Aneirin

Someone else had survived. Someone other than a bitter, antisocial old man. That thought was so strong that Aneirin forgot caution in his desperation to see another friendly face. He reached out, grabbed a corner of the cloth, and wrenched it away.

The force with which the cloth returned to its place wrapped around what he could only assume was his aunt’s body threw him towards the cocoon, where his own cloak touched the pile and was immediately ripped from his body to join the enchanted mass, choking him before he could get the string untied from around his neck.

“Aunt Nerys!” Aneirin shouted, hurriedly backing up a safe distance. “The Vethyles are gone. It’s okay to come out!”

The mass of cloth continued to writhe like an angry thing, almost like a wad of vipers that Aneirin had once seen when his uncle Rees had taken him to the deserts of Iozi.

“Aunt Nerys?” Aneirin asked nervously.

Still no response. No motion from the wad whatsoever, except for the roiling that reminded him of disturbed serpents.

Aneirin gingerly fed some veoh into the cloth, thinking maybe to calm the enchantment into revealing its bounty.

A strand of curtain whipped out of the shell, grabbed him, and slammed him across the room. Aneirin’s last memory as his head and body collided with the loom and his vision started to fade was that of watching the egg-shaped thing in the corner of the room expand like a twenty-headed hydra in the moonlight, with necks and heads twisting, hissing, filling the room as they reached for him…

And then the shirt got between them, flowing open and spreading impossibly outward like a sheet that meant to swallow him whole, filling the space between him and the hydra for a brief moment before there was a flash of silver light that sent him to the Void.

#

Aneirin lunged up, gasping. It was dark, but he could tell he was outside. He could hear the sounds of wind in the trees along a nearby hillside and he could feel damp grass under his fingers.

“Hello?” he croaked, trying to get his bearings.

The shirt that had swallowed him tightened on his shoulder.

Remembering the massive, towering snakes of cloth, Aneirin swallowed. Aunt Nerys or no, there had been no doubt in his mind that they had meant to kill him.

And this…shirt…had saved him. Somehow.

“Thanks,” Aneirin whispered.

The metal shirt tweaked a shoulder again.

What Aneirin didn’t understand, though, was how far the shirt must have flung him through Nerys basement window to wind up in grass. Ganlin Hall was so far up the Slopes that the mountainside was peppered with lichen-covered rocks, but Aneirin felt nothing but lush grass between his fingers.

He wondered how long he had been out. Maybe the shirt had dragged him down the mountain somehow. “What…” he swallowed hard again, because every inch of his body was still tingling as if he’d been doused in veoh. “…did you do to me?”

Shirt remained totally still on his body.

Disoriented, Aneirin struggled back to his feet. All around him, the wind was picking up and it was starting to drizzle. He frowned. Only minutes ago, it had been clear and the moon had been bright enough to see the entire mountainside by. Now, he could barely make out the white trunks of birch trees all around him.

That made him do a double-take. Birch trees didn’t grow anywhere near Ganlin Hall, and were more of a mid-mountain to lower-valley-dweller.

“Okay,” Aneirin said nervously, “where are we?”

Nothing.

Aneirin glanced down at the shirt on his body. “Can you understand me? Indicate yes if you can.” It was worth a shot…

Surprisingly, his right arm tugged up.

Interesting. Since when could a smart enchantment respond intelligently? “Now indicate no,” Aneirin said.

The metal cloth over his left arm tweaked.

Right for yes, left for no. Aneirin took a deep breath and let it out between his teeth. He had no idea where he was—he hadn’t walked a birch forest since he was a very young boy—and he figured he might as well find or make shelter before the misty drizzle became a downpour. “How long was I asleep?”

The shirt gave him no indication, and Aneirin sighed. “Yes-no answers. Right.” He looked around them. “Are we near Ganlin Hall?”

A left-arm twinge.

Realizing that ‘near’ was a relative term to something with as much mobility as a legless garment, Aneirin decided to clarify. “Are we within a mile of Ganlin Hall?”

Left-arm twinge.

Aneirin frowned and cocked his head. “You dragged me more than a mile?”

Left-arm twinge.

Frustrated, Aneirin said, “You dragged me less than a mile.”

Left-arm twinge.

Beginning to suspect that perhaps the smart enchantment wasn’t actually conversing with him as he had originally thought, Aneirin said, “Is it nighttime out?”

Right-arm twinge.

“Are you a shirt?”

Very strong right-arm twinge.

“Huh,” Aneirin said, glancing around him. “Can you lead me back home?”

No twinge.

So not yes, but not no, either. Then Aneirin realized he really didn’t think of himself as having a home anymore. It certainly wasn’t the Hall. Without the laughter, the sound of human voices, it felt like a tomb to him.

Sighing, Aneirin said, “All right. Can you lead me back to Ganlin Hall? It’s about to rain, and I can’t see a damn thing.”

The shirt tugged to the right.

Yes. Good. “Okay,” Aneirin said. Then, because he had a vague sense of unease that he didn’t remember any birch trees this close to the Hall, he said, “How far is it? More than a mile?”

Right tug.

Aneirin cocked his head. “More than two miles?”

Right tug.

He laughed. “Okay. Ten miles.”

Right tug.

He stopped laughing, feeling sudden, full-body chills. The odd way the clouds covered a previously clear sky, the way the grass was so lush, the way the trees were different… “How many miles are we from the Hall?”

The shirt hesitated a moment, then gave a single tug on his hem. Then another. Then another.

