Chapter 22: The South Meadow
He took the long way, past the sheep gate and down through the pines, where the track went soft with needles and the light came down in bars. The truck sat cooling behind him at the fork. He had not wanted to drive the last mile of it.
Two days of holding still had gone into his back like a splinter of iron. He had sat in the municipal chair, then stood by the folding table, then sat again. By the time the woman in the cardigan thanked him, his shoulders had locked to his skull.
Liam moved in the pouch. Small and deliberate, the way he did when he wanted to be counted.
Kaelen kept walking.
The pouch rippled from the hinge of his jaw down to his collarbone, answering him the way it always did. Both of Liam's palms went flat against the lining. He did not say anything to him yet. There was a list of things he was going to say. None of them worked in the open air of the track.
The south meadow opened at the bottom of the slope, ringed by pines standing close enough to keep the wind off it. The grass in the middle lay pressed flat in a wide circle, laid down over years by two bodies and not by weather. The evening sun came through the trunks low and gold, and the midges hung in the light.
Kaelen stopped at the edge and looked at it.
Then he walked to the middle, went down on one knee, then a hand, careful of the bandages, and then onto his front. The grass was cool through his shirt. He put his cheek on his folded arms and let his wings fall open on either side of him. His tail went flat and still.
He worked two fingers up under his jaw and found the edge of the pouch.
Liam climbed out onto the shelf of his chin, then down to his shoulder, walking heel to toe. He sat there for a moment with his hands braced on the fabric of Kaelen's shirt. He didn't ask anything. Kaelen shut his eyes, and that was the answer.
Liam got down onto his back.
He started at the top, at the band of muscle under the skull, and worked down with the heels of both hands. Kaelen could feel every step, small and certain, Liam reading him the way he read a keyboard, by touch and no mistakes. The first knot sat to the left of the spine and had been there since nine in the morning.
Liam leaned his weight into it and held.
Kaelen's breath came out of him in a flat huff across the grass.
"That one's been there a while," Liam said, close to his ear.
"Yes."
Liam's voice dropped, quieter than the midges. "Where's the worst of it?"
"Left side. Under the wing."
Liam went there. He crossed the plane of Kaelen's back, stepping over the ridge of the spine where the scars made a seam, and stopped at the root of the left wing where the muscle fanned out under the shoulder blade. He put a hand flat on it first, feeling, then pressed.
Kaelen heard his own breath stop and start again.
The light changed while Liam worked. It went from gold to something the colour of tea, and the pines took it and held it high up in their crowns. Kaelen lay with his eyes open on the flattened grass and a blade of it across his wrist. He could smell the meadow, green and crushed, and under it the leather smell of his own wing membrane warming in the sun. Something turned over in the earth a few feet away and went quiet.
Liam worked the long muscle from the shoulder blade down to the small of the back, in sections, with pauses between. Every knot he loosened took him three attempts, because the muscle did not want to give up what it had been holding. Kaelen felt each release travel outward like water finding a new channel.
By the time Liam reached the lower ribs, his hands had slowed.
"Do you want me to stop?"
"No."
Liam kept going.
The last one was the worst. It sat under the wing root itself, wedged between the shoulder joint and the first long bone of the wing, and it had locked there when Kaelen stood at the table and answered questions about a log. Liam climbed up onto the wing to reach it. He straddled the leading edge, braced his feet on the membrane, and pushed the knot toward the bone with the flat of his hands, then with his heel.
It hurt enough that Kaelen's tail cracked once against the grass, hard, and then lay still.
Liam didn't apologise. He shifted his grip, found the angle, and leaned in again.
The knot let go all at once. Kaelen felt it come apart under Liam's hands, and then the purr rolled up out of his chest before he could get a hold on it. It went through the grass and into his own jawbone. Liam felt it come up through his feet and his knees, and he stopped pushing for a second and just sat there on the wing, breathing.
Then he climbed down, crossed Kaelen's back, and lay flat between the shoulder blades with his arms out.
