Iylaine could think of only one reason why Alred and Gunnilda together would come to her house on a Sunday afternoon; and why Condal, Gwynn, and Gytha would have to take the babies to visit at Mother Curran’s son’s house down at the road.
There was only one reason why Malcolm would reappear at home in the middle of the day while his father and brother were in Lothere, and why, since he had, he would putter about spending his nervous energy on unimportant tasks, letting Alred and Gunnilda carry on an awkward conversation while they waited; and in spite of many stares, never meeting Iylaine’s eyes.
Bad news about her father: that was the only reason. Alred to tell her, Gunnilda to comfort her, and Malcolm… She did not know what Malcolm was supposed to do. Hold her down while she screamed.
She shuddered and shoved back the thought for the tenth time. Malcolm stepped into the nook, but he appeared to be heading for the poker instead of a chair, and Iylaine could not take it anymore.
“Malcolm!” she said, beaming at him to prove just how little she suspected. “Tell Gunnie and Alred what Duncan said that was so funny!”
Malcolm looked down at her at last and seemed to forget about the fire. He grinned sheepishly, and his face turned a little red, and Iylaine knew that if she could only keep him smiling like that, it would keep all bad news at bay.
“Why don’t you tell them, Babe, since you know which of the innumerable funny things you mean?”
“Well, all right, I will.”
She turned to Alred and Gunnilda, and was pleased to see them sit forward and look eager. Surely they had nothing so very bad on their minds. She heard Malcolm’s chair squeak as he sat.
“It was when Colban and his father first came in, and Malcolm was trying to explain to Duncan how Grandda was his father, just like how Malcolm is Duncan’s father, and how Grandda is also Colban’s father, just as Malcolm is also Maud’s father, which makes them brothers.”
Alred rubbed his forehead. “I do anticipate some perplexity on the part of the wee laddie, if he explained it like that.”
“Hush, Alred. Duncan understood at once, which just goes to show how much smarter he is than you.”
Alred laughed, and Iylaine thought this a good sign. She could beat that bad news back into nothingness.
“So Father asked Duncan if the boys didn’t look a powerful lot alike, and do you know what Duncan said? He said no, Grandda, because his Da has a bottom beard and Uncle Colban has a top beard! Because of his mustache! Can you believe him?”
They all laughed, and Iylaine smiled right and left and folded her hands over her knee, well satisfied. Surely nobody could laugh so at her baby’s cleverness if her baby’s grandfather was in peril.
Alred smoothed his own mustache with his fingertips. “A top beard! I like it. The boy has poetic tendencies.”
Gunnilda said slyly, “I don’t know about bottom beards, though. Sounds like another sort of poetry to me, if you see what I mean.”
Alred bowed in his chair. “Indeed I do. But given the poetic inclinations of our King, I foresee for the boy a bright future as Royal Bard.”
Gunnilda and Iylaine laughed and said, “Oh, pish!” together, which set them off laughing all the harder. Iylaine was delighted. She could talk about her babies all day.
Then Malcolm had to butt in. “Iylaine,” he said, “I have to tell you something.”
Iylaine stiffened. She did not like the tone of his voice: disapproving, as if it was wrong for her to laugh and chatter about her babies.
Well, had his brother not called her frivolous? He must have thought she could not have heard or understood the Gaelic, but that was where pointed ears and Cousin Condal came in handy. Iylaine did not like her brother-in-law anyway, but she thought her husband might have stood up for her, instead of making excuses.
She turned her head.
Malcolm sat crouched over his lap, kneading his hands together, though not cracking his knuckles, because Malcolm thought knuckle-cracking too revealing of nervousness. Still, he ought to have grown a “top beard” if he truly feared that, for beads of sweat sparkled on his clean-shaven upper lip.
“I told you a lie,” he said. “Now I need to tell you the truth.”
Your father… your father… your father… With every throb of her heart she heard Malcolm saying the words, and her heart was beating faster and faster. She clenched her fists over handfuls of her skirts.
“It’s about my accident a few weeks back. It wasn’t an accident. I didn’t hit my head.”
Just as suddenly it was not about her father. She was plummeting—sick and dizzy not with relief, but the vertigo of not knowing what catastrophe was about to impale her.
“Oh?” she said. Her voice sounded muffled. “Just like how that scar on your arm wasn’t an accident?”
She had meant it as a desperate jab, but Malcolm nodded his head steeply, like a horse, and came up looking almost grateful.
“Aye, just like that. Just like that. I lost a lot of blood. Only this time it wasn’t my blood. Do you remember last summer? When Vash unbound you from him by taking your blood out of himself?”
Vash… Vash… Vash… Iylaine shook her head and whispered, “No,” but Malcolm did not stop.
“Well, that’s what he did to me: took his blood out of me.”
Iylaine shouted “No!” to silence him. She looked to Gunnilda, and she looked to Alred, and they both looked sorry, but they did not look surprised. They were all in it together. They were all against her. She wanted her father.
Malcolm said, “Baby…”
“No! You just—you just want to go home with your stupid brother!”
She was desperately flailing, but she had struck a glancing blow. For a moment Malcolm was stupefied. Iylaine heard Gunnilda and Alred stirring beside her.
