Chapter 24: A Day of Braids and Licks
The light came in low and grey off the hills and lay along the floorboards in a long stripe that stopped short of the bed. Kaelen lay on his stomach with his arms flat on the pillow and did not move. The wool of Gran's blanket was up over his shoulders where it had ended up in the night. Under it, between his shoulder blades, his brother was asleep.
He had things he could do. There was kindling to split and a floor to sweep and the truck had a rattle in the near wing of the chassis he had been meaning to look at for a month. None of it needed doing today. He listened to his own breathing and the small tick of the stove cooling and stayed where he was.
When the light crossed the foot of the bed, Liam woke.
He came up Kaelen's spine in four steps and sat down in the hair at the nape of his neck, which was tangled into a black knot from two days of not being touched. His fingers went into it and made a face Kaelen could not see and could hear anyway.
"Did you sleep?"
"Some."
"You were awake when the moon went off the wall."
"Mm."
Liam worked his hand up under the hair and lifted a section of it, then let it fall. It stayed where he put it, sticking out in a black fan. "This is a state. Yesterday's ones are still in."
Kaelen lay still with his cheek on his arm. "Leave them."
"Am I starting fresh, or going round the old ones?"
"Round."
Liam got up on the crown of his head and set to work. He had a tin of the small leather ties Kaelen had cut for him out of an old strap, and he kept it on the shelf above the bed, and he had two of them in his fist before he started. He took a strand from the temple, no thicker than a thread, and split it down again with his thumbnail. Then he crossed it under and over and pulled it snug against the root, and went on.
Kaelen lay under it and felt each one tighten. The pulls were small and even and went all the way into the scalp the way a brush never did.
When Liam had done the first one, he clambered down the side of Kaelen's neck to the pillow. Kaelen watched him come and turned his arms over. He crossed his forearms in front of his face, wrists under, so the new pink skin across his knuckles stayed clear of everything, and opened his hands a little way apart, and Liam stepped down onto them.
The face came close. Close enough that the breath moved Liam's hair about and the violet of one eye took up most of what he could see.
"Same as last night," Kaelen said.
"Not the same. Slower."
"Slower."
The tongue came out and laid him flat. It started at the soles of his feet, went up over the heels and the backs of his calves and stayed a while behind the knees, where two days of standing on a mill floor had set something. Then the thighs, and up across the small of his back, and along the ribs one side and then the other. It found the place between his shoulder blades where he held his shoulders up all day. It worked there until he stopped holding them.
By the time it got to his head, his hair was past saving. It went flat under the wet and stood back up when the tongue lifted, in every direction at once.
Then Liam sat up on Kaelen's hands, pushed the hair off his own forehead, and said, "Again the left side."
So Kaelen put him down on the pillow and Liam climbed back up to the crown of his head and found the left side and started a second braid.
They went on like that through the morning. A braid at the temple, a braid behind the ear, a break on the crossed forearms with the fire ticking. Liam stopped counting them somewhere around the seventh. His shirt was wet through and the wet had gone cold, so he peeled it off and dropped it on the floor near the stove, and Kaelen turned his head on the pillow and looked at him for a moment and said nothing at all.
At midday the light moved off the boards and onto the couch.
Kaelen got up, which he had not planned to do, and built the fire back up from the ash, and drank a glass of water standing at the sink. He did not wash the glass. He put it down and went to the couch and lay face-down along it, his face buried in the bowl of his folded arms, his wings loose over his back, one foot hanging off the far end and his tail slid down onto the floorboards beside him.
Liam climbed the leather arm and walked the length of his back to the nape.
There were still strands free down the back of the head, and he got to work on those. He had to kneel to reach the roots, and the muscle under his knees was loose for the first time in a week. He braided down to the collar and started another from the base of the skull.
"Tell me when your hands go," Kaelen said into his arms.
"They're not going yet."
"They went yesterday."
"I was doing your wing yesterday. This is easier."
The fire found a pocket of sap and spat. Something in the roof timbers answered it, a slow creak, and the room went quiet again and stayed that way.
Kaelen shifted his weight, and the cushions took it, and the whole couch sagged an inch at the head end. Liam sat down on the back of his neck to let it settle, then stood up and carried on.
.
Liam went back to it.
The strands at the back of the head were shorter, and the roots were tighter, and he had to take them in smaller sections to keep the split even. He worked down from the crown in a narrow strip, left of the ridge of the skull, and a tie went on and a tie went on after it.
