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Sébastien le Livre was a married man. He knew how being lovers worked, had known since his wedding night, when Adèle had cradled Amandine in her cupped hands and kissed her tiny head, and Sébastien had let his fingers run across the smooth, soft expanse of Clarambaut’s colourful feathers. It had been more intimate than anything he’d ever felt before, a caress to his very soul. The pinnacle of it all. They’d made love before – and that was blatantly obvious despite attempting to hide it that they’d been… hasty – but that shared touch had been something altogether different. He’d felt it inside him, as if Adèle had reached inside and held his beating heart in her hand.
To touch another’s dæmon was the deepest of taboos. It was trust that ran deeper than any other trust ever could.
There were four in a marriage, yes, but it was a dance with complicated steps. The touches were never frequent, and never given without permission. It was far more likely for two dæmons to intertwine, to show outward affection to each other than their human’s lover. Gentle caresses happened, and they were welcome, but there was a boundary. It happened in every marriage, every love affair, and mostly behind closed doors.
Thus, Joseph and Nicolas confounded him beyond measure.
In truth, the whole trio did. There was Andromaque, this warrior woman in men’s clothes, with her sturdy, muscular horse dæmon Sébastien couldn’t quite understand the name of, the sound of it older than his ear and tongue could manage. An ornery beast if ever there was one, but devoted to his human, that much was abundantly clear. If every human and dæmon was an unbreakable duo, they seemed hewn from the same rock in a way no one else ever had, to Sébastien. Yes, Andromaque was strange, but Sébastien and Amandine could look at Andromaque and… Hwento? (something like that, at any rate) and see themselves reflected there. It was the oldest, most recognisable bond on the planet.
Nicolas and Joseph were altogether… stranger.
Not as men – no, Sébastien found them less intimidating than Andromaque and her utter disregard for societal mores, and he supposed them altogether younger – but their bonds with their dæmons were puzzling, if not downright uncanny.
There were two dæmons, that much was clear. Male ones, too, unusual for two men, but not unheard of – Sébastien had met a couple in his life, knew what they were about, what their proclivities usually were, and did not hold it against them, no matter what the Church might have to say about it. They were stunning creatures, too, one a curve-horned gazelle of some kind, the other a splendid dove with a breast that seemed to be bleeding, as if pierced. Indeed, the whole trio had magnificent dæmons that made Sébastien feel slightly inadequate; he loved Amandine with all his heart, with her quick wit and twitching whiskers, but there was no denying she was a rat, and rats held certain… connotations. Not that any of them appeared to hold it against him. As Andromaque said, on the very day they met, “I’ve seen the worst men walk with lionesses beside them, and the best of people with worms around their wrists”. The names of these intertwined dæmons, he learnt, were Tayyib and Bonamico.
But Sébastien could not, for the life of him, figure out who belonged to who.
The first night they had camped, the night cold, the two men had both curled together against Tayyib’s flank, Bonamico nestled between them. Sébastien, curled on his bedroll beneath two blankets, Amandine snuggled at his throat for warmth, had stared at them. They spoke, sleepily, to each other and their dæmons, in a language that sounded like he should have understood it but could not, until they went silent. Sébastien had felt eyes on him, two sets, and looked over.
Andromaque was herself also nestled in the curve of Hwento’s body, and the two of them were staring at him.
“Do you have a problem, Sébastien?” she asked, her voice calm but her eyes glinting, blade-sharp, an unmistakeable threat. Hwento had shifted, scraping one hoof along the cold ground, and snorted menacingly. Sébastien swallowed.
“None at all,” he rasped, as Amandine trembled against him, and he had a vivid, horrifying mental image of a great hoof pressed against her tiny body. “They are free to do as they choose.”
Andromaque seemed appeased, and as quickly as it had come, the threat abated. Sébastien realised, as he wrapped a comforting hand around Amandine, that she’d misunderstood. He couldn’t have cared less what Joseph and Nicolas did with each other, he was more disturbed by what they did with each other’s dæmons. But Andromaque had huddled into Hwento’s flank and closed her eyes, and it was too late for Sébastien to ask.
