Chapter Text
It was the dead of winter when James arrived at the tower. Coming up from the south, the village was watchful and wary, people making signs to ward off evil after the cart and horses had passed by. He didn't mind; it was strange to see their impersonal suspicion, after the reek of the battlefield and the crisp snap of the tribunal.
The tower was waiting for him, wordless but more conscious than any of the village folk. It was crooked and too ornate, tall in a way that was hard to pin down with a count of windows, and the air went hazy and indistinct if you squinted too hard to see exactly how high it was. And to the north of it, the world ended.
Well, that was dramatic: the world went on for a while, thick forest devouring the hill-slope down from the tower's perch until the terrain below vanished into a tangled mass of treetops that admitted no light. There were paths under the canopy, lightless except for what you carried in with you, trackless to even the most diligent mapmaker. The farther you went from the tower, the less likely you were to return.
James knew all this because he was the tower's latest assigned keeper, and he expected to die there.
He didn't belabor that point with the soldiers who had escorted him, who grumbled through the steps of opening up the frost- and iron-locked doors and starting fires and opening winter stores that could support an occupant. It was a bitter and inhospitable time of year to arrive at a new home, but that seemed fitting.
By evening the soldiers left, down to the ruder lodgings in the village and away from the strange breezes that whistled about the tower shingles at night. From the tallest peak of the roof, a crow watched them leave, and made a mocking caw to send them off.
James appreciated the ambiance, but he wished the previous inhabitant had left better blankets. He'd have to bargain for that, since he had no stomach for intimidating the villagers to accommodate him. But he toured every floor—though it was hard to count their exact number—and looked out the windows that were open, thick glass warping the murky view and casting the stars into a drunken wander. From the north, he could hear faint howling.
Before he slept, he went to the lowest cellar and the highest attic to check the seals. They were there, intact though faded, silver-green lines running like a slowed heartbeat through complicated sigils that coiled and looped on themselves in an endless puzzle. Sacred writings to fix the reality of the world, here at the edge of dissolving.
As he drifted off to sleep in the chilly narrow bed with its hard mattress, he heard a tapping and scraping at his window. He was tired enough to ignore it, and his sleep was dreamless.
— ★ —
Days passed, settling in. James wrote letters to report the state of his arrival, stacked neatly beside the door for the next time someone came to carry them to the outside world. He checked the state of the larder—adequate—and the wine cellar—laughable. The clouds outside spat hard-edged snow, bitter with cold but not thick enough to block him in.
His right side was weak, but it wasn't critical yet. He saved the supplies.
After that first night, his liminal visitor returned, less sinister by daylight as the tapping and scratching revealed itself to be a crow at the window. In softer days he might have worried about its health in the winter, perhaps let it in to warm by the fire. Now he cast it a jaded look and kept chopping dried herbs and vegetables for the stew pot. After a few minutes, the crow always departed, with a noise that sounded distinctly jeering.
The first time he met it face to face—relatively speaking—was a bright noon hour when he went out to the north overlook, laboriously scraping snow from the flagstones to clear a path. The forest lay beyond and below him like a frozen curdle of snakes, branches seeming knotted together and dark under their muffling pale blanket of snow. A breeze wafted in from the north and it smelled like lilacs, summer lies and promises of fairer weather if a person only explored deep enough under the trees.
The crow flapped down to perch on the railing nearby, first looking in the same direction and then canting its head at James. It stared at him so long that he felt some answer was required.
"I'm not looking for a familiar," he said. It made as contemptuous a sound as he imagined bird throats could make, and launched itself off the railing, flapping away to the west. He watched it go with a little smile, and went back inside feeling slightly less lonely than before.
More days and nights. Inventorying the floors of the tower—some safe and sane and habitable, others gone strange in the long inoccupancy or perhaps even before. One set of windows looked out on a balmy summer landscape, meadows full of long grass waving ripple-fast in a breeze that went against the prevailing wind he had seen from the floor below. Faint singing filtered through the window, and when James felt himself swaying toward it, he closed that door and marked it carefully.
Other floors were silent funerals, forlorn but unthreatening, shelves lined with damp and mildewed books and the half-decayed remains of rich tapestries. Those were safe, but he didn't linger.
At the top, he was pleased to find a large balcony with enough flat space for a telescope. The day was cold but crisp, sunlight brilliant on the snow, and it only took a minute of arguing with himself before James decided to haul his equipment up the stairs. That winded him more than it should have—too many months sitting idle, who knew he could ever miss being on campaign—and he took his time checking for damage, fitting pieces together while the sun gleamed off of brass and scrollwork. He did most of it outside, though the final setup would have to wait for night. The crow sat on the roof-slope above him and watched, and he found himself narrating the steps to it, explaining focal lengths and light paths as if it would care. Which it didn't, but it stayed to watch anyway, casting such a covetous eye on the glittering eyepiece lens that he gave the bird a hard look before carefully stowing that part back in its case.