At the base of the skull, where the hair came down over the join of bone and neck, his thumb found something.
It was not a strand. It lay under the skin, a hard pea of muscle gone still and small and stuck in place, right where the skull sat down onto the first bone of the neck. He pressed on it and the skin around it shifted, and the pea did not.
Kaelen's breath stopped for a beat and came back slower.
"Does that hurt?"
"No."
"How long has it been there?"
"Since the wing. Since the week I slept on the porch."
Liam put both thumbs on it and circled. He got no purchase at all. His hands were the wrong size for it, and the muscle under his thumbs was hard as a knot in dry pine, and it had the whole weight of his brother's head sitting on top of it.
He stopped circling and laid the heel of his palm flat over it and leaned.
The skin took the pressure and went pink. The pea stayed where it was. He rode it for a while, easing off and coming back, and the fire spat once and the roof timber creaked and neither of them said anything.
He worked at it in small stages. Off, then on. Off, then on. It was like getting a stuck lid off a jar, where the trick is not strength but patience and a certain angle.
Then he found the angle.
Something let go under the heel of his hand. It was not a sound so much as a shift, small and slick, a knot in wet rope drawn through and gone. The muscle flattened under his palm. The skin laid itself back down smooth over the top of it, and there was nothing left to press.
Kaelen's whole back changed.
It went in stages, top to bottom. The shoulders first, dropping a fraction and then further. Then the wings, both of them, sliding out of their stiff fold and lying loose across his back like something put down. Then the long line of him down the couch, which settled into the leather as if the leather had been waiting for it. His tail slid off the cushion onto the floorboards and lay there. One foot came off the end of the couch and hung.
"Was that the one?"
"Mm." A long space. "That's the one."
Liam put his face down into the hollow.
It was the place just under the base of the skull, where the fall of the rest of the hair came down over it and the skin was always warm, even in a cold room. He got his cheek into the dip of it and his nose against the skin and his hands flat on either side of his own head. His brother smelled of woodsmoke and the soap they both used and underneath that the particular smell of the pouch, close and salt and his.
The purr came up through the bone.
It was below hearing. He had known it could go there and had never been this far inside it before. It arrived in his jaw first, a pressure against the teeth, and then behind his sternum, and then it was in both arms down to the wrists. Felt, not heard. The way a big cat's purr is felt when you are lying on its ribs and not listening to it at all.
Kaelen did not move. There was nothing left in him to move.
Liam stayed with his face pressed into the hollow and let the whole of it come through him. He did not count anything. The fire burned down one notch and then another. The stripe of light off the floorboards climbed the wall and thinned to nothing. At some point he fell asleep, or something close enough to it, and woke with his cheek stuck to the skin by a little damp and the purr still going, slower now, almost idle.
He sat up and got the tin out and carried on with the braids.
The afternoon unrolled by itself. A braid at the temple, a braid above the ear, a break. The breaks got longer as the light went. Twice Kaelen reached back without a word and laid him down on his crossed forearms in front of his face, and the tongue came out and went the length of him, unhurried, foot to crown. It worked the standing ache out of the backs of his calves where he had knelt, and the ache out of his shoulders where he had leaned, and the small caught place under his own jaw that he had not known was there until it went.
Then Liam climbed up again, wet hair flattened to his scalp, and found another section at the front and started another braid.
By evening he could not keep his own hair off his face. It stood up in every direction at once, and every time he pushed it back the tongue had been through it again and it would not lie. He stopped bothering.
Kaelen's head, from the couch, was a semi-neat nest of small braids. They followed the whole skull and ran down past the nape and stopped at the collar, dark ties against black, each one tight at the root in a way that made the scalp feel like it belonged to him again.
Outside, the light went orange and then grey over the hills. Nobody got up to put a lamp on and nobody got up to eat. The fire had settled into a low red bed that threw its light along the floor and up the underside of the mantel.
Liam sat down on the back of Kaelen's neck, in the last of the warm.
"Are we eating tonight?"
"Later."
The word sat in the room and nothing came after it. Kaelen lay along the couch with his face in his arms, and the fire burned down to a red bed that lit the underside of the mantel and left the rest of the room alone.
Liam stayed where he was, on the back of his brother's neck, knees up and chin on them. He had spent twenty years learning how to wait in this house. He was better at it than Kaelen was.
