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Chapter Text

Berlik was washing the upstairs windows when he caught the first glimpse of the old woman. Against the spiky fringe of the pines lining the drive path, his impression of a black coat and a white fog of hair under a matching hat was brief enough to write off as one of the visions he had conjured up as a child. A forest spirit or wood-dwelling enchantress, created for adventures in a land which had seemed to his child self to have a dearth of them since the days of his ancestors who had hunted from his current home.

The second time, glancing out at the same spot, something moved behind the pale echo of his long face and auburn braid in the window. The flash of her face—vague smile, eyes like the darkest parts of the forest—had him halfway down the stairs, arms full of fresh bedsheets, only to nearly collide with Zoe coming up the other way with a toolbox and baseboard molding strips. “Is something wrong?” she asked, pushing a black curl back under the green scarf covering her hair.

“A guest. I think.” He brushed past Zoe to throw open the door to the lobby, then the front door. Over his head, the Chapel Bed and Breakfast sign swung over an empty parking lot, the faint squeak of its hinges accompanied by a single crow somewhere in the woods toward Hermitage beyond.

He was both surprised and not when he came in three days later, shaking snow off his boots, to see Zoe and the old woman sitting together over mugs of Zoe’s favorite green blend in the lobby window seat. “Berlik! First guest of the winter season!” Zoe exclaimed, jumping to her feet to press warm, red lips to his cold ones. “This is Morrig. Morrig, my husband, Berlik.”

“A pleasure,” Morrig said, extending a hand that Berlik was unsure whether to shake or kiss. He opted awkwardly for the first, mumbling a greeting. “Your lady wife was just telling me about the history of your Chapel.”

“Yes. Been here a while, us Greens. I’m happy to have such pleasant company,” Berlik said, winding an arm around Zoe’s shoulder. She laughed and ducked away with an exaggerated shiver.

“Get some tea and sit down with us. You’re done with the pipes, aren’t you?”

“Let me check the water heater and I’ll see if you’re right.” He beat a hasty retreat into the kitchen, taking a deep breath to still the agitation of something in his heart he could not name.

Her gaze lingered in his mind as he vacuumed the lobby, as he ate a foil-covered plate of peas and scalloped potatoes, as he collapsed into bed next to Zoe’s sleep-limp weight. The next handful of days passed slowly, the new guest appearing at odd times and places—outside the kitchen window as Berlik washed fritatta-crusted breakfast dishes, at the window of her room gazing toward the Greenkirk National Historic Site sign at the edge of the drive, speaking quietly to a large black bird perched on the back of the carved wooden boar from Hermitage's single art gallery that Zoe and Berlik had installed near the southern gate. As Berlik watched, the bird disappeared into the wood and Morrig turned her gaze to him until he hastily looked away, the edge of something vast he had not felt since childhood sounding through him. To Zoe's questions and questioning glances he could only shrug, unsure what even he thought.

The day before the solstice he stepped into the stables, converted by his great-grandfather into a garage as horses were relegated to a past that Berlik had devoured in every story of his ancestors. In one corner stood Morrig, staring at the wooden face with its halo of branching leaves carved over the door lintel. “Oh, I’m sorry. This is closed to the public until we can get the historic restoration team in here next month,” Berlik said, standing to one side of the door. “There is a very real danger of a beam falling on the public’s head at the moment.”

“Of course. The public.” Morrig nodded, making no move to leave. “Your ancestor cuts an impressive figure.”

“Who? Oh. The Knight of the Woods.” Berlik followed her eyes, his own meeting the dark wood of the carvings. “He’s more of an… emblem of the Green family. Something between a family crest and a patron spirit for the forest.”

“You’ve seen his passing.”

“I wish I had,” Berlik said, shaking his head ruefully as he stepped pointedly toward the door. “I grew up on stories of the magic here, back when the Greens used to use this place to hunt white stags and questing beasts. But I never did, and I doubt I ever will.”

“You saw with the eyes of your desire. And your denied birthright.”

“Ms. Morrig, my birthright will be at more of a loss if you’re injured by the architecture and you sue this place out from under me.”

“I could show you. Teach you. ” The woman called Morrig stood still as the carved face. “You’ve seen me, that’s the first step. All you would need is an agreement to my price.”

“Your price?”

“A trifle, in the grand scheme. An amusement for my family.” Behind her eyes something stirred, and Berlik shivered, hand paused bridging the gap halfway between them. “It’s not good for them to be so staid, especially these days, with so many changes coming to Wyvernhold. Something of the old ways that you're equipped to provide.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You do. You can see what I'm offering.” A raven’s eyes met his, sparking with the promise of every sorcery and marvel he had ever desired. “Tell me.”

