Aedan, Part Who Even Knows
So, I did say you likely wouldn’t see any more of these guys, but I was rereading my draft and this bit is polished enough for me to feel comfortable sharing. Here is some birdperson comfort! New followers, you can find more about Aedan in his tag.
Shae approached the fire. If she’d been trying to sneak up on it, she thought wryly as she climbed over a dead branch and landed on another with a loud crunch, she would have been very disappointed.
So it was that when she rounded the bole of the big tree and found herself face to face with the fire, Aedan was already on his feet and staring in her direction.
She came to a graceless stop, stumbling the last few steps as her dress hem caught on a tree root. “Aedan,” she exclaimed, her voice trembling with gladness and relief. Then it seemed to stop, as if everything else she had to say was bottled up behind a stone in her throat.
He was scarcely recognisable. His big brown eyes blinked at her, familiar features in an otherwise drastically different face, wan and smudged with dirt. Deep shadows under his eyes and yellow-brown bruising and swelling painting his throat, his fine cheekbone, the hollow of one of his eyes. He looked tiny, smaller even that she was accustomed to him looking, fragile and sodden with a blanket draped over his wings and clutched at his throat with tight-clenched fingers. His hair was dark with water and twisted into rats’ tails.
He looked like he was ready to flee at the sight of her.
She had to say something. Something, before he took off into the woods and she never ever saw him again.
“Oh my God, Aedan, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Please - Aedan - don’t run away. I’ve come to find you.”
The fire crackled between them, sadly, flickering low around the branches Aedan had stacked to keep it burning. Aedan stared at her like he didn’t understand what she was saying.
“Aedan - you look awful - let me help you,” she said. “It’s okay. I’ve come to get you.”
She took a step towards him, without thinking, and he took a step backwards, clutching the blanket tighter.
“Don’t,” he said jerkily. “Just - don’t.” His eyes darted, up and down, behind her, behind him as if wondering if he could get away.
Her heart plummeted, to see him so small and hurt, and frightened of her. She spread her hands, very carefully, and eased herself back a step.
“Where’s - everybody else?” he asked, eyes glancing behind her again.
“Just me, Aedan,” she whispered. “Just me. I came to bring you - home. I came to try and fix it.”
He shook his head. Water dripped from the leaves and branches around them, a quiet patter to fill the silence. Thunder rolled gently in the distance.
“Is… is Lucas… dead?” he asked, his voice hollow.
Shae’s heart twisted. “No,” she said, her voice small and thin. “No, he isn’t. He’s hurt. But they don’t think he’s going to die.”
Aedan didn’t move for a long second, and his eyes seemed to be fixed on something in the distance past Shae’s face. “Oh,” he whispered. “I’m… I’m glad.” He took a deep breath, and she could see his chest rising and falling.
He was silent for another long moment.
“Aedan…” Shae said. “Can I… look, I have dry clothes and blankets and things back in my saddlebags. And food. Why don’t I go and get them, and we can build your fire up a bit, and… and I can help you, okay?”
His mouth twisted and he looked upset. “Help me?” he echoed. “Shae, I’ve been - the last three days have been… you locked me up! I thought I was safe, I thought we were family, but things changed like that and - and - ” He tried to snap his fingers, fumbled and lost hold of the blanket, let it slither to the mud. His voice was starting to rise, cracking and falling over itself. “Lucas broke - he said - he was going to kill me. He would have killed me. Why should - why are you -” He gestured wildly, one of his wings coming out at last to join in the gesture. “What are you even doing out here by yourself?”
Shae stared at his wings, misery sitting in her stomach like cold mud. His wings. One of them was bound to his back with filthy bandaging, the cloth mussing up and fraying the feathers where it held them tight against his body. The other was open, but dark with moisture like his hair, and so bedraggled she could see strips of the forest floor through the gaps between feathers. It hurt her heart to see them like that, beautiful things he’d taken such care of, part of him in a way that clothes and hair weren’t, unkempt and immobile.
