Chapter 3
Three
Outside the kirk, I stood apart 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.
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 over my salvation. 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.
I changed the subject. “Is that why you must tend the flocks of others? Your father has given you no allotment of land?” For in sooth, he was far heartier than the shepherd we’d had previously, with a bad leg and a dog who did most of the work.
“You speak quite plain, lass.” He did not seem offended, thank the Great Mother Mab, more amused.
I did not know how to speak otherwise. My tongue could permit no lie, and I had yet to learn the art of speaking around the truth. “Eamon tells me that all the time.”
The shepherd cocked his head. “You call your father by his Christian name?”
I nodded, wishing he would drop the subject. I could hardly call Eamon otherwise. A true father to me he had never been, not by spirit or by blood.
The shepherd turned away from me and shrugged. “Shepherding suits me.” His expression was like a door closing upon me, defying me to push my way through.
“It is not a bad life, then? To be a shepherd?”
He glanced back over his shoulder, lips curling on one side. “Are you looking for work, lass? Beyond helping your family, and the winnowing at harvest time?”
I had not considered it before. There had never been any question of me leaving Mairi’s bedside. “I do not know what’s to become of me, now Mairi is gone. Eamon may not need my aid any longer. There are none who want to wed me, and I have no skill.”
The shepherd snorted. “No skill? You tended to your ailing mother for the past five years. No matter how much she denied you, you stayed by her side. And before then, did you serve as her helper and aid? Is that worth nothing?”
He had noticed so much. It made my cheeks grow warm despite the chilly air.
Yet the only one who could testify to my skills was now gone. What’s more, Eamon and the priest had made it clear they disapproved of Mairi’s occupation, and I was not to follow in her footsteps, though it was the closest to a trade I knew.
Not well enough. Not enough to save Mairi’s life. “I could not help her. I tried every philter I had ever seen her make, every herb I had ever seen her pluck, but could find no answers.”
And if aught of Faery could have helped her, I had long since proven far too weak.
The shepherd stared at me for some time. “Sometimes there are no answers to find.”
“Tell the priest.” My brows beetled and I twisted my hand in my skirt. “He bends Eamon’s ear and says Mairi was prideful. That she sought to interfere in the will of the Lord. She got what she deserved.”
The shepherd cocked his head. “And what do you say?”
“She was a good woman and I loved her.” I fought back a sob. For long moments neither of us spoke.
My mother’s coffin was lowered into a hole in the ground.
I did not hold with kirkyards any more than I did with bells and crosses.
Yet returning her to the earth seemed the right thing to do.
Again, an image took hold of me. This time it was blood, splashing around my ankles, up to my knees.
I knew a profound satisfaction in feeding the land, for life should feed life, and the payment was death.
Such thoughts troubled me, for I had no idea whence they came.
“Who do you become,” I asked the shepherd, “when everyone who told you what you were is gone?”
He pressed his lips together for a moment, brows knitted in thought before he answered, “Anyone you want.”
For myself, I did not ken who that was.
Only half-fae. Repelled by cross and iron, but with no gifts of my own. Did I belong in Faery or among the mortals? Who could say?
I touched the side of my throat, where Bess’s birthmark bloomed like a rose. Her birthmark, not mine. Her throat. She who owned this visage tarried in Faery still, while I remained in her place.
Something stirred beneath the mark, warm and alive. The mark was shrinking, my skin grew thin, close to cracking, to free the true self hidden inside.
If you shuck off Bess’s skin, what will you become?
“Bess?” The shepherd’s eyes grew wide.
What did he see?
The world around me went still. The lamentations of the mourners went silent, their false tears freezing like icicles halfway down their faces. Did I let my gaze fly to the heavens, I would have seen the birds grown motionless in their flight.
I lowered my hand and let the birthmark stay as it was. The world moved back into motion, and the shepherd blinked in surprise.
Some impulse caught me, and I looked coyly out from underneath Bess’s lashes.
Mayhap I could distract the man, make him forget whatever brief lapse of my glamour he might have seen.
“You have me at a disadvantage, sir. You know what to call me but have not told me what to call you.” My pulse quickened, and my cheeks warmed.
Such boldness had never been my wont, however strangely natural it felt.
He straightened then, squaring his shoulders, and puffing out his chest like a proud bird of prey.
I noted how close his jerkin fit him, how his pushed-up sleeves revealed forearms corded with muscle.
“You may well use my occupation, Shepherd, since my father has not given me his name. And my Christian name is Thomas.”
I had not a Christian name, nor was I the Bess he thought I was.
The knowledge freed me somewhat, kept away my shyness and concern over what others might think.
“Thomas.” I tasted it on my tongue, like the juice of some forbidden fruit.
“Thomas Shepherd.” It seemed too humble for him, somehow.
He had such assurance, such charm. A shepherd with the manner of a king.
He should be Dumuzi, or Endymion, the consort of a goddess.
Not standing here talking to a lowly farmer’s daughter like Bess. Like me.
Then again, I was not sure I still was the lass I had been before. Somehow, standing next to the handsome shepherd, for the first time I felt seen.
The gate to the kirkyard creaked open, and the first of the mourners began to leave.
Mairi’s body rested in the ground, and my brothers had covered the grave with dirt.
Some of my straggling relations lingered, making the sign of the cross over their breasts.
Before long, the family would depart the kirkyard, and I must join their assembly, if I hoped to discreetly insert myself into their midst.
I did not want to go. I would linger here, talking to the comely shepherd, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the beauty of the day.
Perhaps I was the brazen sinner Eamon feared I would turn out to be. It was not in me then to care.
I straightened, lifting my chin like a fine gentlewoman, as though I were garbed in the finest silk, and not my best and darkest dress. “Well, then, Thomas Shepherd,” I said, “I hope we meet again under better circumstances.”
He nodded then took my hand in his own. His fingers were strong, elegant though calloused. He raised my hand to his lips, warm and soft as they brushed against me, then he gingerly lowered his hand and released me, never once moving his eyes from my face. “Till the next time, lass.”
Who do you become when everyone who told you what you were is gone?
Anyone you want.
And despite everything—my mixed heritage, my fae vulnerabilities, and my magicless state—something inside me began to believe he was right.