Chương 144: Chapter 141. The Farm

Adom and Bennu left Biggins' shop a little after midday, the bell over the door giving its crooked jingle behind them, and stepped back into a street that smelled of hot stone and bread and the sea. Bennu rode in the crook of Adom's arm with his head fully out of the wrapping now, since hiding had stopped seeming worth the trouble, and kept up a steady commentary on everything they passed, which was a great deal.

"That one had a bird on the sign," he reported.

"A real bird, or a painted one? It didn't move, so I think painted. The one before it had a boot. Why a boot? Does the shop sell boots, or is the boot the shop's name?"

"Boots," Adom said.

"Both?"

"Just boots."

"Hm." Bennu considered this, satisfied, and moved on to the next thing. He'd been at it without pause since they'd stepped out onto the ocean with Biggins, through the flying, through the long walk back, through the whole of the visit, and showed no sign of slowing. Adom glanced down at him.

"Are you tired?" he asked. Bennu turned the flame-bright eyes up at him.

"What does that feel like?" Adom opened his mouth, then found the question harder than he'd expected.

"It's… well, when you've spent yourself. The body's done a lot and wants to stop. Things get heavier, your thoughts go slow, and you want to lie down somewhere warm and not move for a while." Bennu was quiet a moment, turning it over.

"I know what it is," he said.

"I've heard it described a great many times. People spoke of being tired all through the years, and I know the word and everything that goes around it." He tilted his head.

"But I don't think I know what it feels like. Not from the inside. Is that strange?"

"Huh." Adom considered that.

"No. I suppose ten thousand years of rest buys you a while before the bill comes."

"Perhaps." Bennu ruffled, pleased with the idea.

"So, no. I'm not tired. I don't think I can be yet."

"Well, then." Adom turned them off the main road and onto the gentler one that wound out toward the edge of the city.

"If you're not tired, there's somewhere we could go. Some old friends of ours I think you ought to meet."" Ours?" Bennu's head came all the way up.

"There are some dryads at a farm not far from here. They looked after you a long—"" Daphne." The name came out of Bennu fast, before Adom had finished.

"Daphne, and Clio, and Thalia. I love them. They used to sing to me." His wings pushed against the wrapping, his voice climbing.

"I never got to see them, Adom. Can we go? Now?" Adom chuckled.

"We can go right now, if you'd like."

"Then why are we still walking so slowly?"

The fire carried them up off the lane and out over the hills, and Bennu went with it, wings open, shrieking with joy. It was a strange thing to do, this. Adom had spent most of two lifetimes moving mana from one place to another, and he knew the cost of every spell he weaved the way he knew the weight of his own hand. This had no cost he could find. He reached for the thread to Bennu, the fire answered, and he flew, and nowhere in it could he feel his own reserves so much as flicker.

The fire itself was the mana, he understood that much, but it was mana in a state he had never once encountered, neither raw nor shaped into any structure he recognized, behaving by rules he didn't have names for. It simply wanted to rise, and lifted him because he asked it to. He found, somewhere under the wonder of flying, that the puzzle of it had hooked him completely.

There was a whole field here, hidden inside a single golden thread, and he made himself a quiet promise to find the time to take it apart and learn how it worked. Later, though. Once the more urgent things had passed. For now he let it carry him, and tried, with limited success, to keep up with Bennu.

The city fell away white and gold behind them, and the green country opened ahead, fields and stone walls and the silver crook of the river, and somewhere past the next rise the long dark rows of an orchard that stayed green when everything around it had gone to summer gold. Bennu was the first to spot it.

"Oh! What is that?" Adom followed the line of his attention. Something hung in the air off to their right, keeping easy pace with them, a loose shimmer in the shape of a person that bent the light around it as it moved, two bright points where its eyes would be. He smiled and let his fire slow, drawing them to a hover.

"That," he said, "is Kianthras. He belongs to a friend of ours, or she belongs to him, depending who you ask. Wind elemental. He's the reason that farm looks the way it does now." He raised a hand in greeting.

"Hello, Kianthras. We're expected, I hope?" The elemental drifted closer, regarding Bennu with the two points of light, and made a sound like a long breath drawn through a narrow gap in the rocks. Bennu, surprisingly, made a sound back. It went on for a moment, the two of them, the wind-sound and the phoenix's chiming answer, Bennu nodding along with great seriousness to something Adom couldn't follow at all.

"You understand what he's saying?" Adom asked. Bennu broke off and looked at him as though he'd said something faintly ridiculous.

