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After Beron dies they decide to meet for dinner. And in the ways these things happen, what started as a hesitant request becomes an assumption and assumption becomes habit. Until the weekly Vanserra dinner is a guarantee. Sometimes they meet in Day, sometimes in Autumn. Always on Tuesdays.
His brother never misses it. Not on pain of death he discovers a year in when Eris winnows to the Day Palace courtyard covered in blood and stumbling like a new-born calf. Lucien, who had been expectantly waiting is struck dumb. Azriel and Henri appear in a blur of shadow seconds later, the Illyrian laden with bandages.
‘This idiot’,
his harsh tone contrasting with the gentle way he sweeps Eris into his arms, deaf to said idiot’s feeble protests,
‘decides to winnow after being stabbed because he absolutely needed to eat with you. Care to explain?’
Lucien pausing in collecting the bandages Azriel had tossed in favour of carrying his brother replies slowly,
‘Well after Beron.. you see.. we have dinner… Hold on.’
He squawks as the last thirty seconds register in a rush.
‘Stabbed?!’
He is frozen in space until Henri nudges him back into action, wet nose pushing against his bare thigh, corralling him to the nearest archway that Azriel strode towards shouting for a healer.
Even as he hurries after them, to spend an evening wrapping wounds, learning about the assassination attempt Azriel had ‘handled’ and Henri had saved Eris from, it strikes Lucien, his brother’s commitment to repairing all that lies broken and rotten along their shared path.
His brother who still cannot say the word love aloud. His brother who shook Lucien’s hand gingerly once, to Helion’s bewilderment, after Lucien stretched an arm for an embrace. His brother who is trying with all he has. He is an idiot. A single-minded, confusing, exasperatingly loveable one.
Eris’ care had always come in strange ways, even as children, even for him, his favourite brother. He never hugged him. Not even when he was sick. Not even when he cried. No. His brother is odd to Lucien who hugs at least three people daily, who needs touch the way land-people need air.
All that strangeness he knows and alongside it the undeniable unspoken truth. Eris knows love even if he cannot voice it. Eris’ love is a sharp, gnarled thing that does not hug or hold but falls on swords, that burns for those he holds dear. Eris loves him. His love just looks different.
***
So when one evening shortly after the festival of Enflamai, a letter appears on his desk cancelling dinner, Lucien winnows to Autumn before he realises he is still clad in Day garb. The cold feeling of little importance as he rushes towards Eris’ home.
He finds his brother sitting by the fire in his bedroom, Henri laid in his lap. The white muzzled hound is stretched out, milky eyes unfocused as he whimpers in pain. His brother, long hair catching the light of the flickering embers, rubs along the slender frame of the fine creature. His hands glowing softly with heat. His eyes, depthless in their sorrow, barely look at him as he whispers to the room,
‘Henri is sick. He is not long for here.’
Eris, whose soul always seemed so much larger than its vessel, bursting and breaking from his frame in fire and smoke, who never felt small looks it now as tears fall silently. Some grief does not require expression. Some grief is all consuming. Some grief is vast beyond limits of language. His brother is hunched over in pre-emptive mourning as he sings softly and brokenly. A childhood lullaby to the hound whose laboured breath is the loudest sound in the dark room.
‘Should I light the sconces?’
His lowest murmur crashes like a cymbal in the gloom.
‘Don’t.. Please.’
A wet and garbled confession.
‘I can’t watch him like this. I can’t.’
Lucien stomach is a knot that will not take the lump he swallowed from his throat.
Before Eris and Azriel, before Eris and Lucien even, it had been Eris and Henri. From dark corners only scared children can find, he remembers watching as Eris bitterly wept in the then pup’s neck, his bare back oozing blood from a whipping. When Beron next tried, Henri was there in a growl and a leap before a cowering Eris. His body aglow with a holy fire that only Autumn hounds could burn with, teeth bared.
He looked like a monster.
He looked like a saviour.
Beron too late in averting the whip blinded Henri in one eye. Sacrilegious to wound an Autumn hound, he paid with a finger. Not even Kings were exempt from the consequences of harming the Mother’s gift to their Court. Like Henri knew this, knew Eris’ safety was contingent on his presence he never left him after that. No maid or guard or king could separate them. And though Lucien spied Eris shed many a saltwater stream into fur in the future, it was never again as the result of a whipping.
Henri was devoted to his brother and Eris to him in turn. Henri, who never slept in the fine bed of plush silk cushions and woolen blankets on the floor that Eris had carefully curated, but on his feet instead. Henri who fought vicious and bloody in every battle Eris partook in. Henri, who heard about every lover’s quarrel between shadows and fire during their courtship. Henri who was dying.
***
Azriel enters shortly after his arrival. A silent presence that clenches his brother’s shoulder tightly in a scarred hand. And so the three of them are joined in darkness as Henri fades, in between sighs and heavy blinks, into what lies beyond the realm of life. His last exhalation is a breath of soft golden flame that caresses Eris’ face before twisting its way up the chimney so the great hound may seek out his next journey.
Desolation and a corpse is all that remains. Azriel and Lucien watch in concern as Eris clings to the Shadowsinger's hand silent and unmoving, his other clenched in the grey pelt of his friend. A candlemark passes in silence and then hoarsely Eris speaks with a desperation Lucien has never heard.
‘I love you both. You know that?’
Azriel collapses to the floor to bury his face in the long tangled mess of his brother’s hair, whispering frantic assurances in between kisses.
Lucien kneels to look Eris in the eye.
‘I know.’
And Eris, relaxes into Azriel’s hold like a secret has been released. Perhaps he feels it has. His idiot brother like the love he feels has ever been anything but obvious, tattooed in his every action and expression. Tear stained and drawn his face is fixed on Lucien as he asks,
‘Do you think he knew I love him?’
The plaintive agonised admission of a boy. Something Eris never had the privilege of being.
Some grief does not require expression but other grief we carry is for all we did not say.
‘I don’t think he ever doubted it.’