As we processed through the village, neighbors who had not yet paid their respects came to do so, bowing their heads in reverence and offering their prayers. Hanging back at the outskirts of the procession were beggars, among them an extremely thin woman with skin so grey with dirt I could not guess its shade.
“God rest her, Mairi Grieve,” she said, and I recognized her by voice: Peggy the Cottar. No older than my sister Sorcha, four years my senior, Peggy had lost teeth, was sparse of hair and dull of skin; she looked of an age to Mairi Grieve herself. And her child, so filthy and shriveled it looked more a changeling or an imp than I, clung like a limpet to her skirts.
“Alms for the poor?” Peggy asked.
Even as I shook my head, for I had none to give, Peggy was slapped, and her child screamed. They were pushed out of the way by the gathered townsfolk. I withheld my gasp but could not do the same for my pity.So do “compassionate Christians” treat those without a home.
She should have come to me long before now, the moment she knew her courses were late.Mairi Grieve’s words returned to me, and at last I understood their meaning. To be without home, coin, or man, and raising a bastard; a dreadful fate indeed.
“My man is gone!” Peggy cried out, as the crowd shoved and mishandled her. “Have mercy, please! He was lost in the forest—the fair ones took him and claimed him for their own!”
My breath hitched and my mouth dropped open; we locked eyes, and I tore my gaze away.Not your doing.Yet a most un-faery guilt gripped me, nonetheless.
Now with great pomp and ceremony the menfolk carried Mairi’s body into the kirkyard, and my sisters and brothers’ wives stood outside lamenting, making a show of how sorry they were. They hugged one another and hoped for one last memento of the dearly departed, for sentimental reasons, of course. And if the sentimental reasons could be translated into something of value, so much the better.
Yet Eamon fretted overmysalvation. When your flesh is all but immortal, who needs an immortal soul?
“You do not join them?” came a voice from behind me.
I looked up to find myself accosted by a young man, the shepherd who often watched our sheep. He had glossy curls and merry grey eyes, though his expression today was sober. I knew his face—handsome—and his reputation—scandalous, though perhaps the changeling child of a madwoman should not complain.
“Dinna mean to startle ye, lass.”
I shook my head. “’Tis no matter.” I turned my attention to the cluster of womenfolk. “And no. I do not join them.” I feared I might ask why none of the family had ever visited Mairi on her deathbed if they missed her so.
“Sometimes grief needs solitude,” the shepherd said. “I should leave you to it.” Regret tinged his words, and sorrow. Had he lost someone dear to him as well?
I caught the shepherd’s arm as he turned to go, surprising even myself. How forward I had been! Immediately I released him and glanced down at the ground. “I do not mind your company.” I was glad Eamon was out of earshot in the kirkyard, unable to hear what a hoyden I was.
The shepherd leaned his elbows on the kirkyard fence and watched as the mourners made their way to the gravesite. He turned to me and said, “She rejected you.” It wasn’t a question.
“Not always.” I recalled how she called me her cuckoo, dressed me and plaited my hair. How much she had taught me, even though I was not her true child. How she had never let me starve.
That was the Mairi Grieve I had known and loved.
My four brothers proceeded to the gravesite, bearing the coffin on their shoulders. My sisters bowed their heads and wailed, dabbing at their eyes with kerchiefs, though my fae vision was unable to discern a single tear.
Yet something in the procession caught me, banishing the earthly realm before me, and replacing it with memory or dream. There appeared before me not human mourners, but the trooping fae. Winged and tailed, ethereally lovely or twisted and hideous, there was no in-between. To the last they glowed, not like sunlight or flame, but the moonlight reflecting upon the snow. I saw a gleaming casket, finer by far than the wooden box holding Mairi’s remains, and above it a shining crown, almost too bright to look upon, as though some great saint or monarch had passed away. My heart seized with recognition, but of what, I did not know. Sorrow radiated off from the assembly, deep as I felt for the loss of Mairi.
But among the mourners, one hung back, garbed in green dark as forest shadows, tenting overly long fingers. From him alone, malice emanated, and I could not see his face.
Then, all at once, they were gone. The mourners who remained were but my mortal kin and neighbors—grubby, snotty, enamored with pious pretense as they lowered Mairi Grieve into the ground.
What had I seen? A vision of the past—or of what was yet to come?
“My father never claimed me, either,” the shepherd said.
His comment brought me into the present, to the modest chapel and kirkyard, my homely neighbors and scruffy kin. “I beg your pardon?”
He grinned, and those merry eyes twinkled. “Of course, I was born on the wrong side of the marriage bed.”
A bastard, then.He was brave to admit what everyone else was whispering. It made me like him, at least a little, and envy him as well. “You are the cuckoo’s child, then?”Me too.
He furrowed his brow.
“You know, how they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and...” I blushed, and he chuckled.
I had come too close to admitting my own truth, which I was bound not to, though as a fae it is similarly laid upon me not to lie. A difficult path to tread indeed.