The stripe of light off the window went from grey to blue and then stopped being anything at all. Nobody got up to light a lamp. The clock on the shelf said ten past four, which it had said since Tuesday, and nobody wound it and nobody looked.
Liam said, "Are you going to put one on, or are we sitting here until it's proper dark?"
"Proper dark."
"All right."
His own hair was still up in every direction from the afternoon, wet at the ends where it had not dried. He pushed a strand off his eye and it came straight back down. He left it there.
Then Kaelen moved.
It started under the shoulders and went down the whole length of him. Liam rode it as his brother came up onto his hands and then his feet, and caught a fold of the shirt collar on the way. The tail came up off the floorboards, and the wings settled along his back with a sound like a coat being put on.
Kaelen crossed to the mantel with him still in the collar. He took the match tin down and lit the lamp. The wick caught blue and then yellow, and the room came back in pieces: the two low chairs, the table, the rug worn thin along the line from the door to the stove.
Then he went into the kitchen.
Liam climbed out of the collar onto the back of a chair and watched. Kaelen took the pot off the back of the stove and set it over the ring. He turned the gas up under it and got the loaf out of the tin, and cut it into four thick pieces that took the whole board, uneven the way he always cut it.
He put bread and cheese out on the table with the last of the butter and set the pot down, and there were two bowls, the ordinary one and the small one.
Liam slid down the chair back and crossed the table. He sat on the rim of the small bowl, and Kaelen filled the big one first, then filled the small one most of the way and set it in front of him.
They ate without talking.
The soup was yesterday's and better for it. Liam worked through half his bowl and used the last of his bread to get the sides clean, and watched his brother put away twice as much in the same time. It was the first proper plate of food either of them had eaten since before the mill office.
The purr came up while Kaelen was still chewing. It was idle and low and not aimed at anything, and it moved through the table into Liam's heels and stayed there.
Liam wiped his hands on his trousers.
"You said 'for now' to the panel."
"Mm."
"About the mill job. You said you'd rather finish this first."
"I did."
"So what's 'for now'?"
Kaelen tore another piece off the loaf and did not eat it straight away. He turned it over in his fingers. The lamp ticked, which it did when the oil got low, and neither of them had ever done anything about it.
"It means I didn't want to stand in that room arguing about a job," he said. "I wanted to be out of the room."
"And after?"
"After, the doctor's tick box runs out in eight weeks."
Liam waited.
"I'll take the eight weeks," Kaelen said. "I'll do what he says and keep the wraps clean and go back for the review, because it goes on a file and I'd rather the file said the right thing."
"And the company?"
"Pete can have the yard."
Liam put both hands flat on the table. It was what he did when he wanted to be taken seriously, and it worked about half the time.
"Then what?"
Kaelen looked past him at the black window, where the hill went up out of the frame. He had a way of looking at a thing for a while before he talked about it.
"The north side," he said.
"Ours?"
"Thomas got maybe a third of the way up it and stopped. There's a stand up there that's been crowded since before I was born. They all lean downhill, and every winter takes two or three of them into the burn and rots them where they lie."
He turned the bread over again and put it in his mouth. He chewed it properly and swallowed.
"I could take the little saw up in the autumn and do them a few at a time, on my own clock, and not have anybody standing below me on a cable. Farrar mill will take the boards if I haul them down. I don't have to talk to anybody but the weighbridge man."
Liam thought about twelve weeks of nothing first, because of the hand. It was a long time for Kaelen to be inside four walls.
"And if you've got the stand wrong?"
"Then I've thinned one hill on my own ground and nobody's dead."
A coal went down through the grate and broke on the pan. Kaelen reached over and closed the stove door on it with the toe of his boot.
Liam got up and walked the length of the table, past the butter dish, and stopped by his brother's forearm.
"Do you want me to come?"
Kaelen looked down at him over the rim of the bowl. His hair was still a nest of the day's small braids, tight at the scalp, dark ties against black, running back past the nape where the two of them had finally got the knot out of the muscle underneath.
"Up the hill with me," he said. "In the autumn."
"Yes."
He said it once and left it there.
Kaelen took the bowls to the sink, set one inside the other, and ran the tap over them for the length of a breath. Then he turned it off and left them where they were, and stood in the middle of the floor with his hands empty, which was what he did now instead of the other thing.
