how the light rises

Even if there is something that we believe cannot be forgiven, the old priest had told her, smelling of incense, soured wine, a thousand years of obsessive ritual — It is still forgivable by God Himself. Without Him there would be no sins to be pardoned; we would be far lesser beasts -- animals, unrepentant entirely. And God needs to save as badly as we need to be saved. Do you understand?

She hadn't then, but she thought she did now, standing with her brother at the mouth of their stable as the lean shadow hunched a handful of paces away. A brackish stain bloomed on the man's blue shirt, illuminated by a shard of moonlight through the high window. And Nadine knew that it wasn't rain, couldn't be rain, because the dryness of the season hadn't yet been cured.

Liam spoke for them both, voice steady with strange resolve. "We know it's you, Thomas. Just come out. Nothing to be done now."

How many times before had she thought back to that evening on the mountain; how many nightmares had chased her from sleep? She was growing afraid that her phantom limb had been Thomas all along.

"Not scared I'm going to shoot?" The distinct watery gleam of metal, careless, at his hip.

"You saved me once," said Liam, speaking to a silhouette. "Why would you shoot me now?"

There was a sigh, as if the man was letting go of something heavy, and then he stepped forward almost shyly into a more distinct stain of light. His hair was longer now, the shadows underneath his eyes violent as bruises, but it was Thomas, and something in Nadine went still.

"You two always go for walks in the middle of the night?" Thomas' accent was flat, windswept, his voice gentle but somehow without warmth.

"You always hide on other people's land?" Liam asked.

"No,” said Thomas, bluntly enough. "I had nowhere else to go."

"Oh God, Thomas," said Nadine, stirred by an instinctive dread. "Why'd you do it?"

The silent concession of his guilt felt like a betrayal; and she remembered that old priest in the narrow California church, years ago, lifetimes ago, days after Natalie had left them forever. Nadine hated how everything in her life had splintered, transformed into the silent unendurable agony of before and after. She hated it because she knew the priest, in his way, had been right; if there was no God then there were no sinners, either. No saints, no martyrs -- just roaming unoriginal people somehow inundated with the silly notion that they, in this unforgiving universe, mattered.

"Those men weren't lambs at the slaughter," said Thomas, evasive to the last. It didn't seem as if he wanted to look at her. "Don't think that they were."

“You’re bleeding out,” said Liam, and Nadine found herself unsurprised to hear the concern coloring his voice. While she never forgot a betrayal, her brother never forgot a kindness.

"Either one of you good with a needle?" There was surprisingly little strain in Thomas' voice now.

"Nadine is," said Liam.

"I can't," said Nadine, innately helpless, and for some strange reason she didn't fully understand. "Thomas, I've never stitched a wound--"

"Why did you do it, though?” Liam's gaze was directed at Thomas with all the force of a searchlight; Nadine would have cowered from it, but Thomas didn't.

"Some good people do bad things," said Thomas shortly. "And some bad people do good things. That makes it awfully difficult to determine who is who."

"And you?" Nadine had to ask, even if she couldn't bear to know.

He finally looked towards her instead of Liam, and she saw with a strange detachment how very black his eyes were: so dark she could barely tell iris from pupil. How had she never noticed before?

"I'm neither," he said, with all his typical bluntness, and something in Nadine's chest sank like a stone. He pressed his hand down over the flat of his abdomen, that blossoming rose-dark stain of blood, and Nadine thought back again to the evening she couldn't bear to forget. Sometimes it felt wrong to her. Sometimes it felt not like a loss but like a betrayal. "Stitch me up; I'll be off your hands. I won't ask for more than that."

"But what are we supposed to do then?" said Nadine, and though she included Liam she was really, selfishly, asking only for herself. "You'll be out there hiding — we'll be stuck here, wondering if you're gonna get shot or killed or —“

Thomas' voice was closed and shuttered when he replied, a hundred thousand miles away, his black hair washed in moonlight. "I suppose you could pray."

"You don't believe in God," said Nadine, now angry enough to be brave. "Don't pretend you do."

"I do believe in God," he said, and again his voice had all the eerie flatness of midwestern earth. "I do — and what He can't bring Himself to do, I'll do for Him."