A nightmare took him, that night. Something more terrifying than he’d ever felt before. Darkness. Horrific, tangible, heavy darkness, and water, burning in his lungs. The face of a woman, pale, somehow visible in the dark, trapped in a coffin made of iron, and a snake, writhing in the water, writhing, writhing, and then disappearing as the woman drowned. Over. And over. And over.
He jerked awake to the cold, crisp night sky, and dragged precious air into his lungs, deep, full gulps. He had been hanged, yes, but drowning was agonisingly worse.
The next morning he pushed the dream aside, but the light brought no answer to the riddle of Joseph, Nicolas and their dæmons. Tayyib rose and shook himself, receiving caresses from both Joseph and Nicolas. He would carry both their packs, allowing either of them to load and unload him with gentle patience. He accepted everything with good grace, and often, as they trudged along, one would find Bonamico perched between his great, sword-like horns, and both Joseph and Nicolas’s hands on his flanks.
As for Bonamico, it was just as confusing. He would settle equally on either Joseph’s shoulder or Nicolas’s, and speak to them equally, rubbing his small head against their cheeks. He received the same sweet caresses from the two men, as if they shared him. It disquieted Sébastien, made him uneasy. Yes, the trust of lovers ran deep, but there were limits. It was as if the four of them were intertwined, inseparable, even.
But they were not. Not entirely. And that was also how Sébastien learnt of another disquieting fact of the trio.
The farthest he had ever been from Amandine had been when, as a boy, he’d been trapped in a cupboard in a locked schoolroom by vicious older boys, and she’d been outside. They had been agony, those scant metres, their bond stretched too thin, and he’d pounded on the door, howling to be let out, to get back to her, as she writhed and shifted through all the different shapes she could think of, until she’d wriggled her way beneath the door as a woodlouse and charged the door down as a cow. Never again, they’d both vowed, and it had been that way ever since.
Until he’d died, of course, but she was back, as if nothing had ever happened, and that was a relief. He hadn’t even felt her disappear, and he dreaded to think what that pain might feel like.
But Bonamico… the distance he could go from Nicolas and Joseph was horrifying.
“Scout ahead,” Nicolas asked as it grew dark, and the dove took flight, soaring into the gathering gloom to search for a place for them to sleep.
Sébastien stared in horror. Amandine shuddered within his turned-up collar.
“What?” Joseph asked, noticing his face.
“He’s…” Sébastien gestured after Bonamico, feeling sick to his stomach.
“It is a trick we picked up,” Nicolas explained. The two of them seemed equally unbothered, and still Sébastien could not tell who Bonamico truly belonged to. “Andie taught us.”
“Shamans and the witches of Lapland learn to stretch their bonds,” Andromaque explained. “They can send messages over great distances. It’s a useful skill to have. We shall teach you it as well, but we will have to head north. The tundra is best for it.”
Sébastien’s first reaction was to recoil in horror. “Absolutely not!”
The three looked at him.
“Whyever not?” Andromaque asked, frowning at him.
“Why would I want to be severed from my own soul?” Sébastien said hotly, cupping a protective hand around a trembling Amandine.
“We are not severed,” Joseph snapped. “If we were soulless we would not have cut you down from your noose!”
Tayyib snorted, tossing his horned head. Both Joseph and Nicolas were glaring at him with equal disgust, as if Sébastien were the one who had just done something heinous and ultimately evil.
He turned away from them, coming face-to-face instead with Andromaque and Hwento. He’d never seen a horse look more ferocious.
“There are rules here, Sébastien,” Andromaque said, steel in her voice. “If you want to be one of us, then you follow them.”
He stared at her. Amandine’s tail flicked rapidly against his neck, and she was so close to his ear he could hear her grinding her teeth.
“I am grateful,” he said, keeping his tone steady, “but I am not one of you.”
“You are, though,” said Nicolas, and Sébastien had to fight with everything he had to not answer with revulsion. He merely levelled Nicolas with a stare.
“You are like us, whether you wish to be or not,” Nicolas continued, his voice calm. Joseph had his hand at his waist, and Tayyib was rubbing his regal head against Nicolas’s arm in comfort. “You will come to understand this in the end, Sébastien.”