Kaelen lay still under him and let the purr do what it wanted. The sun had gone off the meadow entirely. Somewhere up the slope a blackbird was arguing with the dark, and the air at ground level was cool enough now to feel it through his shirt.
He turned his head sideways so his cheek lay on his arm and he could see the small rise and fall of Liam's back against his own.
"Liam."
"Mm."
"Do you want to stay out here?"
Liam was quiet for a moment. Then he spread his hands flat on Kaelen's shoulders, one on each side of his spine, and pressed down, which was what he did instead of words.
"Yes," he said.
Kaelen did not get up. Above him the pines kept the last of the light in their tops, and the meadow gave up its heat into the cooling air. His pouch moved once on its own, an empty ripple along his throat, searching for something that had climbed out of it, and he let it search.
He lay flat between Kaelen's shoulder blades with both arms out and let the purr come up through his ribs. It worked into his knees, then his jaw, and he stopped counting anything at all. The grass under his palms was already cold.
The pouch rippled once more, low along the throat, and found nothing in it to hold.
Liam's hands got tired of being still before he did. They walked the seam of scar above him, tracing it from the shoulder blades to the collar, and they didn't need light for it. He knew that ground the way he knew a keyboard, by ridges.
He was five. He had been five in a kitchen with a stove they were still burning coal in, and a chair pulled up to the window because October light in that house only came in through one side.
Telisa sat in the chair with her wings half folded back against the shutter, and the tin open on her knee. The tin was small and dented and had to be prized up with a thumbnail. Whatever was in it smelled of lard and something green and sharp.
Kaelen knelt on the floor in front of her with his wings out and his back straight, because she told him straight was how you could feel the membrane leave the bone. He was ten. Ten looked enormous from the table.
"Feel along the edge, here." She drew her two fingers out from the shoulder to the wrist joint, slow, and the membrane went after her hand. "If it catches on you, it's dry. If it slides, leave it alone."
Liam sat on the table with his heels kicking the leg of it and watched his brother be taken apart like a machine. Telisa pressed the flat of her thumb to the base of his tail, and the wing on that side snapped up level with her chin.
He laughed so hard he had to hold the table edge. Kaelen turned his head and looked at him with a face like a shut door.
"Can I try?"
Telisa looked at Liam's hands. Small even for five, and clean, because she kept them that way.
"Does he have to?" Kaelen said.
"He'll have to know it the same as you." She lifted Liam off the table by the back of his shirt and set him down on his brother's wing. "Small hands are good for this. You'll get at the places I can't."
Kaelen's wing shifted under him, the way a boat shifts. Liam grabbed the leading edge and held on, and Kaelen made a noise she ignored.
She showed him where to stand, one foot either side of the leading bone, and how to press along it from wrist to shoulder with the flat of his palm and not his fingertips. He pressed too hard. Kaelen's back twitched under the wing, all the way down the tail.
"Why does it do that?" Liam asked.
"Because it likes it or it doesn't. You'll learn which by standing there."
Then she had him walk down off the wing onto the tail, which was warm, and round, and lay across the floorboards like something asleep. She put his hands on it near the base and moved them outward in sections, the same way she'd done the wing, and told him the tail would tell him what the wing was hiding.
Kaelen said it tickled. Telisa told him to hold still and he did.
Liam remembered the last part better than the rest. She'd had oil on her fingers and she wiped them on her apron, and she looked at him the way she looked at a job that was half done.
"You'll be doing this for him when I'm not here to," she said. "So learn it properly."
The purr stopped.
Liam came back to the meadow with his cheek pressed to his brother's shirt and his hands gone still at the top of Kaelen's spine. Dusk had come all the way down into the grass. He could smell pine resin and cold ground, and no oil at all.
He sat up. Kaelen's breathing hadn't changed.
Liam walked down the long slope of his back to the small of it, then off the shirt and onto the tail, which lay flat and heavy and had not moved in an hour. He put both hands on it near the base, where the muscle was thickest, and worked outward the way she'd taught him.
"What did she put in the tin?" he said.
