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Kjartan backed away until he stood with his heels out over the edge of the cliff. The
wind from the sea felt hot by contrast with the blast of cold from the creatures all around
him. He smelled the ozone and old-carpet smell of them and shivered as the cold sank
below his bones and crystallized his blood.
Punch a hole in the encircling ring of them and run? No, he didn t think he had the
strength, didn t know how Tyrnir had conjured this many of the things up bribed a
sorcerer, perhaps. A worry for a different time, if he still could.
Ice clogged his eyelashes. His breath turned to snow, and his mouth filled with it.
Spitting it out at their feet, he found himself laughing with a strange delight. So his
brother thought well of him after all? Good.
He still didn t think well enough.
32 www.samhainpublishing.com
Too Many Fairy Princes
The closest wraiths were almost touching him. Kjartan s skin blistered and
blackened in the cold, and the pain speeded him up. He took two deep, glorious breaths,
spread his arms and fell backwards off the cliff, grabbing the universe with his mind as
he did so, and twisting it.
It was not a sheer fall; his shoulder smacked against a protruding rock, the branch of
a tree halfway down the cliff whipped across his flailing legs. The universe fought back,
and he throttled it harder, squeezing it between his mind and his will like a louse between
two fingernails.
It cracked, the light greyed, the scents turning acrid meat and burning oil and he
was in another world. Still falling, past blackened walls. He grasped for a lead pipe that
ran down the brickwork, got it, wrenched his injured shoulder in trying to hold on. Pain
slammed him flat, made sweat slick his palms and the muscles loosen. He let go, fell
again, bounced hard from the ridgepole of a little roof above a bricked-up door, punching
all the breath out of him, and landed at last facedown in a huddle of large metal cylinders
and a stench of rot.
Groaning, incautious, he reached out and grabbed one of the metal objects to pull
himself up by. Jaws of fire fastened on his undefended hand, an agony in comparison
with which the wraiths touch had been a balm. Iron! Iron& so he was on Earth, in the
world of Men, undefended and alone, and going to&
He managed to draw the hand back and curl tight around it. Then his own darkness
came down.
www.samhainpublishing.com 33
Chapter Five
Joel cycled home with his head down, legs pumping as fast as he could go and his
thoughts drowned in the race of blood through his body, the air burning in his lungs.
Manhandling the bike through the front door, he carried it up the shared stairs and into a
flat he d begun to see as a luxury he couldn t afford. He had a bedroom with an ensuite
bathroom too small to fit the handbasin. His tiny sink stood orphaned in one corner of his
bedroom. But he also had a kitchen, and a sitting room cum studio, where the bike
occupied the only space that wasn t covered in reclining canvases.
Resisting the temptation to slump on his bed, pull the covers over his head and
pretend none of this was happening, he got a tenner out of the stash in his I quit
smoking jar and returned to the south-facing light and scent of oil paints of his studio.
The floorboards were bare, scuffed and paint blotched, only a little path showing
between the door and his easel. Ignoring the clench of his heart, he went through every
stacked piece, pulling out those which were finished enough to be framed.
His was not, he knew, fashionable art. His landscapes depicted worlds that had never
been, the bright colours of which might have looked good against an office wall or in the
minimalist white box of a high-class apartment at Canary Wharf. But the photorealism,
the intricacy of his work were off-putting small figures in the distance catching the eye
and making the observer get close and press his nose to the canvas to guess at the stories,
architecture in the foreground with every nuance worked out. With their hyperreal
feeling, oversaturated, as though they were pictures taken under a different sun, Joel s
paintings demanded too much of the observer and had never really sold. People found
them fascinating but disturbing. They looked closely for about half an hour and then
turned away to find something more peaceful.
Too Many Fairy Princes
Joel stacked the landscapes along the left side of the wall. Along the right he placed
all his finished portraits. Old friends from school, who he had not met in the flesh for
years. Old lovers, immortalised even if the pain of losing them was visible in the paint
like a glisten of pearl.
He lifted his best. One of the smaller pieces where, on a background of smoky umber
and sable, Oscar s face was limned in gold. The secrets of the universe shone in his
whiskey-brown eyes, and the smile of a trickster god played on his generous lips.
It was everything Joel remembered of him, if you knew how to look the warmth,
the sensuality, soft as the dark feathering of his eyelashes on his cheek, his selfishness
soft as the fall of shadows beneath his cheekbones. Sometimes when the day had not hurt
him enough, Joel would come in here with the lights off only the hall light shining
dimly through the angle of the door and watch Oscar s face as he had once watched it
in their room at night. Never quite defenceless, never entirely open, always with a smile.
Joel put the portrait with the bundle of other canvases portable enough to transport,
took a step back, forward again, picked it up and put it back on its easel. No, he couldn t.
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