Work Text:
“Brennan!” Mira and I both yell as we sprint over, delighted. It’s been almost two years since we watched him turn his back and walk down the parapet. No visits, no letters, just the daily death report from Basgiath that takes days to arrive here, and the absence of his name.
“Mira! Vi!” he laughs, dropping his pack to wrap an arm around each of us. My right shoulder slides dangerously in its socket from the tightness of his grip, and my ankle is still sore from rolling it on a tree root earlier today, but I don’t care. From what it sounded like in his letter, Brennan had only been able to get weekend leave like this by using the reputation of Mum’s most recent achievements at the Luceran border. This is the longest any of us had been apart from each other and I had felt it, deeply. No one but the gods would know when he’ll get an opportunity like this again. I won’t let my body take away a second of it.
After one final squeeze, he lets us go and takes a step back to let Mum and Dad greet him. The shiny silver scars littering his arms, the curling orange relic that just barely peeks out from beneath his rolled up sleeve, the bulkiness of his legs and torso, even the way he stands now, weight on the balls of his feet — it’s all different. I note with a jolt that he reminds me a bit of Mum, something that had never quite struck me before. I spare a glance to my sister who’s at my side, a spitting image of her, and wonder with a shadow of trepidation if in three years I will open the door not to Mira, but to another Lilith Sorrengail, twenty seven years removed. But Brennan’s hair is still that fiery auburn, like myca berries in the peak of summer, and his grin is exactly as I remember from when we gathered them to rid our pantry of the weevils that had plagued us for a summer. He’s still nine-years-older Brennan, who shoved me into haystacks when I beat him in our races, who scoured every book in Dad’s library just to learn how to wrap my knees, who yanked on my hair when I got to the bathroom first, who read me Fables of the Barren for the fifteenth time in wilting candlelight when Mum was forging her name on a mission somewhere, and Dad was doing the same cooped up in his office. I can only hope that when Mira is thrown into the same crucible, the bits of her that still think the world of her little sister will remain, while every other soft thing is inevitably burned away.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” I murmur over the echoes of my prayers to Amari, to Zihnal, to whoever I thought would listen.
Finally free from the overt fussing by Dad and the covert fussing by Mum, Brennan exaggeratedly stretches his long arms out over his head, though I’m sure it does offer some relief after the seven hour flight from Morraine. I suppress a shudder at the thought of sitting in the same position for that long in the withering cold, back hunched, shoulders tense, legs clenched. “Well you better hurry up and believe it, Vi, because I need to catch up on two years from you and Mira in two days!” he exclaims. He sends a soft smile to the hand Mum places on his shoulder, before pushing both Mira and I over to the living room.
“Okay, fine!” I let him guide me, although it’s not like I would stand a chance against a regular person of his stature, much less a second year rider cadet. But I do spin around a little to tug at his sleeve. “Let me see, let me see!”
My sister is much less gentle and grasps each side of Brennan’s rolled up cuff. She tugs until Brennan yelps, her force tightening the leather into a rather effective tourniquet on his forearm. He lets go of me to shove his assailant away from him. “Fucking hell, Mira, I come home for the first time in two years and you try to amputate me within five minutes?”
Mira just rolls her eyes shamelessly and innocently clasps her hands behind her back before sitting down on the couch beside me. Wordlessly, she gestures a, ‘well, go on, then’ and I, the greatest proponent of sisterhood, cross my arms and raise an eyebrow in synchronicity with her.
Our brother sighs like he regrets his decision to come home, but the glimmer of excitement in his eyes and the eagerness of his hands as he unbuttons the cuff of his jacket is unmistakable. I’m unable to tear my eyes away myself. I mean, who wouldn’t be excited? He bonded a dragon.
I’ve only seen Mum’s relic once — a grand, sweeping mark in rich brown that settles between the borders of her scapulae and creeps up the nape of her neck. I had grown up with a rider in the house — in fact, lesser magic is perhaps the most common form of evidence that indicates that Mum had been by recently— and a relic itself isn’t really active magic per se, just proof of it. Yet, the awe that gripped my soul that day she finally showed me, after weeks of begging, is still palpable in my chest, and I suspect it may never let me go.
Brennan’s relic is smaller and much brighter than Mum’s. It’s formed from beautiful swirling tendrils of ochre that outline a Daggertail, as if he had taken the outer halo of a roaring fire and wrapped it around his arm. “His name is Marbh,” Brennan proclaims proudly. He leans toward me first and lets me trace the edges of the relic, the dragon’s head resting on the edge of his shoulder blade, the pointed tail wrapped around his elbow.
“Orange dragons are the most unpredictable of all dragons,” I recite reverently. It’s kind of funny that that’s the dragon who chose Brennan. My brother has been my rock for years and years and has always been dependably kind. The day I am uncertain about how he might act would be the day I no longer know him at all.
