[This post is from Phelan’s point of view.]
Phelan stared at him for a long moment. “So you lied to her.”
“Eventually, I’ll make it to the forge.” Thordin shrugged with one shoulder. He was still pale after his ordeal and Phelan was more than half certain he’d dropped a dozen pounds—probably of muscle—during his recovery as well. The lindwyrm had very nearly been the end of him. “I did want to talk to Matt about some things and he’s up there, but I also felt like I needed to talk to you.”
“About what?” Phelan mumbled, staring out over the ravine again. A shaft of sunlight through the canopy of trees caught his eye and he tracked it up to a gap between branches and trees before letting his gaze drift away again. “Did I miss something?”
“If you did, it’s less than what I missed.” Thordin shook his head slightly. “They’re coming back for another round, huh?”
“Seems that way.” Phelan chafed his palm against his arm, biting down on the inside of his lip. “Honestly, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Daniel and his pack must have been very good at laying a false trail and bogging them down.”
I hope they didn’t pay a price for it.
“Or they got distracted by something else,” Thordin said, his voice quiet.
“Like what? I don’t know about you, but my experiences with them point to a serious interest in vengeance—to the exclusion of everything else. That’s the only thing that knocked me off their radar. Well. That and distance.”
Thordin shook his head slowly. “They’re more easily distracted than you think, especially if they think they’ve found better targets. But they don’t forget. Sometimes I think they bank on that—their targets forgetting before they do.”
“Except we haven’t forgotten,” Phelan said, squeezing his eyes shut. We’re just not ready for them.
“No, we haven’t,” Thordin agreed. “But I’ll be damned if I know how we’re going to handle them and Leviathan.” He lapsed into silence for a moment, absently rubbing at his injured side, close to healed, but Phelan knew it still bothered him and probably would for the rest of his life. Some wounds were like that—like Cameron’s, where the dirae had gotten a piece of him, like Teague’s where one of Hecate’s daggers had dug deep into his side.
What would he say now if he knew? Phelan wondered, his thoughts drifting. His attention snapped back as Thordin cleared his throat.
“I’m guessing from your silence that you don’t have any really stellar ideas, either.”
“No,” Phelan admitted. “But how the hell do you know so much about them? I thought you didn’t remember everything.”
“I don’t. Sif and I have been talking, though, and they’ve got a reason to hate her, too.” His lips thinned and he swallowed hard. “I’m worried about her.”
“In what way?”
“I’m worried that she’ll try to talk me into cutting and running,” he admitted. “I’m worried that I’ll listen and then you guys won’t have us or worse yet, we’ll go, some of you guys will come after us and you’ll find us dead or worse because we can’t handle those bitches on our own and running isn’t going to help. We can’t run forever. I think that’s the only thing that keeps her from doing everything I’ve just said.”
Phelan winced, rubbing at his jaw. “Are you sure?”
“Never, not anymore.” Thordin leaned back, resting against his elbows and staring at the sky. “If there’s anything that’s become abundantly clear to me in the past year, it’s that there’s a lot of shit I don’t know and even less I understand.” He shot his friend a weak, wry smile. “Honestly, I’m not sure I would want to carry that burden anyway.”
“Trust me, you don’t,” Phelan muttered. “But in some ways, I’m starting to be in the same boat. There are some things I know are supposed to happen and Thom and Marin’s visions have been confirming it, but there’s stuff that I—” he broke off, his jaw tightening for a moment. “It’s starting to get hard to track all of it and keep myself alive at the same time.” And have a life and maybe a future that doesn’t involve me wandering the face of the globe looking for prophecies and shepherding them to their fruition or whatever damned bullshit we were taught to believe a Taliesin was supposed to do. “Maybe I should stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Trying to make sense of all of it,” Phelan said, then sighed. “Stop trying to play the role of the Taliesin in a world where maybe I’m not needed anymore—not in that capacity, anyway.”
“Phelan.”
The tone of his friend’s voice made Phelan grimace. He rubbed at his temple. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“Are you going to make me say it?”
“No,” Phelan said, feeling the weight of the world crash down on his shoulders again. “No, you’re going to tell me that I’m needed, that I still have a job to do and the world still needs a Taliesin.”
“Mostly that,” Thordin said. “But I was also going to say that being the Taliesin and being happy aren’t mutually exclusive. Being the Taliesin and mostly staying here, staying with Jac and the others, you can do that. You’re the Taliesin. You make the rules and no one is going to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. The only person who could is Seamus and he’s got his own shit to deal with.”
Phelan smiled crookedly and shook his head. “When the hell did you get so wise about this sort of bullshit, Thordin?”
“I don’t know,” the other man said. “Maybe I always was and I never had to rise to the occasion. Probably that, honestly.”
Phelan chuckled and Thordin grinned.
“You want company up at the forge?” Phelan asked.
“I probably wouldn’t say no to it,” Thordin admitted. “You ready?”
Phelan nodded. “Yeah. Let’s head up. Thanks for pulling me out of my own head.”
“Easier than pulling you out of your own ass,” Thordin said as he got to his feet. “You’re welcome, Phelan.”
The Taliesin threw his arm around his friend’s shoulders and together, the two headed up the hill toward the forge.