Turnabout (Alabaster Country)

She trod more carefully now. The men with the black coldness that reached their eyes; the leonine Isaiah, always too quick to touch and too slow to pull away; even Thomas, though she could not imagine him ever harming her. But his eyes were deep and unfathomable, eyes that one could grow lost in, and he dazzled Nadine with his infrequent smiles. She didn’t know why she cared so much for him, soulless killer from beyond the mountains, dark cropped hair and constellation of moles scattered along his left cheek. But she did.

“Where’s Liam?” Wren asked midway through the day, and something in Nadine sank, effortlessly as the cut of a knife.

“Went off to the spring to get water.” Isaiah yawned.

“I’m going to go with him.”

“Why?” And then a slow recognition, an uneasy silence. Isaiah looked slightly uncomfortable, and at once Nadine thought of the careless affection the two men shared, though not often among others; in the shadows of a box stall in the stable, in the rocky caves of the mountain stone, unraveling one another in the dusky forest. But Nadine’s heart was too full of beauty to admit fear; and she could no more pin down Wren, butterfly-winged, than she could try and steal him away.  He belonged to no one. Not even Liam.

Wren departed to find Liam and ten minutes later, Nadine followed. The dappled light fell through the arboreal land and the latticed branches, the nameless wildflowers blooming at her feet. It was lovely, effervescent and fleeting, and Nadine crouched to take an armful of blossoms into her hands. They smelled of fragrant warmth, of an endless, formless summer.

Soon, though, she heard voices cut through the pristine silence. Liam, and Wren—Liam with his low melodic tones and Wren’s shy and clever, a voice like a cat who had learned to speak. Nadine could hear the splash of water, her brother’s laughter like a clarion bell.  And then they were both laughing until that laughter went soft, turned into something else: something heated, something at the edge of an ache. She had never before come so close to the sight that she’d fought to avoid; though through the leaves she saw them now, shirts off, jeans unbuttoned, the flatness of their rosebrowned abdomens.  And at once it struck her, the things she would have to learn to live without.

There were so many different ways in which to want, and Nadine thought she could count them all. Frozen, she could not move away. Her brother had his palm to Wren’s cheek with a tenderness he had never shown her: sweet, gentle, soft. The skim of his fingertips along the feline cheekbones, one of his hands in Wren’s. The closer they drew the more devastated she became; clutching the wild blooms in her arms as tears rose to her red-rimmed eyes.

She didn’t know which was worse: getting what you want, or not getting it at all.

You should have known. She’d been played a fool. You should have known.

She’d thought that Liam’s feelings did not encompass anything more than Lydia, her blue-black hair and deep navy eyes, the full mouth always bitten to redness. She’d thought the flirtations between her brother and Wren had been innocent, the actions of two young men with little else to entertain them. Of course they were close, because they loved each other, and and love was all either of them needed. A kind hand, a soft word — it was enough. Or so she’d thought.

But now Liam was pressing Wren against the rough bark of an oak tree, hands traveling over the map of the other man’s body: hips, forearms, even a brief pressure to the pulse in his throat.

“Sick of hiding this.” Wren’s voice, muted.

“Sick of you saying we have a choice.”

In a blush of heat, Wren pressed his forehead against Liam’s. For a moment they were both quiet, still — more silent than the forest itself.

“No one gets what they want,” murmuered Liam, eyes closed as he said it. “No one.”

The world was sober and solemn around them, and Nadine’s eyes were fixed on Wren. The curve of his narrow neck and the profusion of his blue-black hair, the delicate wrists. When Liam ran his fingers across the other man’s abdomen, Wren inhaled sharply. And Nadine knew how he felt—because everything he’d done to her was now being done to him.

Liam tilted his face down just slightly, looked at Wren as if he’d never seen anything so beautiful. Nadine’s heart squeezed.

“I think I’ve loved you my entire life,” Liam murmured. And something in Nadine went still.

Turning, she stumbled through the underbrush, dumping the flowers from her arms and tears streaking her cheeks. The late afternoon light was heady and lush through the branches, pure molten sun. She wanted to hide; she wanted to disappear. But back at the camp there was Isaiah, Harris, Rion — no one with whom she could offer her secret, for she could not risk her brother’s shame.