Author Games: Empty Night

Semifinals: The Cachail

 She was Seelie, as all the most tempting Tuath were in those days. She was good and beautiful, and she danced better than fae twice her age, and she adorned herself with rubies and onyx, not caring that these were Unseelie gems and that they would draw Unseelie eyes. When she thrust her hands into the soil, the plants would grow more heartily and vibrantly; when she walked through a garden, the flowers' heads would turn and watch her pass. But Cian did not love her for any of these things. In truth, he did not know exactly why he loved her, only that he did not need to know the reason. The mystery allowed the love to blossom, and so he would let it be.

The children, too, were Seelie. Twenty years prior, Alma had taken a lover, and together they had borne seven golden-haired youths, each possessing the grace of their mother and the courageous spirit of their father. Perhaps it was for the worse that they had retained their father's bravery; perhaps they would meet the same end, and Alma would soon tend eight graves instead of one. But Cian found that the children were pliable, easy to teach and easy to care for. As inexperienced as they were, they shied away from the skirmishes at the border, preferring instead to tend their mother's garden and read the books that their mother's new lover brought them.

In matters of politics, they were cowardly, but in matters of the heart they were brave. They asked that the wedding take place at night. They asked that it take place at all.

Any court would have found Alma and Cian's marriage to be illegitimate, but Cian did not care for courts. He cared for his wife and their home in the Old Land, decorated in the florid Seelie style. He cared for the books he bound in the basement, and he cared for friends who did not mind where he had been born, only that he stayed where he was and talked with them for as long as he was able. He cared for foggy nights on the riverbank, whispers of affection, the feeling of hands on wrists and kisses on foreheads. He cared for safety and secrecy and love and warmth, and he did not care that he was breaking the law.

Every so often, he would watch people leave the Old Land for newer shores. They claimed that the courts cooperated there, that the strange people who resided there made cooperation necessary. Peace was a distant dream, but some could not help but chase it. And so the travelers who had been Cian's friends would wave goodbye to him, and Cian would smile and send them off with words of encouragement. "May the road rise up to meet you," he'd say, and his friends would tread into the ocean and never return.

There was a more pertinent saying for these people. "One cannot return to the Old Land," the seers would sometimes murmur, "even if one tries." And so Cian vowed that he would not leave the Old Land, that he would dwell in his wife's house until his skin turned pale and his magic ran dry. If he had been cleverer, he would have sealed this vow with something powerful and valuable. But at this point in time, Cian was not so much clever as he was earnest. He believed that good intentions lasted, that good hearts could not be changed, that good people's lives proceeded the way they wanted them to.

Alma was the best person that Cian knew, and she died suddenly in the night. Her mother had died in the same fashion, gray-faced and panting, but Cian had anticipated prior warning before being forced to watch the breath drain from his wife's lungs. The shock was painful enough. The emptiness was worse. Loss had been a stranger to Cian, and now it laid beside him in bed, allowing the rose on the mantle to droop and wilt. Loss opened a great void inside of him; loss whispered that nothing would fill that void, that he could not restore the old feelings exactly as they'd been before.

But he laid in bed with the loss anyway, and he closed his eyes, and he willed the void to be filled regardless. Couldn't he go back to the way things were, if he at least tried?