Swan on the Moor

Chapter One

If it weren't for the memory of the Northern Lights Aine would never have bothered to remain alive. Her mother had taken her there, and they had bathed together in the glow.

"Not all the things of this world are ugly," her mother had said, smiling at her. But that had been a hundred years ago and she had since found nothing to convince her that for the most part the things of humans were dirty and cruel and that exile was perhaps a worse punishment than death after all. Nonetheless, Aine looked back on that day in the north, the glory of the dancing lights that just faintly reminded her of her birthplace, and clung on for just a little while longer.

She supposed it had been worse for her mother, who could remember what it was to fly, and just occasionally when she was young she would find her mother standing on the very top of Haytor in the darkness of midnight, staring into the tattered clouds and the endless empty sky with an expression so wistful and broken that something inside her heart broke too, and she curled up against the bottom of the cold rock, curled into a damp, mossy hollow, and sorrowed with her beautiful, lost mother. Nowadays she just occasionally felt the skin under her shoulder blades itch and she would roll her shoulders and squirm at the tickly feeling, and in her very deepest soul she wondered if it wasn't nascent wings, straining to get out, and if back in the Sithen they would have burst from her back, glorious and right. In this world, there was no room for transformation; she was no caterpillar, more, a egg harvested too early. An omelette in the pan of life. She quirked her lips into a half-smile.

At first her mother had told her little; only that they suddenly had to go away and live somewhere else. As she had grown older she had began to tell her daughter all the stories of Faerie, her barely-remembered birthplace, with a harsh urgency, as though preparing her for some undefined future. Aine had been but a baby when they'd left, but she had cried as they walked away from Faerie and the touch of magic, and even now she remembered odd flashes of memories: burning will'o the wisps, flowers made of jewels and ice, songs that were more physical than any sound should ever be, melting and aching, liquid joy and grief. At the end, at the leaving, she remembered jeers and flashes of taunting, half-hearted harmful magic thrown at her mother, who walked proud and tall out of the Sithen, never to return. She had been just a bundle wrapped in wool, protected in her mother's arms, but she remembered.

"Wither, wither and be gone!" a shriek had risen over the crowd of ill-wishers, and how were they to know that that was precisely what had happened: her mother, the swan-lady, without the touch of Faerie, had lost something as vital as oxygen and she died, alone and cold, in the embrace of Dartmoor heather, her weeping, terrified daughter clinging to her before her body simply crumbled into the air. Yet she had smiled! Even then she had smiled and held her daughter's hand limply and whispered, "Do not hate, dearest one. Do not grieve. All things in nature end, even those of the Otherworld. Do not wish your life away." She flickered, like a bad film effect, her face twisted in pain, and breathed into her daughter's face, "Your father was human, beloved, and I loved him. That was my crime. I regret nothing. When I see you, how could I?" Aine sobbed now, in great harsh gasps, and her mother squeezed her hand, her skin so cold and papyrus-frail. "You will not die here, as I do, for your blood is of this world as much as it is of mine. I have no gift to give you but this...and know that I love you, always..."

It seemed a poor gift, in the harsh, eye-aching daylight of this world, and in the knowledge of the cruelty of her fae brethren.

So at a mere thirty years – barely more than a newborn to a fae – Aine lived alone in the heather and bracken of Dartmoor, with no more company than the ponies, cattle, wild birds and the cold, cold wind, unable to go back to her birthplace and unsure how to begin life in the human world. She survived, well enough, because she was fae enough to be able to live off the energy drawn up from the earth if she had no other choice, despite what her too-human stomach thought. The cramps could incapacitate her for days, instinct still telling her she needed solid food. In the spring the roaming sheep, recognising in her something closer to their own nature, closer to the earth, allowed her to take sparingly of their milk, and she clung to her existence, watching the tourists and farmers with their firm flesh and solid, sensible thoughts, their wonder at the nature they still considered themselves master over.

She dared not yet approach, even now, even after so long. One child had, a long summer ago, ventured away from her parents and run down through the undergrowth into the copse in which she happened to be sitting, singing, a song half-words, half the cries of a bird, the sounds melting seamlessly into a whole, just like Aine herself. The child had run, unthinking, almost right into where Aine sat among the flowers, but she had drawn up short at the strange sound of her singing, and, for just a moment, froze, gulped, and burst into tears, running in panic away from the unearthly noise. Only then had Aine realised she was there – a chubby little girl-child born from nothing more supernatural than the clay – and she had watched as her voice drove her in panic from the heather, back to the safety of her parents' loving arms. She had watched, heart breaking a little, as the parents, disbelieving of the 'magic singing' but acutely aware of the child's distress, had bundled everything into their car and driven away. Aine was left, sick of the sound of her curious voice, of her skin that was not a smooth cream or coffee like the humans she saw but an oil-on-water mishmash, inhumanly feather-white from one angle and a strange, muddy brown from another and, worst of all, her swan eyes: too-large pupils and purple irises. At first she had loved her eyes, because they reminded her of her mother, who was beautiful...but matched with the human genes they looked stark, out of place, and nothing like the eyes of humans. Her unknown father had bequeathed her the form of a human; she would never be slender and ethereal like her mother, but that she didn't mind. Her body was strong and she could climb and run, which her mother could never have dared to. Nonetheless, she knew, painfully, poignantly, that she was not part of either world, and never could be, truly. She knew nothing of the human world beyond the visitors, in any case, beyond what her mother had taught her and shown her in their travels, before her death. She knew what a car and a school and a plough was, but what relation they could bear to her, she could not have conceived, and there was no longer anyone to teach her. It had been difficult even for her mother to try and explain, for she could never truly understand the purpose of such manmade things, so she gleaned further and more mysterious information from leftover newspapers and dropped human items, and listened to her mother tell her how once, her father, the human she had loved, had told her about computers and the new magics, technology. Aine had grown only more self-conscious of her ineptitude. The human world with all its enigmas and difficulties was too hard to consider entering alone. So she survived, well enough, living off the moor and its inhabitants, sleeping in the bracken; the one useful trait from her mixed heritage being an ability to fade into the earth as if invisible, nothing more than part of the plants around her, so she remained safe and unnoticed.

Yet mere survival grew tiresome quickly. Not a day passed she didn't miss her mother, and wonder about her father, and her original home. Would it seem as alien to her as this world? At least the moor felt like a sort of home to her, betwixt and between the mechanical development of humanity and the spirit of the Otherworld; like her, it was an oddity in a world that no longer revolved around Gaia and the superstition of nature. When all the humans had left and the darkness had fallen, blanketing the world away from all that was machine and commerce, she danced in the flowers, bathed in the river Dart, and marvelled at its beauty. Just now and again she felt a lurch in her heart as she passed a ring of mushrooms, or a bare patch deep in the undergrowth, and she knew that the place had once known magic. How she knew this she could never have verbalised, for it was nothing more than a twinge in her blood, ancient knowledge inherited from her mother, but she knew had she been here even as little as a century ago, fae would have met her. The loneliness bit hard, but worse, the fear that they would just see her as the humans would; something that should not exist. Indeed, after her mother's revelation, that it was Aine's birth that got her driven from the Sithen, a little part of her died each day in the realisation that there was nowhere for her, nowhere to accept her. The fae would clearly never take her in again, and no human would believe she even existed. At least, alone, the moors were hers and hers safely.