She took the glossy spheres from him and endeavored to master her emotions sufficiently to concentrate on the trick; however, she was not successful, and fumbled. One apple slipped from her grasp, whereupon they both reached for it simultaneously. Their fingers met, and lingered upon one another.
The sun might have been rising or setting, or turning itself inside out. It was all one, now, to Lilith. Throughout the brightening world, birds were wakening and beginning their morning orchestrations, but their melodies washed unheeded through her consciousness. She did not speak, could not; and he said not a word. At last she took the apple from him, but laid it in her lap with the others and no longer attempted the sleight. The red arc of the sun peeled away from the treetops, rising like the rim of a shield of new-forged metal. The eyes of Lilith and Jarred were turned toward the skies’ radiance, yet the sight was unseen.
Lilith let herself recline back against the slope of the roof. Presently, Jarred glanced down at her hand, which rested on the thatch, and dared to run a fingertip down the back of it. For a while she remained motionless. Then she flipped her palm over, clasped his hand, and turned toward him. He saw her face close to his and leaned toward her, hoping yet not certain. She lifted her chin and their lips touched, soft as feathers.
Then, ever so slowly, he lowered himself on his elbows and laid his body across hers, still dressed in the bodice and gathered skirts of a woman but thoroughly a man, and his unbound hair tumbled down around them both, shutting out the magnificence of the unseen dawn, and their kiss was the alighting of a bird upon a rosebud, the beat of the tide, the drumming of music, the sliding of satin on satin, the sweetness of dew.
Lilith arrived home a little after sunrise. Eoin was sitting on the doorstep waiting for her, scowling. He neither spoke to Jarred nor looked at him, but when Lilith’s escort had departed, he shouted at her, chiding her for her tardiness, until Eolacha rose from her couch and bade him hush. When at last Lilith rested her head upon her pillow, it was long ere she found repose, and when she did, her sleep was restless. That instant in which Jarred had laid his body across hers and she had known the weight of him pressing upon her, and the heat of him radiating through her, replayed repeatedly through her dreams.
The month of Aoust drew humid vapors from the marsh and struck dazzling sparks off its waters. At this season, most folk were looking forward to the annual Rushbearing. Most eager was Cuiva Stillwater, for she was to be this year’s Rush Queen.
Meanwhile, to while away the long evenings of Summer, many of the young marshmen would gather at the cruinniú to play at dice. Eoin was often to be seen at the game; sometimes he won, sometimes he lost. Over all, he usually broke even. Not for money did the gamblers play, for scant coinage was to be obtained in the marsh. Instead they wagered their services as punt-polers or thatchers, or else they bet useful objects such as foodstuffs, knives, and items of clothing. Yet if a man seemed likely to lose the shirt off his back, his friends would forestall him good-naturedly. “You’ve gamed enough for now,” they would say. “Lay off. There’s always tomorrow.” In this way, a degree of harmony was preserved.
One evening, Eoin said to Jarred, “I’ll wager a full hank of smoked eels for that cheap gewgaw hanging at your throat.”
“What? How have you seen it?” Jarred customarily tucked the amulet beneath his shirt, chiefly to prevent it from banging against his chest when he moved.
“I have seen it, from time to time, when you’ve been forgetting to conceal it. An odd shape for an amulet, is it not?”
Jarred envisioned the talisman—a simple disk of bone engraved with two interlocking runes, strung on a silver chain.
“I’ll not stake it,” he rejoined.
“Why not?” said Eoin angrily. “’Tis not worth much, I’ll warrant.”
“Indeed, ’tis not.”
“Well then, Lord High and Mighty,” said Eoin, pretending at jocularity, “what about a hank of eels and half a dozen fine arrowheads?”
“I say nay.”
“A dozen?”
Jarred shook his head.
“Hold your blather, boys!” someone shouted restlessly. “Let us be getting on with the game!”
Eoin ignored the plea. “Hearken,” he said, lowering his voice confidentially. “I shall put up my boat against that amulet. The punt—you know, it is a sound craft, well made.”