Bonamico chose that moment to fly back, landing on Nicolas’s outstretched hand, leaning into the caress Joseph offered.
“There is an abandoned farmhouse not far ahead,” he said. “Half of the roof is intact, and so are the fireplace and chimney.”
“Thank you,” Nicolas said, and Bonamico glowed under the praise.
“Then we’re heading there,” Andromaque said.
“It’ll be nice to have a roof,” Joseph said wistfully. “Or at least half of one.”
That made Nicolas laugh, and the three of them set off in the direction Bonamico led them. Sébastien watched them go, for a moment. It was clear they considered the matter closed, but it left a bitter taste in Sébastien’s mouth: he wasn’t like them. He wasn’t. He was a deserter and a criminal, and perhaps sometimes an average father and husband… but he was not like them. He was no freak.
“I don’t like them,” hissed Amandine, her nose twitching into his ear. Sébastien took a deep breath.
“They did save us,” he muttered, wincing at his own resentful tone. He had not forgotten the agony of cyclical death and resurrection, seeing Amandine flicker back into reality, reforming dust particles, only to know she disappeared every time he died again. It was still too fresh. They both shuddered in unison.
They would still be on that gallows were it not for these three people and their dæmons. And they were kind to them, despite it all.
“Sébastien!”
He looked up at the call. Joseph stood there, a little further back from the others. He waved. He was waiting for him.
Sébastien swallowed, and jogged to catch up.
The farmhouse was old and rotten, and yes, half caved in, but it was somewhat drier than the outside, and, as Bonamico had said, the fireplace seemed in order. Joseph tended the fire, Nicolas busied himself with setting out their provisions, and Andromaque went to find water in the old well. That left Sébastien at a loss, so he found a pair of old milking stools and a crate and set them around the fire. Joseph offered him an encouraging smile.
It seemed his transgression was forgiven and forgotten already. Perhaps that was the way of these so-called immortals: the longer you lived, the less a disagreement mattered. Sébastien didn’t know what to make of it.
They sat, the four of them, in a semi-circle around the fireplace, Nicolas and Joseph settled against Tayyib, as always, but Andromaque had taken one of the stools, sitting beside Sébastien, Hwento standing like an immovable, horse-shaped sentinel behind her.
Sébastien wasn’t certain whether he wished to speak first or not. Andromaque seemed disinclined to, and merely set about sharpening the vicious axe she carried with her, the whetstone sliding along the blade almost musically.
He settled down to sleep, and not for the first time he wished he had a bottle of wine with him, all to himself. They’d finished the last of it last night, and shared between four a bottle didn’t go far to numbing a man to sleep.
He dreamt the dream of the woman again, so vivid, so harrowing. It felt more real than any other dream he’d had before, and he couldn’t get back to sleep.
“Do you see her too?” Amandine asked, her voice quiet and close to his ear. He swallowed.
“Yes,” he said.
“She is so angry,” she continued. “And her dæmon… he seems so weary.”
Sébastien reached up, settled his hand against her warm fur. “It is just a dream, Am.” They’d always shared dreams. Sébastien assumed others did too, with their dæmons. He did not know what the dreams signified, but they certainly couldn’t be real. Dreams weren’t.
Unbidden he thought of Adèle, her belly swollen, her laughter bright, so sure that her dream had told her she would have a girl. Of course, they’d ended up with Martin. “Don’t you say ‘I told you so’!” she’d said shrilly, wiggling her finger in his face, and he’d merely raised his hands in surrender and laughed, too happy with the healthy baby boy in her arms to even think of arguing.
His eyes stung, and he listened to Amandine sing one of her little songs, shreds of childhood rhymes she only half-remembered.
“You did not sleep,” Nicolas said the next morning. He was heating water, laboriously, on the fire, pouring it into a second bucket he’d found.
Sébastien gave him a rotten look, exhaustion making him grimmer than usual, but Nicolas only gave him sympathy in return.
“Bad dreams?” he asked.
