As it so happened, Gilead du Carbennic was one-quarter fairy. When his father’s parents had been killed, he had been taken in by a lady of the lake, not to be confused with The Lady of The Lake, and was raised by her to adulthood. As such, Gilead had always had an unusually good relationship with humanity’s closest neighbors. Where other knights all too often fell afoul of fairy curses for even the smallest slights, that Gilead was of fairy stock meant that they granted him rather more in the way of leniency. This became all the more true after he had actually met his father, and had a chance to learn the elaborate etiquette of the fair folk.
It had been years since he had had a chance to talk to a fairy. After his fall, during the latter decade of his life, they scarcely encountered him. Whether that was out of some curse of ill luck, or because fairies could tell that he had been rejected by God and avoided him for that reason, Gilead didn’t know.
Once Gilead had expressed all of this, and his giddy feelings at finally getting to meet with his kin once more, it fell to Sara to deflate his emotions.
“She’s not an actual fairy,” Sara said, cringing. “She’s just a Pretender. But her Pretense is fairies, so she has… fairy powers?”
“Didst thou not say that the powers of Pretenders are based on stories?” Gilead asked, confusion stifling his immense disappointment.
“Have you never heard any of those stories about kind young girls who escape their terrible home lives because of the gifts of doting fairies? I haven’t, but I’m told they exist. And besides; most things that people tell stories about also exist in real life.”
“Of course,” Gilead replied.
“You know, there are fairies in Scrapyard, I think. In the Kingdom Forest. Once we have my sister back we can go and visit them.”
Gilead liked that idea. But first they had to get Zahra back, which meant seeing Sara’s friend, which meant a very long journey overland, longer by far than the journey from Carlisle to Carbennic had been. Sara groaned to herself about that: apparently there were far faster ways of travel available, something called a “train” that they could not take. Such transportation was fast, but centralized, and the risk that they might be noticed by law enforcement was far too great. But Gilead’s bones were unbroken, and Sara had been healed by her sister, so as long as they rested regularly, both of them could make fair pace overland.
They spent the entire afternoon of that day climbing down from the hills around Carbennic and making their way southwards. Or at least, what Gilead still thought of as south; Sara called it “anti-diluvian”, in apparent reference to the odd, patchwork geography of Scrapyard. He entrusted the navigation to her, as he did with many things.
Many a time had Gilead travelled accompanied by a lady, especially in those halcyon days before he’d been sent on the grail quest to meet his destiny. When a lady met a knight and the two of them travelled together, there was a clear demarcation of duties. It fell to the knight to overcome obstacles, be they martial or magical, through his iron strength of will and skill at arms. The lady, meanwhile, provided direction to the quest, telling the knight where to go and what to do, picking campsites and helping him with his wounds.
Though it was obvious that Sara was not a lady of the kind which Gilead knew—if nothing else because of the tribadism, let alone the issues of personality—he found a great comfort in falling back into that role. If he ignored all of the details, the fact that she wore trousers, the firearms, the way she spoke, the strange steel rods (railway tracks) that they occasionally had to cross, the night-sky writing, the fact that they spoke to each other in Arabic more often than any other language, then this was something quite in his wheelhouse. Going to see the lady’s fairy-friend in order to acquire her aid in rescuing the maiden’s sister from a vicious lord vampire? Gilead almost felt as though he had been through this before.
The first night out from Carbennic, Sara and Gilead were so exhausted that they barely even had the time to eat a meal before collapsing into their bedrolls. The second day of travel was not nearly so exhausting as the first, being mostly over flat and rolling countryside where the roads grew increasingly more well-maintained. Between that increased comfort and the passage of time assuaging his injuries, Gilead had the energy when night fell to sit around the fire and rest his mind as much as his body.
This also gave Sara the time to start interrogating him.
“Why didn’t you react when I said that there was something coming? I get you were having a duel and all, but Ruthven…”
“What said thou?”
“Just that there was something coming. Ruthven’s airship, though I didn’t realize what it was at first.”
Gilead’s brow furrowed as he gazed like a diviner into the dancing flames. “I remember no such thing.”
“Like a fugue state…” Sara muttered to herself.
“A what?”
“It’s a word for where you… you forget who you are and start acting in strange ways. A type of madness.”
Gilead’s heart throbbed. He knew exactly where he had seen such things before, and the revelation of that similarity scared him.
