It pulled Brigantia close, to the point where she felt like she was lodged deeper in him than his own demon. This was music to send indeed, music that made her dizzy, sounds so sublime, it was as though every beautiful sound the earth made had come together in one idyllic chorus. She was soaring, rolling in grass and heather, twirling under a waterfall. She was skipping over treetops, bouncing in clouds, pirouetting across rivers. She was balancing in a brilliant blue sky, floating through a blaze of daylight. The music she loved so much in Mors was dark and exciting and volatile, but this, this was evocative on a different plane altogether. It was what poets hoped to define, or would if they knew it existed. Mors's music thrilled the demon and stoked the fire, but this was music that filled her with glowing warmth, with a bliss so pure and whole, she knew that if she never had another moment of happiness in her life, she would still have this sound to soothe and comfort her, and pull a smile into her eyes.
He saw her, saw how much more beautiful she was with a face suffused with happiness, saw the glint of warm tears clinging to her lashes. The bricks of the wall around him, each from which blinked Alma and Abram's eyes, began to rupture. One of Alma's eyes smiled at him. Smiled, and even winked. Through the chink in the wall, he reached a hand toward Brigantia. She took it, and their intertwining fingers introduced a new song to his repertoire.
“I am Eamon,” he whispered. “Jacob of Emmanuel has been dead a long time, and I release him. Eamon is pulled from Emmanuel, just as a
remnant, but Eamon is his own creature. I've stepped into him and there is no way back.”
“Yes,” Brigantia nodded. “Eamon. I think I've always known that's who you were, or who you were going to be. Welcome, Eamon.”
“It is good to be here.”
She held out a hand and he took it, burying his face in her palm, kissing it with a passion he didn't know he had. He thrilled to the feel of her blood rising, even as they both remembered this was the hand she'd offered up to his mouth on his making. He kissed it in benediction, and she in turn received the kiss with gratitude, feeling his forgiveness and the beginning of something she didn't dare put a name to, in case she might yet be wrong. In his eyes, she saw the shimmering bricks around him, a shadow that clung with a fierce will. His eyes curved toward her fingers, craving their touch, and yet tacitly agreeing that he was not wholly there, not quite ready to take that final step. But he was getting closer.
Hand in hand, they headed back through the deep blue predawn to the lair and exchanged neither a word nor a look as they parted.
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A few weeks later, on a close and balmy night, Eamon felt restless and itchy, sensing there was a direction he was meant to walk but not quite able to find it. He lingered by Micklegate, eager to move and yet standing unbearably still.
Brigantia joined him and took his hand.
“I think it's this way,” she said, and he followed, sure that she was right.
At the curve in the road, she left him and he went on alone.
The musician sat on a stile, his head hanging heavily over bony knees. The rebec lay wedged between his feet, its gleam a glaring antithesis to his worn shoes and shabby clothes. Even a human could have smelled the despair and brokenness that he exuded with such heartbreaking absoluteness. He looked up as Eamon approached, unkempt hair obscuring eyes that were far too dull, his thin face so much older than his years. Eamon did not surprise him, because after the shock of finding daily life so arduous and impossible, nothing could be surprising. Even when Eamon knelt beside him and touched his arm, he didn't move, didn't wonder. His few flat words came easily, answering the question Eamon hadn't voiced.
“The music just wasn't in me, after all. I wanted it. I chased it. My father had it, but all I had was the dream. I thought it was enough. It was, for a while. A short while. Everything and everyone I loved died, and I'm still here. Except I'm not. I should have sold it, I know,” his eyes traced the rebec's silky contours and took on a tiny speck of animation before deadening again. “But I couldn't, how could I?”
“Of course not,” Eamon assured him.
The musician's eyes locked on Eamon's then, and dilated in comprehension and even pleasure. This beautiful young man, he had the music. He had that spark, that ineffable quality that can't be taught, that goes beyond talent and skill and is simply innate and will always captivate. It was full inside him, brimmed over, was the gift given him that he would turn and share with the world. Whether for an audience of one, of hundreds, or of air, this man would make music that would seep into the earth and stay.
The musician smiled slowly, and it looked as though it pained his lips to curl upward, but he welcomed the pain. He handed the rebec to Eamon, who took it with proper reverence. Despite the tremble in his fingers, it was exactly as he knew it would be. He laid it on his thigh, touched the bow to the strings, and spun out a melody that held despair at bay as it told a curious, charming little story.
When he stopped playing, Eamon stared down at the instrument, wondering how he'd ever been without it.
“You're a vampire,” the musician said simply.
Eamon stared at him in astonishment. The musician shrugged.
“Music like that, expressed like that, you should be panting, your pulse visibly throbbing. You haven't taken a single breath.”
Eamon smiled. He couldn't help it.
“The rebec is yours.” The musician smiled in return, and with real delight. “As it was meant to be. It plainly loves you. It's a living thing, in your hands. Me, I want no dark gift. I ask only two things in return. That you find a way to make the music touch the world beyond your own, and that you send me away with ease, and a song.”
Eamon understood, and played a melody that blanketed the musician, tucked him up in a cozy bed and sent him into a happy dream from his childhood. The hands on his face were his mother's, tender and loving,
and the turn was swift and sure, so that the smile stayed on his face above his broken neck.
Brigantia helped Eamon bury the musician, feeling his pleasure in the guiltlessness of the death and the completion of one part of his journey.
That dawn, he stepped inside her chamber. They said nothing, they knew there were to be years of endless conversations. He looked at the bricks of his wall, which were now almost transparent. The sound of them cracking and finally, completely, collapsing, was one he would store for a different song. Alma's face lingered briefly, suspended in his mind's eye. She smiled and nodded, fading to one small flicker and then slipping away under his skin to rest in her own private corner of his partial soul. His hands extended to the creature who had touched him more deeply than he'd even known, long before she'd ever laid a hand on him.
