The Key

Chapter 33

They push the horses the same as they did yesterday, and they exchange them at the available post offices. At one, a particularly hard-nosed clerk starts to give Cleric Jim and Victor a hard time. Waiting inside the carriage, Dan swaps out his hunting jacket for his wedding coat, and when he steps out with royal bearing in full effect, it is surprisingly cathartic. The clerk falls over himself, and every single person at the post office that day is made aware that Knight Prince Dan is in need of fast horses.

Back in the carriage, a supposedly napping Jo snickers to herself where she stretches across the backseat. Sitting in the front seat, facing her, Dan prods her with the dusty toe of his boot until she stops.

Hours later, they leave those horses and set Jo back in place. Grinning wildly at the well-kept road toward the port cities, Jo pushes the carriage faster than a canter and keeps it there longer than ought to be humanly possible. They all tease her for complaining about her extra training, and she proudly declares that there is a reason King John has taken an interest in her skills.

They swing east, away from the Port Road. They branch north. The mask points the way down narrow paths and they stop to consult maps. They keep to the wider, better maintained roads where they think they can risk it, and what their path gains in distance, their journey shortens with speed.

If they’d been led to the northwest, there would have been more roadhouses, but the coast to the northeast is rocky, bad for ports. No ports means fewer roads and less funding to staff them. They’re increasingly in the sticks, patches of farmland stuck in between swamps and marshes. They spend the night in an actual inn, no government affiliation at all, but both the innkeeper and her wife seem to understand that, royal guest or not, Dan is in no mood to be fussed over.

“We’ll find him tomorrow,” Victor says, not with hope but as an educated guess.

Dan nods. The mask sits on the table between the four of them, now easily held down by the weight of Dan’s full glass. As they eat, the spell slowly gives up for the second time that day. Beyond the moments required while eating, Dan keeps his mouth shut.

With the mercy of practicality, Victor soon spreads out a map on the cleared table. Jo brushes crumbs away from it. Unwilling to let so much as a feather fly away, Dan wraps the netting tighter around the mask and ties the small bundle with additional string. Victor casts his third spell of the day.

They find the inn’s general location on their map, orient the map according to their compass, and allow the mask to strain against its tether over the map. The line of the tether stretches across land, over a lake, across floodplains, and out to the ocean. Knowing this, they plot their course for the following day.

West of the lake, they decide. The roads are better on that side, and they can remain nearly parallel to the tether’s path for some miles. When the mask points them directly east, that’s when they’ll move in.

The inn’s staff watches with poorly disguised curiosity. Dan ought to care, but doesn’t. He simply holds the mask in both hands, letting it try to pull him to Cas. It pulls all through the night, up until it stops, and Dan wakes with a limp tether clenched in his hand.

Panic in his throat, he staggers out of his private bedroom and into the inn hallway, all the way down into the receiving room with its many chairs and proud, ornate clock. Squinting through slanting beams of moonlight, he checks the time and does the math. It’s been over six hours. The spell died, not Cas.

He goes back to bed, and he does not sleep well.

The mask begins to change direction well before Jo is worn out. Though the steam hissing up from the engine with each ping of a raindrop doesn’t help, the damp weather has slowed them only slightly. Today as yesterday and the day before, it’s the much slower carts and carriages they share the road with that truly impede their progress.

Dan steers the carriage east while Cleric Jim shouts out directions from inside the carriage, the map kept inside against the threat of misting rain. The road they’re on ought to get them close to the lake without too much turning, which is always a feat of coordination best avoided.

They see the chimney smoke smudging gray into darker clouds above long before they see the shine of the lake. The closer they come, the deeper Dan’s stomach drops, but he blames it on the map. Topography can be a difficult art, and their map is certainly more accurate around the capital. They must have held the tether over the wrong starting point on the map, unable to properly find the inn. That has to be it.

He tells himself this until he doesn’t have a hope of believing it, and all the while, the mask strains directly toward the lake.

They park on the outer roads of the fishing town, the carriage too wide for old, narrow streets. Before the carriage even comes to a stop, they’ve drawn the attention of everyone in the town with a pair of working ears and the presence of everyone with nothing better to do. Or, at least, nothing that can’t be put off for some time spent gawking.

“Jo, stay with the carriage,” Dan orders, climbing down from the driver’s seat and in front of a forming crowd. Though it’s unlikely anyone here has the skill or audacity to steal it, the steam rising from the engine through the rain might not be enough to deter curious young hands from getting burned, and that’s a problem they don’t need right now.

