by IGMS
"You've been far more patient with me than I deserve," Ciaran says. "I've blamed myself for what happened to Asthore. I still blame myself, whatever you may say. And because of that, I've been afraid to ask you --"
"I'm to be married," I blurt. "To Fallon. On the next Day of Sacrifice."
Ciaran draws back, and despite the look of devastation on his face, my anger at the situation finally turns toward him. This he could have stopped. This he had to have known was a possibility. I glare at the bracelet, fighting the urge to rip it from my wrist and fling it into the bog.
"Fallon had my father make this cursed thing for me, and then . . ." A sob catches in my throat. "I didn't want this. I wanted you. You, and my sister back, and my father to be himself again, and everything in this world but Fallon."
"The next Day of Sacrifice," Ciaran says slowly, as if carefully weighing each heavy word before it leaves his lips. "If the gods do not take what the clan offers this year, I will have to kill Fallon. I will kill Fallon. Once I could have done so with the knowledge that I was only doing as my duty required, but now . . . now I will not be able to do so without fearing that I am acting too soon. Too eagerly."
Because of me. The words remain unspoken, yet they hang between us nonetheless.
"I should go," I say, standing.
Ciaran offers no word or motion to stop me as I make my way back toward the trackway. Once there, I step onto the first plank. I mean to walk slowly, to face my fear of the bog and maintain some semblance of dignity, but one step after another my pace quickens until I am running, even after land is once again beneath my feet. Only when the village is in sight do I slow, though part of me still wants to run. But I am trapped -- ahead of me, the home where I face a life bound to Fallon; behind me, that blood-red hand reaching toward shore.
When the next Day of Sacrifice comes, the morning is sickeningly bright. I would rather have a day to match my mood, the sky heavy with cloud cover and the land shrouded in its usual ashen gray. Instead, the world is aglow with more color than seems natural, from the shimmering green moss at my feet to the fiery leaves of red and yellow that canopy the forest. The gods have shown their cruelty once more, marking this of all days with beauty.
Fallon and I stand beneath the feathery branches of a willow tree, hands joined, surrounded by an assembly of politely smiling well-wishers who have gathered to see us wed before the sacrificial procession. Though my father is physically among them, sagging against his walking stick, the way he drools and stares at nothing tells me that his mind is trapped elsewhere, perhaps in a happier time when Asthore and my mother were still alive. But my father's speech has grown too infrequent and incomprehensible for me to ever know for sure.
Ciaran wraps a red ribbon around my and Fallon's joined hands. It is all I can do not to cringe. Fallon's palms are clammy, and his gaze flits about, only ever meeting my own for the briefest and most uncomfortable of moments. Not once does he smile. I grow queasy at the thought of tonight when I will be forced to share a bed with him. Will he look at me even then?
Ciaran's face is obscured by his dark druid's hood, but I hear him more acutely than ever as he speaks of the joining of body and spirit, two entwined as one, blood bound to blood. The torment in his voice is like a magic of its own, weaving invisible threads between us. But those threads can be broken, I am sure. I imagine my new husband catching a look between us and tearing through them as if they were no more than a gossamer cobweb.
Finally, the wretched ceremony ends and the sacrificial procession begins -- one dread traded for another. As the clan-chief's wife, I have no choice but to lead the way at Fallon's side, followed by Ciaran and the offering bearers. At first our procession is accompanied by the crunch of leaves and brush beneath our feet, but as we emerge from the forest, our footfalls become muffled by the soft ground of the bog's peat-scented shoreline. Before us, the blood water stretches toward the horizon, like a blanket of smooth, red silk. My pulse quickens, and I feel a pained longing for the past when I could have lingered here on shore, holding Asthore's hand, only ever following the procession at her behest.
I clutch Fallon's arm as we step onto the trackway. There is no comfort in the touch, but he is at least something to cling to; I suspect I am the same for him. Not that we can offer each other any true protection on the trackway, for the further we walk, the more we are hemmed in by the bog's wide expanse. And if the gods choose to claim me as they did Asthore, I doubt that Fallon will try to stop them.
