Page 85 of Threadbound

“And giant furry bugs,” Jamie finished in a mutter, earning him another flashed wry smile, although he could tell that Bran was impatient or worried or something.

“Aye, those, too,” the fae replied.

Jamie twitched as the giant furry bug in question shifted on his shoulder, settling closer to his face, which definitely made Jamie lean his head the other way, a noise gurgling in the back of his throat. “Is this thing ever going to leave?”

Chapter

Thirty-Four

Thegealach marcaichehadn’t left yet, and it had been two days. It seemed content enough to feed itself from either the fresh flowers left in his rooms, probably for that purpose, or from the dangling clusters of purple blossoms that overhung the windows. Jamie was starting to wonder if he shouldn’t name the damn thing, especially since everyone else seemed to think its presence was good luck.

He also couldn’t keep anyone else—whose shapes and forms Jamie really didn’t have the time or capacity to process, given that he was pretty sure he hadn’t met anyone with human feet, which was oddly disturbing him more than horns or fur or scales—straight. Even though they were all distinct, he was so distracted by how utterly inhuman they were that he struggled to put names with faces… or wings, or hooves, or whatever. Jamie couldn’t explain why, exactly, it was that he was so very fixated on people’s weird feet—or fins, or hooves, or talons, or whatever—but that was what his brain had zeroed in on.

When they’d arrived at the entrance, a tall, sweeping archway with doors that seemed to be formed of still-living bark, a tall woman with bluish, scaled skin, wide teal eyes, and waves of sea-foam hair had come up and put an arm around Bran, andJamie’d watched with horror as Bran had almost immediately collapsed into her arms.

Jamie had since learned that her name was Maigdeann, and she was Bran’s older sister and the second-closest of his siblings to him—and also to Jamie—in age. Jamie had also learned that ‘closest in age’ was a very different frame of reference in Elfhame than it was in his own world. Maigdeann was more than three centuries old. She was something called a ‘finfolk,’ and she was Sidhe. Bran’s mother and half his siblings were Sidhe. His father and the other half were all Sluagh. Bran’s closest sibling, Puinnsean, older than Bran by more than a hundred years, was also Sluagh, a wight like their father.

Jamie hadn’t met him. Or any of Bran’s siblings other than Maigdeann. He had met another healer, Eadar-Sholas mac Madadh Allaidh, who was only a few years older than Jamie and Bran. Eadar—or so he’d asked Jamie to call him—was something called a ‘wulver,’ about Jamie’s height and lanky, with broad shoulders and a sharp face that definitely reminded Jamie of a dog’s or wolf’s nose. He assumed it was rude to specifically ask, but he suspected that wulvers, like whatever Bran was, were shape-shifters.

Jamie ran a hand over the surprisingly soft fur of thegealach’s back. “What do you think, critter?” he asked it. The warm body under Jamie’s palm vibrated softly—Jamie was running on the assumption that the thing was happy when it did that, not because anybody had said so or because he knew anything at all about weird fairy creatures, but because it reminded him of a cat purring.

And it was what you might get if you somehow made a genetic hybrid of a moth and a cat. And a hummingbird. And then made it bigger.

The damn thing was growing on him. Well. Clinging, anyway. Literally.

Every time he left the chambers that he was coming to think of as ‘his,’ although he didn’t know for how long, thegealachwas attached to him, riding his back or his shoulder. Once he’d gotten used to the creature, it brought him an odd kind of comfort… kind of like a living stuffed animal. A really weird living stuffed animal.

Jamie stood with a sigh, then felt the familiar weight of thegealachsettle on his shoulder. Jamie had been given simple clothes that had been spun—using magic, of course—from his own clothing, which meant that he’d been wearing the same shirt and jeans every day… well, the same style and pattern, even if the sets were different.

Eadar had explained that when the sun set, Jamie and Bran would both have to spend three days ‘preparing’ for the actual threadbinding. Jamie had asked what that actually meant, and Eadar had explained that he mostly just had to do nothing. The idea, as far as Jamie understood it, anyway, was to get in touch with his own inner magic. Since he didn’thaveany inner magic, Jamie figured it would be like meditating for three days. He’d asked if they were going to ask him to fast, and Eadar had assured him that wouldn’t be necessary.