About twelve tugs into it, Aneirin stopped it. “More than twenty,” he said, impatient.

Right tug.

“More than fifty,” Aneirin said.

Right tug.

“A hundred!” he cried.

Right tug.

Full body chills again. “And we’re talking in miles, right?” Aneirin whispered.

Right tug.

“Two hundred,” Aneirin whispered.

There was a little hesitation, then both the right and left shoulders seemed to shrug to the sides.

“Less than two hundred,” Aneirin said.

Left tug.

“More than two hundred.”

Left tug.

The message was clear: About two hundred.

Aneirin had to laugh at that. “Okay, clearly you’re just a shirt that has no comprehension of distance. It would take a Gate to travel that far in just—”

Very strong right tug. Then another. And another. Like an emphatic head-bob.

For a long moment, Aneirin just stood there in the dark drizzle of midnight, trying to comprehend what he was being told. Aulds hadn’t been able to build Gates since the days of Ariod and Nefyti—the power required was just too great.

And yet, here he was standing in an unfamiliar forest, seemingly hundreds of miles from his hall of birth.

Gingerly, Aneirin said, “You took us through a Gate?”

Another emphatic right-tug.

Feeling that, Aneirin got another wave of goosebumps. Smart enchantments weren’t even on the same scale as something that could Gate. “You’re not a smart enchantment,” he said.

Strong left tug.

“Which meant Nerys didn’t make you.” That confused him, because as far as Aneirin knew, only Nerys had the concentration and skill to work veoh into cloth. The last Auld who could do it had died almost a century ago.

There was a very hesitant pause, then a full-shirt shrug.

It wasn’t, he realized, a shirt that had saved him. It was the Shirt. The self-aware artifact that Rhydderch Vethyle claimed he had found in the ruins of Ariod, a living thing that the leaders of the Spyre had ordered him to relinquish to be destroyed once the war with Etro had been won. Instead, it had disappeared, and no search of Rhydderch’s rooms afterwards had managed to turn it up.

“You’re thousands of years old,” Aneirin whispered. “From Ariod.”

Strong left tug.

Confused, thinking maybe he had gotten his lore wrong, Aneirin said, “Yet you belonged to Rhydderch Vethyle.”

The entire shirt tightened until it was hard to breathe, reminding Aneirin that he appeared to be wearing a sentient being, not something to be owned.

“Okay!” Aneirin gasped. “But you are older than Ariod,” he hedged.

The shirt relaxed. Left tug.

“You’re…younger?” But that didn’t make sense. The Aulds after Ariod didn’t have enough power to create things like Shirt.

Right tug.

Taking a random guess, now, Aneirin said, “You’re more than five hundred years old.”

Left tug.

Aneirin frowned. Shirt had only appeared once in the history books, around the same time the Auld of Nefyti had resurrected and tried to help Etro invade Bryda three centuries ago.

“You’re three hundred years old,” Aneirin guessed.

Right tug.

“Thibault made you,” Aneirin gasped, immediately feeling unclean.

The left tug that followed almost took his arm off.

“Ow!” Aneirin hissed. “Fine! Ow!” Starting to get uncomfortable at how easy it was for the shirt to hurt him, he reached down to pull the hem up over his head.

The steel material tightened to his skin with such emphasis that Aneirin suddenly felt his arms going numb, the blood-flow to his brain almost cut off completely. The message was exceedingly clear: I’m staying.

Aneirin nervously dropped his hands from the hem and the shirt relaxed.

Uncomfortable at the fact he was effectively some sort of hostage, Aneirin said, “Okay, someone made you three hundred years ago who has enough veoh to Gate.” That was impossible.

Shirt shrugged again.

There was so much, Aneirin knew, that was getting lost in translation. What he wouldn’t have given for a pen and paper!

Another time, he decided. Right now, he had to figure out how to get back to Ganlin Hall and help his aunt. She was obviously still afraid that the Vethyles were nearby.

Though why hadn’t she heard him calling to her? That seemed…odd.

Aneirin cleared his throat. “Think you could Gate me back now?”

The shirt didn’t reply.

“Shirt?”

His only reply was a shrug.

Aneirin narrowed his eyes. “You mean it was an accident.”

Another shrug.

Cursing, Aneirin glanced again at the sky. The clouds were so thick he couldn’t even see the moon, and he’d already felt a few droplets of rain. Out in the distance, he heard odd noises that he couldn’t place, and he felt the need to fill the silence with a friendly voice. “I suppose I should find a place to settle in for the night and make a fire…” If it really was two hundred miles to travel, a few hours fumbling around in the dark wasn’t going to get him there any faster.

At his words, however, Shirt twitched hard to the left, making Aneirin frown. “What, you don’t like fire?”

The way the collar of the shirt suddenly started to choke him at the same time the shirt jerked hard to the right, throwing him behind a tree, made it very clear to Aneirin that it wasn’t ‘talking’ about the fire. Aneirin was about to curse the beast and try again to remove it—this time with veoh—when he heard the odd sounds in the forest again.

This time, the scuffing sounds were too regular to be mistaken as forest noises. Aneirin stopped fighting Shirt, listening. He made a mental map in his head of Ganlin Hall and its surroundings. Two hundred miles in any direction could put him anywhere from the Citadel to the east to the ruins of Nefyti to the southwest, to the southern border of Etro on the northern side of the Ganlin Mountains. The only place he was relatively sure he wasn’t was the farmlands directly to the south—most of the arable land had been cleared of trees long ago.

Aneirin clung to the other side of the tree, listening.