And that was nearly his undoing, because the grip of his hand was unexpectedly weak, and when he lifted the box to take it inside, it slipped from his fingers and crashed to the stones. He swore and knelt to check it, feeling a flicker in his balance and wondering if he was about to have an attack right here on the roof. Done in by his desire to show off for a bird. It passed after a moment, dizzy motes receding from the edge of his vision, and when he opened the case he was relieved to find everything unbroken. He packed up for the day anyway, and he didn't look back to the crow as he went inside.
He spent the rest of the afternoon doing what he should have attended to first, carefully cleaning and checking the cellar. The wards were clean, all the lines unbroken, but they would need recharging soon. There was a planetary alignment in another couple of weeks that would add resonance to the renewal—but he thought about the crow and its unnatural patience, and decided not to wait.
At midnight he was in the circle carved into the cellar floor, concentric layers of dense runes marching outward to the walls of the chamber. Describing the world, the way it had to be, the laws and the rules that kept chaos from encroaching on this land carved out of the wilds. He followed the inscription from start to finish, speaking a quiet but clear reiteration as silver flecks of light swam along the grooves and outward with building brightness. A sense of pressure climbed in his ears, but he ignored it with years of practice, keeping to the cadence and following the lines. He felt the moment when it started to take on its own momentum, instant of needle-stick clarity and then a sensation like warmth running down his arm. And that was going too fast, so he clenched his other hand and kept the pace deliberate, throttling back the power that wanted to leap forward and join like a river emptying into the sea, never to return in its original form.
When he finished an hour later, cobalt blue light had eclipsed the original silver and green, climbing the walls of the room in a glittering cage of rune-lines. With a final flare that he felt all the way down his spine, it slotted into place. Unseen, it bridged with the matching lines that were carved in the uppermost room, that ran through the entire skeleton of the tower. With a blinding flash of pain it finished, and he sat there gasping, sweat beading on his forehead as he wondered how close he had come to botching that.
It took him several minutes to rise, joints aching and right leg weak. At this rate, he was going to have to start carrying a damned cane. But it was done, that was the critical thing, and he managed to find his way to bed without breaking anything. Tomorrow would be better.
— ★ —
That night, James was visited in his dream. He was out on the north overlook and it was summer, air warm as bath water surrounding him, breeze drowsy with flowers and the drone of bees. He was sitting in a chair that was tipped over and warped in the waking world, all sturdy wood-grain and gleaming polish in the dream.
On the waist-high railing nearby was perched a man, looking at James with his head slightly tilted, red eyes glinting through a fall-down fringe of hair. "Think you're going to make a nest here?" he asked, one knee drawn up under his chin and the other ankle dangling down, hooked around the railing to balance him. His clothes were old-fashioned and exotic in a way that was hard to place, long flowing lines of fabric in charcoal and burgundy.
James looked down at his hands—angular tattooed runes marching down his forearms from under his sleeves, muscles firm and skin unscarred. A pleasant dream. "Not a nest," he said. "A posting."
The stranger made an obnoxious noise and leaned back, tipping precariously over the drop so that James had to resist the urge to reach out toward him. "Boring," the man said. "You'll be gone soon."
"See if I am," James said, but he was already drifting toward waking, an uneasy half-slumbering chill before he rolled himself back under the blanket and sank to dreamless sleep again.
In the morning, he checked the wards. Steady and strong, no warnings from the night. He let himself feel satisfied about that, and tried not to mind that he was moving at half-speed, stumbling through daily chores like he was underwater.
Two more nights of restless dreams, no taunting stranger this time but only the discontent hiss of the trees and the things that sheltered under their darkness. During the day, two of the villagers made their weekly visit to bring supplies, help with cleaning, carry away messages.
Military reports went on a separate channel, and he hadn't written any personal letters. Glynda wouldn't be helped by association with him now, and nobody else was likely to welcome the contact. It was enough to make the crow's presence seem welcome, even though it nearly hit him with its droppings one morning as he went outside to draw water.
Maybe it was loneliness—or some perverse desire to show that he didn't fear the intrusion—that made him leave the kitchen window unlatched. As he had half-expected, the crow was inside within the hour, first staring at him beady-eyed from the windowsill and then eventually migrating around the entire lower floor as if it inspect it. "If you shit where I eat, this association is over," he told it bluntly.