“My father would often have spells… He would becometh mad, and for month or year would runneth hither and thither through forest and moor, naked and hairy and…”
Gilead felt faintly ill to remember it. To lay eyes upon that wild man of the woods, with his tangled beard and scarred skin, and to know that this was his very own blood! He was a brave man, and had been all the more braver in his youth when he had still known his father, but even back then he had felt a surge of horror that he might ever come to resemble such a thing.
“If it makes you feel better, you’re nowhere near that state. Is there anything I can do to help when you get… like that?”
Gilead shook his head. He hadn’t even known that there might be a connection between his battle-focus and his father’s madness.
“I nist what might even be done, short of magic. I was more accursed even than I had known…”
Sara coiled tight around herself, knees pressed to her chest, face pressed to her knees. Then, finally, the tension broke. She slammed her feet into the dirt, whining profanities.
“My sister is gone, and all I have is you! Why did it have to be you! A Lazarius madman!”
“If it was my right to choose to be other than who I am, I would have done so a very, very long time ago,” said Gilead. “But I was foretold before I was born. I do what I can.”
Slowly the fire of Sara’s rage and frustration guttered out, leaving only the ashes of misery behind.
“It’s been three years since the two of us were apart for this long. It hits in waves, like a sickness that comes and goes. Knowing I’m not there to keep her safe feels like a fever that won’t break.”
“Where are… what happened to her parents?”
Sara’s eyes flicked over to meet Gilead’s, full of a concentrated venom even as they overflowed with tears.
Gilead fell silent. For a little while, he considered retiring to his tent there and then; in the morning, whatever discomfort existed between them would be buried. But it would not be gone. And then Gilead remembered something Sara had said to him before, about how she did not often talk to people. He slid around the fire until the two of them were only perhaps half a meter apart.
“My parents both outlived me, as far as I know. But this I can say only secondhand; both of them believed me long dead.”
“At least they were both alive.”
“And what use is having one’s blood alive, if one cannot lay eyes upon them? It brought me no succor to know that my mother was alive when I knew that she was a monster, or that my father was alive when he had…” Gilead stopped himself. “I did not mean to compare.”
“Then what were you fucking trying to do?”
“Talk?”
“Then let’s talk about something else. Could Merlin really turn people into cute little animals?”
That was a tricky question, and at first it seemed an absurd one. At least, until Gilead thought about it some more. If he were to meet a man who had lived and died in the land of Judea five centuries before his own time, would he not ask about Christ, no matter how unlikely that they had ever crossed paths?
“I can only speculate, seeing as the man in question was locked in a tree twenty years before I was born. But considering he was said by all to be the greatest wizard Britain had ever known, and Arthur is no fool when he maketh selection for his court, I have little reason to doubt that he could have turned men into beasts. Certes, lesser magic-workers have performed the same feat. I once knew a man who was turned into a wolf by his own wife!”
“Have you ever been turned into an animal, then?”
“No,” Gilead said with a sigh. “Some have tried, but to little avail.”
Sara raised an eyebrow. “You sound like you’ve thought about getting turned into an animal rather often. Which one?”
In truth, Gilead had rarely put thought to the specifics, so much as the mere yearning to no longer be subjected to humanity. He stared then into the fire, thinking of possibility after possibility until at last he had settled upon one that pleased him.
Gilead turned to Sara and said, “If I should have to be cursed with bestial form, it would have to be that of the humble ferret. They have great use, defending mankind against pests, but are also beloved. None have ever accused a ferret of wrongdoing.”
Sara was grinning from ear to ear. “A… ferret? A pet ferret?”
“Mayhap a hunting ferret,” Gilead said with a shrug. “And you?”
“Eagle.”
Sara spoke with no hesitation, almost interrupting Gilead’s question in her eagerness. The campsite fell silent, at least until Gilead realized there was something concerning about their respective choices.
“Doth not the eagle hunt the ferret as part of its chosen items of prey?”
At that, Sara burst out into peals of laughter, no longer able to contain herself. Gilead found it rather less mirthful, but still could not help but chuckle to himself.
“No wonder we bicker, when without realizing each is other’s natural foe!”
It wasn’t that funny of a joke, all things being said. But the tension was so severe that Gilead and Sara laughed for a full minute, leaving both travelers suddenly feeling far more weary than they had before. Then Sara did something unexpected: gingerly and gently, she placed her hand over Gilead’s.