His hand closed over her arm, his mind fixated on the promise, ignoring the darkness, the danger and terror visited on his ancestors masked by the half-remembered carving. Yes and no and outside, please, we can talk there hovered on his lips until one spilled from them in a single rush of desire.

He saw through the eyes of the land.

The pull behind his breastbone drew him through snow-furred branches, through the small dreams of torpid squirrels and foxes. The land filled his mind, his heart, his eyes where a stranger the color of pine boughs returned his gaze from a half-frozen pond. A beard like yew branches to his sternum, covering emerald-green plating like a jeweled beetle, part of him or another skin to shed like whatever it was he had left behind.

Blurs of noise and color intruded and withdrew like the lap of waves, what might have been voices or simply the howl of the forest gales that carried him further and further, the winter trees shrinking around him into ordered and regular shapes some part of him recognized as far from the wood he knew.

Before him a door loomed, small dark shapes parting like shadows before a light. Faces lined a cave of stone piled into darkness above them, bodies shrinking from him even as a gathering dusk of the dark shapes surrounded him. Voices and noise scratched his ears and he turned to the brightest blur at the table, chagrin carving it into a rictus as it raised a weapon to mirror the dusk around him. Voices rose, questioning, meaningless as the shapes they emerged from.

A game. His own voice was the roll of thunder, the howl of the winter gales. For those civilized by the Wyvern’s blood. No harm, only the sport your knights pride themselves on. A stroke with this axe, to be returned in kind. Or are you afraid, Wyvern’s son?

“No.” Next to the Wyvern, tawny hair, eyes full of something that made him remember. The knight rose to his feet, a single point of clarity in the shadows of the strange hall. Muscle lined his bared forearms, the sharp angle of his jaw the perfect compliment to a neck like a lithe bough. “My uncle has distinguished himself enough for anyone in this room. I’ve never even had a successful quest. Let me.”

From his back, an ancient weapon, the height of the young man who stepped forward to wield it. His hands were broad and capable, his face shining with knowledge older than this strange place, older than the Wyvern and its conquest of everything over the land but not within it. He bent his head, and the blade sang through silence.

The spin of the room stilled and it was only as he lifted his head by hair like briars that he realized what had happened. The horror on the Wyvern’s right hand had melted into wonder, the green-hafted weapon he had struck the blow with lying discarded next to his feet to be claimed with a swoop of free hand.

Meet me in Greenkirk in a year’s time, he told the knight, raising his head into darkness.

Chapter Text

The smells of coffee and bacon were enough for him to finally crack his eyes open onto the anger and hope that warred on Zoe’s face. Two half-moons a shade darker than her rich skin underscored her eyes as she stared. “Where is she?” he croaked.

“Who? Berlik, what—“

“Morrig. Did she check out? I need to talk to her.”

“You need more than that.” The upset cant of her voice shaded into baffled, relieved, angry. “Three days! The entire Hermitage police department was convinced you’d been eaten by a bear or fallen in the Severn and you’d be trawled up by some fisherman next year, and then you come crawling out of the woods like you’d been trying to hibernate yourself. I only found you this morning when I nearly ran the Polar over you. What happened?”

Images flew through his mind out of order and strange: black uniforms, cars screeching away from him, extending a hand broader than his own to touch an unfamiliar face. His head falling from his shoulders. “I think,” he said finally, “I’ve made a huge mistake. If I could just talk to Morrig—“

“She disappeared the same morning you did. Didn’t even sign the guestbook.” Zoe shook her head, half amused half exasperated. Her tight curls swung around her face as she sat down next to him on the bed, taking his hands. “Just tell me what happened. Start at the beginning.”

“I don’t know if I can.” Berlik buried his face in his hands. “It was like a dream. A dream of the woods. Of my ancestors, the ones who knew the Knight of the Woods. Magic. She offered me the magic the Green family used to have.”

“I knew it.” Zoe’s lips formed a thin line. “I knew there was more to her than met the eye, the way you kept staring at her. And you took her up on it, of course.”

“I should have known better.”

“You couldn’t have.”

“No. I’ve wanted this since I was old enough to see what was latent here. In Chapel, in Hermitage, in the woods...” Berlik trailed helplessly into the quiet murmur of the heater, of guests dining floors below. “I took a stranger’s gift, and now I’ll have to pay for it. For better or for worse.” He pressed Zoe’s hands between his. Beneath his skin something shifted, a luminous green moth testing the weakening walls of its chrysalis.