“Brigantia,” he breathed, tasting each syllable with care.
But she shook her head, a strange smile on her face. He waited.
“Not anymore,” she said, “the name of a goddess no longer fits. I think, with you, with us, I have to ⦠I have to be ⦔ her eyes were filling with tears and she struggled to command herself. He stroked her palm and she clenched both his hands in hers and gazed at him intently. “Yours is a human name, and there is a thread yet of humanity in you, and always will be. And to be with you, properly, the way we're meant to be, I have to be more and less than a goddess. I have to be something closer to human. The goddess name was presumption, perhaps, but it fit then. It doesn't now. Now I am Brigit, I have to be, there's no one else I could ever be. You and I, we are equals, each making one half of the other. So I step down from the goddess and into Brigit, and as surely as you and I will learn Eamon, we will also learn Brigit.”
He kissed a tear from her cheek, slipped a hand around her neck to look deep into her eyes.
“Yes,” he murmured. “The education of a lifetime.”
And they kissed at last, a kiss that seemed to have neither beginning nor end, because it was always meant to be. He pulled her hair loose around them, ran first fingers and then face through it. Her mouth
traced his ear, his neck, the shoulder she gently laid bare. They took great care tugging at each other's clothes, letting hours pass as threads slipped away to reveal oases of skin, vast acres of terra incognita to be explored over centuries. Their inexperience was a patient guide, leading them to sweet spots in wrists, the crooks of elbows, the shallows of necks. There were deeper shivers to enjoy as first fingers and then tongues discovered the delicious sensitivity in nipples, in inner thighs, and all that lay between. The impossibility of their physiology, of bodies that were predominately shells and yet still generated such heat and moisture, an impossibility that allowed him to slip deep inside her and carry them on a long, long journey into the heart of ecstasy, this was the unspoken benevolence of the dark gift. The demon took pleasure when the body bathed in eros, and it was generous enough to allow the relic of the human inside to fall into the warmer, sweeter bath of love.
All throughout that long, rapturous day, they mapped every inch of each other's body, discovering their own selves in all those commingled molecules. Every sigh and cry and drop of sweat was precious, each whisper imprinted deep upon the psyche and lodged in silent, yet swollen, hearts. As tongue entwined with tongue, the separate entities ended and a new creature emerged. They were wrapped in a binding that was unique and had more power than either of them could ever possess on their own, however long they both should live.
When at last there was a place for words, Eamon took her hand again and pressed it to his heart.
“You are my blood now.”
“And you are mine,” she promised.
A few hours later, she suddenly laughed.
“Tell me,” he smiled, winding a lock of hair around his hand and kissing it.
“We are meant to have received a curse from Hell, and yet here we are, touching Heaven.”
They settled into each other's arms, preparing to sleep.
“Yes,” she said again. “Heaven. We must cherish this thing. Honor it, and protect it. Love it. As we will cherish, honor, protect, and love each other. And I do, Eamon. I love you. I love you.”
“And I love you. My Brigit. I love you. You are the music. You're everything.”
They wiped each other's damp eyes and slept the sleep of the blessed.
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It was exactly as Otonia had imagined. The true union, without barrier, of the ones they now all called Brigit and Eamon, was a force to be reckoned with. It was a phenomenon that Mors, Cleland, and Raleigh observed with bemusement and awe. And indeed, it was not written about in the legends, because few humans could believe such a thing could exist anywhere, even, or perhaps especially, in the dark and inhuman world of the vampires.
Once, when Eamon was off hunting, Mors came to Brigit in her garden. She handed him a trimming of lovage.
“Explain it to me, my dear old Brigatine”âshe noticed he hadn't yet used the name Brigitâ“my brilliant and powerful brain cannot wrap round this puzzle. Cleland and Raleigh have a great love, and whatever else you want to say about Swefred and Meaghan, less said the better, generally, you can't deny their love. Leonora and Benedict, Althius and Allisoune ⦔ He ticked through the tribunal's couples in a singsong recitation. “And yet somehow you and your Eamon are peculiarly peculiar. What 'tis, old girl?”
Brigit snapped off a sprig of parsley and nibbled it thoughtfully.
“You're asking a question for which there is no answer.”
“Isn't that the sort of thing you like about me?”
She laughed, pulling his dog out of the burdock.
“Ah, Mors, what isn't there to like about you?”
“Well, now, that is a good question. One for which, perhaps, there is no answer. Or rather, if we're being completely honest, one that there would never be enough time to answer.”
She reached out and squeezed his hand.
“True enough, my friend, true enough.”
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Brigit and Eamon did not question what had grown between them. They tended it carefully, as though it was a delicate plant in Brigit's garden. They talked of everything: books and poetry, music, the funny quirks of humans, remembrances of things past. But Brigit was circumspect about her history. She was secure in the knowledge of Eamon's love, but not
ready for him to know about Aelric, or the fire. For his own part, Eamon did not mention the guilt that clung to him, the path his mind occasionally walked toward Alma and Abram. They would both be grown up now, he realized with a jolt. Grown, married, with children of their own. What would Alma look like? A beauty, no doubt, like their mother, with untamed dark curls and flashing eyes. Marriage and motherhood would not have suited Alma, though, not the girl she was under her sweet smile. Alma would want what Brigit had, the chance to read, to run, to explore. But then, if she didn't know such a chance existed, would it have mattered? Eamon couldn't stop himself wondering about her, wishing he could reach back through the vortex of time and pull her through it.