Mine are a twilight people, and when night falls, we come truly alive.
I sat on my stool, the room dim around me but not fully dark. Outside, the wind battered at the shutters, and the cold February air crept in beneath the doorframe, so that I pulled my shawl more snugly around me. The pottage still simmered over the hearth. The house settled, vermin crawling inside the walls.
My skin thrummed with energy. And still, I waited.
A clay cauldron fell from the rafters and clattered to the floor.
I started and hissed out a “Shh.”
Eamon’s snoring stopped briefly, then resumed.
Muffled cursing came from inside the cauldron. To mortal eyes, it would seem empty. Only fae sight would notice the spindly limbs that emerged one after another and pushed themselves upright, followed by a shaggy, dun-colored head. For a moment the brownie stood there like a tortoise, with the heavy clay cauldron for a shell. Then she shrugged it off and bustled towards me.
Morven, the household brownie, my only connection to the realm of the fae.
I put a finger to my lips. “Do not wake them.” I gestured upstairs.
Morven waved this off, bright eyes peering through her mop of hair. “That lot have been drinking all day, and human senses are dull besides. I’ll not wake ’em, niver fret.” She tugged on my arm, paying no mind to the corpse I was seated beside. “Can ye not feel it? Imbolc today. The Veil is grown thin.”
“Imbolc,” I repeated. One of the four times a year when the Veil between the mortal and fae realms lay open, and one might cross to the other side. Imbolc sang through my veins, made all my hairs seem to stand on end. My pulse quickened even during this time of grief when my sorrow knew no bounds. “I had forgotten. I was too caught up in preparing Mairi for her funeral.”
I glanced down at the body. So impossible to believe it had once been a living woman, full of kindness, full of knowledge, full of love. Not my true mother, I knew that. But she was the closest thing I ever had. I swallowed hard, my eyes tracing every angle of her face. Stroked back her greying hair.
Morven snorted. “Ye think it’s gonna get up off that bed on its own?”
“Morven!” Warmth flooded my cheeks. “Christians think the Devil will creep in and take her body.”
Morven tilted her head at me. “And do ye hold such beliefs?”
“Of course not.” I wasn’t as superstitious as a human. “But Mairi did. And I owe her much.”
“She canna see ye now.”
I entwined my fingers and stared down at them. Mairi was gone, never to walk these green hills again. Whether she had moved on to work off her sins in Purgatory, as the priest said, whether her spirit lingered or was vanished and gone, it was not on me to know. When we of Faery die, our empty flesh feeds the earth, our mother, but our spirits simply vanish. For all I knew, that was true of the humans as well.
“Maybe she can.” I looked up at Morven through my teary eyes. “Maybe somehow, though she is gone and dead, her body no longer moves, she can still see me. She can still know?”
Maybe the dead remain with us, their love and deeds caught up in our memories, long after their flesh is gone.
Morven hmphed, and I had the sense she was raising an eyebrow, though she was far too hairy for it to show. She started her sweeping with a vigor born of the Imbolc energy, humming tunelessly as she did.
She was right. Mairi Grieve was long gone, however much I might wish it otherwise.
But I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.
Three
Outside the kirk, I stoodapart from my kinfolk, unable to take any comfort from their tears false as faery gold. My eyes were glued upon Mairi Grieve’s casket, to burn her into my memory while I still could.
The kirk was modest, not much larger than our house, of squared sandstone with a semicircular apse. Its masonry construction mocked the peasants’ houses clustered around it, which were lucky to last even a generation without repair; it was built to last long past such time as their graves came to fill its grounds. In fact, some said the kirk dated to the time of Saint Columba, or at least King Alexander, which as the humans reckon it is ancient indeed.
I had never been inside. Mairi had ever protected me from it, given me a sprig of chamomile to comfort me when I must venture nearby.
The kirk smelled of morality and mortality, and my people despise both. The fae are completely outside the world of sin and salvation, even those only half-fae like me. I do not believe we ever fell, angels tumbling from the heavens like birds downed by arrow’s flight, and if there is a Hell, our relations with it are naught but landlord and tenant. We are no more innocent than the hare who eats the farmer’s vegetables, no eviler than the wolf who steals his sheep. We simply are.
Mortals are creatures of faith, and the more they believe, the smaller we become.
Earlier that morn, the men of her family had carried Mairi’s body to the kirk to be buried. My seven siblings, who had scattered to the four winds as soon as they were old enough, had all returned for this last show of mourning. Already they had been bickering over who would get the heirloom ewer, or the ring Mairi wore on her right hand. All while I tended to her body, leaving her side only to ensure the lot of them were fed.