“Yes, sir,” Jo replies with eyes that say No, Dan. “Unless you need me to procure rooms or find someone, I will be right here.” And she draws out her father’s knife from her boot to cut off a small lock of her hair. The knife goes back into the boot. The hair goes to Victor who, anticipating this, already has an empty vial in hand.

“Victor, Jim, with me.” Dan leads the way directly into the crowd of people better dressed for the weather than they are, and most of the townsfolk do have the good sense to get out of their way.

As always, there is that one random person who recognizes Dan without anyone needing to use his title, because that’s just the way the world works. Today’s variation is the second kind of annoying, announcing rather than fawning. She looks older than Grammy Millie made it to be, but she’s got the lungs of a much younger and larger woman. There’s nothing like a half-deaf woman “quietly” informing her neighbor, to make news spread immediately.

A child, maybe five years old, one of those small ages, comes running straight up to him with wide eyes. “Is there a monster, Your Majesty?”

Dan ignores the matter of address for the more important point. The unexplained presence of a monster-hunting prince is enough to cause panic, he knows that, he knows that. “No,” Dan says, gesturing for the boy to walk alongside him for a moment, even as the boy’s mother looks on, aghast. Making sure his voice carries, he adds, “I’m looking for my friend. He’s a man with dark wings.”

The boy’s wide eyes try to eclipse his entire face. Behind him, his mother hurries to keep pace. “You have an angel friend?”

“I do,” Dan confirms, because it is important the entire kingdom know this lie as truth. “A very good angel friend. He got hurt helping me fight a monster, and we think he fell somewhere nearby. We’ll need somewhere to patch him up.”

“I know where the doctor is,” the boy offers. “My daddy needs the doctor a lot because his lungs make this noise.” And the boy lets out a dramatic coughing sort of wheeze. “That.”

“Tell the doctor we’ll need to borrow some space,” Dan tells the boy, his eyes raised to the mother. “We have our own healer.”

“Of course, Your Highness,” she says over her son, and bows deeply. She pointedly holds out her hand to the boy, and he grabs hold. “Shall I fetch the veterinarian as well?” When Dan stares at her, uncertain whether to be offended, she adds, “For his wings. Your Highness said he fell? Our doctor is a fine one, but I don’t think she knows how to set broken wings. The vet, he’s mostly cows and goats, but he treats the turkeys well enough.”

“Yes,” Dan says. Then, stronger: “Yes, find the veterinarian, thank you.”

Both woman and child hurry away, the boy with many a backwards glance. The tethered mask leads Dan down narrow streets, across a stone road, and ever closer to the destination he fears. They reach the docks, and still the mask strains forward.

“We’ll go around,” Dan announces.

“Prince,” Victor begins, but Cleric Jim nudges him.

“Surely taking a boat would be faster, Highness,” Cleric Jim points out.

Dan stares across the water, dotted with fishing boats and absolutely no islands, and the mask draws him onward.

“If he’s on the other side, we can get Jo to come around and meet us easily enough,” Victor says. If.

“And you’ll sweep up the moon, huh.”

Cleric Jim looks to Dan in confusion, but Victor merely nods. He is very nearly sympathetic, and that is already more than Dan can stand.

“Find us a boat,” Dan orders.

The boat is a small thing, ironically named Leviathan. Its owner is an even smaller woman named Ashley with arms like steel. The boat is big enough for a three person crew, and so she takes merely herself, her daughter, and Dan. She steers the boat where the mask points, but the mask no longer stretches out horizontally. Increasingly, it strives downward at a slant.

“The girl dives well, sir,” Ashley promises. “Whatever you need fished up, my Pat can reach.”

“It’s the getting him back up I’m worried about,” Dan says, only a partial truth. It’s the everything he’s worried about. Alive, Victor had said, or guessed, but floating underwater for over a week tells a different story.

As if reading his mind, Ashley asks, “With all the respect in my heart, sir, are you sure we’re not sending my girl down to fetch a corpse?”

“I can do it, Ma,” complains Pat, teenaged and horrified at being embarrassed in front of a prince.

“Angels are tough,” Dan promises them, and he is the best liar he has ever known.

Much too soon and after far too long, the mask finally appears as if the spell has worn off. It hasn’t. Now, the mask drags his hand down with a force stronger than mere gravity. Careful about it, Dan looks over the edge of the boat.

With a confidence Dan frankly envies, Pat tugs off her boots and socks before tying a rope around her waist. “I can ride the anchor down, Your Highness, if you think I won’t hit him.”

Dan holds the mask out over the water and waits until the tug is straight down. The water is dark and murky, its surface disturbed by ripples and misting rain. Even without a splash landing on him, Dan’s clothing sticks to him wetly, and he fights the urge to shiver despite the mid-May warmth.

