Awakenings

[This post is from Phelan’s point of view.]

“Don’t let it eat at you,” Seamus said quietly. “And don’t deny that you’re letting it because we both know that’s a lie. It’s in your nature.”

Phelan snorted humorlessly, crossing his arms tightly against his chest. “Yours, too.”

Seamus nodded. “Aye. It is and I know it. I accept it, own it.”

“So do I,” Phelan said. Seamus gave him a sideways look and Phelan smiled ruefully. “Most of the time, anyhow.”

Seamus smirked. The expression faded a few moments later as he surveyed the southwestern horizon again.

“You should go to the fire,” he said quietly. “I can keep watch here.”

“Who said I was keeping watch?”

Seamus looked at Phelan and gave him a familiar crooked smile. “I know you, Phelan, and I know you haven’t changed that much. You’re here keeping watch and pretending to clear your head. I know the latter isn’t happening—if anything, there’s more rattling around in there now than there was when you climbed up.”

“You don’t think that has something to do with the company?”

Seamus shrugged. “It might, but I suspect it would have happened whether I was here or not. Go. You’ll do more good there than here. We both know that.”

“Do we?”

Seamus smirked again, crossing his arms. “Now you’re just being deliberately difficult.”

“Maybe.” Phelan sighed. Another shiver crept down his spine, goosebumps rising along his arms. The wind—what little of it there was—wasn’t cold. “I have a bad feeling, Seamus.”

“We all do,” his cousin said quietly. “We’ve been trained for it, conditioned for it. But if it’s something or if it’s nothing, we’ll survive, as we always do. We’re trained for that, too.” He fell silent for a few seconds, watching the clouds. “We’re meant to.”

“Meant to?” Phelan watched him for a few seconds, saw one corner of his cousin’s mouth quirk upward in a smile.

“Come now,” Seamus said softly, his voice mildly chiding. “We both know that I didn’t tell you everything.”

“Well, no,” Phelan agreed. “But usually you don’t play games like this. What is it, Seamus?”

“All in good time, Phelan,” Seamus murmured. “All in good time.”

[This post is from Phelan’s point of view.]

For a few seconds, Phelan stared at the clouds without really seeing them. He took another deep breath and exhaled it slowly, eyes fluttering shut for a second. In a long-ago yesterday, he could hear the sound of blade against blade, of spears splintering against shields. He listened to the cries of the dying, to the sounds of battle all around him.

Then his eyes blinked open and it was gone. Seamus’s hand was on his shoulder.

“You’re surprised,” Seamus murmured.

“Yes and no,” Phelan said. He scrubbed a hand roughly over his face. “I shouldn’t be. I know the bargain we struck. I just—to think of this as their home, too, to think of them having any kind of home again, it’s jarring and strange.”

“A little,” Seamus agreed. “Believe me, I never thought that we—they—would have a home again.”

Phelan glanced at him, his jaw tightening for a moment, then easing. “We, Seamus?”

“It’s still hard,” his cousin murmured, staring out over the field and toward the clouds again. “I’m still adjusting.” A brief smile curved his lips. “Leinth keeps calling me on it. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m free.”

“You are free,” Phelan said, grasping his arm. “Don’t forget it.”

“I know,” Seamus said, dipping his head. “But they’re still a part of me, Phelan. They’re a part of me as much as you and Teague and Neve and Aoife and Leinth are—as my children I never knew are.”

Phelan’s fingers tightened for a moment. There had been a bare trace of pain in his cousin’s voice, one that struck him to his core. “I’m sorry, Seamus.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Seamus murmured. He shook his head. “It was nothing you did that caused any of it. You know that and so do I.”

“That doesn’t mean it should have happened. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything we could do.”

“But there wasn’t.”

Phelan shrugged. “We’ll never know whether there was or not. I still feel like if we’d known, we would have done something.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No,” Phelan said softly. “No, we didn’t.”

[This post is from Phelan’s point of view.]

Phelan stood out on the wall, watching the storm roll in. He could feel it in his bones—something was askew, though he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. It was one of those moments when he wished he had more clues, when he wished everything were clearer.

At the same time, he was silently grateful that they weren’t.

“You feel it, too, then?”

He glanced at his cousin, watched Seamus as he climbed up to the top of the concrete and brick structure from the inside. Phelan’s lips thinned for a moment, then his gaze flicked south and west again. He nodded, but didn’t say anything, not yet.

Seamus came to stand beside him, followed his gaze for a few moments. “The storm will come first.”

Phelan nodded. “But what comes inside of it? What comes after?”

“It could be nothing,” Seamus said.

“You don’t believe that.”

“I believe that any enemy in the cadre would send a storm to soften us up.” Seamus crossed his arms. The storm was nearer now. “But most of them wouldn’t want to fight in it.”

“Some would,” Phelan murmured. Wind stirred in the trees, then died. He took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. Something seemed to whisper in the back of his mind, a wordless warning—or one that he simply couldn’t quite make out, something that was perhaps a little too far away to hear, to understand.

“But most wouldn’t,” Seamus said. “Either way, the Hunt prepares.”

A chill crept down Phelan’s spine. “For what?”

“For anything that might need to be done to protect them,” Seamus said, crossing his arms. “For anything that needs to be done to protect our home, Phelan. What else would they do? This is home. Those kids—all of them here—those are their family now, too. Their people. They’ll die to protect them, and us.”