Jarred recoiled as if Eoin were some noxious insect. “You have an amulet of your own,” he said irritably. “Why so keen?”
“You know why,” said Eoin softly. Narrowing his eyes, he fixed Jarred with a challenging stare. “That is no ordinary ward against unseelie. If it were, you would be more willing to risk parting with it.”
“It was a gift from my father,” Jarred replied curtly. “I have worn it all my life. Whether it possesses any monetary value, I do not know, but to me it is beyond value and I will not part with it.”
“Ha!” sneered Eoin. “And the King’s Swanherd is a pig in purple.”
“Are you two in the game or not?” demanded the other players irascibly.
“I’m in,” said Jarred, coldly turning his shoulder against Eoin.
“I too.”
For the remainder of the evening, the two antagonists assiduously disregarded each other.
On the morning of Rushbearing Day, flowers and rushes—always plentiful but especially so at the waning of Summer—were gathered by the armful. The marshfolk plaited these together to make intricate symbols known as “bearings,” in shapes that included rings, crosses, stars, triangles, doll figures, birds, mammals, and amphibians.
Rush boats were prepared by various competing groups, including the watchmen, the west-marshers, the goatherds, the eel-fishers, the divers, and whoever else wished to partake in the tradition. Each punt was piled high with a pyramid of rushes fastened in place by flower-woven rush ropes. The rival bands of rush boaters further decorated their vessels by hanging them about with small bells. The largest punt was devoted to the Rush Queen in all her glory; she would lead the procession.
The house of Chieftain Stillwater was in cheerful disarray. Cuiva’s friends and her younger sister, Keelin, were adding the final touch to her flowery crown when Lilith came running in, unannounced and disheveled.
“Alas!” she cried. “Last night I helped Eolacha make the Mosswell-Arrowgrass bearing, but I have been tending to my grandfather all day and have had no chance to gather a single bloom for the decoration. All the islets near and far have been stripped bare. Can anyone here be sparing me a small posy?”
The damsels threw up their hands in consternation, fluttering like a flock of pigeons amongst whom a handful of crumbs has been thrown.
“Not I,” they chirped anxiously.
“My bouquet has gone to decorate the goatherds’ rush boat.”
“And mine went to my cousins for their bearings.”
“I have only a few flower heads left, ones too short stalked to use in braiding.”
“You may take some blooms from my crown,” offered Cuiva.
“Tilly-fally! I could no more do that than fly,” retorted Lilith. “Spoil the crown of the Rush Queen? What do you take me for?”
“But what will you do?”
Lilith slapped her palms together. “Wait—an idea has occurred to me. Fear not, for I believe I know where an untouched garden is yet to be found! Look for me soon!” Away she ran.
The sun was a white-hot hole burned through a gentian sky. Throughout the marsh, seven million dragonflies hovered, their gatherings like a heat haze filled with tiny rainbows.
Headed by the Rush Queen, the procession proceeded around the populated areas of the marsh. Youths standing around the central rush pyramids of the rush boats bore aloft the elaborately wrought bearings, which they hung on each house they passed. Rushes were strewn along the shores of Charnel Mere and on the cruinniú, after which lotus candies were distributed to the children while ale and seedcakes were consumed by everyone else.
&
nbsp; Jarred, intrigued by the simple, compelling pageant, looked for Lilith among the spectators but could spy her nowhere. He supposed she had chosen to go with Cuiva or her family rather than seeking his company. Telling himself that her choice was of no consequence, he tried to shrug off his disappointment. Still, he could not help searching for the slightest sign of a graceful girl with a ragged sweep of sable hair. Since the night of the costume party, he and Lilith had shared many secret kisses, stolen many a moment of privacy together, their embraces forming a barrier to shut out the rest of the world. The more time they spent together, the more it was borne in on them that they could not bear to be apart. Their thoughts were consumed in each other; each day and night was sweet craziness. Time itself seemed pulled out of shape—sometimes life’s moments dragged on interminably; otherwhiles they fled on the swiftest of wings.
