Cian cries up from the depths

Dantalion bent his head and scuffed his feet through the weeds. With the toes of his boots he snapped through stems and ripped up roots, and he kicked up entire mats of dead leaves that were heavy and wet underneath like scabs. What he sought was below all that rot, below the spores of mold, below the creeping tendrils of fungus. He was scraping down to the cold clay, such as men were made of.

“Over here,” he muttered.

He had chosen a spot near the very wall behind which he and Eithne would be sleeping, but there was no other; the opposite side of the court sloped down into a dank puddle, and a tree had grown up in the center of it, directly over the old well.

“I would have taken you out into the woods,” he said, “but I suspect it will be easier to hide this from Eithne inside the castle, with all the other magic whirling about in here.”

Araphel lifted his head in surprise. “You aren’t meaning to tell her?”

“No, I am not meaning to tell her,” he snarled. “That is,” he coughed, “not unless she asks.” When Araphel began to look dubious, he added, “Did you tell Flann how her precious Brude was made?”

Araphel grimaced slightly, but he looked away. Dantalion sniffed in satisfaction. He would not give Araphel the chance to look down on him in judgment again.

“Drop it.” He snapped his fingers and pointed at the ground. “What sort of freckle-​faced freak or hook-​nosed hobgoblin do you have in store for us this time?”

Araphel mumbled, “I don’t know.”

“Or did you pick a handsome one, since you could choose for your— What do you mean, you don’t know? Whose child was it?”

Araphel refused to look at him, but he was equally careful not to look in the direction of his own blackened hand. “I don’t know…”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Dantalion repeated in a cold growl. “Where did you get it?”

Araphel lifted his head, eager to reply now that he had a reply to give. “In the old cemetery, by the old church. No one has been buried there for years—”

“In this valley?”

Araphel winced.

“You could have gone anywhere on earth, and you stayed in this valley?”

“I could not go anywhere on earth,” Araphel protested. “I couldn’t go anywhere at all—one of my brothers might have seen me.”

“And you did not even bother to find out whose it was?”

“I didn’t have time!”

“You didn’t have time!” Dantalion whined. “What have you been doing all this time? Following Flann around and groping her through her clothes?”

Araphel barked, “No!” But he added in a sheepish mumble, “I was with my daughter.”

“Your daughter!” Dantalion groaned.

“My daughter, whom I had seen for less than an hour altogether since she was born!”

Dantalion grumbled, “Your daughter…”

He lifted his head and began to roll his eyes, but his gaze was arrested by the stars that glittered between the bare branches of the tree.

Even bounded by the narrow horizon formed by the well-​like depths of the ruin, the stars of the sky were countless, and the sight left Dantalion breathless and dizzy as it had Eithne on the night of their wedding. How carelessly he had spoken of his descendents then—mere hours before the first two flickered to life in her body like new stars.

Araphel was so eager to talk that this brief silence was all the opportunity he needed.

“I think she knows me!” he gushed. “She couldn’t get enough of me! I had to leave so she would take her nap! How she stared with her gray eyes, and smiled and laughed—I wish you could see her laugh—”

“Drop it!” Dantalion commanded.

Araphel stared at him, his mouth still hanging open in the hope that he would be allowed a few more words on the magnificence and beauty of his daughter. Dantalion could not have borne another syllable.

“Drop it, I said! What is it, anyway? How do you know the creature didn’t die because it was deformed or headless or something hideous?”

Araphel clapped his mouth shut turned his face aside.

“Are you even certain it’s not an animal?” Dantalion grimaced.

“Of course it isn’t. It wouldn’t cling to me unless it was a son of man.”

“So is that how you found it?” Dantalion sneered. “Running around the old cemetery, dipping your hand into the earth until you found something that would stick?”

“Not in the cemetery…” Araphel said, clumsily avoiding the question. “Just outside the wall. By the green willow tree. No one has been buried there in many years.”

“You do realize that ‘many years’ in this valley means less than twenty?”

Araphel shrugged a wing. “Then make me twenty-​five.”

“I shall make you fifty-​five,” Dantalion said curtly. “Now drop it.”

“No! Please! Not so old!”

“You do realize Flann is married?”

“Not for that,” Araphel whimpered. “Aelfden needs me…”

Dantalion snorted.

“And I want to see my daughter grow up…”

“If you do not hurry and drop that—filth—your daughter will be grown and married by the time you crawl out of the ground! Now drop it before I lose the last of my patience with you!”

“I can’t drop it,” Araphel muttered. He held out his hand. “You must take it and shape it.”

Dantalion bit his lips together and shrieked in his mouth, but he hurriedly scraped off a handful of earth as Araphel melted away.

Once loosened from the soul they were trying to enfold, the clumps began to break apart and crumble between his palms. Frantic and careless with revulsion, Dantalion only managed to squeeze them together into a rough egg-​shape, eerily like the lumpy little clay gods the first men had made before Araphel and his kind had taught them art and luxury and the waging of war.

He dropped onto his knee and smashed the warm lump into the cold earth, hissing through his teeth the ancient spell he had bought from Baraqiel in exchange for his silence.

As soon as the last syllable crossed his lips he rolled away from his cousin’s lingering blue fog. He dragged and wiped his hands over everything he could find—torn-up roots, sheaves of soggy stems, damp leaves—any ordinary filth being more bearable than this human kind.

Before he could go back to his wife he would have to go to the stream and wash his hands until they turned blue with cold. Eithne! Warm and soft and sweet! At the very moment Araphel had appeared he had just begun to believe she would lie close to him that night—that in the snug room he had made for her she would be tempted to sleep without her cloak and gown—that she would let him touch her and make love to her—and instead it was to this use his hands had been put tonight!

His mortal eyes were nearly crying with despair, his mortal lungs sobbing, and he calmed himself in the only way he knew—with hatred.

Up from the depths of the ruin he cried, “Here is your god of clay!”

The last word echoed from wall to wall, all the way up until it poured into the sky. Like the raven, he wondered whether anyone was listening.