The Cunning Man || ONC 2021

12: Acceptance

"Are you sure about that, Cade?" Nora when I swore the same to her.

"I came to this conclusion an hour after the Captain left us here. Then I spent all day yesterday thinking it over. So yea. I'm sure."

"So," she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. "You are a Changeling? And you've known that all along?"

"Yes to the first. More or less to the second. I've fought the truth tooth and nail, as you yourself have seen. Coming across my mother and her Familiar having relations one afternoon, made me look a lot harder at myself in the mirror afterwards. I knew. I just didn't want to accept it."

"What do you mean, about looking in the mirror?" Nora looked over at me, puzzled.

I flashed her a rueful smile. "Neither my mother nor her husband had red hair."

I inhaled deeply, then spoke his name for the first time in ages. "Thom did, though. His primary magic was also the same as mine."

"That could be coincidence."

"The red hair, maybe. Or the magic. But not both together."

Nora thought this over for a moment, and brushed her fingers across the bandages around my right hand.

She then whispered the direct translation of 'necromancy'. "Death knowledge."

"I can see spirits, human or otherwise. I have the power to speak to them, call them up, command them, control them." I fell silent for a moment, then added, "I have a lot to learn in a short amount of time."

"The revenant?" her brow furrowed.

"It's still out there, and Kilwin will compel it to keep going until it has either completed its mission, or it's been destroyed. I have to face it, sooner or later."

I glanced over at the table, where Josiah had left the source of so much damn trouble. Nora followed my gaze to Theo's box, then sighed softly herself.

"We're going to have to open that, you know. We need to know what's so important that Kilwin's spent a decade trying to hunt you down."

"Yes," I turned back to her and traced the curve of her jaw with my eyes. "But not tonight."

She started to laugh. "I have a gash down half my leg that requires stitches, and you have a broken hand, Cade. I think it'll be a few days before we can get to the business of a Pact."

"I think we can figure something out," I followed my gaze with my left hand, down the side of her neck and toward the swell of one breast. "Just won't be in any way you've been raised to think of as proper."

"I was raised to think of my own desires as improper," Nora retorted dryly. "So while I have some idea of how the basics of coitus works, I'm quite sure I wouldn't know proper from improper during the act."

I snorted at the word 'coitus' and rolled my eyes. "I'll never understand how people who claim it's proper to mind their own business outside of other people's bedrooms, don't find the irony in the fact that they still dictate what other adults do and how they do it."

Nora put a hand over mine and stopped me just short of tracing the outline of her nipple through my shirt. "Before we become distracted any further, I still have a few questions."

I grumbled under my breath, but withdrew my hand and looked her in the eye. "I'm sure I have a few answers."

I was trying to be cheeky, but Nora's mood had turned solemn. "I only want the truthful ones."

"All right."

It surprised me how easy it was, and how good it felt, to agree with her. I didn't have anything else to lose, now that I knew the stakes we faced. There was an unexpected freedom in having finally chosen my path.