“Not just you.” Zoe’s arms were suddenly around his neck, her hand tracing the line of his spine through the thin shirt she had helped him into at some point. “Whatever happened, whatever she did to you, awakened in you… we’re in this together.”

“My mistake shouldn’t be yours.”

“That was what my mother said when I married a B&B owner who didn’t even have a family title anymore.” The scent of her warm skin rose over the confusion, and, for the first time since he had awakened, Berlik breathed easily.

In him, the Knight of the Woods lay in torpor. Berlik caught glimpses of another face in the mirror occasionally, skin, hair, eyes in a riot of leafy shades with wild hair and a beard that surely meant he would never be recognized even by any knight who would deign to travel as far as Hermitage looking for answers. No news reports of huge green men wielding antique weaponry were broadcast out of Severluna in the days following the solstice, and after a few nervous weeks Berlik stopped watching for them. Instead, each morning he sat inside the mound of Greenkirk, mind open to the Knight of the Woods.

In the darkness he emptied his mind once more until the wood rose to claim it, implacable, ancient, uncaring of anything but the ritual it had worn into Berlik’s bloodline like a river valley. He reached his mind toward it and recoiled as from somewhere both within him and all around him the wood flowed into his mind's vacuum—trees, streams, the spirits of creatures that crept and killed and mated under sky filigreed by an endless net of branches. Life and death passed with every moment of the moon’s path and the river’s flow to the sea until Berlik gasped and pulled back into the world, eyes blurring. Severn’s waters became the hammer of his heart in his ears, the ground became his flesh and bones, those bones that had been shaped and molded by the generations of Greens subject to the Knight's power.

Again.

The thing that was Berlik Green narrowed the world to a single point, a green jewel where his mind touched the land. Beneath his skin the Knight of the Woods rose in his blood, enveloping his consciousness, but Berlik moved with the force, buffeted and wrenched but discrete from the maelstrom. He held to himself like a drowning man until the jewel flared in his heart and he drew back once more, still reeling but contained by his own flesh, his own thought. His hands had clawed furrows in the dirt beneath him and he eased his cramped fingers, eyes blindly focusing past the dark walls of the hollow hill to the face he had worn, would wear again.

He half-crawled back to the house only to be met by Zoe, a paintbrush in one varnish-flecked hand. "Is it going better?" she asked, helping him to the antique rocker at one end of the porch near where she had been touching up the railings.

"I can touch it without drowning in it, but I can't control it at all." He allowed himself to relax, breathing easier as Zoe sat down to continue her work.

“We’ll figure something out,” Zoe curled the brush around a whorl of wood, a thin line forming between her perfectly curved brows. “Did you try the library?”

“Genealogy records, and some stories about the Green family. Anything you could find on the informational plaques outside Greenkirk.” Berlik took a deep breath, the rhythms of his own body slowly losing their foreign feeling. “What about the attic?”

“It looks like your parents donated any documents that were there to the library after all. Or shredded them. Though I haven’t braved the stable yet, maybe there’s something in the crawlspace.” Zoe took a sip of iced tea from the tumbler resting next to her. “How are you feeling?”

“Nothing’s happened that I haven't sought out. Yet. I feel...” Berlik sighed explosively. “I feel like it’s just under my skin. I’m nothing, a film over the enchantment that’s waiting for whatever that knight brings here. Half of me still thinks I should drive to Severluna and turn myself in before I do hurt him.”

“Can you talk about him? The knight, I mean?”

“He was all I could see, once he spoke up. He had brown hair, like a fawn, but curly. And grey eyes. Apparently he's a good hand with an ancient battleaxe, too.”

Zoe's lips curved slightly. “If the circumstances were different...”

“It's not like that. I swear.”

Zoe's laugh was a flash of light from a mirror. "You might have to kill a man and you're worried that I would be jealous? When we've had others on multiple occasions?"

"College were a long time ago."

"Berlik, I trust you." Zoe slid one thin, brown hand over his broad, red-speckled one. "I trust us. The magic runs in your blood, and I'm a part of you as much as anyone else. We'll figure something out."

Following lunch, Berlik fixed a fence near the north gate, called an arborist about an oak with galls, and had deposited his toolbox in the shed before he remembered the crawlspace over the stable. Pushing open the trapdoor on the dark space illuminated by pale evening spring light, he paused on the ladder before raising himself up onto the uneven boarded floor.

The flare of black feathers nearly knocked him backward down the ladder. In the darkness, the raven’s eye glinted like a jewel and he steadied himself against a carved-oak beam as thick as his own waist. “What have you done to me?” he finally demanded.