“I came to find you,” she said, faltering. “I - I thought - ”
“Why would you want to help me?” he asked. She could see his mouth twisting for a moment, and then he was crying, tears mingling with the water running down his face from his hairline. “Aren’t I just… just some bargaining chip to you? Just a token of, of an alliance that it turns out isn’t even worth the paper it’s written on?” He rubbed his eye with the heel of one hand. “I-if the treaty’s worthless what’s that make me? Aren’t I j-j-just another wingfolk, your enemy, barbarians, vermin? Lucas called us v-vermin, why are you out h-here tramping th-through the woods for some creature if I’m n-not even useful for making my family do what you want...”
“Aedan!” Shae begged. “No!” She wrung her hands in front of her, wanting to go to him, wanting to touch his wings, wanting to bundle him up into her arms, stroke his hair the way she knew he liked. She had never wanted to touch anybody as much as she wanted to touch Aedan now, with a force that startled her.
He stared at the ground, tears dripping from his chin. His arms were folded, hugging himself, thin shoulders shivering. “I don’t know if I’d be able to stop you dragging me back to the castle anyway,” he said bitterly. “Wouldn’t get very far if I tried to run, would I?”
“I’m not going to drag you anywhere!”
“Really? So if I told you to turn around and go back without me, you would?”
“I - ” Shae swallowed. She buried her hands in the hair at her temples, stared up at the rain-soaked canopy for a long moment while she thought. “Yes,” she said. “I don’t - please don’t do that, though. You won’t make it through the forest and out the other side by yourself.”
“Made it this far,” he mumbled, staring at the ground. “Must be halfway, right?”
“I don’t… know,” Shae said uncomfortably. “Look… since I’m here, can I go and get my stuff? You look freezing. And you must be hungry.” She coughed suddenly, trying to clear the wobbles that kept trying to creep into her voice. “At least let me feed you before you leave, if you’re going to.”
“I…” He rubbed absently at one shoulder, and shrugged. He didn’t meet her eyes, didn’t even look up, but he nodded at the ground. “Yeah. Okay. I guess.”
Shae exhaled shakily in relief. “Great!” she said quickly. She backed up a few steps, held her hands up like Aedan was a wild animal that might startle at sudden movement. “I’ll be back soon, all right? Don’t go anywhere!”
When Shae returned, leading the horse very carefully across the uneven ground, Aedan had pulled some dead branches close to the fire to dry out. He was sitting on the thick, coiled root that was protruding from the ground, sodden stringy tail feathers out behind him, hunched up and staring into the fire.
“Hey,” Shae said, out of breath, her saddlebag over one shoulder. The root was long enough to seat a couple of people side by side, and she pointed to the space beside him. “Can I sit there, Aedan?”
His eyes flicked up to her. He shook his head slowly. “You can sit over there,” he said, pointing to a rotten log at least a metre and a half away, at a right-angle with him and the fire.
Shae nodded, a lump in her throat. “Sure,” she agreed.
She knelt and began to spread the contents of the pack out, keeping them as dry and clean as she could, relieved to find that the waterproof material of the packs had kept everything dry. She shook out the set of Aedan’s shirt and what passed for pants for him out. “I brought you these, Aedan, do you want to get out of your wet things? In the meantime I’ll start boiling water and we can have tea. I brought this, um, travel cake, I don’t know if you’d have tried it before but it has dried fruit and honey so I think you’ll like it….”
Aedan tipped his head slowly. “You brought a set of my clothes?”
“Well - yeah,” she said. “I figured, if you were only dressed for hanging around at home reading, you would still be in those…” She squinted across the distance at his shirt. It didn’t seem to be done up right - the tie around his neck was done, but she realised that the part that was supposed to fasten around the small of his back had to be left loose because the bandaged wing was in the way.
He didn’t make any move to come over to get the clothing, so Shae stood up, stepped around the fire, and draped it over the end of his root along with one of her blankets. He watched her wordlessly as she approached, and as she retreated.
He looked exhausted. He looked sore. She found herself looking at the livid bruises around his throat and feeling a black tide of anger against Lucas rising up in her chest.
