TEN
The night brought a wet, thick snow that steamed into heavy fog as soon as the sun rose.
“You cannot travel on a day like this,” said Sarai. “Stay another day with us and we will have a proper guest’s dinner with our kinfolk.”
“Stay! Stay!” The two young boys, so shy the previous night, gambolled about Sive like puppies.
She had been true to her word, had not laced her voice with the slightest enchantment. Still, music had its own magic. An evening’s singing had melted away the family’s edgy caution. She was welcome now from the heart, not from a host’s obligation. It was hard to turn away from that. Sive pictured herself, once again a spotted deer, vanishing into the fog. It was like ceasing to exist altogether.
And there was something else holding her here. The night had been long and anxious, Sive not daring to sleep for fear of being caught unawares. But the Dark Man had not come. Now, in the morning’s cheerful bustle, Sive tried to keep a stern and cautious mind. But hope grew in her like a seedling under a rock, creeping sideways unseen until it finds the place where it can leap up toward the sun. Perhaps he truly could not see her. Perhaps he was not merely delayed but actually unaware. It would take more than a day to find out.
THERE WAS NO BUILDING in the cluster of dwellings big enough to hold everyone, so Sive spent the morning following Sarai into one dark little home after another. By midday she had met the entire sprawling family, sung to two babies and a sick, bedridden grandfather, and sampled many bowls of tea and ale.
It was not clear to her where “dinner with the kinfolk” was to take place. Though the fog had lifted enough that the houses no longer looked like wavering illusions, wind and intermittent bursts of rain made it even more unpleasant outside.
Nonetheless, a pig culled from the herd soon hung spitted over a fire in the cooking shed while the women set themselves to baking and stewing. The children, gleeful at the prospect of two big dinners so close together, were put to work as well, but that did not keep them from wrestling and teasing and filling the air with their high spirits.
Sive helped where she could, hoping this extravagance— for so it evidently was—would not compromise the family’s winter stores. But through it all she also kept watch. The Dark Man, if he was coming, must be near.
Sive Remembers
They hung blankets on the woven wattle walls of the cookhouse to keep out the wind, and set the food out right there. Their very best, it was, yet poor compared to what I ate every day at home. But it meant so much more, for I had seen how they toiled to provide it.
A few of the young men stayed in the cookhouse, eating by the fire, but most of us went to one house or another to find better comfort. Sarai led me to a house crowded with women, all of them gossiping and laughing and arguing. They went quiet for a bit when I entered, but it did not take them long to start up again.
I could see well enough that there were jealousies and resentments among them. But I saw too the strength of the bonds they shared—it shimmered among them like an invisible rope, twining one to another. They knew each other’s troubles and joys, shared jokes and stories reaching back to their childhood. In that warm, noisy gabble of women, my own solitude seemed unbearable.
BROGAN PADDLED STEADILY, drawing the tippy coracle ever closer to the far bank. The strange woman of the Sidhe was leaving them, and an uncomfortable mix of relief, regret and worry—for how could anyone, from any land, travel through winter slush and mud with nothing but those dainty scraps of cloth on their feet?—warred within him. Still he kept his mind to his task, for the Shannon had strong currents beneath its smooth surface and a dunking mid-river could be the death of them both.
Sive huddled in the front facing Brogan, wrapped in the old blanket Maine had pressed on her.
“Almost there, m’lady.” He gestured with his chin to the little strand where the coracles could be pulled right up on shore. A jetty had never seemed necessary, not with that shelf of gravelly sand, but Brogan wished for one now. He did not, as a rule, cross the river in winter, so he had never minded wading through a few inches of water to haul up the boat. Today it would be an icy soaking.
Sive twisted around in her seat to see for herself. She scanned the shore and then leapt to her feet with a cry. The coracle rocked wildly, but Brogan’s sharp instructions died in his throat when he saw her face. The color blanched from her cheeks, eyes wild. Her mouth worked, but no words escaped.
Brogan checked the shore himself in alarm. A single figure came into view, walking along the track that led from the strand to the Western Road. He raised a hand casually, it seemed in greeting.
Brogan’s eyesight blurred, fragmenting the woman before him into a jumble of fleeting images. He squinted but could not bring her into focus. Then a violent heave threw the coracle out of control. Brogan flung himself low across the gunnels as the little boat spun and bucked, on the very brink of capsize.
It took only moments for the danger to pass, but when Brogan looked up the woman was gone. Fallen in! Frantic, he searched the surface of the water for her.
A deer swam strongly north against the current, already too far to catch up. Brogan gaped, his body slack with shock, unable to accept what his eyes told him.
An angry shout brought him out of his daze. The fellow on the far shore had reached the riverbank now, was in fact running north along the strand, shaking his walking staff and yelling at the deer.
“Swim fast, Sive,” Brogan whispered. Somehow the stranger’s threats made the words believable. Whoever that man was, he would be hard-pressed to follow her, for where the little strand ended, a head-high thicket of gorse grew right to the water’s edge, and a little after that, where the river rounded a bend, a tumble of great rocks blocked the way.
Brogan turned the coracle around and began paddling back to his jetty. He did not intend to give the stranger any chance to commandeer his boat.
THE WINTER PASSED and another, and the third whispered its approach in the frosty autumn night, and still Sive wandered. She stood on the windy cliffs at the edge of the western sea, browsed the lower slopes of the wild north country mountains, slipped like mist through the orchards and pastures of great chieftains. She even watched the sun rise over a strand, which, if she had only known, could have led her to her grandfather’s undersea island.
She did go back to her homeland once. She found the portal by accident: a crack gouged into the side of a great mountain that looked as though its top had been lopped off with a giant sword. A breath, a feeling, a smell? Something caught her attention as she passed by, and she remembered the same sensation from her first escape from Tir na nOg. It seemed a gift of fate, and she took it.
But it was worse, being home. Though the weather was kinder and food plentiful, the pain and loneliness were more cruel. The pull of her sidhe, and her family, were so terribly strong. Helpless to stop, she began traveling east, picturing in her mind the string of hills, the rich rolling fields at their skirts and the flat peat bog stretched out behind. If she could just have a glimpse of her house, or spot a familiar face on the road…such foolishness.
It was herself that was seen, long before she was anywhere near Sidhe Ochta Cleitigh, and it was almost a relief to have to pull her thoughts away from her homesickness and concentrate on eluding the hunters. When the small hunting parties swelled suddenly to swarms of men and dogs, she knew the Dark Man had received word of the spotted deer he sought. She barely reached the portal in time.
She stayed in Eire after that. At least if she fell to the hunt, it would be to feed a family’s hunger, not a sorcerer’s ambition.
She never again risked staying in a dwelling overnight, but she did, a few times a year, allow herself a brief time in human form. To share the company of another person, a bowl of ale or the comfort of a fire—these were sharp, bittersweet pleasures.
Yet it was not loneliness but fear that made her risk attracting the Dark Man’s notice and take her own form, for each day spent as a deer took her further from herself. It became difficult to remember her life as a woman. How could she picture her mother’s face, when her deer eyes distinguished faces so poorly? Or recall the intricate stitches her clever fingers had embroidered, when she had no hands? She was afraid she would forget how to sing, how to speak. How to change.