When Eadar had asked him if he would need anything, Jamie’d had no idea what to ask for. But if the fae expected him to actuallydosomething in his room for three days with only agealach marcaichefor company, then the one thing Jamie knew he could do to focus his energy was macramé. So he’d asked for anything he could knot, tie, loop, or weave together: wool, thread, twine, yarn, beads, ribbon, and so on. Eadar had promised to bring him some.

Jamie really wanted to see Bran, but Eadar had told him that Bran had overextended himself bringing Jamie through the Gate—not that they’d had any choice, since Jamie couldn’t do it himself—and that he needed to recover before being ableto prepare himself for the threadbinding. Since that wasn’t an option, Jamie had taken to wandering the halls before sunset, when most of the fae were sleeping or resting or at least not active in the castle or keep or whatever it was they called the structure that housed the Court of Shades.

It was at least as much living wood and vines as it was planks and stone. At first, Jamie had gotten the impression that the Court of Shades was old and crumbling, but he quickly realized that it was no such thing. Instead, it was both built and grown, the living and inanimate working together in concert rather than being at odds. It wasn’t what he was used to, but it had a beauty all its own.

Kind of like thegealach.

Jamie reached up a hand and stroked its fur, and it rubbed its weirdly squished face and big ears against his fingers. “How aboutPatchwork?” he asked it. “Patch for short?”

The vibrating thrum under his fingers grew stronger.

“Patch it is.”

Bran had spentthe better part of the last two days unconscious, and not by choice. His body was weak, his joints ached, and his magic felt thin and tremulous. He could barely stay awake for a few hours at a time, and even walking around the confines of his chamber made his muscles tremble.

This morning, knowing he had to spend the next three days preparing for the threadbinding, he’d changed forms, and it hadn’t at all helped. He’d been violently ill, given himself a splitting headache, and ended up curled on his side on the cool stone of the floor for most of an hour before letting Maigdeann help him into bed again. She and his father had both plied their healing magics, and he felt better—but not good. Not strong. And now the healing treatments they had been doinghad to stop for three days before the threadbinding itself so that Bran’s magic would be his own, unaltered—unstrengthened—by anyone else. Cairn had pronounced him well enough for that, at least.

Bran knew his father very much hoped that the threadbinding itself would restore what healing could not. Bran could only hope that Cairn was right, and that the worry on his sister’s face was only temporary. But only time and the completed threadbinding would be able to tell.

In the mean time, Bran had three days to himself, giving him plenty of time to feel guilty about bringing Jamie to Elfhame—about embroiling the half-breed in this whole thing by drawing the attention of the Sidhe court to him in the first place. Bran still didn’t know why it was that Darach mac Craobh-na-Beatha wanted Jamie dead. Bran understood whyhehad been targeted, but he didn’t understand why Jamie meant anything at all to the King of the Sidhe. If Bran were dead, whatever bolstering or stabilizing power the threadbond might have had would be gone—and even if Jamie did have some latent or minor magic, not that Bran had ever seen any evidence of it, it wouldn’t be significant enough to matter without Jamie being tied to Bran.

What worried him the most—and what had caused him to give in to Jamie’s insistence that they come to Elfhame to complete the threadbond—was the fact that the Sidhe King sentgeàrd soilleirto kill Jamie. Jamie was no doubt upset about the man who had been killed in his place, but Bran couldn’t help but be grateful for that man’s death—for the sacrifice he had made, unknowing as it undoubtedly was, so that Jamie might continue to live. The man hadn’t deserved death, of that Bran was reasonably sure, but he had given his life for Jamie’s nevertheless. And that merited Bran’s respect and gratitude.

Bran had the suspicion that the reason for the Sidhe King’s very unwanted attention was significant—at least moreso thanCairn or Iolair or Maigdeann was admitting, at least to Bran. Bran understood why he himself might be a target. He was Cairn’s youngest son, he was weak and vulnerable, and killing him would cause pain to his father. Killing Jamie served no purpose other than slaughter.

Assuming the Sidhe King had not simply gone mad, there had to be a reason. Something more that they didn’t know, but that Darach mac Craobh-na-Beatha did. Something important.

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