“Well, I guess Marbh lives up to his family name,” Brennan corroborates. He shakes his head a little after, probably responding to something Marbh is saying in his head. Mum barely speaks to Aimsir at home, at least not obviously, and the idea that these mythical creatures open their minds to you, and only you, is something I still can’t quite wrap my head around. “But more importantly, have you ever read that Orange Daggertails have the best taste in rider? Because I may just be evidence for new research.”
Mira groans as Brennan cockily wiggles his brows, but I can’t find it in myself to disagree too much. The fact that Brennan has always treated me well and looked out for me despite being Mum’s favourite speaks millions to me — Mira, too. I like to think that this is something he either learned from Dad, or something us Sorrengail children were all born with; that way, no matter which reason, it means that I might have that innate kindness too.
Despite her complaints, Mira grabs Brennan’s arm as soon as I let go, just as eagerly as I did. She rotates it in a way that would probably slip my shoulder right out of its socket and maybe take the elbow with it too. “I can’t wait until I get mine,” Mira says certainly. No one in this room doubts that she will.
I can’t help the sinking in my stomach at that. I love dragons. More than the other girls who have riders as older siblings and parents. Probably more than Mum and Brennan and Mira. Definitely more than any scribe, even Dad. But the smallest dragon could flap a wing in my general direction and the resulting wind could fracture a bone. That, or just tilting my head up to look at a dragon would probably send my heart rate running so high that I’d crumple straight onto the floor and embarrass not just myself but my entire family line. Hell, even if by some miracle I found myself riding a dragon, I’d barely be able to last an hour before my joints lock and my muscles stiffen and I tumble right off. The best I can do is study them from the Archives and wonder forever what it would feel like to have the wind blowing through my hair, to have smooth scales beneath my legs. It’s time to get over that, too — I’m almost twelve, and soon I’ll start formally training for the Scribe Quadrant with Dad like Mira has been training for the Riders with Mum and Brennan. I can make peace with that, probably, if I have Dad by my side and maybe Dain.
I shake myself out of that train of thought, and try to drink in everything Brennan says so that I have as much of him as possible to last me the next year. He was the quickest time on the Gauntlet, which doesn’t really surprise me, but does spark the competitive Sorrengail spirit in Mira, who assures him she’ll beat it. He also has a best friend called Naolin, who he near waxes poetic about — Naolin bonded the second biggest dragon on the continent, and not only is he the second biggest dragon, he’s a Black Morningstartail, the only Black Morningstartail, and not only did Naolin bond a Black Morningstartail, he’s a siphon, which is so rare and so powerful, and on and on and on.
(This memory comes back to me long after Tairn chooses to save me from that clearing, but once it does, I revisit it often. To have him tied so closely to me, ten years before we ever meet… I don’t often believe in coincidence, but it feels like fate.)
“So have you two fucked yet?” Mira interrogates, over the sound of Dad’s scandalised admonishment.
Brennan’s face turns a red so bright it nearly blends into his hairline. I almost expect Mum to say something about focussing on staying alive in the quadrant, but she loves Brennan much more than she loves me, so all she does is raise an inquisitive eyebrow at him and give him the tiniest up curling of her lips.
As much as I want to tease him as well, I value catching up with Brennan more, so I change the topic to tell him about the recent classes I’ve had with Dad learning Tyrrish and deciphering Old Lucerish, and how Calldyr City has barely any woods, but still Dain and I found a stream to dip our feet in and a new tree to call our home base. And well after the last golden drops of sun have been washed out with shadows and the slight silver glow of the moon, disrupted only by the mage lights that Brennan happily conjures up to my delight, we all retire to our rooms.
I try to sleep for a bit, but I toss and I turn. Eventually, my assertion that I am grown up, almost a teenager, bows to my yearning for my older brother. So I grab Fables of the Barren from its place at my bedside table, and pad over to Brennan’s room. We have a secret knocking pattern, which I instinctively use on the door, never mind that it’s been years since he last heard it. He’ll know it’s me instantly; not Mum or Dad or Mira, though it was Brennan’s idea, so I’m sure that he has a different secret knock with Mira. But in this moment, I let myself believe that this is something that only I have. That I am special too — in a good way for once, not the way that I’ve been since I was born.
The slight confusion in Brennan’s eyes when he opens the door softens when he sees the book clutched in my arms. “Of course, Vi,” he says, without me needing to say anything. He shuts the door behind him and follows me across the hall to my room, perching on the foot of my bed after I settle beneath the covers.
“Hm… Which one today, Miss Violet?” he enquires lightly, flicking delicately through the worn pages.
I am overjoyed that Brennan is back, but also feeling a little pitiful, so I ask for The Origin.
