When dawn broke, Idris felt the herb-induced fever break, too. The illusions that had kept him company all night dispersed. He no longer saw shadows of his uncle, wandering the room, or heard Lila’s voice calling from through the wall. His stump did not hurt as much as it had. He had not slept, but that was not a problem.
Layton had been true to his word and returned hourly, with water and wine and damp cloths. He came, finally, with a tray of simple breakfast foods.
“There is colour in your cheeks, at last,” he said, setting the tray down and pouring a cup of water.
“I think the fever passed. I am through the worst of it. Thank you,” said Idris, taking the cup.
“Shall I check your leg?”
“Please.”
The necrosis had abated once more, back to its patches in the rough, calloused skin of the stump. Layton diligently checked each inch, measured against the lines of paint he had daubed on Idris’s skin to mark the initial rise.
“We are in the clear,” he said, sitting back.
“You were a better healer than you think you were,” said Idris. “Blood-letting is… no joke. Especially from this monstrosity.” He raised his leg and released it, so his stump plopped like a dropped ham down on the sheets. “You did not even have to strap me down.”
The insinuation paled Layton’s cheeks. “Goodness, Idris, does that happen often?”
“Not anymore.”
“How do you manage this out in the kingdom?”
Idris sipped his water, sighed. “Poorly. I tend to myself, mostly.”
“Letting your own blood?”
“If leeches would drink it, I would not have to. But they will not.”
“You live alone?”
“I have… an attendant.” Idris sighed. “But mostly alone.”
He could see the cogs whirring in Layton’s head. Here, he had seen for himself the fragile mortality that the necrosis in Idris’s leg had cursed him with; confronted with this on a regular basis, who would balk at the idea of lichdom, of magical armour which might make one whole?
“Will this kill you?” said Layton finally, turning to look uncertainly in Idris’s eyes.
Idris did not turn away. “Yes. It is likely.”
The Remaker shifted his jaw, frowned at the rough sutures he had put in. Carefully, he stood and collected Idris’s breakfast.
“I made a bone broth,” he said, replacing the cup of water with the bowl. “Drink as much as you can. It should settle your stomach. If you finish and are still hungry, there is fresh bread, too. When you feel like you can stand… well, we will wait for that. Can I bring you any of the texts from the library?”
“I will eat and finally sleep. Thank you. You have been most kind.”
“Nonsense.” Layton took up the tray. “I will not allow my flesh and blood to wither away in my home,” he said, his gaze firm on the empty cup. “In our home. That is not the fatherly way to behave.” He sighed, squared his shoulders. “You were rather brave, to entrust your care to a stranger the way you did.”
“You are not a stranger,” said Idris quietly. “You are my father, are you not?”
Layton’s head snapped to him, shock in his eyes. Then, all at once, he smiled, like he had never heard a sweeter sentence.
“This was not the bonding time I expected, but I will welcome what I am given,” he said. Idris laughed.
“If I had known getting gravely ill would clear the air, perhaps I would have done it sooner.”
“Quite.” Layton moved towards the door. “Sleep well, Idris.”
“Thank you, Father,” said Idris.
Layton smiled shyly as he kicked the door closed. Idris spat the taste of bile that the word ‘father’ had pulled up in his cheeks and drank his broth.
*
The deception had been more effective than Idris expected. After his long sleep and another meal, Layton pulled up a chair, placed a pile of books on his lap and looked musingly at their covers.
“Lichdom,” he said. He flicked through the top text. “I cannot say it will… prevent the necrosis from spreading. Separating the death aria from your body, though… that might work.”
“How would I do that?” said Idris, chewing a bread roll.
“It is a long, difficult, painful process. It could take ten years. I have here all of the texts which will assist you in your first few steps along that road, should you still wish to travel it. In the meantime, there is… there is a less permanent solution. You asked me about the Dead Walker armour. I told you it did not exist. That… that was not entirely true.” Layton patted the now-open book. “This is a text that I keep in my private library. It was written roughly six, seven-hundred years ago, by our ancestor, Johannes Vonner. In it, he details how he assisted the fae in creating the Dead Walker armour, and its accompanying weaponry.”