"Well, yes. Don't you?"

"... I'd need to be an elementalist for that. I'm a druid. Different branch." Adom frowned a little.

"Beasts and growing things, yes. Wind spirits, no."

"Oh." Bennu absorbed this, then turned back to the elemental, and a moment later let out a bright, delighted laugh.

"What?" Adom said.

"He says he remembers you." Bennu's whole body was shaking with it now.

"From the river, years ago. He says he spent the entire walk to the cave deciding whether you were a threat, and when he decided you weren't, he was disappointed. He says he wanted to test something on you." A fresh peal of laughter ensued.

"He says he had been looking forward to lifting you off the ground when you weren't paying attention, just to see your face. Someone named Cyrel told him he wasn't allowed. He says he has never quite forgiven her for it, and that the offer, from his side, remains open." Adom looked at the shimmer in the air, which gazed serenely back, betraying nothing. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"I see," he said.

"Don't worry," Bennu told him, still gleaming with the joke.

"If you ever want to understand him properly, I'll teach you! It isn't hard! You just have to listen with the right part of yourself!" He cocked his head at the elemental, considering.

"Though I think he rather enjoys you not knowing." The orchard came up to meet them, and Adom brought the fire down slow, setting them both on the grass at the edge of the rows where the green began. He'd been here often enough over the years that the strangeness of it had mostly worn off, but never entirely.

Borealis Farm sat high on the cliffs with the academy's seven spires just visible to the north and the enchanted windmills turning their slow circles against the sky, and below the cliff edge the sea went on forever. The farmhouse stood where it always had, weathered stone and dark wood, the long porch wrapping around it for the sake of evenings exactly like the one coming on. This had been Law's land three thousand years ago.

It belonged now to old Hether Borealis, Warden of the archipelago, whom Adom had met exactly once: a man near seventy, kind, and so deaf by then that most of their conversation had been conducted at a volume the whole room could enjoy. He rarely came here anymore, and left the place to Ben, and to the trees. The strange thing was that when they met, Adom had come away certain the old duke carried none of the story his line had been charged to keep.

Hether had been warm, vague and entirely without any idea who Adom was. Somewhere across the centuries the knowledge had thinned from one generation to the next until it ran out, and the duke had inherited the blood, the duchy and the apples without the reason for any of them. And he was the last. No wife, no children, no heir of any kind. When Hether died, House Borealis died with him, and the line that had waited three thousand years would end with a kind old man who never learned what he'd been waiting for.

That saddened Adom greatly, more than he let himself sit with most days. He decided to stop thinking about it, and looked around, noticing the trees had become greener than ever. The whole orchard had thickened and risen under the dryads' keeping, the rows heavy with fruit out of all season, and at the center of it the great apple tree stood taller than the rest, its leaves stirring in air that held no wind. Ben wasn't out front.

The yard was empty, the hens grumbling to themselves near the run, no sign of the old man or his stick. But there was laughter coming from somewhere in the orchard. It drifted up from the direction of the big tree, in a light and overlapping manner, more than one voice and none of them quite human. Adom turned toward it, and beside him, Bennu had gone very still.

"That's them," the phoenix breathed. His whole small body had begun to tremble, the flame in his eyes leaping.

"Adom. That's them, right? I'd know them anywhere."

"I know," Adom said gently.

"Come on. Let's go and say hello." He didn't get the chance to lead the way. Bennu was already off his arm and into the air, streaking low between the rows toward the sound of the voices, and Adom went after him at a jog, grinning despite himself, leaving the empty yard and the grumbling hens behind. The voices led them in among the trees, and the deeper they went, the more the orchard stopped behaving like one.

The light came down gold and slantwise through the leaves while the grass underfoot had gone soft, thick and starred with small white flowers that he was fairly sure did not grow in any season Adom knew. The big tree stood at the center of all of it, and the three of them were there. The dryads had half-stepped out of the trunk and the low branches, the way they did, more solid than light and less solid than people. Daphne first, tall, silver-birch pale, her eyes the blue of mountain water.

Clio beside her, small and autumn-colored. Thalia a little behind, who'd been humming under the laughter and stopped when she felt them come. Their eyes found the small blue shape hovering at the edge of the clearing, and for a moment nobody said anything at all. The silence went on for a few more seconds, before Daphne lifted one bark-textured hand to her mouth." Oh," she breathed.