Lucas might not get better. Lucas could have died. So it felt in some way disloyal for Shae to be this furiously angry at him, to want to shake him and ask him what was wrong with him, to want to never speak to him again so that maybe he’d understand what an awful thing he’d done.
She started to busy her hands with the little pan, pouring her bottle of water into it and fishing for the store of tea leaves she had brought.
“Did you tell Lucas I would be on the roof?”
She started, nearly spilling the tea leaves. “Um,” she said, thoughts racing, staring at her hands. “When do you…”
His voice was low and angry. “When? Stop it, Shae, you know what I meant. Lucas told me that you didn’t care about what happened to me, and he knew exactly where I’d be, out reading on the roof like I always am in the mornings when I’m not in the library. I trusted you. I trusted you, and he said you told him where to find me!”
“I guess I did,” Shae said, wincing. “But it’s not like that, Aedan, I didn’t mean for - I didn’t know he was going to hurt you.”
She gathered her courage and looked up, over at him where he sat on the root.
He was looking back at her with wild, hurt eyes. “He’s your brother. Don’t you know him best? What did you think he was going to do? Didn’t he say?”
“No!” she protested. “He just said – he just said that they needed to find you, in case – I don’t know, in case you were in on the attack. He didn’t say he was going to hurt you. I just thought we’d lock you in a room or something until we knew what was going on!”
He let out a disbelieving breath. “Oh, just that, then,” he said, and his tone was very unlike Aedan, bitten off and sarcastic, tight with hurt. “Not to worry! Just going to lock me up!”
“I’m sorry,” Shae said, closing her eyes, wanting to shrivel up with shame. “I shouldn’t have…”
“Did you really think I had anything to do with killing the King?” he asked. “Why would I do that? Did you think, what? That I was a spy, that I was going to hurt you? I wouldn’t have! I liked the King, he was never anything but kind to me, and even if he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have hurt him!”
“I know!” Shae said, lifting her hands to her head. “I know that now! Now that I think about it. But at the time, I just… we just didn’t know if we could trust you! And Dad was missing, we didn’t know - everything was so confusing, and I didn’t know I felt about you when I thought about it, and I just - thought - there was so much I needed to do and I thought I could figure out what I felt later!”
She put the tea down, sat back in the dirt, wrapped her arms around her knees. Everything was a tangled mess inside her chest. Dad. I miss you. You’re never coming back.
Aedan was silent, over on the other side of the fire. When she looked over at him, blinking back tears, she saw that he had his hands over his face.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice thin and muffled. “About your dad. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened but it was wrong, it’s not fair, I’m so sorry. He was… he was a good man, he was a good king.”
She nodded, her throat tight. “Yeah,” she whispered. “He was. Thank you.” She wiped her eyes.
They fell into awkward silence again. The fire crackled. The little pan of water was starting to boil, and Shae moved it off the fire, for something to do with her hands.
Aedan’s hands crept out and took the clothing she’d put on his seat. “Look, thanks for - thanks for thinking to bring these,” he mumbled. “And everything else, too. I know you don’t want to hurt me, not really. And Robb didn’t, either. It’s just… it’s all so complicated, Shae.”
She latched onto that gratefully. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”
“I’m going to - go put these on,” he said nervously. “Don’t, um, look over I guess.” He stepped up onto the root and over, walking a few steps away.
Shae stifled a rueful little smile, as if Shae catching sight of Aedan minus his pants was really something that needed to worry them both at this point. She kept her gaze carefully on the fire.
He returned, and when she looked cautiously over at him he was toweling his hair dry with one of the blankets.
He paused, looked at her, looked at the fire. Then he ignored the root he’d been sitting on, took the extra few steps around the fire, and settled carefully on the end of Shae’s log, leaving a space between where he was and where she would sit when she came back from the fire.
She held out one of the thin metal traveling cups to him, giving off fragrant steam. His eyes flickered, and he gave her a hesitant, tremulous beginning of a smile. He put the blanket aside, leaving his hair a birds-nest of braids and knots and tangles, and reached out to take the cup from her. Their fingers brushed, his cold and soft, and she shifted her grip away from them as she handed it to him.