Kaelen's voice came from somewhere above him, slow with sleep. "Lard."
"And the green?"
"Something out of the hedge. She never said what it was."
"You still have the tin," Liam said. Not a question, but Kaelen answered it.
"Bottom drawer. In the mending tin, with the waxed thread."
Liam kept working. The tail muscle gave under his hands in sections, the same as the wing had, and every section he loosened let something go further up. He found a hard knot two-thirds down that no wing work had touched, and he leaned into it and held until it softened.
Then he climbed back up, found his place between the shoulder blades, and lay down again. His hands ached at the heels. The purr came back up slowly, low, and turned over under him like something settling into a nest.
Kaelen's tail lifted off the grass, found Liam's ankle in the dark, and wrapped it. It held him there while the last light went out of the tops of the pines.
The tail kept hold of his ankle the whole way up through the pines and let go only at the sheep gate.
Kaelen opened the truck door one-handed and set him down on the passenger seat, in the fold of his jacket. Then he got in and drove the last mile with the heater breathing on the windscreen.
Liam stayed in the fold. Every bend in the track slid him an inch along the seat toward the seam, and every time, Kaelen's bandaged hand came flat across the leather and stopped him. He didn't have to look down to do it.
Halfway along, Liam raised his voice over the engine. "Can you get your hands wet?"
"No. Not for another day."
That was the whole of the conversation until the house lights came up over the rise.
The kitchen was cold. Kaelen lit the lamp first, then ran the tap until the water came warm and filled the shallow bowl. Liam stood in it to his knees and scrubbed, and dried himself on the corner of a flannel Kaelen held over the rim. Kaelen washed his face with the other hand and left the bandages alone, and the two of them were done with the whole business of the day inside ten minutes.
The bedroom was colder than the kitchen. The big low bed sat under the window, and the moon was up past the pines now, throwing a grey square of light across the boards.
Kaelen pulled the covers back with his forearm and lay down on his front. His wings came open a hand's width on either side of him, then settled flat along the mattress. His chin went down onto his folded arms.
Liam climbed the bed leg at the foot. Then the sheet, which took both hands. Then up over the rise of Kaelen's hip and along the long slope to the place he always went, between the shoulder blades, where the two wing roots met the spine.
He lay down there and put his cheek on the shirt.
Kaelen reached back over his own shoulder, slow, and pulled the crocheted blanket up off the rail at the foot of the bed. It came with a small dry sound of wool against wool. The colour had started out a fleece's colour and had gone the colour of tea since, and the stitch ran in tight shell patterns down the middle and looser at the border.
He dragged it up over his back one-handed until the weight of it settled across his wings. The soft wool came to rest just short of Liam, close enough that he could feel the warmth of it and not the wool itself.
Liam turned his head and looked at the edge of it, a foot away.
"Is this the one Gran made?"
"Gave it to Mum the year I was born," Kaelen said.
Liam pushed up onto his hands and knees, crossed the last of the bare shirt, and went under the edge of it head first. The wool dragged over his back, heavier than it looked, and then he was inside where the air was his own breath and already warmer than the room.
He worked down along the channel of Kaelen's spine until the blanket lay over his whole body and he could feel it resting on his heels.
Underneath him, Kaelen's back lifted a fraction with each breath. Since the hearing that had been the only thing the man's back had done, rise and fall, while the rest of him stayed locked. Now the muscle moved all the way down past the ribs and into the small of it, loose and slow, the way it did when he was nearly asleep.
Liam put his palm flat over the place where he'd freed the worst knot. It was still warm from the afternoon.
"Do you want it off?" Kaelen said.
"The lamp?"
"Mm."
"Not yet."
So the lamp stayed lit, and the grey square of moonlight lay on the floor beside the bed, and Liam lay in the dark with a hand pressed to his brother's back and the wool over his head.
He found the dropped stitch by feel while he was thinking about nothing. It sat a hand's width from the blanket's edge, a loop of wool that had slipped its course a very long time ago and never been picked back up. Nobody had fixed it. Gran had let it go, or Mum had, or neither of them had noticed, and it had stayed slack like that through the winters the house had been cold and the ones it hadn't.