“Don’t drop here. Go a few feet to the side,” Dan orders.

“Yes sir,” Pat says, before looking at her mom.

Ashley hefts up the iron loop of the anchor, the cords of her arms taut. “Ready, girl?”

“Ready, Ma,” Pat confirms, taking hold of the anchor without supporting it. The pair count down together before Ashley tosses the anchor and Pat jumps. The girl and anchor break the water with a single joint splash. They go down in a rush of bubbles, but when Ashley doesn’t seem concerned, Dan decides to keep his mouth shut. He waits instead, watching the rope tied to Pat uncoil, following her into the lake.

After an impossibly long wait, Pat’s head breaks the water. Her eyes and teeth flash as she takes in a deep breath. “I found something!” she shouts, and she lifts the hand not holding the anchor’s rope.

Kneeling at the edge of the boat, Dan stretches out his hand. He doesn’t think of what ten days submerged does to a corpse. Doesn’t think of swollen limbs and putrefaction, the insides spilling out through broken skin. A human body would need a net at this point, and a fine one at that. A single rope would split the corpse in half.

Not thinking, not thinking at all, Dan holds out his hand, and she slaps a wet, matted mess of a feather against his palm.

“I need the rest of him, kid,” Dan tells her, voice remarkably steady.

“I got the rope looped around him, sir,” she says, treading murky water. “Gonna make sure the knot’s good and won’t go near his neck.”

“Do it,” Dan commands.

With a nod, the girl drags herself back below the surface, pulling herself down by the anchor’s rope.

Waiting with the mask in one hand and the soaked feather in the other, Dan forces his eyes clear and open. He makes himself breathe. By sheer force of will, he keeps the entire world moving from one second to the next. He holds the damp feather to his lips and tells himself that what he smells is lake muck, not death.

Pat reappears. She nods to her mother, and with that, Ashley begins to pull on the rescue rope. Dropping the wet feather into the boat and sticking his arm through the mask’s band, Dan helps her. They haul on a firm, resisting weight. The wet rope is a black and slippery tendril, and Dan holds tight until his hands burn with the cold. Pat paddles to the side, making room for a dark, rising shape.

He surfaces chest first, shirt cut, the blood sigil clear and red, neither scabbed over nor rotted open. His head lolls back into the water, and his wings stretch below him, endless, their tips invisible beneath the gloom. Holding onto the boat, Pat lifts his head up, touching him without the reservations that decay brings. The immense discoloration of his face must be a bruise. Eyes closed, body limp, Cas doesn’t cough or breathe, but he doesn’t look ten days dead either, no matter how much murky water spills from his open mouth.

Carefully, Pat manages to turn him around so his chest faces the side of the boat. They get one arm up, and then the other. Pulling at his clothing only rips it further, the worn fabric weary with water and half-shredded from the attention of fish and bottom-dwellers. Needing the firmer grip, Dan grabs Cas’ right hand the moment it’s within reach, and the skin is cold and slimy with algae.

“The wings will make this difficult,” Ashley observes, but she bids Pat to swim around to the other side of the boat as ballast all the same. For the rest, Ashley does the hauling, Dan the supporting. She pulls and he secures, taking more and more of Cas’ weight until Dan’s half-crushed, lying down in the narrow space of the deck with Cas’ limp wings sprawled to either side. It’s his first time with Cas on top of him, and the result is like being soaked with ice.

Turning Cas over takes some work. Dripping but back in the boat, Pat helps Dan fold up Cas’ right wing, so they can better roll Cas over it and onto his back. The left wing is a maze of broken angles that Dan doesn’t dare touch.

Once they turn him, Pat swears hard enough to give Jo or even Ellen a run for their money.

Ashley cuffs her daughter upside the head, but Dan can’t particularly blame the girl. Cas’ shirt is a ruin of its former self, slashed to bits even before the water damage, and the sigil shines wetly between that parted curtain. Covering only a small part of the pattern with his hand, Dan feels no heat, no heartbeat, but neither does his hand come away red. “Yeah, it’s a blood sigil,” he acknowledges.

“I saw that in the water, sir,” Pat says, vaguely recovered. “I meant, what’s that sword doing in his arm?”

“What,” Dan says, but Pat kneels down and parts Cas’ split sleeve over his left arm.

There, as if the flat of the blade has been glued down against his skin, is an angel blade. The tip reaches toward the crook of his arm. The hilt seems to have fused with his palm. When Dan reaches for it, the blade refuses to shift, stuck to Cas’ skin. No: embedded.