The lamp on the mantel ticked, the way it did when the oil got low.
Liam stayed on the table. He had been raised on this table more than on the floorboards. He knew which board dipped under the salt crock and where the splinter bit if you crossed at the near end. He crossed at the near end anyway and walked the length of it, past the butter dish and the piece of bread his brother had torn off and not eaten.
Kaelen's hand was on the table edge, palm up, fingers half curled, where it had sat since the loaf came round.
He had not moved it. Liam stopped and looked. The new skin over the knuckles had gone from pink to a pale shine under the lamp, and the palm lay open with nothing in it, and nothing in it had been asked for.
Then he stepped on.
The tendon at the base of the middle finger made a firm step. The heel of the hand was warmer than the table and softer. He got both feet up and his weight came down, and the hand woke under him.
The fingers came up an inch on either side. Not closing. Just up, the way they came up when his brother carried him. Then the whole arm lifted.
The table dropped away.
Liam put a hand flat on the pad of the thumb and held on. The lamp came level with him and sank again. The couch, the chairs, the stove, the two low chairs, all of it swung down and settled below him, and he was up at the height of the kitchen window with the black hill filling it.
"Are you putting me down?"
"No."
The arm kept going. Past the collar of the shirt, past the chin, and then his brother's face was in front of him across a hand's width of air. Both eyes on him, pupils wide with the lamp behind. There was a thread of soup along the lower lip that the cloth had missed.
The hand did not close. It stayed open and level, and the only thing holding him up was that he had decided to stand on it.
"From the table," Kaelen said. "You stepped on."
"Yes."
"I've never asked you to."
"No." Liam shifted his feet on the tendon and found his balance again. "And I've never done it."
"Mm."
A coal went down through the grate in the other room and broke on the pan. Neither of them turned toward the sound.
The arm bent and brought him in. Kaelen set him against his own throat, in the hollow under the jaw where the pulse came through hot and quick, and then the hand settled over him without pressing and stayed.
Liam lay along the pulse and let it run under his ear. It was a good deal faster than the evening deserved.
"How long do you want them in?"
"The braids?"
"Mm."
"Till they come out. You did them."
"They'll look like rope by morning."
"Then they'll look like rope."
Liam got a hand into his own hair and found it still standing up in every direction from the afternoon, stiff at the ends where it had dried wrong. He gave that up. He put the hand back on his brother's skin instead and felt the pulse go through the pad of it.
"When the review comes round you'll have to take them out."
"Eight weeks."
"Will you?"
"I'll think about it."
The lamp burned down to a stub. Kaelen turned the wick down with his fingers, which was the wrong way to do it and the way he always did it, and the room went to the red of the grate and nothing else.
Then he turned and carried them through.
The hall was six steps and the cold came in under the door and went over both of them. The bed was still unmade from the morning, the wool blanket in a heap at the foot. He sat down on the edge and the frame knocked twice against the wall.
He held the hand out flat over his knee. Neither of them said anything about it. Liam had been set down on this bed by that hand a thousand times and never once from up here, standing on it, with the whole arm steady underneath.
He walked off the palm onto the knee, and then the thigh, and then up the front of the shirt, using the same holds he had used since he was small.
At the collar he stopped.
"In the autumn. Up the north side. Back or pouch?"
Kaelen thought about that long enough for the hall floor to tick.
"Pouch," Kaelen said.
He turned his head on the pillow and looked at his brother standing in the hollow of his collar. The lamp was down to a stub and the hall was cold enough that the breath showed when either of them spoke.
"Back's for when I've both hands full. There's nothing to hold today."
Liam stood there a moment with his hands loose at his sides, then took hold of the collar and climbed down the front of the shirt the way he had climbed up it. Kaelen lay back and let his jaw fall open a little, and the pouch opened under his tongue with a small wet sound and let out the warm air.
Liam walked in without being told. The lining took him and the entrance drew shut over his head, and the purr came up through the bedframe and into the wall.
Neither of them said anything else about it.
He slept in there. Kaelen knew because he woke twice in the night with the pouch full and warm and the muscle doing its slow work around a shape that was the right size, and he lay in the dark and listened to the house and went back under each time.
The morning came in the same way the last one had, low and grey off the hills, with a stripe of light on the floorboards that stopped short of the bed. Kaelen lay on his stomach and listened to the stove tick. There was kindling to split. There was a bucket of water on the stand that had gone flat overnight, and the floor wanted sweeping, and the truck still had that rattle in the near wing of the chassis.