I glance back toward shore. Where before the curious would have followed the procession, only a handful have today. Most of the other villagers watch from the forest's edge with a wariness as thick as the blood water.
At last, our interminable procession comes to a stop at the trackway's end, deep in the heart of the bog. Ciaran begins his incantations, and the first sacrifice is thrown into the water: a bundle of wheat, the finest of the harvest, but a small fraction of what will sustain our clan through the year ahead.
The gods refuse it.
The second sacrifice is offered: a young stag that could have grown to feed and clothe a family during the winter cold. But it is no matter, for the deer have been plentiful, the hunts successful.
The carcass floats beside the wheat shafts, unclaimed by the gods.
More and more offerings are tossed into the bog. Food and pelts, weapons and baubles, all refused. Useless, I think, watching them float. Useless trinkets and excess that could not save my sister, that can never equal her in value.
But can Fallon? The muscles in his arm tense beneath my hands; I can smell the stink of fear in his sweat. The other gathered clan members cast furtive glances toward him, the unspoken question on their faces: are the gods still displeased with our clan-chief after all?
My gaze strays to the place in the bog where the bloody hand reaches toward shore. I cannot make out its outline from where I stand, but I shiver, certain it is still there. But why? I want to scream. Why do the gods not make their intentions known instead of speaking in signs and symbols?
Ciaran calls for the next offering. I wonder if the others can hear the quaver in his voice, or if that tremor is something I feel instead of hear, a vibration through the threads between us. Whatever its source, I tremble along with it. For all of the times I've imagined Fallon dead, I know now without doubt that I would rather endure this marriage than see Ciaran kill him. I cannot bear the thought of Ciaran's compassion being overshadowed by guilt, fading from his eyes the way it has among the warriors in our clan, leaving something cold and hard in its place. But when the next offering lands unclaimed upon the bog's surface, Ciaran turns toward Fallon, then nods toward a man holding a length of rope -- not a sacrifice, but the means to bind one.
"There are more offerings yet to try," Fallon says. He grabs me by the arms, fingers digging in with bruising force, and holds me before him, a shield between him and the others. His desperate breaths are hot in my ear. "The gods wanted her sister before, perhaps they will take her now."
I twist and kick at him, but Fallon's hands only clamp down harder. Is this why he has married me? So that I am at his side to offer to the gods in place of his own life?
"It is my charge to interpret the will of the gods," Ciaran says to him, "not yours." Ciaran draws a dagger from beneath his robes, long and curved, its iron blade notched with teeth-like points. "Let her go and accept your fate."
"The gods do not want me!" Fallon cries with a madman's passion. As much as I shudder at the thought of him throwing me into the blood waters, in a morbid way I am also grateful, for one way or another, tonight I will not be forced to share his bed.
"Your clan-chief speaks the truth."
I gasp at the sound of Asthore's voice. We all whirl to find her climbing from the bog and onto the trackway, naked and dripping red, leaving bloody handprints on the oaken planks. Everyone watches in stunned silence as she rises to her feet, even Fallon, whose grip on me loosens. I shake free of his hold and st
agger forward until I am at last face to face with my sister. Her eyes look even more unnatural than when the gods took her, filled with copper and red swirling against a backdrop of endless black. For a moment, I fear that though her body stands before me, Asthore herself must be gone. But then she smiles at me, and there is no mistaking the look of both mischief and tenderness that could only belong to my sister. I open my mouth, wanting to tell her how much I've missed her, but all I manage is a choked sob.
"You don't have to fear this," Asthore says to me, the words not so ominous as when I heard them disembodied on the Druid's Isle. But when she turns to address the rest of those gathered, her voice hardens. "I speak for the gods now, and they do not want your clan-chief, for losing such a coward is no sacrifice."