Two conflicting urges arose in Gilead’s chest. One was to stiffen up, jump away, and apologize for his wrongdoing whilst begging for Sara’s forgiveness. The second was to melt like so much butter, pulling her close to himself and refusing to let go until the coming of dawn. Neither was appropriate, so he remained exactly where he was, allowing the gentle prickles of skin contact to fade up the length of his arm. When was the last time he had felt someone else’s touch like this?
“You know,” Sara said, “maybe you’re worth more than just keeping me and Zahra safe, Gilead of the Round Table. You’re forcing me to start considering you a friend.”
Gilead remained silent. After a few more seconds, Sara stood up, yawned, and explained that she was going to go to sleep in her bag out at the very edge of the campfire’s light. Gilead said that that was fine, but that he planned on remaining awake a little while longer. He stared into the fire, thinking about what it would be like to not have to be himself, until Sara suddenly returned.
“By the way, if you hear any shuffling noises or odd breathing, that’s normal. Don’t come rushing to my valiant defense or else I’ll set off the charges and kill us both. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Sara, of course I do.”
“Good.”
Gilead did not understand, but he knew well enough that Sara had her own strange peculiarities, and not to pry into whatever she was getting up to. As for himself, there was something that had been weighing on him for the last couple of days; literally, as he had suspended it from around his neck.
In his final moments, Duranore had handed him a chip of cool, smooth, white material, claiming that it was his armor. Gilead had traded for a bit of twine and held it concealed underneath his shirt, but until then had not had the time with which to examine it closely. Now, with Sara presumably asleep (not really) he could take it out and give it a thorough looking-over. That it was a work of true artifice was his first conclusion. By turning it over and over and feeling its weight, Gilead became increasingly certain that it was not a solid piece of matter, but that it possessed inner components of some description, like a locket.
Except that it had no hinge or clasp, no lip that his nails could get any bite on. It could not be opened: some strange art had caused it to become entirely sealed shut, invulnerable to any prying. The only way Gilead could think to open it would be to smash it.
After maybe a quarter of an hour of failure to find a button or any other mechanism by which to activate the supposed armor, Gilead had no choice but to admit defeat. However this thing was related to Duranore’s black harness, it was not something that Gilead could understand. Perhaps the dying man’s mind had been failing, and he had merely handed his uncle a trinket and believed it to be an armor. It scarcely mattered; whether it had any practical purpose or not, it was a reminder of the nephew Gilead had never had the chance to meet.
That settled, he went to sleep.
The rest of the journey to the border of Leedsrealm was easy, making for the slowest and least stressful days that Gilead had had in quite some time. That was good, because it meant he was able to keep Sara stable in spite of the constant toll her sister’s plight placed on the woman. There were times where she looked liable to detonate and go on a self-destructive charge at any moment.
On top of everything else, there was also one other danger created by the risk of arrest at the hands of Ruthven’s government: they couldn’t take a normal border crossing. There was some kind of danger to crossing between the different shards of scrapyard outside of a maintained border crossing, but Sara was highly vague about the specifics. It wasn’t until the border finally came up on the horizon that Gilead realized exactly why: he wouldn’t have believed it without seeing it.
“It’s called a suture,” Sara said as Gilead looked on in horror. “However Scrapyard was built, it was… crude. The worlds don’t like to interact, and where the stitches can’t hold together, the underlying matter rises to the surface like petroleum.”
Gilead knew of oil seeps, but he didn’t particularly see the resemblance. The comparison to a suture, however, was one he understood immediately. The land, in all of its greens and browns, left off, replaced by an expanse of ugly red, like a fresh scab interrupting smooth flesh. The air on the horizon was distorted and miasmatic, shimmering with opaque substances that had the appearance more of taint spilling into water than anything aerial.
“What labours must be required to make stable crossing of such a thing!”
“There’s a reason why there’s only two of them on this side. But it’s not impossible to cross through unprepared, either.”
Gilead nodded, steeling himself. “Is there aught that I must needs know?”
“Yeah. Don’t get turned around. If you keep moving forward, no matter what, you’ll come out the other side eventually. And… don’t think too hard about anything you see in there. You’ll drive yourself mad if you try.”
“Aye, that much I can do. Onwards?”
“Onwards.”