He got up once, to put wood on the fire and set the kettle, and then he went back to the couch and lay face-down along it and did not get up again.
Liam came out of the pouch at the sink. He drank from the tap with both hands cupped, and put his shirt back on off the floor near the stove where he had dropped it the day before, and then climbed the leather arm and walked up the length of his brother's back to the nape.
The tin of ties was on the shelf. He got two out and held them in his fist and started again at the left temple, where yesterday's work had come loose in the night.
Kaelen lay still and let him pull.
The pulls went into the scalp and down the neck and out along the shoulders. Liam worked in strips, half a finger wide, and took each strand down to itself with his thumbnail before he crossed it. When one was snug he pulled the tie off his teeth and knotted it at the root, tight enough that the skin moved with it.
Somewhere past the third one Kaelen's purr came up and did not stop.
"Cold?" Liam said, working.
"No."
"Your back's cold."
"It's the leather."
Liam knelt and put his palm flat on the skin between the two wing roots, where the day before there had been a knot the size of a pea. It was flat now. Warm under the hand, the way skin is warm when the blood has finally gone back into it.
He picked the next section and carried on.
At midday Kaelen reached back over his own shoulder without a word and laid him down.
The forearms came up crossed in front of the face, wrists under, knuckles clear. Liam stepped down onto the backs of them and sat with his knees up, and his brother's face came close, and the tongue came out.
It started at the toes and went up. Over the arches, around the ankles, up the shins and behind the knees, where two days of kneeling on the back of a neck had left something. Then the thighs, and the small of his back, and up the ribs on the near side and the far side. It did not rush and it did not miss, and when it found a place that held, it stayed in it until it didn't.
Liam lay on his back across the crossed arms and let it. The wet went through his shirt again, and the shirt was warm for a while and then cold, and he did not care either way.
Then Kaelen set him on the pillow and Liam climbed back up and found another strip at the crown.
"Am I doing the front now or the back?"
"Back."
He went back.
The afternoon went the same way. A braid, a tie, a break. Twice more the arms came up and the tongue ran the length of him, unhurried, foot to crown, and each time it found less to work on and took longer about it, as if it had nothing else to do and knew it.
The tin came up from the shelf and went back down. The ties ran out and Liam refilled it from the box in the drawer under the window, sitting on the sill with his legs swinging while he counted them out. He counted fourteen and put them in the tin and took the tin back up the arm of the couch.
"Do you want the blanket back?"
"Under me, not over."
He got the wool out from under his brother's hip and shook it out and laid it back across the small of his back, and went back to work.
By the time the light went orange over the hills, Kaelen's head was covered in them.
They followed the whole skull. At the temple, above both ears, down the back by the ridge. The dark ties showed against the black like little knots of wood in a fence rail, and under each one the scalp was pulled smooth and tight, and there was nothing left anywhere with a tangle in it.
Liam's own hair was worse than it had been in the morning. It stood straight up at the front and stuck to his forehead at the sides, and every push at it brought it straight back down again. He gave up around the fifth time and left it.
The fire had burned down to a red bed that lit the underside of the mantel and left the rest of the room to itself. Nobody had lit the lamp. Nobody got up to eat.
The clock on the shelf said ten past four, which it had said since Tuesday.
Neither of them had looked at it once.
Liam came down the back of the head and sat on the warm skin just under the collar, where the braids stopped. The purr was still going under his heels, low and idle. Below it, through the couch and the floor, he could feel the hill doing nothing at all. No wind, no rain on the glass, not one sound out of the yard.
Then Kaelen moved.
It went up the shoulders first and then down the whole length. Liam got a hand in the collar and rode it while his brother came up off the couch and onto his feet, and the wings settled along his back with the sound a coat makes when it is picked up.
He crossed to the door and pulled it open.
The cold came in over the step and up through the room. Out past the gate the field went grey and then black, and above it the north shoulder of the hill stood up against a sky with nothing left in it but a low stain of orange.
Liam stood up in the collar and looked at it with him.
"Before the review, or after?"
Kaelen stood in the doorway in his bare feet a while longer than the cold wanted. His hair was a nest of small braids and the ties caught what little light there was, and the breath off the two of them went out into the dark together and went away.
"Before," he said.
Then he shut the door and carried them both back through to the bed.