by Anna Elliott
EVER SINCE GAMMA had shown me her vision in the scrying waters, I had felt, like the throb of open wounds, how much would have been different had I been the boy my father so craved, the boy I had now spent weeks pretending to be.
My mother would have lived and been hailed as queen. My brother Arthur would never have been born, and perhaps all the prophesies spoken of him would have been made over my cradle, instead. Who can know such things of a certainty? But betimes Arianrhod, mistress of fate and the silver wheel of the stars, seems a cruel goddess indeed.
And yet, that daybreak, I knew that I would never have traded places nor wished to be any other than I was. For in so doing I would have lost the wonder of that morning.
There is an old tale—I heard Gamma tell it once—of a maid of the Fair Folk, who fell in love with a human man and carried him away on a snow-white mare to live with her in the Otherworld. The Summerland, where there is no weariness, nor pain, nor sorrow, nor toil, but only day after day, perfect and unblemished as an endless strand of pearls.
And yet the maid’s human love sickened and pined there, for his old life in the human world. And in pity, she allowed him to return to his own home, his own kind. She rode back with him on the snow-white mare, and left him to a human life and human love. But as she turned back towards the veil between the Otherworld and this, she wept, and her tears fell onto the rocks and grass and soil where she rode.
And it was said that any who touched the earth where one of her tears fell would be granted the gift of living a day from the Otherworld, one whole and utterly perfect day.
An old tale, and perhaps never meant to be believed, even when first told. But I could believe it that morning.
We ate of the food I had brought, and slept, and moved together in shadowed, earth-scented half-light. I was aware of the lightening of the tunnel as the day broke outside, of the movement of the patches of sunlight that dappled the earthen floor. But only in so far as they showed me my companion’s face more clearly, let me see the look in his eyes: a kind of earnest, astonished wonder that made my heart ache with a pain so fierce it was sweet as that first meeting of our lips had been.
Other women had spoken in my hearing of pain, but truly I felt none. Another gift of the Goddess, maybe. For if the weavings of our lives are spun of both joy and sorrow, the fabric of that morning seemed destined to be cast from threads of joy alone.
“Thank you,” I whispered as I clung to him, my face buried against his shoulder. “Thank you.”
“I think—” His voice, too, sounded younger. Husky, and with a break in it, like a youth’s caught in the change from boy to man. “I think that’s supposed to be what I say to you.”
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