He hooked his thumb through the loop and let it sit there.
The purr came up slowly under him, rolled together with the heat from Kaelen's skin, and went through the mattress and the frame of the bed and into the floorboards. Liam closed his eyes on the wool and stopped listening for anything up the slope.
Out in the dark the truck ticked as it cooled, and a pine branch scraped the corner of the roof, and neither of them said anything about the room at the mill.
He slept with his thumb still hooked through the loop, and the purr went on under him, slow as a kettle coming up.
Then the wool got lighter. The room went the grey of the moon square and then it went green.
He was standing in the back grass with it up over his head. It shouldn't have been over his head in the yard, because Da kept that cut for the washing, but it was over his head, and it was wet with dew, and he had to part it with both arms and lean into it like water.
Kaelen was nine and a wall of him, and Liam heard him coming from the far side of the yard, where the trees creaked. He lay down flat and stopped breathing, the way he'd been taught.
His brother walked past him twice. The third time he stopped, turned his head, and put his nose down into the grass an arm's length away.
"You smell like the hedge," Kaelen said, and scooped him up in one hand.
That was the game. That was the whole game for two summers, and Kaelen never once pretended not to find him.
The meadow came next, and the woods after it, but those were the same afternoon turned over and over. Seed heads taller than the house. The ring of pines with the flat place in the middle that they'd worn down themselves, long before anyone put a truck on the track. Kaelen carrying him out there in the crook of his arm and setting him down at the edge of the flattened grass and lying down on his front beside him, wing spread out level, so Liam could walk up onto it.
Then the step, and Mum.
She sat on the bottom step with her wings folded back against the doorframe and her elbows on her knees, which was how she sat when a thing had to be said properly. October light. Their father's shirt hanging on the line behind her, four inches of sleeve.
"You've noticed you're not the height of the postman," she said.
Liam had. It was mostly what he had noticed.
"You've got a tail, and you, Kaelen, have a pouch under your chin you'll grow into, and a set of wings on your back that came from my side." She looked at both of them, one then the other, and didn't soften it. "Down the glen there are people who have none of that. They'll be kind about it for a while."
"Why do we stay up here?" Liam said.
"Because kind wears off." She took his tail in her hand, the whole of it, and ran her thumb along it. "You keep this out of sight at the gate. And you, you keep your wings folded where they belong."
Kaelen asked what would happen if they didn't. She told him he would find out, and he would only have to do it once.
Da came in from the hen house with the bucket, and the memory went bright.
Thomas was Liam's size and brown-haired and had Liam's hands, which he saw every day in his own reflection on the dark laptop screen. He set the bucket down and put his fists on his hips and looked at his two sons the way a man looks at a hill he's planning to walk up.
"Right," he said. "Which one of you is climbing today?"
Liam put his hand up.
Thomas took the bucket off the step and set it by the door and looked at the two of them the way he did when a job had come up.
"Inside, then," he said. "Boots off at the door."
The kitchen was warm from a fire that had been banked all morning. Kaelen went down onto the rug in front of the stove without being asked twice, and lay out on his front with his arms folded under his chin. His wings came half open on either side of him, then still. He had grown into them that summer.
Liam got his boots off by pulling at the heel with his other boot, which took a while. Thomas waited and didn't help.
"Hands and feet," he said. "Three of them on him at any time. Which three doesn't matter."
"Why not four?" Liam said.
"Because you'll want one free to take hold of a thing you can't see yet."
Kaelen turned his head sideways on his arms. "Why am I the hill."
"You're the best hill in the county," Thomas said, and put his fingers up under Kaelen's ribs.
Kaelen went up off the rug in one writhing motion, wings snapping open and tail knocking the coal scuttle, and the laugh came out of him high and helpless. Thomas kept his fingers working along the boy's side, up over the ribs and down again, quick, nothing cruel in it, and Kaelen rolled onto his back to get away and only opened himself up to more.