“You know.” Morrig's mild, soft voice did not seem to come from the raven itself, entering Berlik’s mind from what felt like somewhere below his right ear. “The world is changing. Slowly but surely the realms outside this are coming back to bear against the world as you know it. The power in your line is a thread in the tapestry, and you will follow the thread or snap it.”

“This isn’t what I wanted!” Berlik’s blood pounded furiously in his ears, the Knight waiting patiently for his move. “I agreed to a harmless prank on your family, who are apparently the Wyvernborns, and now I could kill an innocent man in less than a year!”

“Oh, that’s very unlikely.” In his mind’s eye he could see Morrig’s human face, placid and smooth, the surface of a bottomless pool. “Gawain is a good young man, certainly for a knight. And you’re closer to the magic of these woods than you think.”

“I can’t control it.” Berlik stared at the floor. “But no one else could, could they? This is something beyond my turning myself into the police.”

“There’s no need for that. Most of them wouldn’t believe you, and it wouldn’t avail anything anyway. This is old magic, moreso than anyone at court knows about. Only you can tame it.”

“I still don’t know how.”

“Then see.”

Before his eyes, the Knight of the Wood sunk into men and women like roots into soil. One sought five quarries, those who had run from his challenge, leaving them murdered in their beds before one man prostrated himself before the blow. Another warned the challenged of his true nature, then fell beside her dead as a withering like wind struck them both. Yet another swung a single stroke of the axe to behead both his wife and the questing knight as they glanced up in horror from their embrace. Dressed in the skins and coarse, bright cloth of the past, sporting Berlik's flaming hair, his high cheekbones, they fought or placated or succumbed to the being they carved on lintels and banisters, a reverence and a warning to those who sought the power buried deep in blood and time. Brambles caught at them, weaving them into a web, married to the land, buried with in it like the ancient priests who had once used Greenkirk for their worship of spirits older and stranger than Calluna and Severn.

He came to himself kneeling on a floor empty of anything but his own footprints in the dust. He must prove his loyalty to the land, and the one who embodies the land, an echo of the voice spoke before falling silent.

Chapter Text

"I still can't understand," Zoe said, setting a tray down on the table like a full stop. Absent of any of the handful of late-summer regulars who had adjourned to day hikes or to explore Hermitage proper they had compiled a cold afternoon lunch and taken it out onto the porch. Berlik tore into a fresh bread roll, followed it with a round of sharp white cheese liberally slathered with Zoe’s mother’s sweet pickle relish. "Why it cares so much about such a human thing as loyalty, I mean. What does that mean to something as old as these woods, even where it brushed up against your family?"

“The Greens have been here for a long time. They were here before the first Arden, and they were some of the last holdouts when he united Wyvernhold.” Berlik gazed out at the trees, the flames of yellow and red around the edges of aspens and white oaks that grew brighter every day a warning he dreaded even as the colors filled him with the same wonder he had felt since the formation of his oldest memories. “Morrig said it was old magic, some of the oldest. Maybe at some point the magic just got… mixed up in itself. Human wants and the needs of the land, tangled together until it did more harm than good.”

“Then maybe you can change with it. Or change it.”

“I've tried. I've been trying. It's still like throwing myself into a hurricane and expecting to direct it with my mind. If I can't find a way to do it that the Knight accepts...”

“Berlik, you’ve wanted this part of yourself since you were a child. Now you don’t only have the means to use the magic, you have a reason.” Zoe turned to face him, her dark eyes shining with determination and the love that had never once left them since Berlik’s awakening three days into the bright year. “You can’t just give up because some of your ancestors tried different things and failed. You’re not them.”

“But they’re all I have to go off of.”

“That’s not true.” Zoe pressed one hand to his heart, the beat seeming to course between them for a breath. “You have me.”

Following the meal, Berlik checked in a family with an indeterminate number of children who seemed driven to find everything in the lobby that could be climbed on, mixed a batch of bread dough to proof for breakfast rolls the next day, and managed to spend the next hour updating guest records before the gold of sunset magnified by the gold embellishments of the trees reminded him of where he must go. Slowly, deliberately, he made his way through the flares of crimson and ocher among the green that lined the path toward the mound of Greenkirk before sitting and closing his eyes.

The Knight filled him like twilight, not the consuming hunger for existence embodied that he had felt at first but with the inexorability of falling night. The root grew and blossomed, became a tree that unfurled through his veins and bones to leave him cruciform, helplessly spread before the force within. Every bird-wing flicker, every salt breeze carried miles from the coast, drew him farther until, gasping, Berlik returned to himself, eyes fixed on the high-domed dirt roof above his head.