It tilted its head at him, made a faintly derisive caw, then discarded him as beneath its notice and resumed its tour. And departed before dinner with as little fanfare as it had arrived, into a sky with livid clouds that might bring snow or might vanish before reaching the tower. But he had watched the sill of the window when the crow first poked its head inside. The marks carved there had sounded no warning, which meant it was only a little foolish to welcome the bird instead of chasing it away.
— ★ —
It was another night before the stranger came back to his dreams. This time James was in a tower room that he recognized from his exploration, where boards had been nailed over the windows and a massive chessboard occupied a table with stacks of half-rotted books to either side. In the dream, the windows were uncovered, late morning sun streaming in through a glory of stained glass. The colored shards picked out abstract flowers, a sunburst, a sky that faded into dusky midnight as it rolled around the room until washing up against the moon and a carpet of stars.
James was lost in the view until someone cleared their throat, and he looked over in startlement to see the stranger from before lounging in an open window frame. "Your move," the man said, nodding to the table.
James looked down and found the chess game spread out before him, carved pieces upright and none missing, arrayed against each other with a battle already in progress. The board stretched around them with impossible opulence, exotic wood grains and precious stones picking out fantastical terrain. His hand was already resting on a piece. As he shifted, it pricked sharply at his finger, so that he lifted his hand to see a bead of blood welling up. "I don't remember the rules," he said, and looked over to see the man hitching one shoulder in a shrug.
"That's not my problem. If you didn't want to play, you shouldn't have come here."
"I told you, I was posted here," James said a little testily. Why should he have to explain himself?
The man rolled his eyes and hopped down from his seat, strolling over to the table but seeming disinterested in taking up the opposing side of the game. "Also not my problem. Do you ever do anything besides what you're told?"
Memory yawned, pitch black as the night that had torn it open. A desperate battle, a split-second choice, a fissure opening across earth and sky. So many dead.
His hands ached. He looked down and the runes on his right arm were blurring, running like ink that someone had tried to paint on a sheen of water. It burned as if his skin was peeling off, but this wasn't real, so he clenched his teeth and waited out the agonizing seconds until everything went still again.
He made his hands loosen their grip on the table and he looked up, meeting the now-sharp gaze of the stranger who was leaning one hip against the table and watching James with folded arms. "What do you want?" James said.
"A pony?" the man said rhetorically, then grinned. "A story would be nice. Unless you're afraid of a little conversation."
James snorted. "I'd be stupid to give you even that much, depending on where exactly you came from." He felt steady enough now to stand without leaning on the table, folding his arms to give the man a measuring gaze back. "But you're not Grimm-touched, or you wouldn't be able to reach me here."
The man tilted his head with a mocking little smile, eyes glittering. "You've decided I'm safe. How flattering."
James laughed, and it sounded a little rusty in his ears. "I didn't say you were safe. Just not corrupted."
"Corruption—ah, there's talking to a human for you. Everything needs to be about purity and neat lines." The man's voice was scornful, interest receding from his expression.
"A lesson we've learned the hard way." James studied the man for a minute longer, trying to glimpse the intent that moved behind those light red eyes. But that had never been his gift, and after a minute he sighed. "So tell me, why should I spend my time talking to you?"
The man snorted derisively and stepped away from the table, passing closer to James as he moved toward one of the windows. "You're right, you have so many other options. Try the snowdrops maybe; they're nice. Or see if you can find a rabbit that will talk back."
Amused in spite of himself, James raised his brows. "Your best recommendation is desperation?"
Quick grin—flash of too-sharp teeth—and the man stepped closer, suddenly in James's personal space. James leaned back slightly before he could stop himself, and amusement danced in those wine-colored eyes. "Oh," the man murmured, "there are much better reasons to talk to me than that."
He leaned forward a little more, and this time James refused to retreat on principle, so that the man was staring at him from bare inches away. "See you around," the man said quietly, and James could feel the bare edge of the exhalation against his cheek. "If you're interesting enough." Then he turned and strolled away, setting one foot on the low sill of the open window before stepping out through it and vanishing from view.
James took a step to follow, but a chill breeze blew past him from behind, washing colors from the room and leaving a grime of age and years behind it. He turned to look for the source of the draft, but the whole scene dissolved as he half-woke. He could hear the hissing of snow against the windows, and even under the blankets the room was relentlessly cold.
As he sunk back to sleep, he wondered if he could find the dream again. But no annoying mystery or half-finished chess game waited for him. Only the passing thought that if the snow built up thick enough, it could bury the whole tower as a treasure to be found by a future age, and himself peacefully departed in it.