Chapter 10 The Hunig Moon #3
Having apparently decided to take root where she stood, Fairhrim used the watch and its chain as a sort of lead by which to tug Osric closer.
He did not mind. She undid the top few buttons of his shirt herself—a novel development; she usually left his undressing to him.
She pulled the back of Osric’s shirt down to expose the nape of his neck.
She made none of her usual complaints about wasting seith on the likes of him.
(Come to think of it, when was the last time she had fussed about that? He couldn’t remember.)
“Twenty seconds,” whispered Fairhrim through pale lips.
She held her hands together below her chin in something of a prayer. In her left ticked Osric’s pocket watch. In her right, her tācn glimmered with readied seith. She stared at the clouds as though she might push them away through the force of her will.
She really wanted this to work.
She cared.
What was left of Osric’s anger bled out of him. He tried to hold on to, at the very least, annoyance, but his annoyance had dissipated. Look at her. Look at what she was doing. Petrified practically to the point of fainting, and yet there for him.
How could one not forgive?
The waterfall thundered on. Mist danced around them like a many-pleated veil, opening and closing, spreading and massing upon itself, deadening everything beyond it.
The vapour thickened into something like rain.
There was no longer a horizon marking the junction between sky and mountain, there was no hotel and no lake, only Osric and Fairhrim, dripping wet, in this pale, opalescent void.
Osric bent his head towards her. She held her palm to the back of his neck. Her face was inches from his. Their breaths mingled upon dew-laden air.
“It’s got to be now,” came Fairhrim’s whisper, even if the sun wasn’t visible and there wasn’t a single rainbow.
Her tācn made contact. Her seith surged into his system.
At that moment, the clouds broke.
The air sizzled with a low crepitation. Light touched the veils of mist, broke and splintered, refracted into its individual components, shattered into pieces beyond count. The ribbons of vapour turned prismatic. Colours in their many millions gleamed around them. They stood in a rainbow.
It wasn’t anything like the rainbows Osric knew. Colours swept into one another in cataracts and rivulets, shades of wildflower, sea glass, pines, summer, iron, ice, gas lamps, ivy, heart blood, bruises, all in a churning iridescence.
Droplets gathered at Osric’s eyes too quickly to be blinked away; the colours took on forms half imagined, forests and palaces and spires and another sky; a world alongside this one, but not of it.
The roar of the falls was the swell of music from another place, rhapsodic and dazzling.
Osric felt himself on the cusp of a deeper understanding.
His senses were sharpened. He knew nothing. He was only just beginning to know.
Fairhrim was painted upon the world in impossible pigments. Vapour came off her in a sunlight-smoke. Hallowed was the hand she pressed to his skin.
The torrent poured at her feet like a confession.
The veil of mist swept around them, and it wasn’t a Haelan and a Fyren on that pinnacle, it was her essential self and his, together, chest to chest.
They stood star-crossed in the prisms and beams and could-have-beens. And there, at that primal source, in the narrowed space between heaven and earth, between spite and forgiveness, between colours undiscovered and rain-that-wasn’t, she pushed her healing into him.
Once again her seith was a burnishing, a benediction, a hope.
The earth tilted. The veil settled. Colours faded like closing petals. Solemnly, quietly, the world grew solid again.
The sun, drunk with its own loveliness, sank into the lake.
Above them, the Hunig moon did not let the sky go dark.
Osric and Fairhrim stared at each other, exhilarated, lightheaded.
She held him still in that healing embrace, with her hand pressed to the back of his neck.
He had at some point clasped her in his arms; she quivered between them, breathless.
He tucked away a curl of her dark hair, on which droplets gathered like pearls.
She moved her hand to his clavicle and cast a live diagnostic. It flickered palely in the silver mist. Osric, veering wildly between hope and fear and hope, waited.
Then something happened, something exquisitely rare. Fairhrim threw her head back and laughed. A bright, genuine, delighted laugh. The crystalline sound echoed in the mist. Osric fixed the moment in his mind; one day, this memory would be all he’d have left.
“I think we’ve done it again,” said Fairhrim, sounding as though she didn’t believe herself.
“Are you—are you certain?”
The shimmering diagnostic, incomprehensible to Osric, continued its slow pivot. Fairhrim’s eyes were luminous as she studied it, vivid with curiosity. She pressed her hands to her mouth and nodded.
Before him was beauty trebled by brilliance. She was doing it. Moon by moon, she was healing him. She was doing the impossible thing.
What could have been between them if he wasn’t what he was and she wasn’t what she was? Could anything mend the breach? he had asked himself at the Stánrocc.
She wiped at her muddied cheek and smiled at him. His soul thrilled as though resonating with something holy.
Could little human heartstrings span a breach so vast?