Again.

Seasons passed in a flicker of time-lapsed images, summer conflagrating into snow that became a fall of breath-white petals adorning ground already lush and heat-brown. Creatures lived and died and lived with vivid flickers like shooting stars in the slow passage of time and he was gone, lost, a mote in the world’s infinity struck into life by a single heartbeat that wrenched him back to his body with greater effort than before. Berlik swallowed, took a breath, and closed his eyes.

Again.

It reached out to him from somewhere near, the Knight’s gaze settling, awareness extending a tentative hand to touch something younger than itself but still old, so old, a language of mingled essences as Severn traveled toward Calluna's source for their slow journey to the sea, as twilight met night edging into morning and the shadow behind the autumn brightness. Something beyond his mind cried out and he reached for it until his mind touched another one, not the fey, unknowable darkness of the Knight, but something vibrant and alive and familiar. Blood fell with a heart's rhythm into a bowl black with tufts and quills of black, and Berlik saw something rise from it, an ancient shadow cloaked in feathers and darkness that the sun itself could only throw into deeper shadow. The slender figure before it bowed but did not break, blood binding the two together as the Knight watched in slow deliberation, Berlik helplessly pinned by the power within himself. Sounds spilled from the two, fragments the Knight's presence muffled into a litany Berlik could only half understand: temptation, obscure, gifts, blood, fastness...

Trust.

He wakened into himself to find Zoe in his arms, trembling and ashen-faced but teeth bared in triumph. “It’s okay,” she panted, swaying back and forth in his arms. “I got it. I found her. Morrig, I mean.”

“How could you do that? What happened?”

“What she is… it’s old, and it’s powerful enough to destroy me without a thought, but it has certain rules. Just like this magic. I brought my blood—you know I can trace my own family back to Persant Indis. He knew her, and he showed me. So she showed me how we could work together on this.”

“So.” Berlik drew Zoe close, pressing his face to her hair as a spark of half disbelieving hope caught in his chest. “What do we do?”

It was three days before the deadline when Berlik heard the squeal of brakes outside and hurried away from his conversation with winter regulars Doctor and Mister Lake toward the source of the noise. A small, car-shaped disturbance lay at the end of a parabola through the calf-thick snow, and Berlik hurried off the porch, fumbling for his phone as he tried to determine the extent of the damage.

The Afalach Grey was half in, half out of a snowbank that offset its dirty snow-flecked silver. A large, broken lump to one side suggested that the car had collided with the wooden boar, sending its head minus one tusk several feet from the rest of the body. “Are you all right?” Berlik called, lifting his phone to bathe the scene in a weak glow that illuminated the odd angle of one wheel.

“Just shaken, I think. My door isn’t… oh, no, there.” The driver’s side door etched an arc into the fresh drift on the other side of the car, and a figure unfolded itself, only to suddenly double over as Berlik darted forward to catch him. His eyes settled on the black clothing offsetting the pale angles of the face, the ruddy brown hair worn practically short, the eyes that wrenched Berlik’s spirit from his body hard enough for him to bite down on his tongue as the knight’s head raised itself in his mind, meeting the eyes of the Knight of the Wood without fear or shame. Curls and tendrils of vine and branch crept through him, blocking his throat and clouding the space around his vision.

"Tell a lie. I think my ankle's twisted," the knight said breathlessly. “What are my chances of getting a tow at this hour?”

“I’ll call the body shop in Hermitage but I guarantee everyone’s asleep by now.” Berlik’s voice was steady in his own ears, the level beat of a heart. He realized he was still clasping the man he would kill in his arms and he helped him to lean against the flank of the Grey. A round shape on his chest caught Berlik’s eye—Calluna’s moon, etched in some kind of luminous white stone. “Fortunately, you’re right outside the foremost bed and breakfast in northern Wyvernhold, where you are welcome to stay free of charge until I can get Hector Feire out here to fix that wheel.”

The knight’s eyes grew round as he glanced nervously at the Grey. “What are the chances of that? It looks like the axle’s done for.”

“I’m no mechanic, but I’d say a week at the outside.”

“Oh. Is there a bus I could get on, at least tomorrow morning? I’m looking for Greenkirk.“

“Greenkirk?” The words were light, falling as easily as the coin-wide flakes dusting Berlik’s hair. “That’s easy. You’ve found it.”

“I have?” The knight blinked. “No one I talked to could tell me anything other than ‘north, near the coast but not quite to the sea.’ This is really it?”