“What the f**k,” Dan says in front of two of his father’s subjects.

They have no more answers than Cas’ motionless body.

“What the f**k,” Dan says again, but the closer he looks, the clearer it becomes.

“It looks like it melted into his arm,” Pat says. “Is it enchanted to do that? Sir. Because that looks nasty.”

“An angel’s sword is a spell,” Dan says, and then he starts laughing. He grips Cas’ left forearm with both hands and starts pushing, trying to force the blade in deeper. “It’s got his magic in it. It’s got his life in it, that’s why he’s… The blood sigil could only take the power in his blood. Stupid f*****g genius stored some life inside his body, but outside of his blood.”

Broken wings and cold body or not, all they need to do is get that blade back inside him. Or get him back to Sam. Or maybe just wake him up enough for Cas to pull in the blade on his own.

Dan gives up on pushing the blade in while Ashley pulls up the anchor and brings them back to the docks. Instead, he shucks his jacket and drapes it over Cas, concealing both the sigil and Cas’ lack of breath. Ignoring the smell, Dan brushes wet hair off his forehead. He takes the damp, used towel Pat offers him and dries Cas’ face. He nods when Pat asks if she can pull sticks and seaweed out of those sprawling wings. The mask hangs limp around Dan’s wrist, having long since made contact with its intended target, and Dan didn’t even notice the spell ending.

When they return to the docks, Victor and Cleric Jim are waiting for them there with a pair of stretchers.

“I’d have gotten one for each wing as well as his body,” Cleric Jim explains, “but they only had the two.”

On the docks, there is no end to the gawking, and Dan makes sure throughout that his jacket remains across Cas’ chest. His hands don’t leave Cas once during the transfer from boat to land. Cas’ body gets one stretcher, his left wing another, and the right wing, they keep folded up under Cas in a way that hopefully only looks excruciating.

The doctor opens the door to her practice herself. She shows them inside and keeps a calm face despite the wings and the blood sigil and the half-embedded blade. She presses on his chest so water comes out his mouth. She enlists help in turning him onto his side—his right side, on his better wing—to get more of the water out, and she puts him on his back again to continue the pumping. Both she and Cleric Jim lay their hands on him and close their eyes with the clear concentration of magic casting. After, she listens to his heart and shakes her head and Dan says, “I know this is crazy, but keep going.”

She keeps going.

She cuts off the remains of his shirt. She instructs Dan to pry off his boots. Dan gathers up these and the ruins of Cas’ belt and pouch, Hannah’s belt and pouch. He keeps his back turned while the doctor cuts Cas out of his pants too. He doesn’t turn until she assures him Cas is modest once more, because there are some memories that can’t be overwritten. The next time Dan dreams of Cas naked, he doesn’t want it to be like this.

Bare save for a towel across his lap, the extent of his injuries is clear. Mottled bruising lines his arms and shoulders and punctuates his knees, but nowhere is it as severe as on the side of his face. Lacerations spill down his arms and cover his chest, and not simply the lines of the sigil. His right wing might be dislocated, but the left is obviously shattered. Both sport puncture wounds.

The doctor bandages most of the body injuries by the time the veterinarian arrives. He takes a bit more coaxing to get to work, but Cleric Jim does the glaring on Dan’s behalf. Dan’s too busy standing around being useless.

He watches the vet feel along Cas’ left wing. He watches the vet measure and cut splints, and he watches the vet, the doctor and Jim do what they can. No matter how he’s moved or adjusted, Cas doesn’t wince or groan. Cas simply lies there, and lies there, and at some point, Dan started holding his cool hand. There’s no telling when, but there’s a stool under him now and he doesn’t remember seeing one at all in the operating space. Nor does he remember sitting down. Casper’s left wing stretches out onto a second table while they focus on patching his right, and Dan sits opposite, stationed by Cas’ hip and looking at his bruised face.

“Where’s Victor?” Dan thinks to ask a countless number of minutes later.

“Still finding accommodations with Dame Jo, Highness,” Cleric Jim answers. “Come morning, Seraph Casper will be as safe for transport as he’s going to get.” The uncertainty in his expression says even caring for these injuries might make no difference.

“I think he’s getting warmer,” Dan says.

The vet grumbles something about lake stink, but he falls silent when Dan looks up at him.

“There’s a puncture wound in his left wing,” Dan says. “He earned it saving my life. See to it.”

The vet sees to it.

Bandages unroll. Splints are secured. Debris and broken feathers drop into buckets. Distantly, as the doctor lays a blanket over Cas, Dan realizes they had an angel shirt back at the castle but forgot to bring it.

“Jim,” Dan says.