Sébastien sucked at his teeth, contemplating not answering, but then decided there was no point. “Terrible ones,” he said. “You would think I would have nightmares about things I know, but it’s… a woman. A woman in a metal coffin, at the bottom of the sea. She drowns, over and over and—”
Nicolas’s tin dropped to the floor with a clatter. His face drained of colour, and his hands trembled.
“Hayati?” came Joseph’s voice from the door, rushing over to him, two dæmons in tow.
“Quynh,” Nicolas breathed, pressing his hand to his mouth. There were tears in his wide, horrified eyes now.
“What?” Joseph tensed, and his face turned ashen as well. He turned to look at Sébastien, who merely stared at them. “Do… do you dream?” His voice was a croak, the words coming out stiff.
Sébastien frowned. “Most everyone dreams—” he began, but Joseph shook his head.
“Do you dream of a woman drowning? A woman with dark hair, and a snake for a dæmon?”
Sébastien almost considered lying, but he had no doubt that Joseph would believe Nicolas over him without question. He swallowed, and nodded.
Joseph slumped, burying his face in Nicolas’s shoulder. Their dæmons crowded around them, huddled against them, and with a jolt Sébastien realised Joseph’s shoulders were shaking. He was weeping.
“We… we must tell Andie,” Nicolas murmured, though his voice sounded distant, small and broken, as if he were not entirely in this world with them.
“Tell me what?” Andromaque had now reappeared, her coat rolled under her arm, her face pink and her hair damp. She stopped dead at seeing the state the two were in, and looked to Sébastien, frowning in confusion.
“He dreams of her, Andie,” Joseph said, scrubbing furiously at his eyes. “She’s still down there.”
Andromaque’s legs gave out. She dropped to the floor, like a stone, Hwento tossing his head and whinnying in anguish, and Sébastien had never seen a face of such unfathomable horror on another human before. This stoic, stone-hewn woman was quivering like a leaf, hands clutched to her breast, teeth gnawing at her bottom lip. It was disconcerting. It felt like stumbling on uneven ground, or being lost in fog.
He left them to their obvious woe, and headed quietly outside. They spoke in broken, grief-stricken voices in tongues he couldn’t understand, undercut with the noises of tormented beasts. It was horrible, and Sébastien found himself wandering further away to flee the noise, tears in the corners of his own eyes, as if their sorrow was contagious.
“Who do you think this Quynh is?” asked Amandine.
“Someone they loved, certainly,” Sébastien said, dabbing roughly at his eyes with his knuckles.
He did not return for a while, and when he did, there was an air of deep gloom in the place. They were huddled together, Andromaque cradled between the other two, but that was not what shocked Sébastien. What shocked him was the fact that Bonamico was perched on her knee, and the three were leaning back against the crossed necks of Hwento and Tayyib. Every day, it seemed, the relationship these three had with the dæmons confused him more and more – repulsed him, even.
It was Nicolas who peeled himself from the huddle first, rubbing at his eyes.
“I let the fire go out,” he muttered, though when he reached for his tinderbox, his shaking hand knocked it to the floor.
“Let me,” Sébastien said, moved from his frozen place in the doorway.
Nicolas attempted to offer him a grateful smile, but his smiles were small to begin with, and his lips barely managed a twitch. Behind him, the other two unfolded from each other, though their dæmons stayed close, Bonamico settling between Hwento’s ears.
Once the fire crackled as strong as it ever could with unseasoned wood, Amandine slipped down Sébastien’s arm to sit on his knee, the most in the open she’d been for days. She looked, pointedly, at him, and he sighed.
“Who… who was she?” he asked, not needing to explain what ‘she’ meant.
They told him about her. About Quynh, the former fourth of them. Quynh the viper with the viper dæmon, their archer and Andromaque’s beloved, lost to the sea. One more reason to hate the English dogs, he thought bitterly to himself.
“We searched for years,” Joseph said. “But we… we never found her.”
“We’d hoped she was dead for good, by now,” said Andromaque. It was the first thing she’d uttered for a while, and her voice was flat and dead.
