his leg. His voice was soft, almost a whisper. "He'd have you believe that it's a simple case of too much grief and not enough love. But it's far more complicated than that. Even he doesn't know all of it. He thinks there's still a chance to fight it."
His voice was filled with such resignation and weariness that Gateau looked sharply at him. "And you think there isn't."
A whisper now, humbled, broken. Distantly, Gateau marveled at his ability to project such feeling with his voice while his face maintained its impassive mask. "I know there isn't."
As Gateau stared at him, unsure of what to say to that, Marron abruptly slipped forward off of the edge of the pool and into the steaming water, settling on an unseen shelf of rock beneath the surface. "Come in with me, Gateau," he said softly. "It's cold."
A little closer.
He would make it quick and painless. He sorted through his options and decided that the best way would be a cerebral embolism. Gateau wouldn't even have time to fear.
He closed his eyes as Gateau finally got over his surprise and moved, crossing to the other side of the spring to undress, a bit hesitantly. No doubt his instincts were trying to warn him. But then, Gateau had never been one to back down from danger when he thought the cause was just. He would do anything for those he loved. He never gave up. And he would succeed, Marron knew. Because he would keep coming, no matter what Marron did to escape him. And because every contact between them brought Marron a step closer to redemption. A step farther from revenge.
He prayed that the gods would forgive him. Gateau, he suspected, would not.
Awkward silence as Gateau settled into the water, and Marron could feel the intensity of his gaze. Still in love, after all this time. It was what made him so dangerous.
"Gods." Gateau exhaled suddenly, breaking the silence. Marron glanced up at him. The warrior was slumped against the wall of the spring, watching Marron with weary frustration. "I'd planned all these profound things to say, when I saw you again. To try and convince you to stop what you've been doing. But now that I'm here... all I can think of is the stupid, selfish questions I probably already know the answers to." He sighed and closed his eyes. Marron watched him for a moment.
"Such as?"
Gateau said nothing for a long moment, leaning his head back against the stone, gazing up at the night sky. "Why didn't you tell me about him?"
Marron sighed. No clinical detachment would do, this time; Gateau meant to keep this powerful and personal. And difficult. "Is that really what you've come all this way to ask me, Gateau? Do you really want to know?"
Another moment's hesitation, and then Gateau opened his eyes, crystal blue glittering almost black in the light from the mage-spheres overhead. "For now, that's all I want to know. It's the one thing I've never understood."
Marron regarded him for a moment longer. "As you wish." He looked down at the water, watching its slow current swirl around his torso before flowing toward Gateau.
"In part, it was fear. And selfishness. That was most of it, but there were many reasons. I'd never told anyone about Zeii. I didn't want anyone to know. Not just because Zeii was a man. It was also to keep him, and what he meant to me... safe, I suppose. If no one knew, no one could tell me it was wrong to love him, or that I was a stupid infatuated boy, or anything else like that."
Memories, coming unbidden. A cool night in Zeii's chamber, the breeze chilling his bare skin even through the thin sheet that covered him. Watching Zeii sleep, beside him. Longing, so hot and fierce that it had driven him from his bed in the apprentice barracks and into his teacher's quarters, hoping for---what? Had he even known what lovemaking really was, back then? He hadn't cared, really.
He clenched his jaw against the unexpected remembrance and the pain it brought in its wake, and forced himself to concentrate on the present again. Already Gateau was poisoning him with his presence.
He lifted a hand and pushed back his hair. "And I was in my journeyman period, as a magician-in-training. Abstinence from all pleasures of the flesh throughout the seven years of the journeymanship is supposed to aid in the development of the self-control that a Mage requires. I don't think you know how much of a torment you were to me, during those years."
Gateau flushed a bit. "You could have told me. I'd have left you alone, then."
"No. The point is to resist temptation." He lifted his eyes to meet Gateau's, debating for a moment, and then continued. "And I... wanted to test myself. To see whether my feelings for Zeii were true."
Gateau frowned, his face clouding as understanding registered. "So." His voice was soft, but Marron heard the anger in its depths. "That's all I was to you? Nothing more than a... an exercise?"
Marron watched him for a moment more, and then nodded, speaking quietly. The whole truth, in all its ugliness and revelation. "That's how it began, yes."
What you wanted, Gateau.
Hurt was fast giving way to rage, and rage desired an outlet. Gateau clenched his jaw and struggled to contain both. His pride would allow him nothing less.
"Yahari," he said at length, when Marron fell silent, and he managed a smile that didn't go far past his mouth. "All those times you turned away... Saa." He looked up at the sky and sighed. "If you used me, it's something I left myself open to, I guess."
Marron still said nothing, and Gateau scowled. "Would you have told me, if things had... worked out differently, when you went back to the school?" Bitterness roiled in him, and he couldn't help adding, "Once you didn't need me anymore?"
Marron didn't answer at once, and Gateau glanced up at him, mildly surprised to see the faintest of frowns on his face, under the stray strands of his hair. His next words wiped away Gateau's anger in a single, swift stroke.
"I would have brought you to meet him," Marron said, finally, closing his eyes. "He was willing to share me with you. If you had been willing."
Gateau stared at Marron in complete, stunned silence for several seconds. "He what?"