"Oh, look at you. Look at you, little one." Bennu drifted forward into the gold light, shaking, and for once he couldn't find any of his usual flood of words. He got as far as their names.

"Daphne. Clio. Thalia." Then his small voice cracked clean down the middle.

"I can see you. I can finally see you!" They came to him the way grandmothers came to a child too long away. Clio reached first and pressed a leaf-light touch to the edge of one blue wing, as though she didn't quite trust him to be real and was checking. Bennu squirmed and let out a startled, giggling chirp.

"I think that tickles," he protested, delighted, and the dryads laughed, and then all three of them were touching him at once, careful bark-rough fingers smoothing along his feathers and his small head and the line of his back, while Bennu laughed and leaned into every one of them in turn, soaking it up. Adom simply hung back at the edge of it, and watched the reunion, delighted. It was Thalia who turned to him eventually.

"Do you understand what you've done, Adom?" she asked. He wasn't sure what to answer to that, but from her tone, it did not seem like a bad thing, so he just let her explain.

"A phoenix has not opened its eyes on this world in longer than the records of your kind run back. They come at the turn of things. At the old ends and the new beginnings. The world does not make one of these when it is comfortable." She looked back at Bennu.

"And here he is!"

"We told you, did we not?" Clio said to Adom.

"When you carried him out of the dark, frightened half to death, certain you'd ruined it by taking him too soon. We told you he had only to arrive when he was ready."

"You did," Adom admitted.

"I didn't entirely believe you."

"No," Daphne agreed, though not unkindly.

"Your kind rarely does. It changes nothing about whether the thing is true." She gave Bennu one last long look of satisfaction.

"And what a thing you turned out to be. We knew you'd be lovely. We didn't know you'd be this. You'll turn every eye in any room you enter. There'll be no hiding what you are."

"... Yeah, that's the part I'm still working out," Adom admitted.

"He can't go through the city looking like this. People notice. I've had him wrapped in a cloth all day, and that won't hold once he wants to fly about, and he very much wants to fly about." He rubbed the back of his neck.

"Biggins said something about him learning to change shape, but we didn't get to the how of it. I'll be honest, I don't really know how to deal with it." The three of them exchanged a look that passed a whole conversation between them.

"Primordials are excellent metamorphs," Clio said, in her small voice.

"It's in their nature. Dragons, phoenixes, the umbra, the demons, all the old true things. They wore a great many shapes before any of them ever settled into one." She looked at Bennu with fondness.

"He won't need teaching, not really. Only permission, and a reason."

"Go on, little one," Thalia said.

"Show your brother. Choose a shape and step into it. You've watched a hundred of them go by since you hatched. Surely one stayed with you, no?"

"I can be anything?" The phoenix asked.

"Yes, anything you have looked and understood enough." Bennu went still while his head cocked. Adom, watching, felt the bond between them warm and then flood, a sudden brightening along the golden thread, and he leaned in despite himself, every part of him that loved knowing how a thing worked straining to watch it happen. Then the phoenix caught fire." Fuck, Bennu!" Adom had crossed half the distance with a shield half-woven before his brain caught up with his hands.

"Oh, I'm fine!" came the cheerful voice from inside the roaring column of fire.

"Don't worry. Fuck, though, I do love that word. It's fascinating how people use it for everything. There was a woman once, very early on when I was in my egg. A man gave me to her as a gift, a lover of hers I think, and that night she said it more times than I could count." There was a small pause, and when he went on his voice had taken a turn toward genuine puzzlement.

"Though that's the part I never understood, actually. She sounded like she was in a great deal of pain, and it seemed to be him causing it. By everything else I'd learned, that should have made her want it to stop. But she kept telling him not to stop. To do it harder, in fact. And the more pain was in her voice, the more pleased she sounded, which contradicts —""Okay," Adom said.

"— everything about how pain is meant to work. Adom, do you know why she—""We'll come back to it." The dryads had turned, in unison, to look at him. Adom was, at that precise moment, contending with two separate embarrassments. The first was that he had genuinely tried to shield a phoenix from fire, which was roughly like fishing a trout out of a river to keep it from drowning.

The second was that the word had come out of him first, on reflex, and there was something about hearing fuck in that small, newborn voice that landed on Adom like a personal failure. The phoenix was a day old. He'd had one full day of influence over him, and this was the result. … Fucking hell.

"I can hear your thoughts, you know?" Adom looked at the phoenix, and sighed. They would probably need to talk about boundaries soon.