Flann laughs

Flann would not have come down at all if Cat had not convinced her it was for Egelric’s sake.

Fate was too cruel. Only that night she had decided to bury her love for Brude forever. This afternoon there came a young man with a spade.

“My best-​​beloved cousin Flann!” Egelric beamed.

“I shall tell my father you said that,” Flann smiled. “You do have at least two cousins Flann, you know.”

“That is perfectly all right with me. Anyone without a beard is necessarily better-​​beloved to me than anyone with. Speaking of beards, is this little one going to cry when she sees mine again?” He rubbed his chin as if the idea pleased him rather more than not.

“Take her and see,” Cat said. “Since you loooove the babies!”

“Ach! I had better not.” He wriggled his fingers stiffly. “My hands are as cold as a nun’s behind from my walk. Better let this young gentleman hold her while I warm myself up. I believe he keeps his hands tucked into his armpits when not in use.”

Finn giggled behind him.

“And you want me to put this tidy little baby into them?” Cat gasped.

“I do not put my hands where I should not,” Sebastien grumbled.

“Well, darling,” Cat said to the baby with a sigh, “cold or stinky as they may be, you might as well get your fill of a man’s hands now, and save Mama some worry in the hereafter.”

“My hands are neither cold or stinky.” Sebastien’s grumbling had softened into cooing as the baby passed into his arms.

“Even so,” Cat said, “I hope you won’t be calling her ‘louse’ or ‘tick’ or whatever you have coming today.”

“I shall call her mon ange,” he said reverently. “It means ‘my angel’.”

“That will do nicely.”

Flann did not like him to call her “his” anything, but no one had asked her opinion.

Osh helped her to be seated and afterward remained standing behind her chair. Cat gave him a scolding look, but he did not move, and Flann was grateful.

Cat immediately engaged Sebastien in a teasing conversation, with a vivacity that she usually reserved for people she liked very much.

As for Flann, she tried to rouse herself to do her part and began teasing Egelric, but she had none of her usual spirit. Somehow she was dropping jests as ponderous as boulders with a body that seemed to float hollow above them.

She leaned her head against the back of the chair, bringing it as close as she dared to Osh. She wished she could be an invisible observer of the scene like Osh himself. Only he seemed real.

And she could not understand why Cat was so friendly with Sebastien, whom she had occasionally mocked in his absence. Her fear was that Cat had chosen Sebastien for her.

But Sebastien caught her eye after a few jokes had passed between her and Egelric. He lifted a hand from the baby’s back and, with a nod towards the floor, held a finger to his lips.

Flann realized that there was one more invisible observer: there was Finn. Cat was keeping Sebastien occupied so that Finn would have to talk to his father – and Flann was spoiling it by speaking to his father instead.

She fell silent, and after an awkward moment, Egelric spoke to his son, and Finn replied.

Now Flann thought she could be invisible. Now she would be free.

She was free to wonder why Sebastien had come. Had he come to return the letter he had thoughtlessly carried away? Had he returned to read it to her? Had he come to open that grave while the earth was still damp upon it?

She was possessed with the thought that she could sense and almost see that letter beneath his cloak – over his chest, as he had carried it last time: his heart throbbing beneath it, and her baby’s body lying upon it.

Her hand clenched in a sudden, urgent desire to seize it from him who had had no right to take it when he had left her last time – who had had no right to carry it in the first place – this stranger, this black-​​haired foreigner.

The secret Brude had confided to him could not be untold, but she could burn that letter unread and let it remain a half-​​mystery to her. Ashes could not be reassembled into a page, any more than the parchment could be uncut, the hide unscraped, the carcass unflayed, or the goat restored to life and to pasture. The weeds and nettles could not be ungrazed, nor shrunk back into seedlings and seeds, nor returned to the earth in which they had lain.

It was a road that ran in one direction, from dust to dust, and there was no turning back on it for her, for Brude, for anyone. So she had admitted to herself that very night. So she had told Osh that very morning.

She wanted to be an invisible, impassive observer, but she could scarcely turn her eyes from her baby and the young man who was holding her – not only holding her, but caressing her, cooing to her, and examining her fingers and feet with a rapture that would have seemed excessive even on a bitterly unhappy, barren woman.

It was rare that Flann herself could look on that greedy, selfish, demanding little person with such affection, and she hated Sebastien, too, for making her seem a heartless mother.

She could not even exclaim over his remarkable interest in the baby, since she knew the reason, insufficient as it seemed: he was so taken with Liadan because he must have loved Liadan’s father.

She hated him, too, for making her jealous of Brude’s love – this interloper, this gray-​​eyed foreigner.

And she hated him for having gray eyes. She had even, in her moments of greatest despair in the last days, permitted herself to imagine that Brude had done as he had hinted: dyed and curled his hair, tinted his skin, powdered over his freckles…

Now that she had him before her, however, it was clear it could not be. Even starvation could not make a robustly-​​built man like Brude turn graceful and lithe. A man could not change broad, square hands into slender, any more than he could change the color of his eyes.

And yet now that she had him before her, she could scarcely turn her mind from that cryptic question: how else would she know him but by his eyes?

She had already seen magic, and she had already witnessed a miracle. More than anything she longed to believe that love was as it had been for Aillinn and Baille, for Liadan and Kurithir, for Etain and Midir – stronger even than death.

There was one person on whom such intense adoration of her baby would not have seemed out-​​of-​​place: on her baby’s father.

And when in the course of his caresses he glanced up at her over her baby’s head, his eyes were gray and sad and pleading: the eyes she thought she would have seen if Brude had opened his at the last moment, the last time she had seen him on this earth.

She felt a gentle hand stroke her hair, so lightly it almost stroked the air over her hair, and yet it startled her.

“Are you having a headache?” Osh murmured.

Perhaps it was his way of asking her whether she was uncomfortable, or of offering her an excuse for escaping. But it felt like his hand was turning her head around, telling her, “Look this way. No more looking back.”

Her yearning soul came shuddering back into her body and she was hollow no more. She was simply a fool – a fool. After swearing to Osh that morning. After swearing to herself that sleepless night.

She heard herself laugh: a sharp, throat-​​tearing giggle as at some comically horrific scene. So would she have laughed to see a headless chicken bolting across the yard, foolishly trying to escape a fate that has already happened.