The River Wife Read Free

grew still again. ‘Are you asking me if I have regrets?’
    ‘I think I am. Or maybe I want to be sure I haven’t been the cause of you losing something that might have been yours. What I want to say now is, Father, if there is any place you wish to be . . .’
    ‘Ah, my daughter,’ he replied. ‘What could offer more than this? To see you step from the river. To see your mother come home again, though I know she never will. I didn’t realise it until I got here, but this is my home. It holds everything that is dear to me. My favourite memories. My most loved people. The sounds and smells and patterns that make me happy. How rare it is to find all of that. No, what I must work out is not how to go, but how to stay.’

M y father’s face softened into the kindness of moss that grows in the furrows of trees and asks for nothing but dappled light and the touch of rain. He carried with him a carved stick when he walked, to steady himself. He was happy with the simplest things. He smiled and his eyes carried the brightness of sunshine caught in a ripple of water.
    As if he glimpsed the years ahead, he asked again and again of me that I make no contact with any human who came to the river. To never speak with the humans who visited the lake.
    ‘I wonder sometimes what the world is like beyond here,’ my father said. ‘I wonder how the cities have changed. We may need to go further upstream. Go further into the mountains.’
    ‘What worries you, Father?’
    ‘The world I came from and this one here may yet meet. I do not want you thinking it would be kind if that happened. It would not. Whatever I can do to keep you safe from that, I will.’
    ‘Somewhere there are humans that I belong to.’
    ‘Nowhere more than here, little fish.’
    ‘But if there are people, if they do come, they are not so different from me, surely,’ I said. ‘I am your daughter.’
    ‘They are as different from you as rock is to water. You must promise me that you will never be tempted to speak to them, to choose one for friendship, for I fear it would be the end of all that is here, and the river itself and every story within it would be lost.’ And then he said, ‘But there are other people you belong to.’
    ‘River wives?’
    ‘Yes. And other keepers of things. Like your mother.’
    ‘Where are they, Father?’
    ‘They will come.’
    And as my father had imagined, my own people did come for me, and my father was happy. It was as if he had been casting a thread for many years and had finally caught what he needed. The Winter King arrived on the first day of deep snow with his companions and musicians. He had travelled far from the land of blue ice to find the river wife who was spoken of in stories. My father walked deep into the forest with him and many days did they talk and many songs were sung before the Winter King asked me to be his wife. Asked me if he might be my husband through all the days of winter and depart each year at snowmelt to return to his land where spring and summer never visited. When he returned the following winter I agreed.
    On the day of my wedding, my father spoke to me of a journey he wished to make to the lands beyond the mountains.
    ‘I will be back, I hope, by summer,’ he said.
    But it was many seasons before my father returned. The Winter King had travelled nine winters to be with his wife when my father at last came back to the river. It was late spring. I stepped from the river on a bright sky day to find my father waiting on the stone he liked to sit upon. His hair had grown quite white and his face had the light of the moon in it. His back was no longer bent and he did not need the staff he had once used to help him walk. He was straight and tall and he had no words. Only the light that shone from his eyes spoke to me.
    It was that summer my father began standing still. At first he did it for a day and later more days. Not coming into the cottage at night. Not eating his soup. Not coming to