C.E. Mutphy - Hands of Flame

They still weighed him down. Would always weigh him, as they should. There was still despair when he thought of Ausra’s death, though that was tempered with inevitability now. There was still horror at Malik’s death, and an awareness that his acceptance within the gargoyle overmind might be short-lived: there had not yet been a reckoning on the matter of the djinn. Only confession, spilled messily into the minds of all the trial attendees through Margrit’s dangerous inability to control her thoughts and memories.

Unfair, Stoneheart. Alban’s silent chiding came the way Janx would form it, as if he played up the stoniness by scolding Margrit for lacking a skill she had no reason to have. No one, least of all Margrit, could have suspected what would happen if she attempted to share memory with the gargoyles.

And there was a certain relief in all secrets being undone. He wasn’t made to keep them, not the kinds he’d accumulated in the past few months. Kate and Ursula, yes; Sarah’s life; that secret he had been willing to keep for the sake of children and for the sake of friendship. Killing, done in defense of another or not, done accidentally or not, was too burdensome to bear.

Biali’s grumbling presence was nearby, awake and tinged with bitterness. Alban welcomed the familiarity as much as he regretted the divide that parted them. Regretted, but doubted he would try to cross: too many lives, too many deaths, lay between them, and Biali was not by nature a forgiving soul.

Sour humor pulled his mouth long and Alban stretched out of his crouch, admitting the truth behind that thought: gargoyles were not by nature forgiving. Stone did not forget easily.

Beyond Biali in Alban’s mental awareness, if not actually in physical distance, were the gargoyles of the tribunal. Eldred was the steadiest of those, his sense of self and his roots in the memories reaching down until they became bedrock. Amongst those memories were the last encounter any of the Old Races had had with the selkies before they’d slipped into the sea, becoming, as far as their ancient brethren were concerned, extinct. Eldred had, all those centuries ago, expressed disgust for the selkie attempt at saving themselves; at their decision to breed with humans. It had seemed futile at the time, and the elder gargoyle’s opinion had been widely reflected throughout the Old Races.

Their world had changed profoundly since then. Alban had, as he’d foreseen in his youth, watched humanity restructure the world to its liking, and had held fast against those changes, believing tradition to be the only way to survive. That long-held conviction had been shaken under the tidal wave that was Margrit Knight.

Margrit. A smile curved his mouth. She pervaded his thoughts the way Hajnal once had, her actions affecting him so deeply that he could barely imagine his life without her. He’d lost passion to solitude centuries earlier; rediscovering it in her arms was a breath-taking adventure. For all that he couldn’t always agree with her, her fire was welcome, warming him after lifetimes of loneliness. Her memory, and the long-lost echo of the gestalt whispering at the back of his mind gave him courage, and with it in hand, he left his chamber to greet his own people at sunset for the first time in centuries.

“Korund.” Grace’s voice cut down the tunnels, sharp with alarm. Alban turned, surprised, and Grace strode toward him through flickering lights and tall, round walls. “What in hell are you doing?”

Alban glanced down the tunnel, then back at Grace, eyebrows lifted in confusion. “Searching out a meal and the tribunal before finding Margrit.”

“Like that?” Grace gestured as sharply as she’d spoken and cold curdled Alban’s heart. He flashed to human form, hands lifted to stare at them. Talons disappeared into well-formed nails, the one delicate compared to the other, though even in mortal form he had strength beyond anything men could conjure.

“I have never forgotten that before.” Disbelief strained his voice. “In all my years, I’ve never forgotten.”

“You’re getting complacent,” Grace snapped. “Too many things have gone too well for you lately. You’re forgetting what you are and what the world would do to you.”

“Never,” Alban murmured without conviction. “But thank you, Grace.” He finally took his gaze from his hands, training it on the curvaceous vigilante instead. The impulse to follow Margrit’s curiosity—and his own—caught him for a moment, but he swallowed it with a reminder to himself as much as an acknowledgment to Grace: “It seems the debt I owe you is growing by the moment.”

“And I’ll call it in some day,” she promised. “In the meantime you can get your Margrit to call in her last favor with the dragonlord and get him out of my tunnels.”

Alban lifted an eyebrow. “And that’s not calling in my debt?”

“That one’s Margrit’s promise to keep, not yours. Besides, you’re the one walking around human territory in your natural form, love. Even if I’d never done you any other favors, you’d owe me large for that one.”

“I would.” Alban studied the door he’d almost taken, then looked at Grace again. “Tell me what my welcome will be, Grace O’Malley. I was confident a moment ago, confident enough to forget myself. But now I find myself remembering that these men and women were called to pass judgment on me, and while they have granted amnesty and I can once more walk among the memories, I know very little of them, or how they think of me.”

“And you think I know?”

Humor quirked Alban’s mouth and he quoted, carefully, “‘Grace knows more than she should, love.’”

Surprise brightened the woman’s dark eyes and she laughed. “There’s a spark of cleverness left in there after all. All right, Korund. They’re curious, is what they are, which I think you could learn quick enough from the memories.”

“I could.” Alban hesitated over continuing, and Grace hopped on his pause with a spark of humor in her eyes.

“But it seems like prying, does it, after all this time? Ah, Korund, you’re not one of them anymore, but you can’t be human, either. Maybe you’re well matched with Margrit after all, the both of you forging ahead into new territory.” A shadow passed over Grace’s face, aging her unexpectedly and making Alban realize he had no idea how old the platinum blonde was. She’d been part of the city’s underground for years, according to Margrit, but it hadn’t left its mark. Just then she looked far older than even the greatest number of years he could accord her, though it faded and left her as she had been, young in form and face, but somehow ancient in her gaze. “Go on, then, Stoneheart. Join them. See who you are among them, and then move on to see who you are in the world.”

“What about you, Grace?” The question held him in place even when he might have wanted to move at her command; to embrace the world as it had become and learn his place in it. “Will you stay where you are while the world changes around you? Will you not move on, too?”

“Ah, sure and you know the answer to that,” Grace said with a sighed smile, and a ghost of humor turned Alban’s mouth up at the corner.

“You’ll move on when you’ve been given the kiss of angels, isn’t that what you say? What does it mean?”

“Grace’ll let you know when she finds out.” She nudged him toward the door with a bump of her hips, encouraging him to move without touching him. Alban chuckled again and went where he was bid, putting weight onto the heavy iron door handle that opened the way into the below-streets central refuge.

It opened silently. Grace’s territory was inevitably well oiled and smooth-running, far more so than might be expected of a ragtag bunch of teens led by a leather-clad den mother. The group within, though, was wholly different from the youthful faces and chip-on-the-shoulder attitudes Alban had come to recognize and admire over the past months.