“I am sorry,” Sébastien murmured, and it was the truth. He couldn’t imagine a more horrible fate, and he felt sick knowing that he was not seeing the mad conjurings of his own mind, but a true event, real and happening at the very moment he was sleeping. Amandine let out a shrill squeal, and he scrambled to his feet, lurching from the door, to vomit outside.
“Oh, Lord above…” he groaned, his stomach heaving again. He roughly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaning heavily against the doorframe. Amandine, on the ground, rocked from side to side, staring into nothing.
When he looked up, there was Joseph, holding out a tin cup of water. Sébastien nodded jerkily, taking it, swilling his mouth with a gulp before spitting it out.
“You should not have to see her,” Joseph said. “It is unfair. The dreams will not abate.”
Sébastien gave him a mournful look.
“We dream of each other until we meet. Nico and I dreamt of Andie and Quynh for seventy-five years until we met.”
He placed a hand on Sébastien’s shoulder. A small flicker in Sébastien told him to shrug it off, but he did not. It was comforting, and the part inside him that was revolted by these people and their ways was growing smaller and smaller.
The dreams did continue, as Joseph had said, and they continued west. They swung southwest after Smolensk, towards Minsk, but keeping far from main roads, Andromaque explaining that they did not want to continue retracing the steps of the Grande Armée. Though covered by a much less conspicuous great coat, they had not yet found Sébastien a change of clothes, and beneath that coat was the sore thumb uniform of a French grenadier.
Eventually, along the way, they scrounged him a coat and breeches that did not scream “French”, and when they finally reached the banks of the Niémen, they halted by a shallow inlet, where Andromaque stretched her arms above her head.
“I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’m tired of being filthy.”
Sébastien spluttered as she began to strip, baring lily-white skin to the chilled air, soon naked as the day she was born. Sébastien’s face went brilliant red, Amandine hiding her face against his neck, only peeking when Andromaque let out a shrill curse as she stepped into the freezing water of the river. Joseph laughed uproariously.
“What, never seen a woman naked before, Sébastien?” he asked, teasing, clapping him briskly on the shoulder. Sébastien scowled, but then he noticed Joseph was stripping as well, and soon he was stepping into the water beside Andromaque. He too let out a curse, and she laughed at him, making her pert breasts bounce as she splashed him, and Sébastien had to physically turn away.
He was met with Nicolas’s smirk.
“Not joining them?” Sébastien grumbled. Nicolas chuckled, arranging river stones in a sensible ring.
“Someone has to make sure they don’t freeze once they’re out of the water,” he said. He frowned suddenly, standing up with his hands on his hips and looking around. “It’s too cold, this year. It does not feel like summer at all.”
Sébastien nodded in agreement. He’d seen fickle summers before, but this felt sharper, crueller. He dreaded to think what the winter would be like.
“Anyway, we shall wash once they’re done,” Nicolas said simply. “Let the fools have their fun!” he added, louder, intentionally making his voice carry to the sound of laughter and cheerful whinnying and joyful hoofbeats, before heading to the edge of the forest to gather wood. Sébastien followed, to help.
That was when he realised something.
Bonamico was perched on a nearby branch, close to Nicolas, cooing gently. Tayyib was with Joseph, frolicking along the bank with Hwento.
“Well, that’s a mystery solved,” Sébastien said. It was meant to be solely for Amandine, but Nicolas heard, because he had the ears of a rabbit.
“What mystery?” he asked, curiously, his arms already laden with the driest branches he could find.
That caused Sébastien to flush again, coughing in embarrassment. Amandine giggled on his shoulder.
“He couldn’t tell which was which!” she crowed, always happy for some mockery at Sébastien’s expense.
Nicolas gave her a puzzled look as Sébastien ran a hand down his face with a groan. He allowed him a few moments of humiliated silence, before clearing his throat.
“Which was which?” he prompted, eyebrows arched.
Sébastien sighed, tossing the meagre assortment of wood he’d gathered to the ground. “I couldn’t tell whose dæmon was whose,” he admitted, through gritted teeth.
“Oh,” Nicolas said. He chuckled. “Really?”