"Da. Da."
"I'm checking the terrain," Thomas said.
He stopped when Kaelen was gasping, and patted the boy's stomach twice, and Kaelen lay there with his wings flat under him and his chest going. The two of them looked at each other, and something passed between them that Liam couldn't see, and it was fine.
"Over then," Thomas said. "Hill's closed on that side."
Kaelen rolled back onto his front.
Liam went up the way he'd been shown that afternoon. Heel first onto the soft place above the hip, then both hands on the ridge of the spine, then a foot on the far side, low. The rug was nowhere near as warm as the skin through the shirt. He could feel his brother's breathing under his knees, and under the breathing, a low steady hum he had always known about and never thought to ask after.
"Where's your weight?"
"On the bone."
"Both feet on it, then."
Liam shifted, and Kaelen grunted, and Liam shifted back.
"See how he breathes?" Thomas said, close to his ear. He had climbed up onto the table to be at the right height. "Fast means you're standing on something that hurts. Slow means you've got it."
"It tickles," Kaelen said into his arms.
"Slow," Liam said.
"Good."
He made Liam climb the whole back five times. Up over the shoulder blades, across the flat between the wing roots, down the long slope to the small of the back, and back to the hip. On the fourth trip Kaelen tried to shrug him off, which did not work, because the shrug was slow and Liam had felt it start in the muscle and had his feet set.
They did the tail next. Thomas taught him the tail the way he taught him everything, by doing it once with his own hands and then standing back. Liam walked out along it from the base, and the muscle gave and gathered under each step, and twice it lifted him a quarter inch and set him down again.
"What do you do when the ground moves?" Thomas said.
"You stop walking."
"Then what?"
"You wait for it to stop moving."
Kaelen brought the tail level and held it level, which took effort, and Liam could feel the effort in it. That was the second lesson, though Thomas didn't say so out loud. A thing that held still for you was working.
Then Telisa came in from the porch with the light behind her and stood in the doorway with her arms folded, and Liam knew what was coming because it came every week.
"Your turn," Thomas said.
She sat on the edge of the chair by the window and folded one wing down along her side like a ramp, and the membrane went slack and grey in the low light. She was bigger than Kaelen and always had been, and the wing reached from her shoulder past the arm of the chair.
"This one you don't rush," Thomas said. "Different bone."
Liam went up the wing. The leading edge was smooth and warm, and his hands slid on it, and under the thin skin he could feel the strap of muscle that ran from her shoulder to her wrist. At the joint it caught, and he stopped and looked back at his father.
"That's where it's dry," Telisa said. "Step past it. It'll take your weight at the wrist, never at the elbow, and if I go quiet, you get off."
"Why?"
"Because quiet means it's about to fold."
He practised it four times, up and back, until his legs ached at the tops. Kaelen watched from the rug with his chin on his arms and said nothing. Telisa watched the room and not Liam, which was how she stayed ready.
Then Thomas said that was enough for one day, and lifted Liam off with both hands under his arms and set him on the table. Kaelen got up off the rug and stretched his wings out to full span, and one of them clipped the hanging lamp, and everyone laughed except Kaelen.
"And stop being a jungle gym," Kaelen said.
"You love it," Thomas said, and got him under the ribs again.
Kaelen went down laughing with his wings spread out on the boards, and Telisa stepped over him without looking, and the fire ticked in the stove, and that was the whole of the afternoon.
Liam woke with his knuckles aching and his thumb still hooked through the loose loop of wool. The blanket had gone stiff with his weight and the air under it was warm and used.
Beneath him Kaelen's back was rising and falling, slow, all the way down past the ribs and into the small of it.
He lay still for a moment and let the dream go. Then he pulled the loop through, and the dropped stitch came back into its course, and the wool drew tight and stayed.
The wool had stopped being warm a while ago.
Liam lay under it with his cheek on Kaelen's shirt and his thumb hooked through nothing, because the dropped stitch was back in its course and had drawn itself tight. Sweat had gathered behind his knees and along his hairline. The air under the blanket was his own breath used twice, and it had gone flat.