Asthore turns back to me, and though she does not speak, in my mind I hear the other words she said that day on the Druid's Isle: join me.
"A coward would not be missed," I say, "but I would be. At least by some." I look toward Ciaran at that, then at the unclaimed offerings on the bog, this time with understanding. I wrench off the bracelet Fallon gave me and throw it at his feet, so hard that he steps backward in surprise, nearly losing his footing. But were he to fall into the bog, I am certain he would float.
"We offer excess and vanities," I say. "Nothing of true value. But not this time."
Ciaran steps forward. "Seara, I will not --"
I hold up a hand to silence his protest. He thinks I mean for him to offer me as sacrifice, but I could never ask that of him. Not when I have a will of my own.
I take Asthore's hand and leap with her into the bog.
I have no sense of myself until I am rising from the bog waters and stepping onto the muddy shore of the Druid's Isle. How long has it been since my nose has filled with the scent of birch and peat, since my feet have pressed against soil and grass, since the breeze has elicited a pleasant shiver with the way it brushes my skin? Days? Months? I have memory of all those sensations, yet still it is as if I am experiencing them for the first time, a stranger in my own body.
Days, I realize. It has been only four days, for that is when I told Ciaran I would return. Asthore has taught me to call to him from the bog. To call to anyone. I can speak to our father and comfort him in his dying days. I could haunt Fallon if I chose, whisper to him no matter how far he runs in his exile from the clan. But I leave him to his cowardice.
Ciaran is not in his hut when I reach it, but he has left me a basin full of water and a woolen dress. I smile at the gesture, though such things seem trivial to me now. But I can imagine Ciaran's furious blush to see me in my current state, naked and dripping red, and so I cleanse myself of the bog water and dress.
I find Ciaran sitting on the rock where we once gazed out at the bloody hand reaching from the bog. Ciaran starts to rise, but hesitates. He stares at me for a long while, searchingly, as if to assure himself that I am truly there. My eyes must look to him as Asthore's did to me, swirling red with the depth of a thousand worlds.
I sit beside him and reacquaint myself with the way my weight presses down on the rock. Out in the bog, the sedge patterns have shifted. The hand is gone, for my sister no longer has reason to beckon me.
"I see a duckling now," I say.
Slowly, Ciaran's wariness fades and his lips curve into a smile. "I think it looks rather like a hawk."
"You were right," I tell him, taking his hand between my own so that I can feel the soft warmth of his skin. "Something changed when the gods took Asthore -- when they took someone living. They discovered a new way to speak to us." I look toward the bog. The waters are still, yet I can sense my sister coursing through them, delighting in more curiosities than she ever could have imagined in her mortal, flesh-bound life. "The gods desire a prophet, but Asthore has no interest in returning to this world again."
"And you?" Ciaran asks.
"I will be your link to the gods now. There will be no more need for rites and divinations. No more need for sacrifice. I will tell you their will."
Ciaran touches my cheek, and I sigh contentedly. Slipping through the bog waters is like a constant caress, but this -- this I have missed. This touch is more specific, more fleeting. And when Ciaran kisses me, when we leave the rock and lie together in the soft grass, it is as if a thousand fires light within me, one after the other, burning brighter and brighter until at last they flicker away.
Too soon after, my gaze turns again toward the bog.
"You will not stay," Ciaran says with sad certainty.
"I cannot stay. But I will come back."
I draw Ciaran close, certain the gods will let me linger for a moment longer. But even as I kiss him, I feel their call -- a pull toward the bog, where my sister waits. There Asthore and I are weightless, as liquid as the water, moving through each other, filled with knowledge we don't yet fully understand. There we are one with the gods, yet somehow freer than we have ever been. There, in the depths I once feared, we are home.
I Was Her Monster
by Jessi Cole Jackson
Artwork by Wayne Miller
* * *
I started acting as Libba's full-time monster when she turned three -- a long thirteen years ago. I had, of course, been assigned to her at her birth, but a monster isn't much good to an infant. I popped in now and then while her age was still counted in months, but once she was old enough follow the rules of hide-n-seek, I knew it was time to stick around.