Sébastien scowled at him for a moment, face still hot, before sighing again. “You and Joseph… you act unlike any other people I’ve seen. It is as if you share dæmons. It is more… intimate than I am used to.”
Nicolas hummed, Bonamico alighting on his shoulder, allowing him to gently card his fingers through soft feathers.
“I can see why you found it strange,” he said. “People are usually very restrained with their dæmons. But… Joseph and I have been together for centuries. I have forgotten where I end and he begins, and with our dæmons it is no different. It is like we share them, because we have forgotten what it was even like to be without each other.”
Sébastien swallowed, feeling suddenly humbled. Yes, he loved Adèle, and he thought that, although their lives were simple, it was a grand love, but these two… Centuries together. And still in love – indeed, so in love, so familiar, that the whims and worries of mortals must seem senseless.
But that did not account for… “What of Andromaque, then?”
“We have known her almost as long as we have known each other,” Nicolas said. “She is like our sister, as well as our leader. After so long the boundaries mean nothing. If we can comfort her, we do it however we can. Touching another’s dæmon is not evil, if the touch is welcome, regardless of who it might be from.” He looked thoughtfully at Sébastien. “Perhaps one day it will be so for you, too.”
A lump rose in Sébastien’s throat, and he could not hold Nicolas’s piercing gaze. He looked instead to the river, where Andromaque and Joseph were now wandering back to them with reddened skin and almost transparent underclothes. He quickly looked away again, at the ground, this time, a neutral place to settle.
These three evidently had plans for him, of some kind. They spoke of them with an air of inevitability, as if they were going to happen, whether Sébastien wished for them or not. They spoke of him already like family, as if he were the happy arrival of a new infant into home, and it rankled. He was older than both Joseph and Nicolas, for one (or rather, he’d died later, anyway), and for another, he had a family. A family that was waiting for him, that missed him, that prayed every day he hadn’t died. If he closed his eyes he could see them, vivid and beloved in his mind: Adèle with her plush curves and dimpled smile, Martin with mischief in his eye, Philippe and his daydreams, Jean-Pierre with his mind for numbers. He could see their house, ramshackle though it was, and he could see the lazy cat on the windowsill. He could taste the air of home on his tongue, and he could return to it. It was not lost to him. He came back to life, and he could go back home.
He was grateful to these strange three, but he could not be one of them. He would go home, and remain Sébastien le Livre, husband, father, forger, bookbinder.
Amandine returned to her favourite place in his upturned collar, her whiskers tickling his skin, her fur warm. He cupped her with his hand, and didn’t say any of what he was thinking. Not yet, not when there was a warm glow of camaraderie, of merriment, around him, allowing him inside this circle.
He would be in it, for now. Until he left. He would live out the rest of his days with his true family, and with every generation after that if he had to. He did not want what these strange folk had.
He stayed with them through the next weeks as they travelled west again, through the Duchy of Warsaw, cutting through Bohemia. He learnt that Joseph was an artist, and that made him miss Philippe. He learnt that Andromaque played tricks, and that made him miss Martin. He learnt that Nicolas was a phenomenal cook, and that made him miss Adèle. Their dæmons would show familiarity, getting closer to Amandine, and she bore the new approaches, but barely reciprocated. She kept the distance better than Sébastien himself could, and if it was noticed, it was not commented on.
It was on the outskirts of Prague that they stopped, at a crossroads, Andromaque looking darkly pensive.
“We must decide where to go from here,” she said.
“I grow tired of this cold,” Joseph grumbled. “South! I want to wake up somewhere my toes aren’t turned to ice in the mornings.”
“Somewhere free of war,” Nicolas added. “I believe Sébastien needs time to recover.”
Sébastien’s stomach roiled, and he could hear Amandine’s teeth grinding again. They discussed their destination so blithely, as if it were a given Sébastien would meekly follow them like some stray dog they had found. As if his wellbeing were any of their concern.
“I am not coming,” he blurted.
The three turned to stare at him, all surprised. He almost wilted under their gazes, but instead stood firm, clearing his throat. Amandine’s back arched, her tiny claws digging into the skin where neck met shoulder.