“Sir Dan?”

“When I showed you Michael’s sword, I asked you to heal it.” He’s almost certain it was Michael’s, not Gabriel’s. Something in the way Cas had reacted.

“Michael?” Cleric Jim repeats with a frown. “Which Michael?”

“Archangel Michael.”

The vet and the doctor both visibly double-take at that.

“Oh,” says Cleric Jim. “That Michael, yes. That sword. Ah. More of the same with Casper’s?”

“It’s what’s keeping him alive,” Dan explains. “How strong is it?” He didn’t bring Michael’s sword for comparison, the blade too important to remove from the castle when Dan was heading in the opposite direction from Lucifer. It’s in King John’s keeping for now, and may remain there for some time.

Cleric Jim lays his hands on the blade, fingers curled over Cas’ forearm. Keeping his expression carefully smooth, Cleric Jim says, “It doesn’t compare to an archangel’s, I can tell you that much, Highness. It feels empty, too. Hollowed out. But there’s still more magic left in the blade than two, maybe three mages could muster.”

“We’re going to monitor that,” Dan instructs. There’s nothing else they can do.

“Yes, Highness,” Cleric Jim agrees. He asks the doctor if they might both stay here overnight with Casper. She gives slightly begrudging permission, but Dan barely hears her. He’s too busy waiting. It seems hours until the doctor and vet are done, hours until Dan can have a private moment with an unconscious angel and his own feelings. At last, they finish what rudimentary measures they can take, and Cleric Jim herds them into the doctor’s front office on the pretense of devising a treatment plan.

For the first time in ten days, they are alone. The first time in even longer. Eleven. And still Cas doesn’t move or twitch or breathe.

“Got you, Cas,” Dan whispers nonetheless. He lifts Cas’ unresisting hand. He presses his lips to a clean bandage over split knuckles. “You’re all right, you f*****g asshole, I got you.”

Cas’ body is devoid of response, but Dan watches for one anyway.

At some point during the day, Dan eats. At some point during the evening, he hears a debate over magics and medicines. At some point even later, he wakes up with an aching back and his hand still around Cas’.

“What time is it?” Dan groans, relinquishing his hold on Cas to stand up and stretch.

“Past ten,” Cleric Jim says, standing on Cas’ other side. By the light of an actual candle, not a magelight, Cleric Jim checks Cas’ blade yet again. “He’d still holding strong, I think.”

“Until the wings burn off, he’s not dead,” Dan says.

“So I’ve been hearing,” Cleric Jim says. “Which I imagine would be too loud an event to sleep through, so Your Highness might as well bunk down for the night.”

“Yeah,” Dan says, not moving.

“There’s a cot,” Cleric Jim adds. “Behind you. Thought you wouldn’t want to be separated from your fiance while he’s like this.”

“Yeah,” Dan says, somehow even more motionless than before.

With one wrong word, Cas could destroy every piece of King John’s cover story. A simple we’re not engaged or a confused what treaty? could bring it all down. All the more reason Dan can’t risk Cas waking up without him there.

“Highness,” Cleric Jim prompts, more firm than gentle. “You need sleep. It’s a three day journey back, and he’ll need someone to prop him up in the carriage if he’s not to put weight on his wings.”

“I know,” Dan says.

Cleric Jim sighs and comes around the operation table to Dan’s side. He sets a hand on Dan’s shoulder. “If I stayed up with him, would you sleep?”

“Wake me up the moment he does,” Dan orders.

“No fear as to that, Highness,” Cleric Jim promises. When Dan still doesn’t move, Cleric Jim’s hand on his shoulder becomes a quick rub against his back. “It’s a frightful thing, to lose the ones we love. But I won’t let him slip away from you again, not if I can help it, you can count on that.”

Dan nods rather than risk speaking. He clears his throat and still needs words and what comes out is, “Do you know where my jacket is?” He doesn’t need it. The room is hot, the fireplace lit for Cas’ benefit.

“Hanging up to dry somewhere,” Cleric Jim answers. “The rest of your clothes are with Jo and Victor at the inn. Dame Jo thought she could bait you away to a real bed if she withheld them. I would have thought your old squire would know you better.”

“She’s hopeful,” Dan explains.

Cleric Jim nods his agreement before giving Dan one last pat on the back. “Not a bad thing to be, Highness. Sleeping, sleeping is also a good thing to be.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dan says, but he does as bid. Mostly, he lies on his side, watching Cas’ silhouette by the light of the fireplace. He listens to the logs crackle, to Cleric Jim breathe, to his own breaths and the sounds of the town beyond. He falls asleep still listening for something that isn’t there to hear.