Page 6 of Threadbound

A cackle like the scraping of claws down rough stone. “There are ways, child. Ways that I can teach you. I will do this, if you answer my second question.”

He was satisfied with this. “Ask,” he said, pleased.

“What is it you fear about the human, child?”

That one surprised him. He didn’t fear humans, especially not this one. “I dinna,” he said.

“You do,” she countered. “Speak truth, or your wish will go unfulfilled.”

Bran frowned, then forced himself to think back on his few encounters with the half-breed to find even a trace of what might be taken as fear.

He remembered, when he was young, wanting to see the creature who held the other end of the glimmering thread he saw sometimes out of the corner of his eye, slipping from just below his breast bone and extending away—far, far away.

He asked Cairn mac Darach where the thread would lead, and his father told him that it would take him to Dunehame, where very few people—hardly any at all—had magic.

He had begged his father to take him there, to show him the person on the other side of his gleaming thread.

It was another three years before Cairn reluctantly agreed.

The other boy Bran had seen hadn’t known him. Had thought him exactly the same as the other birds that flew from branch to branch in the dingy heat of his school’s summer playground. The harsh, hot metal of the playground equipment had been painful on Bran’s sensitive feet so used to the give of wood and grass and the cool of stone.

The boy had made small noises at him, a tsking sound in his throat that Bran didn’t understand until the boy had held out a small piece of food.

Bran’s bird-eyes had watched him, uncertain.

This creature was not bright and brilliant like the thread. He was dull, flat, with pale hair and cheeks discolored by sun and something that might have been a healing bruise.

Bran did not trust this half-breed human, with his too-large hands and awkward, jerky movements.

The boy eventually stopped trying to coax him over and simply set the food down, then backed away, well out of reaching distance, and waited.

Bran had not understood, at first, that the boy wanted him to take the food, so he’d just stared, trying to figure out to what god or gods the half-breed was making his offering.

He’d realized it was him when he saw the boy go on to offer some of the food to a handful of nearby grackles, their feathers iridescent spotted amid black and dark chocolate brown.

The boy had offered him a gift, and it would be rude not to take it—but it would be worse if he did not return the gift.

Bran looked about, trying to find something. A quick circuit of the playground showed him a glint off something—a stone with a chip of bright mica that caught the sunlight just enough to shine if held at the right angle.

Bran picked it up and brought it over to where the food waited, the other birds instinctively knowing that what was intended for him was not for them, even though they were happily pecking away at more of the same thing only ten feet away.

Bran dropped the shiny pebble and took the proffered food in his beak, watching, noticing how the boy saw him, but didn’t move, as though he were afraid.

Bran thought this was foolish. He was no more a threat to this boy than the boy—with his lack of magic and obvious fear—was to him.

The food was tasty, though. So he ate it.

And then the boy tossed him another. And Bran, of course, had to take it, which meant he had to leave another gift.

This went on for the better part of an hour, the boy tossing crackers and Bran circling the area to find gifts to give him in return. A handful of colored or sparkling stones, and a piece of adornment that had fallen from some other mortal’s clothing.

Over and over, until the boy ran out of crackers and Bran, annoyed and exhausted, flew away, promising himself he would never visit this irritating human again.

But he did, of course. He could no more resist the pull of the threadbond than he could force himself to stop breathing.

Sometimes, the other boy—at first, taller and lankier, then no longer a boy at all—would run through the woods, and Bran would track his path through the sky over the flickering shadows of dark green leaves or winter-stripped branches. Sometimes the half-breed simply sat and stared across the flooded river bed, the stones of the shore crunching under restless feet.

Bran had not been foolish enough to allow the human to see him again.

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