“I am going home. Back to France.” He looked at them, pointedly. “Back to my family.”
Their incredulity morphed into hideous expressions of pity, something that set him immediately on edge. Amandine backed up into his collar, ears back, chattering loudly.
“Sébastien,” Joseph began, “it is not a good idea…”
Sébastien shook his head. “It is my choice. I would desert a thousand armies, but I will not desert them.”
The three of them exchanged looks. Tayyib pawed the ground nervously, Bonamico fluffed his feathers, trembling beneath the two different hands that gently settled on him, and Hwento… Hwento simply stared. It was a most unnerving gaze, searching, far too human for Sébastien’s liking, and neither he nor Amandine could hold it.
“If that is what you choose,” said Andromaque, “then we cannot stop you.”
There was distance in her tone now, none of the warmth that had been growing since they cut him down. Hwento turned away, flicking his tail. Dismissive. Joseph looked down at the ground, disappointed, his face pinched. Nicolas merely closed his eyes and sighed, turning away.
Sébastien could feel it, this sudden barrier between them. Everything they had thought they were building in these last few weeks, this one-sided familial camaraderie, had crumbled in a moment. Sébastien shook it off. They had no right to him. Yes, he owed them a debt, but they had no right to keep him from where he belonged. Still… their pain was unpleasant to see.
“Please do not think I am ungrateful!” he hastily said, Amandine loosening, her head peering out, squeaking softly. Nicolas looked at him, and those eerie seawater eyes drove into him like shards of glass, with a pity Sébastien almost felt disgusted by.
“We do not think that,” he said. “We merely think that it will hurt less if you come with us.”
He spoke as if from experience, but what could he know? He never spoke of family with the quiet, clawing desperation Sébastien felt within his gut, and his sympathy made his hackles rise. Sébastien shook his head.
“It is my choice to make, is it not?” he demanded, spreading his arms. Joseph opened his mouth to say something, but he was halted by Nicolas’s hand on Tayyib’s neck.
Andromaque stepped forward. “Good luck then, Sébastien. Goodbye, Amandine.”
She clapped him on the shoulder, nodded once, and then turned away. Hwento fell into step beside her, and they took the south road.
Joseph and Nicolas both hesitated.
“I hope you don’t have regrets, Sébastien,” Joseph said with a long sigh, as if he were Atlas, the weight of the sky upon him. He looked bitterly down at the ground, then back to Sébastien. Tayyib lowered his horn-crowned head, tail flicking. “Goodbye.”
A small echo came from Nicolas, and they both turned, and followed their leader. Their sister.
Sébastien was left behind, staring after them, and for a long while, until they had disappeared in the distance, he could not make his feet move.
“I… I don’t think I don’t like them, anymore,” Amandine said quietly, burying her face in Sébastien’s throat.
Sébastien raised a hand and cupped it around her, the oldest and most familiar gesture they had. With feet like lead, he turned and continued west, towards France, towards Marseille, towards his family, towards home.
Adèle welcomed him back with tears in her eyes and arms open wide, sobbing into him with relief. He wrapped her in his own embrace, pressing kisses to her soft, brown hair (more grey there than he remembered, he noticed with deep terror in his gut), weeping himself. Amandine reached between them, burrowing into Adèle’s neck, chittering softly.
Adèle started back with a gasp, eyes wide, and Sébastien had to fumble to catch Amandine before she fell. His heart thumped, Amandine’s fur raised along her arched back, ears drawn backwards.
It took what felt like an age before he was brave enough to look Adèle in the eye.
“S-sorry,” he muttered. “It’s… it’s been so long. We missed you.”
Adèle offered a gentle smile. “It just surprised me.”
Sébastien swallowed, setting Amandine on the windowsill so she could greet Clarambaut. The pheasant began preening her softly, and that felt better. It felt normal. It soothed the both of them enough for Sébastien to reach out his hands and pull Adèle closer again, into a kiss. Yes, this made sense.
And if he longed for the intimacy, the softness of feathers beneath his fingers, well, that was simply a trick of his mind, some feeling of Amandine's that had snuck into him.
He was not like them.