“It’s a historical landmark an hour’s hike from the house. An ancient religious site.” Berlik gestured toward the plaque, the words printed on royal Wyvern green confused by the dapple of clinging snow. “Please, though, at least get a night’s sleep and some mulled wine before you leave. It’s hardly hiking weather.”

Eyes the color of sea storms met his as the knight ran a hand through his short curls, dislodging a good amount of snow. “Technically I don’t have to be there for another two days, so it seems I have no choice but to accept your hospitality. Who do I owe this honor to?”

Berlik swallowed hard. “Berlik Green,” he said, the name forcing its way through a dam of all the words he couldn’t say.

“Gawain Loth.” He pumped Berlik’s hand with a firm grip that belied the ankle and any nerves or cold. “If you don’t mind I think I’ll take you up on that mulled wine, since I definitely won’t be driving.”

Berlik turned, breath shallow. “I’ll see if the clientele hasn’t finished it all.”

Hector Feire drove his aging tow truck gingerly through the ongoing snowstorm to Chapel the next morning and Berlik gratefully spent the morning and most of the afternoon helping him dig the Grey out of the snowbank. He caught occasional flashes from the porch, then an upstairs window, of knight-black and fawn-tawny moving restlessly. When Berlik returned to the front of the house after seeing Hector to the mostly-plowed road, Gawain was sitting on the front porch, leg elevated. A pair of crutches from when Zoe had torn a ligament in her knee rested on the table next to him, abutted by a mug of rum cocoa. “How are you?” Berlik asked.

“Not bad, thanks. Your Doctor Lake was kind enough to look at it and she says it’s a bad sprain I should stay off of for the next two weeks.” Gawain jerked his chin toward the drive path. “How’s the car?”

“On the way to the repair shop. I found your trouble,” Berlik said, placing the carved wooden tusk onto the table next to Gawain.

“Defeated by a boar like a knight in the old days,” Gawain said with a self-deprecating smile. “I’m happy to pay for it.”

“No, of course not. In fact, keep it. A souvenir of your stay.” The green mist was back, obscuring his eyes and heart with steady tendrils. “Just give me something equally memorable in return.”

“That I can do.” They stepped into the lobby to the smell of Zoe’s four-cheese lasagna and Berlik paused by the kitchen door.

“Since you can’t drive to town for dinner,” he asked, “would you like to eat with us?”

“I admit I haven’t had anything since those pancakes this morning.” Gawain glanced longingly through the kitchen door, smiling as Zoe beckoned. “Was that blackberry syrup?”

“It was. I pick them and make the preserves myself.” Zoe piled Gawain’s plate with a thick, cheese-stringed helping abutted by garlic green beans and parmesan breadsticks. “The cheese is from a farmer just on the other side of Hermitage, the tomatoes are canned from the store.”

“Was that Dun Cow Dairy, by any chance?” Gawain took a large and grateful bite, continued through a mouthful of cheese and pasta, “I had an encounter with its owner on the way down. A fox was involved.”

The length and breadth of Gawain’s adventures, from a flat tire just outside Severluna to the recovery of his Calluna medallion from the fox's den, occupied the rest of the meal until Gawain and Berlik found themselves washing dishes together to the slow drone of carols on the lobby radio. “Why do you need to be at Greenkirk the day after tomorrow?” Berlik managed to ask.

Gawain’s eyes flitted away. “Technically it’s official knight business. Which I’d be happy to tell you under most circumstances considering the extent of your hospitality, but—“

Berlik held up a soap-streaked hand. “No, please. The last thing I want to do is be a party to state secrets.”

Gawain nodded and placed the last of the tumblers into a cupboard before drying in his hands and turning to Berlik. “You said to give you something memorable,” he said finally.

Berlik regarded him. “Anything. Just in the interest of equity.”

The knight’s lips were there and gone, a shooting star in the dimmed light of the lobby. “Thank you,” Gawain said breathlessly, and was gone before Berlik could formulate a response.

Chapter Text

The next day a pipe froze and broke, forcing Berlik to carefully navigate the Polar through the steadily-falling snow to the Hermitage hardware store, thankfully empty of the last-minute holiday shoppers who crowded the supermarket and the handful of tourist shops along the main drag. He braved one of the latter, run by a school friend of his youth, for a tray for the guests: cheeses, summer sausage, dried lingonberries, and fresh bread from the bakery next door, including a custom holiday loaf shaped like a fox. Hermitage locals greeted him, the pleasantries he offered in return sounding nothing like the words of an incipient murderer.

