Surely she had stepped into a Shakespeare play, Jessie thought, all bemused, as she followed the girl through the heather. Yes, there was her current dwelling, a den at the bottom of a long, large ditch, down which Aine daintily stepped, each movement practised and controlled, and Jessie slithered with a shrug. The faerie motioned her to sit on a patch of soft, dry moss and after a moment's pause at the sheer oddity of it all, she sat.
"How long have you been here?" Jessie asked, watching the girl perch herself on a tree root and cross her legs. She seemed completely at home here – not exactly supernatural, but how Jessie imagined early humans to be; a part of the natural world, not half-divorced from the world around them. Even her voice wasn't the voice of the people to whom she spoke every day; each word was a song, a trill at the back of her throat. Part of her mind was idly classifying, 'water bird' whenever the girl spoke.
"I'm about thirty years old," Aine said. "I've been here pretty much all my life."
Jessie blinked. "You look so young!" she exclaimed, and Aine actually laughed. It was a lovely sound, a ring of pure happiness. Jessie rarely heard people laugh like that back home. She couldn't help but smile with the girl...woman. She was older than Jessie herself, technically.
"I suppose I age slowly..." she surmised. "The fae don't age at all. My mother didn't change a day when we were together."
She could have easily passed for fifteen, sixteen, Jessie mused, studying her. Clad in a simple brown dress, barefoot, her strange eyes clear and free from guile or cynicism, she was a strange half-child, wild and timeless. The dreamy quality had faded, leaving Jessie quite rooted in reality, but instead of fear and shock at the upheaval of her logical beliefs, it was as if something had clicked into place, something right, inside her mind. The secret that Steven Williams had dangled before her on a balmy night on London bridge; the passion that drove her to chase and follow the beauty and wildness of birds down the years; the part of her that never grew out of Oxfordian traditions because she loved the ritual and mystery of it.
"Do you not...know your father?" she asked, gently, hoping it wasn't too a tactless question. There seemed no better way to ask. It seemed odd that a human would go so far as to strike up a relationship with a fae and then just abandon a child alone – although that, she corrected herself, was an idealist's view, not even a natural view. Think of cuckoos, she reminded herself, and the news each day. What would a man do with a half-faerie child he could never bring into his world, really? "No, don't worry, sorry, that was rude."
"It's fine," Aine said, clearly surprised. "That wasn't rude. Mother always told me truth and honour were the highest virtues among the fae, and mostly among humans. There is no shame in asking an honest question. If you wish to know something, you should ask freely."
She wouldn't survive five minutes in a city, Jessie thought, with something like shame. The vague curiosity that had been formulating in the back of her head about why her father hadn't taken her was forming a sad clarity. And besides, how could she contact him? She clearly had no access to or way of entering the human system. She was totally trapped in her own solitude. Jessie couldn't imagine the overwhelming loneliness in the lack of society, of just little every day contacts...it was a terrifying prospect.
"I don't mind," Aine continued, with just a slight note of wistfulness. "Not really. Mother always told me it was she who left him...that because they were in love, she had to leave him. She told me he was special. I wouldn't know who he was if he ever came. Maybe he comes every day and I don't know it..." She turned a sad smile to Jessie. "I want sometimes to go and speak to the families and the visitors and I can't ever quite make myself. I'm...I'm scared. I'm not lonely...I talk to the birds, and the animals. But the fae don't come here...I've never seen any...and I scare the humans." A tight little expression came into her eyes, and
YOU ARE READING
Swan on the Moor
FantasyPOSTED FOR REFERENCE. Aine and her mother were thrown from the Fae Sithen when Aine was nothing more than a child, for the crime of her being the daughter of a human father. Once her beautiful mother has wilted and died, Aine roams the moors alone...