Then she eased herself backwards and up onto the log, leaving a few hands-widths between them. He had his hands wrapped around the tea and his shoulders hunched over it, pressed against his chest. Shae took her own cup and sipped it, more for companionship than because she really wanted tea. The taste was soothing, though.
“You need to eat,” she said, firmly, unwrapping the waxed paper from her travel cake. “When did you eat last? You look horrible.”
He gave another, stronger smile. “Um. I found a few things,” he said. “I do know some woodcraft, you know. Unfortunately a lot of the plants here are different so it wasn’t as helpful as I was hoping it was.”
He took the cake from her hand, and didn’t speak at all for the next minute or so as he ate it, every crumb, silent and intently focused on it in a way that made it clear just how hungry he’d been.
“Shae…”
She looked up and over, her heart skipping. “Yes?”
He was staring into the flames. It was getting darker, and the leaping shadows made the bruising less obvious. “I would have liked it if you had trusted me,” he said slowly. “I trusted you.” He put the empty cup down, and crossed his arms, gripping his elbows. “I thought that we were, you know… I liked you, and I thought maybe you were coming around to thinking better of me. And I trusted your family, Robb and Lucas. And I trusted Wizard Tamsin when she said I’d be safe here. I trusted my family.” He hunched forward, hugging his arms to his body. His voice was a whisper. “I guess I’m just an idiot, aren’t I? Because it turns out I shouldn’t have trusted any of those people.”
Shae bit her lip. “Aedan… no,” she said. “You’re not - an idiot. You just want people to be good, you think the best of people. That’s a good thing. It’s something that I like a lot about you. You should have been safe to trust people.”
Aedan hummed wordlessly. He had his arms wrapped around himself tightly, like he needed to feel them, like he would fall apart otherwise. She could see the shivers wracking his frame, and the urge from before resurfaced harder than ever, to wrap her arms around him.
“I’m really sorry, Aedan,” she said softly. “It’s complicated, you’re right, but I should have done better by you.”
He nodded, shivering still. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
She hesitated. She didn’t want to reach out, not if he didn’t want her to. She settled for leaning back and opening her posture slightly, leaving a space that he could fit if he wanted to. She opened her arm, hesitantly, slightly, trying to make it obvious to him but at the same time not obvious so that if he wanted to ignore it she could put her arm back down and they could both pretend that she had never done it.
His eyes slid over towards her, and for a moment they were unreadable. Then he unfolded his arms, sat up a little straighter, and edged over, inch by inch, until his side with the broken wing was pressing into the space she had left for him.
Shae drew in a slow, shaking breath, and let her arm come around to lie across his shoulders. He was ungainly under her arm, all shivering and wet feathers and joints that she didn’t want to jostle.
“Is - oh, your wing - I’m not hurting it, am I?”
He shook his head. “No. No, it’s fine.”
He pressed closer as her arm closed around him, and then suddenly with a choked noise he turned in the circle of her arm and let himself fall forward against her chest, face buried in her shoulder.
Shae felt, very definitely, as though she did not deserve this. But she put her other arm around him, too, snugged him closer against her hip, and leaned her head down on his. His hands and arms were caught between them, pressing against her front, and she could feel the water from his wings and hair soaking into her dress.
It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t even all that warm. But they sat there, as darkness deepened around them and Shae realised they really ought to be caring for the horse and setting up more of a camp, since they wouldn’t be heading out until morning. Aedan’s shivering slowed, and stopped, and he stopped pressing his face into her neck quite so desperately.
His left wing had relaxed and was drooping in front of them, half-open, the feathers drying out to a more familiar and comfortable cream and brown. Shae shifted position, reached out and gently ran her finger and thumb down the vane of the first primary that came to hand.
Aedan at first tensed, looked up. When he saw that her hand was what had touched his wing, he relaxed a little further into the embrace and sighed. She could feel his breath stir the air close to her neck.
“You know,” Shae said, and her hand continued picking and stroking gently amongst his feathers. “I brought some stuff for your wing, from Martin. Clean bandages, something for pain. Want me to get them out? ”
“Yes,” he said, into her shoulder. “Please.”