He pulled his thumb free and worked backward down the channel of the spine, hands and feet, until he found the edge of the wool and the cold under it.
He came out into the room air and stopped there on his hands and knees. It was cold enough to feel in his teeth. The lamp was still burning on the table by the bed, turned low, and the moon square had moved a foot across the boards toward the wall.
Below him Kaelen's back went up and down, slow, all the way into the small of it.
Liam sat down in the flat between the wing roots and let himself cool. The shirt under him was damp where he'd been lying, and warm, and the warmth smelled of him. He wiped his hands on his own arms and got up again.
He took the climb slowly. Along the seam of scar, over the left wing root where the muscle was still soft from the afternoon, then up the last short rise of the neck.
Kaelen's hair lay loose over the nape, black and heavy, tangled in the hollow where the skull met the spine. Liam parted it with both hands. It smelled of woodsmoke and of the salve that had come off the wing, and under that the plain smell of his brother's skin.
He stepped in and put both feet on the top vertebra.
The tendon there went tight under his heel. On the left, a wing lifted two inches off the mattress and stayed up a moment, then settled back. The tail along the bed flicked once, hard enough to move the sheet, and lay still.
Liam froze, the way he'd been taught. Both feet on bone, hands braced, no weight moving anywhere.
Then Kaelen's breathing changed.
It came up out of the deep part of his chest, longer than before, and went down again slower than it came up. The mattress gave under the both of them as his weight sank into it, shoulders first and then the whole length of him, and the last lock in his back let go without any sound at all.
Liam waited until the second breath came and matched the first.
"Are you awake?" he said, quiet, into the hair.
"Mm."
That was the whole of it for a while. Liam sat on the bone with his knees drawn up and watched the room from there, which he never did. The window was a grey square, and a pine moved across one corner of the sky and back.
He said, "Do you want me back in?"
Nothing for four breaths. Then the pouch moved, low along the throat, one slow ripple that traveled up through the collarbone and into the hinge of the jaw. It was empty, and it went the whole length of itself anyway, the way it had out in the meadow.
Kaelen's bandaged hand came up over his own shoulder, blind, and found only the pillow. It stayed there a second and dropped back to the sheet.
Liam looked at the hand lying open on the cotton. He stayed where he was and did not go down.
He wasn't tired either. Not the kind of tired that went anywhere.
He spread the hair across his lap and found the small muscles at the base of the skull, behind the ear, where the jaw tied in. They were hard as fence wire. He'd never worked that ground on purpose; nobody had ever showed it to him. He put the heel of his hand against one and leaned.
Kaelen's breath caught and came out through his nose.
Liam held it, waited, and leaned again. The muscle gave a fraction, and then another fraction. He moved to the other side and did the same. Under his knees the throat moved once, swallowing, and then the purr came up.
It came slow, from the whole of the chest instead of the top of it. Liam felt it in the bone under him before he heard it at all.
He lay down then, flat on the nape with his arms out, one hand on the wing root and one on the slope of the shoulder. The hair was warm under his cheek. From here the purr wasn't something that came up through his feet. It was under his ear, inside the skull, in the same place his own thinking lived.
Below him, Kaelen's mouth had come a little open.
Liam could see the lamp from where he lay, the wick burning down inside the glass. Nobody was going to turn it off. He thought about the drop to the table and the climb back up, and he decided against it in the same second the thought arrived.
The truck ticked out in the yard. A pine branch scraped the corner of the roof. In the kitchen the fire went down to nothing, and the house gave a small knock of cooling timber, and Kaelen's breathing went long and even underneath all of it.
Liam put his ear back against the skull.
The purr came up through the bone, steady, and it was still coming when the lamp ran dry and guttered and went dark.
The purr went on under the bone after the light went. Steady, and unhurried, and it did not seem to know the lamp was dry.
The room had gone down to two greys. There was the moon square on the boards beside the bed, and the colder grey of everything the square left out.
