Merlin's Harp Read Free Page B

little about this "going free in the forest." My brother had told me somewhat on his rare, secret visits.
      "Why secret?" I asked him once in sunshine, beside the fountain.
      "Gods, Niv, the others mustn't know! They'd get sick, laughing at me." Graphically, Lugh acted out how sick "they" would get.
      "Why?"
      "Look, I'm not…I'm supposed to…I'm practically grown up, Niv."
      "You are not." Lugh stood a head taller than me. I had to look up to him. But I had to look up to everyone, even my ghostfriend Dana.
      "You know, I guard you. I keep dragons and Humans out of the forest. And I take care of myself. I hunt and steal for me. I find my night shelter, for me. I'm grown up, Niv."
       I find my night shelter, for me. I thought of the Lady's bearskin cloak, wrapped around us both, of her warmth along my back, her arm over me, me curled into her warm body all the way.
      I decided and declared, "I won't go free in the forest! Not ever."
      "You'll have to," Lugh assured me.
      "Not me."
      "Everyone does. Even you."
      But I decided there and then that I would always stay in Lady Villa. And in a sense, I always have.
      After my birth the Lady stayed. The villa made a fine den. Sunshine poured into the protected courtyard. Not all the roofs leaked rain. You could sleep dry on a stormy night, warm in winter. And we were left entirely alone.
      The Fey always keep a respectful distance, one from another. But with the Lady they kept also a fearful distance.
      Humans fear us Fey and leave us very much alone. They call us "the Good Folk," though we are not good to them; and "the Fair Folk," though we are dark. They never speak our name aloud: "Fey."
      In much the same way, the mainland Fey feared my mother. They called her "the Lady," never by her name, Nimway. Their fishing coracles stayed well out from the island. Only those in great need sought her healings and prophecies. Till slippery Otter Mellias raised his neighboring cabin, Apple Island belonged strictly to her, Lugh, and me. Apple Island and Lady Villa trapped us and transformed us into a unit resembling a Human family, in which a growing child would grow a feeling heart.
      The Lady's friend Merlin, a half-Human mage, was almost a part of this "family." He would come and stay, sometimes for a season, and then return to the outside kingdom.
      Because he was half Human, Merlin had once had a family. He had even known his Fey father. I thought this stranger than his magic. From birth I had watched the Lady raise wind and call wild creatures, but I knew nothing of my father, or any other relative.
      Merlin once whittled me a small whistle shaped like a thrush. Whittling, he told me, "My mother was Human. My father was Fey."
      I stared from the wooden thrush to his intent face. The Human mother I could imagine: shared bed-cloak, warm breasts—a giant version of my own mother. But the Fey father…
      So Merlin had been a child, like me?
      At that time his hair and Human-style beard were brown, his thin shoulders straight. The slim white fingers that whittled my thrush were not of different lengths, like the Lady's, or Lugh's. Four of them were of one length, like mine. And they were all equally dexterous. All my young life I had watched those fingers shape oak cakes, scale fish, or sweep across harp strings. I loved Merlin's pale hands, and sometimes I flexed my own brown, even-lengthed fingers and tried tricks with them; but mine were less talented, stiffer, than Merlin's.
      I asked him, "Were you like me, Merlin?"
      He glanced a smile at me across the thrush-shaped whistle. "Yes, and no. I was small. I lived with my mother, and people left us alone. But…" He paused to study the whistle, over, around, and under.
      "But what, Merlin?"
      "I was Human, and I had power."
      I understood. Small Merlin had magical talent. He dreamed true and talked with ghosts, as I could not talk with the merry little boy in