Idris said nothing. This was the text he had been waiting for.
Layton put his tongue in his cheek.
“I am not… comfortable with sharing this,” he said quietly. “I told you it did not exist because I was unsure of your intentions. Anyone who asks me gets the same answer, for a very simple reason. The Dead Walker armour is and was coveted and powerful. It was so powerful that the fae eventually reclaimed the staff and destroyed a piece of it, rather than allow our family to keep it safely in our vault. I suspect they still have the staff. There are pauldrons, which are lost to time, and there is a dagger.”
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“Where is the dagger?”
“It was buried with the last wielder. He lies in Outer Arbedes.”
Idris watched Layton’s face, looking for the tell. The man was an adept liar, for someone who lived alone. There was hardly a twitch in his expressions to suggest that he had given Dravid Orrost full permission to take and use the Spirit Dagger.
“The final piece,” said Layton, with a heavy sigh, “is in the tower. It is a breastplate, which I keep in a crystal-lined chest. On its own, it holds much less power than the full suit. I am not sure it would protect you the way it is supposed to.”
“What did this armour do?” said Idris.
“The staff worked much like Raven’s Roost does,” said Layton, turning the book around and showing Idris the illustration. The picture of the Spirit Staff showed its pentagon head, the careful construction. “It funnelled the death aria up and through, allowing the casting necromancer to focus fully on the notes he heard, and it amplified the effect. The stories say the staff could raise a thousand men with two notes and no stances required.”
“There was a dagger, too?”
“The dagger manipulated collected souls. Spirits, ghosts, call them what you will. It agitated the energy of a place until the souls manifested and could move at will.
“But the Dead Walker armour itself, it created a death curtain of sorts. It surrounded the wearer with death aria energy, making them painful to perceive and touch. The heat, it is said, melted swords and arrows as soon as they entered the aria’s field.” Layton turned to another picture. Arrows bent. Shields bubbled. “The true power of the armour, though, was that the glass used to create it was unbreakable, except under the scrutiny of a second piece of glass, much the same as it.”
“The armour could destroy itself,” said Idris, frowning.
“Not when it was all together. When all five pieces were under the control of a single user, it was indestructible, or so Johannes claimed.”
“But the fae…”
“The fae,” said Layton wearily, “cursed the artefacts, in their own, baffling way. The price of all of this power was that it stripped your body clean of anything which made it mortal, or even human. Johannes was naught but a walking skeleton when he was done with it, when the fae smashed the helm with the staff they had stolen. He had his soul and his power, but… everything else, it was gone. The Dead Walker set was literally holding his body together. When the armour was removed from him, he fell to ash.”
Idris looked at the hill his left foot made under the covers, the flat valley of his right.
“Then… then the armour, the breastplate, it will not save me,” he said. He could not hide his very real, bitter disappointment. Although his condition was not as severe as he wanted Layton to believe, it would have been a weight off his mind.
“I do not know, Idris. Nobody has worn the breastplate since Johannes blew away in the wind.” Layton closed the book. “The power in it is much diminished as an item by itself. I doubt it can hurt you at the rate that it ruined Johannes. In fact, I doubt it can do much on its own at all. I have wondered, previously, if it could be… reshaped.”
“Into what?”
“Anything I like,” said Layton. “It is glass, after all.”
“A foot?” said Idris, half-joking, but Layton smiled placidly.
“Now that might be something,” he said. “A glass foot, which protects your blood from harm. Which strips the death aria from your skin and prevents the necrosis rising. Is that not appealing?”
Put that way, it was.
“You should not have to suffer, Idris,” said Layton, a frown creasing his brow. “I did rather… burden you, didn’t I? You call our necromancy a curse and I cannot disagree from your perspective, not now, after what I have seen. If I had been with you, from a younger age, perhaps this would not even be a conversation we were having. But I was not. And, to my shame, the gift I gave you took something from you in a violent manner. Your sickness was frightening, and I cannot, in good conscience, let an opportunity pass me by where I could have eased your suffering a little more. Besides, dragging yourself up and down these stairs on one crutch is hardly living. A new foot, made with ancestral glass, could be just the thing.”