When he returned, Gawain and a handful of fellow guests were seated in the lobby, engaging in a rendition of a carol pealing from the radio. “Oh, thank Severn, the hero returns!” Doctor Lake interrupted herself, smiling up at him from near the fireplace. “The lady of the house has been heating water on the stove since you left if you need to freshen up.”

“If I sit down at this rate I won’t get back up till after the solstice and you’ll all be out of luck for bathing.” Berlik stepped toward the door to the stables at the back of the kitchen, only noticing as he knelt on the icy concrete next to the water heater that Gawain had hobbled after him.

“Please tell me if there’s anything I can help you with,” he said, lowering himself laboriously next to Berlik. “Plumbing isn’t really something they teach knights, but I couldn’t feel more useless right now.”

“Hand me tools as I need them and I’ll see if I need any hands otherwise.” Berlik reached for the tangle of pipes that had hardly been updated since running water had belatedly come to Chapel in his grandfather’s youth, carefully uncoupling a few fastenings from the wall. “I’m frankly surprised you made it this far in this snow in that little Grey. We have what amounts to a snowmobile and I was having some trouble on the last stretch.”

“Beginner’s luck, I guess.” From the toolbox Gawain passed the wrench that Berlik indicated, their fingers brushing. “Zoe says you’ve lived here all your life.”

“Absent some vacations and four years of business school down south, yes.” As he worked, Berlik spun a tapestry of skinned knees, forest expeditions, and encounters with various probable and improbable animals as Gawain braced pipes in place and provided tools, apparently unbothered by the freezing stable air. Finally, Berlik rose stiffly to his feet and stepped back through the kitchen door to test the warm spigot, his gaze falling on the bag of shopping next to the door. “The fox is yours, by the way,” he said, producing it from the bag.

Gawain accepted it with a blink. “Well. Happy solstice to me.”

“It made me think of your fox story so I picked it up at one of the tourist traps.” Warm, then hot water flowed from the tap, and Berlik breathed a sigh of relief. He stepped back from the sink only to find Gawain standing close behind him.

“Why are you doing all of this?” he asked softly.

“I told you. You’re our guest until your car can drive a straight line again.” After only a day it was easier to look steadily at the man he stood every chance of beheading, to repeat the half-truths that might save or doom them both. “As patriotic Wyvernholders it’s the least we could do for a knight of the realm, in any case.”

“Can I give you something memorable in return again?”

Berlik stepped back to place the fridge between them and the ajar kitchen door as their lips met. Gawain slid one hand up his chest, fingers curling around the end of Berlik's braid, and Berlik gasped only for Gawain's tongue to flicker past his parted lips. His hands cupped Gawain's shoulders, urging the knight's wiry-thin weight against him to pin himself against the kitchen wall as his own tongue pressed against the slick heat of Gawain's.

A soft pop sounded from somewhere to Berlik's right and they were clasped in darkness. From the lobby, a chorus of surprised noises filled the rooms and Berlik stepped from Gawain’s arms into the dark. “Wait,” he thought he heard Gawain say, but he was already fumbling his way up the stairs toward the fusebox.

Moments of fruitlessly tripping switches later, a call to the power company determined that they would be out to fix the downed power line the next morning. Berlik reassured the guests as he passed out small electric lanterns and extra blankets from the earliest days of electricity at Chapel. The last to receive one was Gawain, light glancing off the moon on his chest as he took both under the arm not lumbered with a crutch. “I’m surprised not to see our most prominent guest down here. Roarke Wyvernborne tells me she hates the cold,” he said with a half-smile.

“He is. Obviously.”

Gawain began to shake his head, stopped. “Oh Severn, was it supposed to be a secret? Or did she just not say who she was?”

“Who? Exactly?”

“Morrig Seabrook, my great-aunt once removed or something. I know she hasn’t been seen outside court much in the past few years, but… did she check out already? I saw her my first day here. She was talking to Zoe. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I—“

“No, she must have checked out. I’m sorry. Good night.” Berlik took the stairs two at a time, ignoring Gawain's noise of confusing, to find Zoe sitting in front of her vanity table placing a nightcap over freshly-oiled curls.

“Berlik, what’s wrong?” she asked, turning.

“Morrig was here? And you didn’t tell me?”

"You'd been in and out so much I didn't even have a chance to tell you." Zoe twisted her wedding ring unhappily around her finger. "She barely said anything, just to give him something physical that would protect him in addition to... everything else. I just gave him my scarf, the green one I was wearing. I'm so sorry."

"So you kissed him twice, then."

"I gave it my best performance, I really did. I just told him that you wouldn't mind, but he said he wouldn't do anything without your explicit permission. Or participation." Zoe's hands stilled as she smiled tentatively at Berlik. "I hope it was enjoyable for you."