Brennan obliges. “In the days where magic touched every blade of grass, every branch and every borough, there once lived three brothers…”
His voice is deeper now than it was before he left, but still just as comforting. I know this story back to front and back again, but still I listen with rapt attention. About the first brother who is brave and strong and forms an unbreakable bond with a dragon. About the second brother who is cunning and agile and bonds a gryphon. And about the third brother, who is so jealous and so desperate that he looks at the beautiful, magic rich earth that surrounds him and carves out the space that his soul once occupied, to fill up with magic that only he was unfortunate enough to be born without. Everyone has magic in this story. Everything has magic. Everything, except for the third brother.
And so I do wonder, not for the first time, but the first since seeing irrefutable proof that Brennan had bonded a dragon, whether one day I will wake up to a nightmare. One where Mum has relocated us along the Poromish border, and Mira returns home, not from Basgiath with a dragon, but from whatever school they have in Poromiel with a gryphon. That nightmare feels real, not because I believe that Mira would ever defect to Poromiel, but because my joints are just as stiff in it and my muscles just as sore and my head just as dizzy, and Brennan has magic and Mira has magic and I have nothing more than a body that would have already been lesser than without dragons and gryphons. That nightmare feels real, because in it, I still feel the imprints of awe and longing around my soul from seeing Mum’s relic and Brennan’s relic. It wouldn’t surprise me then, if in that nightmare, my soul aches so much that I carve it out and bury it deep into the earth. I wonder if the third brother was truly evil, or just so tired of being trapped in his body that he listened to the only magic that would let him. I wonder if I could be evil.
“Vi?”
My brother’s hand is on my shoulder, gentle. “Hm?” I reply.
“Where’d you go?” my brother asks. His brow is furrowed.
I don’t know how to respond to that, so I don’t. “You’ll come back to read to me again, right?” I ask instead. It sounds childish even to me, but I’m too tired to feel embarrassed. “After you become a real rider? After Mira bonds a dragon?”
“Vi…” My brother puts the book down and settles his hand over mine, looking right at me. Brennan’s eyes have always been a clear amber. I wonder if he can see red rings around my pupils. “You know in class, Professor Kaori told us that signets manifest based on our deepest desires.”
I blink, a little taken aback by the change in topic. “I know that already,” I say.
Brennan huffs a little. “Of course you do, you’re Vi,” he replies, only a little exasperated. “Well, Vi, we only briefly mentioned it today, but my signet is mending.”
“Because you fix things,” I tell him frankly. “Because you’re kind and you want people to be okay.”
“Maybe,” Brennan acquiesces. “But wanna know the real reason?”
“What do you mean ‘the real reason’?”
Brennan hums in response, like he’s trying to decide how best to word it. “This is gonna hurt a little. I saw you limping.” He tilts his head slightly to ask if I’m prepared and folds the covers up from where they cover my feet.
This sort of pain is a familiar one, and I know that even without a mender I would be completely fine in a week or so, and have been absolutely more than able to push through it today. I nod anyway, because Brennan seems to be trying to prove a point, but more importantly, because I want to be the first person here to see him wield. There is a burning pain in my ankle that I grimace at, and then it feels good as new. It might be in my head, but it feels just a little less stiff than when Nolon mends me.
“I got this signet because I learned how to wrap joints and make slings and massage muscles, Vi.” Brennan pats my ankle and places the blanket over my feet again.
This is the point I was letting him prove? My throat burns as I keep my voice as steady as I can. “Because you always have to fix me,” I mutter bitterly.
“No, Vi.” Scratch what I thought earlier, this is exasperated. Brennan sighs, and I can’t help but bristle at it. “My deepest desire, what I want most,” he tells me, gentle as ever, “is for you to be able to get through your day, pain free. And I’m truly very sorry that there isn’t a signet out there that can cure every condition, and that Marbh and I couldn’t create a new one. But the next best thing is mending.”
… What does one even say to something like that?
“For me?” I manage, voice smaller than it’s ever been.
“For you,” Brennan assures, his new, deeper voice just as small. “When I’m good enough at this, I’m going to mend your pain whenever it needs to be mended, so that there is nothing holding you back from showing the world who you are. That’s why Marbh chose me. You’re the reason I was able to become a rider, Vi.”
I search in his face for any sign that he is lying or just taking pity on me. I’ve had that nightmare too, one where Brennan loves me in a way that turns me fragile. I search for any indication that he has taken his newfound power as a sign to anchor me in the harbor and keep me intact, while everyone else is free to do what ships are meant to do: sail. I don’t find that. What I find is a much fiercer emotion. One that drives. Strong enough, even, to go against the current. But just to make sure, I whisper, “You promise?”
“I promise that you made me a rider,” Brennan says. “And I promise that I will be the best mender there has ever been.”
(A decade later, those same amber eyes pierce through the murky haze of pain around me. He has a name that I do not recognise. He has done things I do not understand. I doubt, for the first time, whether that promise is still true. I made it out of the harbour but now I’m lost at sea. And I do not know him at all.)