I've been by her side, day-and-night, ever since. I thought we'd been a happy pair -- until a certain rainy afternoon in late September.
"I have an announcement, and you're not going to like it," Libba said, her arms crossed over her flat chest, her brow pinched. It was a posture usually reserved for browbeating Mom into trips to the mall. "I am not going trick-or-treating this year and you cannot talk me into it, so we might as well not even have the conversation."
I dropped the sock I'd been about to devour. "I don't understand."
She picked up my dropped sock, matched it with a mate and threw it into her brother's hamper. "Maybe because you're choosing not to understand."
She widened her stance and I half expected her to bring up her fists. "I'm sixteen years old. Too old for trick-or-treating."
I folded two shirts simultaneously, using different sets of legs and saying nothing. She'd been moody and difficult ever since she'd started eleventh grade. I determined not to be baited, particularly over something as immovable as trick-or-treating.
"I'm not going trick-or-treating. I'm not a kid anymore." She folded a pair of underwear dotted with hearts and rainbows.
I gestured to myself with half of my legs. "I beg to differ." The very presence of my large, furry body in her living room declared her childhood status to the world. Adults did not have monsters.
Libba mumbled something behind a pair of acid-washed jeans.
"Just say what you have to say."
She refused to meet my eyes. "You're a fluke."
"Excuse me?!" While it was highly unusual for a sixteen-year-old girl to still have her childhood monster trailing her into her junior year of high school -- we disappeared at puberty -- I would not be called names.
I drew up to the full height of my eight spindly legs. "I am not a fluke, I'm a blessing. You're lucky, Ms. Libba Ruiz Moreno, and don't you forget it. Who else gets to keep their monster this long into high school?"
"Hello? Ara? That's the problem," she said. "I'm tired of being a freak. The freak and the fluke. I'm ready for people to start treating me like an adult."
"You won't like it nearly as much as you think."
Her tan face flushed and her hands shook. She stuffed them into her pockets. "You don't know everything about me, Ara! I will like being an adult. I will like having hips and boobs and responsibilities. I want to get a job at the mall and I want to go on dates and have a gir --" She stopped abruptly.
"Girlfriend." I whispered the word. I'd known for a long time, but she had always been too shy
or too scared or just too young to say it aloud. Still, I knew. Of course I knew. I was her monster, I knew every beautiful corner of her.
"How . . . ?"
"I heard you talking to Emily once. About a kiss?"
More than just her cheeks were flushed now. She was red from her hairline to her scrawny chest. "You don't know everything!" She stomped out of the room.
"I know we're going trick-or-treating!" I called after her.
I had already ordered our costumes.
A month later, I laid curled up on Libba's giant fuchsia-colored beanbag listening to her sing off-key and bop around our room as I tried not to moan out my sickness.
The doorbell rang.
Libba danced down the hall. I imagined her sliding around corners in her mis-matched stockinged feet.
Her greeting to the bell-ringer was so enthusiastic I could hear it from my sickbed in her room, but it was followed by only murmuring. A few moments later, Libba came in with a huge grin on her face and an even larger package in her hands.
I watched through a single cracked eyelid.
"What is it?"
Libba dropped the large box and it hit ground with a whomp.
"I don't know, but it's for us!" Moody and distant for months . . . Of course the day I felt like I'd been sprayed with Raid was the day Libba was giddy and playful.
She nudged my second left foot.
"Ara, it's mail!"
I moved in my very best impersonation of a shrug.
"Don't feel good," I mumbled again.
"Belly ache?" Libba asked.
"No," I moaned.
"Headache?" Libba asked.
"No," I groaned.
"Feetache?" Libba asked.
"No."
Libba plopped down on the yellow, daisy-patterned rug between the box and me. "But you only get sick when I'm sick, Ara. And I feel great."