Marron did not reply. No further explanation was necessary, really. It wasn't the unconventionality of the idea that shocked him so much. It was the depth and strength of love that it implied, between Marron and this Zeii.
And it implied one thing more, he realized. He suppressed a shiver that had nothing to do with the chilly air above the water's surface.
He looked up. Marron had neither moved nor opened his eyes; he seemed content to sit there and stare at the water for however long it took for Gateau to assimilate what he'd been told. For a moment, Gateau frowned, unwilling to accept his own conclusions. Marron had hurt him too many times already.
But then, against his will, he remembered a day, a lifetime ago, under the blossoming cherry trees. And a later day, under the falling leaves of autumn.
Tell me you don't want me, Gateau had challenged him.
You know that's not true, had been the reply.
He drew in a deep, slow breath, and felt something inside himself tremble, just for a moment.
He shifted forward in the pool, his face only inches from Marron's downturned one. "Would you have been willing?" he asked, keeping his voice low and thankfully, even. "To be with both of us?"
Marron spoke softly, but with no hesitation. No attempt to dissemble.
"Yes."
The horse was saddled and ready to go. Kei reached for the pommel to pull himself up, and paused. Then sighed, leaning against the horse for a long, painful moment, his face pressed against the animal's warm hide.
After a while, he crouched to unbuckle the saddle-cinch again.
"Marron..." Gateau's voice was soft, wondering. There was the sound of something lifting from the water, and a moment later Marron felt wet fingers touch his cheek, just grazing his skin.
Zeii's fingers, light and graceful on the curve of his jaw, a touch full of love and tenderness and more---
He opened his eyes and turned his face away, sharply, from Gateau's hand. Gateau draw back in surprise and confusion.
"It changes nothing," he said, as harshly as he could. He had to do it soon. Everything Gateau did, everything he said, everything he was, had already eaten inexorably away at his resolve. He took a deep breath and poured coldness into his voice. "That was then and this is now. Zeii is dead. Whatever might have been will never be."
Gateau looked hurt for only a moment. "Like hell." He took hold of Marron's shoulders with both hands. Marron tensed, frowning, but Gateau ignored whatever warning he might have seen in Marron's eyes. "Don't do this. Don't push me away again. I'm sorry about what happened to Zeii, for whatever that's worth---truly, I am. I wish I could have met him. But... but don't you think he would have wanted you to be happy? Don't you think--"
Acid, hot acid thrown on already-raw nerves, and he reacted in reflex with anger. "Don't you even begin to try and guess at what he might have wanted for me," he snarled, clenching one fist. "You didn't know him. You---"
"I know how much he must have meant to you, for you to have changed like this after his death. Would he even know you, if he could see you now? Marron---"
"It doesn't matter! None of it matters!" He was shouting, shaking, dangerously close to losing control. With an effort he brought his voice down, but was unable to muster more than a fraction of the calmness he needed.
This was going too far. Somehow he'd lost control of the conversation. He struggled to regain it, quickly. "He's dead. I died with him. You can't replace him. He was my soul. I needed him. I don't need you."
He waited, his guts clenching, for the hurt look to return. But Gateau didn't let go of him, and what Marron saw in his face was something far worse than pain or anger. He caught his breath and tried to cringe away from it, but there was stone against his back. And Gateau's hands on his shoulders, for all that their grip was gentle, might as well have been bands of steel.
"I know I could never be half as important to you as he was," Gateau said softly, letting go of one shoulder to touch his cheek again. And he could not turn away. Not from that touch, not when it was so much like Zeii's caresses. Not when something so simple evoked so many feelings that shot through him, too swift and jumbled to interpret but more than powerful enough to paralyze. Gateau's eyes were dark and warm, half-shadowed in silhouette---but not so hidden that he couldn't see the understanding there. The compassion.
No! He closed his eyes to escape, but Gateau's voice followed him into the darkness.
"But I think you just lied to me again, Marron. I think you do need me. I think you know it, too."
With a snarl that was more whimper, he put a hand on Gateau's chest, no longer caring whether Gateau died without fear or pain. He was shaking inside as feelings too-long suppressed began to surface, feelings he'd refused to face because they would destroy him, they would make him what he had once been, too weak to protect Zeii and too gentle to avenge him. He could not let that happen. He had to silence Gateau now, before more damage could be done. A heart attack would---
Gateau leaned forward and kissed him.
It wasn't what he'd intended to do. The breakdown of Marron's emotionless facade had been painful to watch, but he'd exulted to see it---it was proof that the young mage wasn't completely dead inside. But then Marron had made that sound---half growl, half sob---and touched him. Maybe just to push him away, maybe to blast him across the pool, but it didn't matter---Marron had touched him, and the impulse to return that contact had been too powerful to overcome.
He pulled back after the first instant, shocked by his own temerity. Marron had gone rigid, eyes flown wide open, and for a moment Gateau feared that he had jeopardized everything. He cupped Marron's face in his hands, searching, afraid of what he might see.
Among the miasma of emotions warring there, most of which he didn't dare interpret, one thing shone clearly. Not love. He knew better than to hope for that. But loneliness---that, he knew. That, he understood.
Slowly, carefully, he kissed Marron again. After a moment, Marron's hand on Gateau's chest trembled once, and then dropped back into the water.
**End Ch. 16