“The fae would have to shape it, though,” said Idris. “How would you propose to do that?”
“Well…” Layton sighed. “There are ways.”
Idris knew them. A jaunt into a fairy circle was a one-way ticket to the fae realm, unless they agreed to return the unwary traveller – those agreements were usually bound to the kind of bargains that he himself had made. A particular mushroom helped the transition. Failing that, it seemed that the bright dreams Willard claimed to have were a good method of communication with someone of fae descent. But was Layton really considering making a deal?
“I will conduct some research,” said Layton, with a comforting smile that did not quite sit happily on his face. “In the meantime, you shall rest. Here are your books.”
Idris did not read the texts. He lay in bed, gazing at the ceiling, wondering where to go next. Layton was willing to share the breastplate, but Idris did not yet have the glass required to break it. He needed to write to the Queen again and make an official request for the pauldrons – that was not going to end well. Either that, or…
The staff still existed.
He drummed his fingers on his stomach, frowning. The person who had the audience with the fae had to be him, not Layton. All he needed was access to the vault, and this was over.
That thought felt less like a release and more like a prison. Idris was so close to being out of his deal with the Fairy Queen, so close to escaping Raven’s Roost and forgetting about his father, and yet…
He liked the tower. It sang to him without other, invasive arias making him feel guilty. He liked the library and the resources, texts that could truly hone his craft. He liked the isolation, instead of the whispers and stares. Some moments, he even liked Layton. If nothing else, the man knew his struggles in a way that nobody else could. Leaving Raven’s Roost meant explanations, letters to write, confrontations with his mother and Obrin and…
Idris sighed, wiggled his fingers at the aria, hoped it connected. Idly, he rubbed the scar on his shoulder. He thought that knowing who his real father was would mean nothing. Instead, it had complicated everything.
He owed Layton nothing. Even so, the light in Layton’s face when Idris was kind, or thanked him, or joked with him, was warm and honest and it made Idris want to be better. He had hated Layton, a man who had deceived the Eremonts for his own perverse reasons; now, he pitied Layton. Layton, who lived alone through fear, with no company but the long-dead and a handful of ravens and cats. Layton, who went to Temple Hill to collect a son who was not there. Idris had accused him of being unfeeling and that was not fair. What else was Layton supposed to do? Pine?
What if Layton could be redeemed?
Idris shifted his jaw, scolded himself for the thought. Now was not the time to make everything more confusing.
He spent the rest of the day cleaning himself up, reorganising the herbs and lotions he had made. Around dinner time, he struggled down to the dining room, and was surprised to see that Layton was not there. Instead, there was a single thrall, wiping the table down.
Idris turned, looked around. Nothing. He went to the library and Layton was not there, either.
Curious, Idris ascended the stairs further to Layton’s bedroom door. When he pressed his hand to the wood, he could feel the death aria, thick and pulsing, drifting from the room.
What is he doing? Idris thought. He could not identify the melody.
Tentatively, he knocked. The aria dissipated almost immediately.
“Layton?” Idris said.
Layton opened the door a crack. His face was shining with sweat, his pale cheeks flushed, but other than that he was unruffled.
“I did not think you would be walking around,” Layton said, placing his body between Idris and the view of the room.
“I thought you would be dining. I went to see if there was anything to eat.”
“Oh my,” said Layton, seemingly confused about the time. “I… yes, you are right. The hour is late. I…”
“I can put something together,” Idris said, but Layton shook his head.
“A midnight snack, yes. Let us go to the kitchens. We can dine with the cats, this evening.”
On the way, Layton closed and locked his bedroom door firmly, smiled amiably at Idris as they descended, inquired about his health. Idris answered automatically, his thoughts lingering on the closed bedroom door and the music beyond it.