“That’s more like it.” Margrit wound her arms around Alban’s waist. “We should be together, and on the same side. The djinn aren’t going to let Malik’s death go. I’m sorry.” She set her front teeth together delicately, lips peeled back in a show of frustration. “I’ve been playing both sides against the middle for two days, not letting anybody know how he died, and now—”
“You could hardly have anticipated what would happen when you offered memories to the collective.”
“A feedback loop would’ve been bad enough. I turned into a broadcast tower!” Margrit wrinkled her face as her own pitch made her head ring. “I blew the top off every secret I knew.”
“No,” Alban said with sudden clarity. “Not every secret. You buried one with an avalanche of others.” He glanced toward the door, and Margrit followed his gaze, knowing which two of the many who’d passed through it he was thinking of.
“Yeah. I told them everything, but I didn’t tell them you’d found her again.”
Even with static rushing in her head, it was easier to ride memory now, as though new channels had been opened up in her mind. She knew that it was Alban’s memory she recalled, but she felt very little dichotomy, no confusion of one body or another. Wings spread beneath the moonlight felt natural and strong, and wearing his broad body, meant for flying, felt natural, with no confusion as to what had happened to her own smaller form.
Forty miles outside of London, in the midseventeenth century, might have been four thousand in the modern world. It was an easy night’s flight, even there and back again, as long as the winds were with him. Janx and Daisani had taken the broken pieces of their hearts and left the city that had disappointed them years since, and Alban had waited until he thought even Sarah’s memory had faded before he winged north to the farmstead she’d owned.
He knew it had been abandoned before he landed. The land was unfurrowed and weeds choked those vegetables left to grow on their own. No smoke rose from the chimney, and no scent of it lingered on the air to say a fire would be banked high in the morning. There was a stillness to the house that said it was unlived in, and when he first opened the door, it was to a room stagnant with disuse.
A cradle, long since too small for the girls’ use, was tucked against the wall beside the fireplace; opposite lay a straw bed molding with age. The twins would have altered their hours in the cradle and bed, one suckling while the other slept, but neither had done so for a long time.
Everything else was gone from the cottage: no pot hung over the fire, no blankets lay to rot with the bed. Even the kindling was gone, perhaps to be made use of on the road. Alban crossed to the cradle and set it to rocking, a little surprised it hadn’t been broken apart to be burned, as well.
A patterned piece of fabric lay at its bottom, little more than an off-colored shadow in the moonlight from the open door. Alban lifted it, finding the pattern to be stitches, and, frowning with curiosity, he brought it into the light.
A crude shape was picked out on the fabric, a rough oval with a handful of divots breaking into its form. Near the bottom was a tiny stitched house; at the top, another. The piece’s edges were ragged and frayed, as though it had once been a child’s chew-thing. Bemused, Alban tucked it into his fist and carried it back to London.
Hajnal gave the scrap a bare glance and, with a look of fond exasperation at him, said, “It’s the island, Alban. England and Scotland and Wales. She’s gone to live in the north.” Then amusement had sparked in her eyes and she’d added, “It’s very like our way of making sure we won’t lose each other, isn’t it. Our promise to meet each other at the highest point we can find. Did you tell her about that?”
Alban, flummoxed, admitted he had, and Hajnal looked knowing. “The top of Scotland is as high as you can go without leaving this island. It’s a clever bit of work.”
Nearly four hundred years later, Margrit felt Alban’s rise again in both memory and the present, pure bewilderment as he said, “But how do you know?” And in memory, she thrilled at the warmth of Hajnal’s responding laugh.
“I know because Sarah would leave a message only one man could read, and you’re him. You’d have come to it in time.”
“Your faith is ill placed.” Alban pulled his lifemate into his arms, and memory faded into another time.
Not so very much later, but long enough. Winter, for ease of traveling through the long nights. Two gargoyles winged through cold starry skies, full of joy at living and exploring and togetherness. The northern coast of Scotland was an expansive area to search, but there was little hurry. Children grew up quickly, but not that quickly, and a woman alone with two young girls would eventually be found.
“She might have married,” Alban said one night, and Hajnal, warm with firelight under the stars, shook her head. Bemused all over again, Alban said, “How do you know?”
Hajnal shrugged. “Her daughters’ father is one of the Old Races, and there’s no telling how that will show up. Not even the memories tell us that, Alban. Perhaps the winter slaughter will bring out a hunger and a speed and a darkness from them, or a bit of bright coin will trigger need and an impossible new form. Sarah wouldn’t risk the girls being exposed to a husband.” Hajnal went silent a long time, playing with a piece of obsidian, catching flame in it and releasing it to the night again. “But that’s only the pragmatic reason. Sarah Hopkins loved them both, my love. It takes an unusual woman to draw a dragon’s eye, and a rarer one still to dare turn away from the love of a vampire. Perhaps I’m wrong, but if they had been the men in my life, and I had been only human, I think I would not look for anything more after them. I think the memory would be sweeter, and more bitter, than any other life I might find in their wake, and I think that I would be happier with the dream of what was than the possibility of a new future.”
“How maudlin,” Alban said with a smile, and Hajnal laughed again, protesting, “Romantic. It’s romantic, not maudlin.”
But there was no husband when they found her, only Sarah and twin girls, rangy now with young women’s years. They were slim and tall and quick and not alike at all, but for a sense of raw command about them both. Sarah, a dozen years older than she’d been when Alban last saw her, had weathered the time well, and watched the girls with pride.
“But I’m not like them,” she said. What had once been a thick London accent was marred by a burr now, misplacing her wherever she went. “You’ll look after them when I’m gone, Alban? I have some years left in me, but they’re special. They’ll need watching. They’ll need—”
“Hiding,” Alban finished in an acknowledging rumble. “They’re not supposed to be, Sarah. Not according to our laws.”
“Do you believe your laws are right?”
“I believe I flew you out of London when you asked me to, knowing you were pregnant, knowing you would birth a half-breed child. I believe our future is difficult enough without losing ourselves to the human race, but I don’t believe it enough to let you fall, or your children suffer. Are you sure this is where you want to live?” he asked more solicitously. “It’s a hard life here, Sarah. Hajnal and I could make it easier for you somewhere warmer and finer.”
“Somewhere that they would be more likely to find us. The only years of my life that haven’t been hard were those times in London with them. I don’t mind, and it’s safer here for the girls. In a city, if anything happens, someone will notice. Here…” She opened a hand, trailing it across the windswept hills. “No one will see but the cattle.”
“Leave another message,” Alban murmured. “When you move on, so I can find you.”
“The girls can write and read a little already,” Sarah said with pride. “Send us letters, and we’ll keep you in the know.”