Blade Dance

She sat with her back against the tree, feeling the damp, cool air on her face. Finn’s beauty, framed by the wildness all around them, struck her forcefully. As did his concern. She could read it in every inch of his body. This man was her lover. She’d been more intimate with him than with any living being, ever, but somehow it was easier to share bodies than to tell the story of her childhood.

Because she was afraid that he would reject her. She wanted another night with him before that, another night to feel loved and cherished and free to be herself with a man. But that was selfishness talking, and cowardice, because tomorrow she would want another night. And then another. And the problem was not going to go away.

“What were your parents like?” she asked, prolonging the inevitable, trying to figure out how to put it all into words.

“Mine?” asked Finn. “They were country Fae. They were old when they had me, and I always had the impression that they were surprised to have me.”

“Did they love you?”

He seemed to consider it. Then he said, “I’m certain they did, but they were old-fashioned, formal, distant with me, although not, I think, with each other. They had a language of their own in a way, a manner of communicating. They thought the same way. They had been together a long time by the time I arrived, and I was very much a visitor in their lives. Welcome, but a visitor all the same. They did things according to the old ways. We never even had Druids to oversee our lands. My parents and I hunted and we had orchards, but they were suspicious of fields and the vast serf populations needed to tend them. That was all the Queen’s doing, and they remembered the old monarch, from when the court was smaller and less powerful.”

“But the example they set for you as adults was one you weren’t afraid of growing into,” she concluded.

“Not afraid,” he agreed, “no. But I didn’t necessarily want to follow it. It was Brigid’s family who opened my eyes to what a marriage could be. Her parents did love each other, unfashionable as that was with the Queen, and the warmth of their home was something we wanted to re-create together.”

“I didn’t have that,” said Ann. “I had the opposite. I never knew my father. My mother was promiscuous. I learned that word from a social worker when I was five. My father was just one of hundreds of men she slept with. She couldn’t remember their names. Nothing was regular, safe, or secure about living with my mother except the pattern of poverty and flight. That was always the same. She could never hold down a job for more than a few months at a time. She never finished school, so the jobs were never very good. Grocery bagger, dishwasher, parking attendant. It didn’t matter. She could never keep them. She’d get mad and then she’d get into a fight and then she’d hurt someone. She’d get fired, we’d fall behind on the rent, and then we’d be evicted. And I’ve always been afraid that I’d end up like her.”

“You’re nothing like your mother,” said Finn. “You finished school. You hold down a job. You have a temper, I’ll give you that, but you control it.”

“Only because I’ve built my life around controlling it. And my mother was in control, too, for weeks, months, sometimes years at a time, but it only takes one slip. It was a rotten childhood, all in all. We were never warm, we never had enough to eat, but we had each other, until my mother slipped, and then we didn’t even have that.”

“What happened to her?” Finn asked. He was standing very close to her, rubbing her back, and when she shivered, he pulled off his flannel shirt and put it over her shoulders, pulling her into his warmth.

It was so hard to talk about it. She wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t do it now. She was tired and cold and she’d never get through the story in this condition without breaking down into tears. “I’ll tell you later,” she said. “I promise. For now, I want to go home.”

Ann stood up slowly. She felt light-headed at first, but she grasped the tree to steady herself. Somehow she seemed to draw strength from it. “Hang on,” she said. “I never knew bark could be so comforting,” she joked.

“That’s because you have some Fae blood,” he said. He was hovering over her like she was a child taking her first steps, and she was unsteady enough to be grateful for it. “You can draw from living things. Not as efficiently as a Fae, probably, and certainly nothing like the way Miach does, but enough to make a difference.”

“Ginger tea,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s like ginger tea. The kind you buy in packets at the Chinese market. It’s honey powder and dried ginger, and you mix it up in hot water and it makes your nausea go away like magic. That’s what it feels like clutching the bark.”

“If you’re nauseous, then we stay put,” he said.

“How about if I’m starving and nauseous?” she said.

“You can’t be both at the same time.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Mrs. Friary will have a meal ready when we get back,” he said.

“I don’t want Mrs. Friary’s cooking tonight. I want pizza in front of the television. My television. And beer. And my own bed.”

“Mrs. Friary will be making chocolate mousse,” he reminded her.

“How about we take it to go?” she said, thinking of her bed in the attic beneath the skylights.

“I can’t, Ann. I called the Fianna together today to rescue Davin. I led them into the very last place on earth any of them ever wanted to go again: a Druid mound. You’ve seen the tattoos on my shoulders. They’re the mantle of responsibility. I have to thank those Fae and half-bloods and break bread and drink with them because there is a fight coming, a fight to keep the wall standing, and I finally know what side the Fianna and I should be on.”

“Did you really mean what you texted me? Or did you just send that message because it was too late to tell Brigid?”

The words left her mouth before she realized what she was saying. It was too raw. She saw the meaning hit him like a whip. He closed his eyes and let out a breath.

“I’m sorry,” said Ann. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not very good at this. No one has ever said they loved me before. No one except my mother. It’s made me greedy and selfish.”

Finn opened his eyes and stepped close. He took her face in his hands. The warmth of his touch made her realize how cold she was.

“I love you, Ann Phillips. Never doubt that. But I have to do what is right or I will be weakened, and without the Fianna, the wall will come down. Tonight, we sleep in my bed. Tomorrow, it will be yours. I promise.”