Evening drew in its smoky veils. A few stray stars needled the upper atmosphere. Jarred was wandering disconsolately down near the cruinniú mere when Lilith’s stepfather, Earnán, approached him. The face of the eel-fisher appeared bleached, almost luminous in the dusk. Its flesh seemed to have been dragged down, hollowing out his cheeks, sagging in bruises beneath his eyes.
“Have you seen Lilith about the place?” he blurted.
“No.” Alarm welled like bile in Jarred’s throat. “I thought she kept you company.”
“We took it she was with Cuiva, but she was not. We cannot find her. She has not been seen since she went to gather flowers.”
“Which flowers? Where?”
“No one knows.”
Cold fear gripped the vitals of the young man and a wave of sickness passed through him. The inventory of wights, predators, and accidents waiting in the marsh unrolled in his mind’s eye.
As he stood, gripped by dread, a far-off sobbing sawed at the evening air. It died away, then rose again, the very essence of desolation. A third time the mourning keened out across the marsh, and all who heard it were stricken with foreboding at the weeper’s signal.
Earnán could not speak. For an instant he paused, as if his limbs had turned to wood, then he sped away without a word.
Hounds were loosed from their kennels and search parties were formed; they spread out hither and thither through the marsh. Strings of lanterns could be seen bobbing along bridges and causeways, winking in and out of the willows, mirroring themselves in the pitchy water like floating treasures from underwater chambers. Voices called—there came no answer save for the hoot of an owl or a sudden shriek of eldritch laughter; nothing extraordinary for nighttime.
“Flowers,” Jarred whispered feverishly to himself as he strode along a shaky boardwalk. “Where would she seek flowers?” He stared at his surroundings, newly waking to their existence with intensified clarity, seeking some clue in grove and reedbed, in fernbrakes and undulating rafts of duckweed.
A mist was rising.
At random, he chose a direction and began to run, calling Lilith’s name.
Having covered a fair distance, he realized that his feet were taking him to the Mosswell cottage. He slowed, stopping outside the door. There could be no profit in searching here. As he turned to depart, a tweaking of nearby bulrushes caught his eye. He faltered. The rushes rustled again. This time the movement rippled through them as if something passed in their midst.
“Wait!” Jarred called imperatively. There was no reply. Sprinting to keep pace with whatever traveled invisibly, he reached the border of the bulrush thicket just after the ripple arrived there. It seemed to the young man—although it was difficult to be certain through the gloom and the streamers of fog—that a child, or else the shadow of a child, had emerged from the bulrushes and was now walking quickly away from him, following an overgrown track.
Jarred was seized by insatiable curiosity.
“Wait!” he cried. “Prithee, wait! Do you know where to find Lilith?”
The child, if it was a child, never slowed. Instead, it vanished around a bend in the path. Jarred sprang after it, terrified he might lose it, convinced—for no fathomable reason—that somehow it held the key to finding the lost damsel.
A chase ensued. Jarred was forced to summon every particle of his skill and strength to forge ahead through the blind darkness. He carried no lantern, and the marsh was lit only by a drizzle of starlight and the erratic lamps of will-o’-the-wisps. That which led him moved with a swiftness that seemed incredible, considering its size. And lead him it did, for whenever Jarred lost track of it, he would, after casting about desperately, come upon it waiting just a little farther on—waiting in misty shadows, never able to be distinctly viewed. When his path ended at the edge of a mere, he found a boat tied up nearby. He borrowed it, for he saw—impossibly—the silhouette of his lure waiting on the opposite shore, smudged by steams and vapors.
Through mire and wash, through spongy sphagnum bog and shallow linn, Jarred stumbled, and by now the world had become a blur. All his focus was on that which he pursued. All his desire was centered on discovering his sweetheart. He did not even pause to wonder if he were in the grip of some spell.
“Lilith!” he yelled as he pelted through the marshways. “Lilith!”
At last, he heard an answer. A heady perfume of crushed lavender went up around him like a tempest. He crashed through a bank of bushes, making for the source of that familiar voice—and he saw her.
She was sitting with her back propped against the stem of an alder tree, her beautiful face framed by a cascade of hair so dark it was like an emptiness, a void in which distant stars might be found if one was willing to abandon oneself to its universe.