"Despite everything, it was." Berlik's laugh was a fathomless hole. “Zoe, if I have to confess to the murder of a knight of the realm—”

“What if it doesn’t come to that?”

“What if it does?”

Zoe crossed the room to bury her face in his chest. “Magic isn’t what it seems,” she murmured. “That’s the first thing you ever told me, when we met. Whatever happens tomorrow it’ll probably be something none of us expect. Maybe even that... woman, or whatever she really is.”

Berlik didn’t answer, only cupping her chin to return Gawain's kiss as they made their way toward the bed.

The dawn was a prism, cold sunlight stabbing from the newly-clear sky in brittle rays to light the path of his feet over the snow. The flicker of foreign thought that burned beside the all-consuming green flame considered the trail that would implicate him in moments, but as the white-buried swell of Greenkirk came into view through the trees, this line of thought seemed to matter less. The wooden gate over the entrance stood ajar, an uneven tripod of prints leading through onto the hard-packed earth inside the hill.

The knight knelt in one corner, black coat buttoned to his chin, crutches propped against the wall next to him. “Good morning,” he said, voice carefully neutral as he made as though to rise to his feet.

He extended a single, broad hand, and Gawain took it after a moment’s pause, reaching for one crutch to steady himself. Your bravery is admirable. What words do you have, before your forfeit?

The knight’s chin remained level, his jaw set. “Just do it now so I can die while I’m still in a good mood.”

The light from the door fell in a spill of pearl over Gawain’s back as he knelt again, bowing his head nearly to the floor. He raised the axe, only to stop inches above Gawain's neck as the spark inside him flared against the greater fire. Looking down, he saw that the knight had flinched as well, fists clenched at his sides.

Raise your head, he ordered, the close walls of Greenkirk flattening his voice into something old and empty.

The knight obeyed, and he raised the axe once more. In the dawn light the blade flashed once, the land and its descendant claiming their due.

The ice fell from his hands, the vine mist from his head, and Berlik blinked, opening his eyes on the crumpled figure before him. His heart froze in his chest, then slowly gave a painful, stretching throb as Gawain raised himself onto his palms.

“Berlik?” His voice was small in the darkness, and Berlik nodded slowly.

“I couldn’t tell you. The magic wouldn’t let me. It and your aunt—“

“My what?”

“Your great-aunt. Lady Seabrook. I asked her to teach me magic and she made me into my ancestor. Or… whatever possessed my ancestor when he killed six men in their beds for not responding to his challenge.” Berlik wavered a moment, then collapsed to his knees next to Gawain. “The spirit of Greenkirk Woods, whatever it is that used to protect the integrity of the forest, the integrity of my family. I never set out to hurt you, or anyone. All I could do was work with Zoe to make it easy for you. For all of us.”

"A lot of things make a lot more sense now, actually." Slowly, Gawain reached up to undo the top button of his collar. Under it the dim light glanced off something green and shining that he drew out of his collar, the back of it stained with a slash of red. His blood. Zoe’s scarf.

“She told me she gave you that.” Berlik touched the dark blotch where the Knight's axe had parted the fabric. "Why didn't you give it to me?"

“She said that someone had told her that it would keep me safe." It was Gawain’s turn to trip over his words. "That and her blessing, which was why she kissed me. Sort of. I know you asked for equity, I was just so afraid that the knight would take it from me that I didn't—“

“Morrig must have—“

“I’m sorry—“

"For what? I'm the one who put your life in danger and lied to you for two days straight."

"To save my life. From something neither of us could possibly understand." A breath, and Gawain's mouth was pressed to his, one hand tangled in his hair. In the darkness, surrounded by what now filled him, illusions stripped, Berlik's returning kiss was frank in its passion, breath short and pulse quick until they both parted, panting. "I believe you that you never meant for this to happen. Last year, that quest that was in the news... everyone saw things that let us realize how alive this kind of magic is, even these days. We all saw something bigger than ourselves, and how dangerous it was. How alluring. I don't blame you."

"I'm still sorry you got mixed up in all of this," Berlik said, hands resting on Gawain's shoulders. "All I can offer you is a full explanation, now that Zoe can hopefully talk about it with us. And our hospitality for as long as you would like."

Gawain smiled as he reached for his discarded crutches. “How could I lose my honor by turning down the perfect host?”

The two stepped out of Greenkirk side by side, to where Zoe stood waiting for them, trust and love and a host of possibilities unconstrained by the dead or the land vibrant on her face.