Liam lay with his ear on the skull and listened to both. In the wall a mouse worked at the plaster, stopped, worked again. Out in the yard the truck had finished ticking a long time ago.
He let his eyes come up. When he could find the edge of the blanket again, down the slope of his brother's back, he sat up and brushed the hair off his knees.
He did not go down there. He had walked that ground twice already that day, once out in the meadow and once under the wool, and there was nothing left in it.
He went forward instead.
Past the hollow where the skull met the spine, three steps and a reach, and out onto the line of the jaw.
Heel first, then both hands. He worked the band of muscle that ran from behind the ear to the point of the chin. It was hard under his palms, hard as a bootlace, and it had been hard like that since nine in the morning.
He took it in three passes. On the second the muscle softened under his weight. On the third it let go along the whole of its length, and Kaelen's breath came out through his nose, long, and did not go back in for a moment.
Below him the corner of the mouth had come further open, the way a mouth does at the bottom of a sleep. Warm air moved out of it in a slow current. It smelled of tea, and under the tea, faintly, of iron.
Liam walked down the last of the jaw and sat at the edge of it with his feet on the lower lip. The lip was dry on the outside and warmer than the rest of the face.
Behind him and below, he could feel the throat. The long drop of it, dark, going down to the collarbone. And further up than that, where the pouch sat folded, the whole length of it was quiet, waiting to be asked.
He did not ask it. He got a knee over the edge of the lip and went in.
The lip gave under him like the rim of a mattress, and a step past it his foot came down on the tongue.
It took his weight. It was warmer than the air by a long way, and it was bumpy, and wet. The bumps stood up under his sole like small stones in the shallows of a burn, and between them the wet came up over his heel and into the tread of his foot.
He stood and let it hold him. Nothing happened. His brother's breath went on moving the whole floor of the mouth, a fraction up, a fraction down.
So he got down onto his hands and knees, and then he lay out flat on his front.
The heat came up through his sleeves and the whole front of his shirt. The wet came after it, slow, spreading along his arms. Under the surface he could feel the pulse, a long knock, further apart than his own, and when he put both palms flat he caught it in each of them at once.
The air in there was his brother's breath used once already. Warm and used and flat, and it moved over the back of his neck with every one.
He turned his head and laid his ear down on the tongue.
The purr came up through it. Not through the bone this time. It came up through the muscle itself, closer and lower, and the pulse sat underneath it like a second floor of a house.
Above him in the dark, the pouch rippled.
Once, along the whole length of it, from the hinge of the jaw down into the throat. Twice.
It did not find him.
Liam stayed flat and let it search. He had spent two nights inside it and one whole day, and it had learned him the way a hand learns a latch. Now it went over itself, top to bottom, and came up with nothing, and went still.
Then the tongue moved.
It came up under him slow, lifted him half an inch clear of the bumps, and set him back down further along. The sides of it came up after that and made a hollow for him and held there.
Somewhere above him a swallow started and did not finish.
Kaelen's voice came down through the throat, muffled and half under, one word with a question sitting in it.
"Liam?"
Liam did not answer with his mouth. He pressed both palms flat on the tongue and pushed down once, hard, and the purr changed under him, went up a notch, and stayed.
Then he put his cheek down on the wet and lay still, and the hollow closed around him, and neither of them moved.
The hollow held him for a while. Long enough that the pulse under his cheek slowed and the wet soaked through the whole front of his shirt and stopped being a sensation at all. Liam lay in it and let the floor of his brother's mouth take his weight, and his own breathing settled down to match the larger one moving the room around him.
Then the tongue shifted.
It was not the lift from before. It came up along his side, a long slow drag from his hip to his shoulder, and the whole flat of it went over him and rolled him a quarter turn. The wet came with it, warm and thicker than water, and it left his sleeve plastered to his arm.
Liam stopped breathing. He counted the beats after it. One. Two. Three.
It came again, back the other way, and this time it did not lift him off the bumps. It pressed and dragged, slow and even, the way a thing is done when it has been done a great many times before.
