Twixt Firelight and Water Read Free

ambition.
     
    ‘Conri,’ said Lóch, raising herself on one elbow to study my face. ‘You look so sad sometimes. So troubled. What is it, dear heart?’
     
    ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to remember the words of a ballad, but the rhyme’s eluding me.’ I sat up and tickled her nose with a blade of grass until she was helpless with laughter, and the shadow was forgotten.
     
    * * * *
     
    Lóch’s grandmother liked me, but she wanted us to wait. We were so young, she said, too young to see anything but an easy future. The prospect of leaving the cottage where she had brought up her orphaned granddaughter, and the friends she had in the district, and everything familiar, was frightening to her. Well, she was old by human standards, and I almost understood how she felt, but I knew we must leave. If we stayed close to this forest we would be within my mother’s reach for all of our lives.
     
    My musical skill was not the only thing I had inherited from my mother’s line. I would live far longer than Lóch; I would continue to look young as she gradually aged. I dismissed this, certain my love for her was strong enough to withstand any test. Like many folk of mixed heritage, I had the ability to turn the minds of human folk one way or another — charm, one might call it, though not a charm in the sense of a spell, more a gift for choosing the right tone, the right words, the right look of the eyes to persuade a person to a certain way of thinking. I never used it on Lóch. She chose me for myself, for the man I was. I shied away from all magic, for I wanted to be human, not fey. But when Lóch’s grandmother put her foot down, determined that we should wait at least a year to be sure of our minds, I used it on her. It was not long before the old woman was saying the plan was a fine one, and of course we were old enough, at seventeen, to be wed and journeying and thinking of a baby. So the hand-fasting was set for Lugnasad. We’d be married as soon as the harvest ritual was over, and straight away we would head north to a place where there were some cousins of Lóch’s dead father. We packed up the cottage; there was little enough in it.
     
    ‘What about your things, Conri?’ Lóch asked. ‘Clothes, tools, all your possessions?’ She had never asked me where I lived. I thought perhaps she did not want to know. Of recent times I’d been sleeping at the cottage, chastely on a bench while Lóch and her grandmother shared the bed.
     
    I was about to reply that the only possession that mattered was my harp, but I realised it was not quite true. I had a little box, back in the Otherworld, with objects I had collected through the uncomfortable years of my childhood, treasures I had taken out at night after the day’s failures and punishments were over. Holding and stroking each in turn, I had been comforted by their familiarity. I did not want to leave that box behind. Besides, Lóch was right about clothing. In the human world one had to consider such activities as washing and mending. Before I was quite done with the Otherworld, my mother’s world, I must make one last trip back.
     
    * * * *
     
    Ten days before Lugnasad, on a morning of bitter wind, I slipped across the margin and fetched my box from the cave where I had hidden it. I took a cloak, a pair of boots, a favourite hat. I spoke to one or two folk, not saying I was leaving, and discovered that my mother had gone away to the south. Nobody knew if it was a short trip or a long one. I breathed more easily. With luck, she would not return until Lóch and I were far away.
     
    I emerged into the human world close by the cottage where Ciarán and his keepers lived, a low, secluded place nestled at the foot of the crag called Hag’s Head, and surrounded by rowans. Why did I choose that way? Who knows? As I passed the place I heard a sound that stopped me in my tracks. It could have been me weeping like that, in little tight sobs as I tried to hold