A sweeter sight had never thrilled the young man’s heart. He dropped to one knee at her side, his lungs still heaving from exertion.
Regarding him fearfully, she said, “Is it human you are?”
There was so much to say, he could barely utter a word. “Yes! Oh, yes!”
Eldritch wights, both seelie and unseelie, were incapable of lying. They might take human form, but they could not verbally deny their unhumanness. Jarred did not ask her the same question. He needed no verification. He recognized in the very marrow of his bones that it was Lilith who was before him, knew her by her limpid eyes, the lashes resembling two strokes of a charcoal pen, the brows arched like the wings of a bird in flight, her lids like the translucent wings of a blue butterfly.
“By all that’s wonderful,” he said huskily, “you live! On my honor, I never was so restored.”
Half-laughing, half-crying, she held out her arms and he embraced her, burying his face in the fragrant mass of her hair, clasping her to him with savage tenderness.
“On my life, if I had lost you,” he whispered, “I could not endure it. Wed me, that I may never lose you.”
“I’ll gladly wed you,” she said, swept by exhilaration so intense it was almost numbing. “I’ll be yours forever and you’ll be mine. That is all I could ever wish for.”
Gently he brushed her mouth with his own.
“But first,” she murmured, “you must get me home, for I have wrenched my ankle and it is so sore it cannot bear my weight.”
Without delay he swept her up in his arms, kissed her again, and began to carry her home.
On the journey few words were spoken; it was enough to have found one another. Lilith let her cheek rest against the nettle-woven folds of her rescuer’s shirt. She could feel the unyielding sinews beneath the coarse fabric, the heat of his skin, and the thudding of his heart. The curve of his shoulder was outlined against the starlight, and a seductive breeze wafted loose threads of his hair across her face, like a caress. His locks were streaked with variegated shades: tawny, hazel, bronze, mahogany, and chestnut. When she raised her eyes she beheld the line of his jaw, faintly dusted with new beard growth. Below his chin, the strong neck, the smooth nub like a crab apple caught in his throat, shadows pooling in the hollows of his collarbones. She breathed a scent of musk and leather, swayed with his every pace as he shifted balance, felt the
impact of his booted feet striking the ground and the vitality coursing through him. The sense of his curbed desire was potent, and she understood at last the suffering and rapture of such closeness. Understanding, she longed that the journey might continue forever.
When he placed Lilith in the waiting boat, Jarred reached his two hands to his throat and took off the chain on which was strung the amulet of bone. Placing it around Lilith’s neck, he said, “I should have given this to you long ago. Never should I have delayed.”
“But I already possess an amulet,” she said, glad despite the pain of her ankle.
“Wear that as well, if you must,” said Jarred, “but swear to me you will wear mine.”
Perplexity scored her brow.
“This thing owns a special property,” Jarred said. “No harm can ever come to the wearer. All my life I have worn it, throughout wrestling matches and riding accidents, in horseplay and weapons training. During all these risky exploits, never have I sustained so much as a pinprick. I have not heard of another amulet like it. You must never tell anyone else of its power, in case the story should come to the ears of thieves. Men would do murder for such a talisman. And if the wearer cannot be harmed, still the amulet can be easily removed by stealth or force.”
“’Tis a wonder!” exclaimed Lilith. “But it is you who should be wearing it, for if aught should take you from this world, I could not live.”
Adamantly he shook his head. “I will not hear of it. The amulet is yours, or I will cast it in the lake. Now, swear you will wear it.”
She drank his earnestness like wine. “I swear!”
By water and over land they returned. As they neared the cottage, they encountered Odhrán Rushford.
“Sessa, Lilith!” the young watchman cried joyously. “You are returned to us at last!”
“That I am, Odhrán, she said with a smile, “though somewhat lame.”
“Methinks you would be having a sweeter, swifter ride were I to take over. Your bearer was never too strong in the arms,” he gibed. “Give her over, Jovansson. I’ll take her the rest of the way.”
The Iron Tree: Book One of The Crowthistle Chronicles Page 16