He had not had this since he was sixteen.
It had been a prank, that summer evening. He had climbed in while Kaelen slept in the chair by the stove, and he had meant to be found. But Kaelen had gone down deep and had not woken, and then Liam could not get out past the muscle. He had panicked and kicked and made a small strangled noise with his hands flat on the roof of his brother's mouth.
Kaelen had come up out of sleep in a lurch, taken him out, and held him against the light, checking him over for damage with both eyes wide. Liam had been the one crying. Kaelen's hands shook for an hour.
Then, somewhere in the shaking, Kaelen had put him back and started licking him.
It took him half a minute to work out what he was doing. Liam had lain there in the wet, rigid with surprise, and it had gone on and on until the crying stopped. Kaelen said afterward that he had not decided to do it. That it had simply happened, the way his tail moved or his wings came up when something came at them.
Da had asked him what the kitten was doing, and Kaelen went red to the ears, and the three of them had laughed about it at the table for the better part of a week. Telisa had called it the oldest thing in the house. Liam had never lived it down, and had never once wanted to make him stop.
Liam came back to the mouth now with his hands still pressed to the wet floor.
The tongue went over him a third time, slower than the first two, and paused at the base of his spine.
He could feel it thinking, of a sort. There was no hurry in it. It was working along the small bones of his back like a thumb over the joins in a piece of furniture, and where it went, the ache in him went. Two days of the hearing had gone into his shoulders and stayed there. It was coming out now, pass by pass, in the dark.
He got his palms flat and pushed down. Once, hard.
The purr jumped under him and stayed up. His brother made a sound in his chest, low and half under, and the tongue came up higher along his back, tipped him gently onto his side, and went to work on the backs of his legs.
Liam lay on his side and let it happen. His arms had gone loose. This was the part he had forgotten over four years, that it did not feel like something done to him. It felt like the fire being banked, and the blanket under the wool, and every hand that had ever set him down carefully.
"Kae?"
The word went up the throat and came back down changed.
"Mm."
"Are you awake?"
"Half."
The tongue dragged up the length of him and folded him onto his front again. He heard his own breath come out of him in a way that surprised him.
"Kae."
"Mm."
"You know what you're doing."
Kaelen went quiet. The tongue lay still under him, and the wet began to cool along his arms, and above him the mouth held its shape. Liam could feel the pulse, and under the pulse a small tightness that had nothing to do with sleep.
"You want me to stop?"
The question came down thick and slow, and there was something underneath it. Liam heard it. It was the same thing he had heard on the rug, and on the couch, and at the edge of the mill corridor.
"No," he said.
Nothing happened for four beats. Then the tongue came up under him and took him the whole length of his body at once, and set him back down, and the hollow closed in around him like a hand.
Liam turned over onto his back. The bumps stood under his shoulder blades and the wet came up along his neck and around his ears, and he lay there with his arms out and both palms flat, and let the mouth do what it had been waiting four years to do.
It went over his chest, and his knees, and the ticklish arch of his feet. It found the place where his tail joined and worked there until the tail stopped flicking and lay still. It came back up to his hair and pushed the wet off his face.
The purr went up through the floor of the mouth and got into his back teeth.
He did not fight any of it. He reached up instead and took hold of the front edge of the tongue with both hands, and pulled himself up it, and pressed his palms flat against the place at the roof of the mouth where the sound seemed to start.
Above him, the whole body flinched. He felt it through the muscle, a single hard jolt from the throat down into the chest. The licking stopped. Kaelen's breath came in through his nose, long and careful, and did not go back out.
Liam held on.
"Li."
"I'm here."
The tongue came down under him and lifted him off the roof, and laid him flat, and held him there, and the mouth was very still.
"You still taste like that summer," Kaelen said. It came down muffled and enormous and flat, the way everything came down from out there.
Liam did not answer. He turned his cheek into the wet, and put both hands flat, and pressed down once, gently, the way he would have pressed a palm to his brother's thumb.
The licking started again. Slower this time, and lower down, and it did not stop.