“Fine! Go! Go if you want! Is that what you wanted to tell me, Malcolm? Would have been nice if you had asked me, but then who cares what I want?”
Malcolm shouted, “That is—!”
He had only wanted to get a foothold in the conversation, and now he gaped at her as he collected his thoughts. Iylaine hunkered down inside herself, preparing for his assault, but her heart kept pounding Vash… Vash… Vash…
Malcolm said, “My brother has nothing to do with it! It wasn’t even my idea!”
Alred said, “Malcolm, please, don’t shout.”
Malcolm cried, “I? She was—” He closed his eyes, set his jaw, and deliberately collected himself. “Baby…”
“Don’t call me Baby!”
His face clenched, but again he took a breath and relaxed. “Iylaine…”
Iylaine only felt insulted by his efforts to remain calm. Did he mean to imply it took all his noble forbearance merely to converse with her?
He opened his eyes, and his voice softened. “I’m sorry. This is coming out all wrong. May I start over?”
She could hardly refuse. She made a stiff nod.
Malcolm took a breath and began again. “That night, when Alred sent for me, it was Vash who wanted to see me. You know, what he did last summer, it was only half-done. You are no longer bound to him, but he’s still… still bound to you.”
Iylaine sat up, tense and still as a deer about to take flight. Something terrible was coming. She could not quite sense from where.
Malcolm leaned ever closer to her, red-faced, sweating, wringing one hand in the other as if he could barely suppress a desire to strangle and kill.
“He knows how to do it now. He wanted to practice on me. And I let him. And it worked. He’s free of me now. And now he wants to be free of you.”
Free of you. Iylaine’s heart stopped, stilled by a rib-piercing arrowhead of pain. Impaled, and still falling head over heels through a white void. Sounds muffled. Blood on the snow.
“It will only take a tiny cut,” Malcolm said gently, mistaking her silence for fear. “Only a moment or two. We’ll be there with you, Alred and Gunnilda and I.”
The shaft of the arrow was still quivering, making her heart seem to beat still, but it only sent out ringed wavelets of pain, echoing free of you… free of you… free of you…
“He would like to do it at the new moon,” Malcolm said. “But I told him whenever you’re ready, Baby. Whenever you’re ready. And then it will all be over. This will all be behind us.”
“No!” Iylaine had to rip the word out of herself, and it hurt to blink and breathe and move, and she felt as if she were spouting blood, but she had to fight back. “No!”
Gunnilda moved to comfort her, and Iylaine flung off her arm. Malcolm sat up.
“Not now, and not ever! No! Why do you even bother asking me the date, Malcolm? To make me feel like I have some kind of a say? No one ever asks me what I want!”
Malcolm was on his feet so suddenly that Iylaine fell back and threw up her arms, expecting him to strike her, though it would have been the first time.
“Aye, then, perhaps I should!” he shouted. “What do you want, Iylaine? Perhaps I should ask you, instead of simply assuming that, say, because you married me, and share my bed, and mother my children that, perhaps, dare I hope, you actually want me?”
He loomed over her, so close that his kneecaps brushed hers. Alred was on his feet, too, though Malcolm’s towering body nearly eclipsed him.
“Malcolm,” Alred said, “this is uncalled-for.”
Malcolm swatted at him without looking around. “No no, I should like to know! I should like to hear an answer! What do you want, Iylaine?”
Iylaine blubbered, “Go away!”
Malcolm reared back as if she had struck him, and Alred barreled into him shoulder-first and pushed him away from her.
Malcolm choked, “So! At least I know.”
He spun away from Alred and stomped out into the entry.
His sword belt jangled as he hefted it from its hook, but he went out without buckling it on. The door slammed, and Iylaine heard his boots thundering down the wooden steps and squelching through the mud in the yard. Gunnilda’s arm was around her. Alred sighed.
“I shall go after him,” he said. “I apologize, Iylaine, on his behalf as well as my own. I can only beg you to keep in mind that jealousy is a sort of madness. The fonder a man’s heart, the crueler is jealousy’s hold on his mind.”
Iylaine never lifted her blubbering face from her hands. Alred took his cloak and sword belt and went out. She heard his high, clear voice call, “Malcolm!” in the yard, and then his feet too plashed away.
Gunnilda rubbed Iylaine’s shoulders and repeated, “There there… there there…” until she sounded very stupid and Iylaine ran out of patience with her.
Iylaine stood and stalked from one chair to the other, and finally broke down sobbing again before the fire.
“You see?” she demanded. “That’s all we ever do, is fight.”
Gunnilda followed and laid an arm over her shoulders. “That isn’t all you do, honey. I see you having good times, too. But right now I guess the fighting has a way of sticking out in your mind, doesn’t it?”
“Nobody ever asks me what I want! ‘I have something to tell you, Iylaine.’ Why didn’t he say, ‘I have something to ask you, Iylaine,’ but no…”
Gunnilda sighed. “Iylaine, I don’t know but I guess he meant he wanted to tell you he didn’t have an accident. That’s what.”
“But he still isn’t exactly asking me to do this, is he? Nobody is exactly asking me what I want, are they?”
Before she could thrust the thought away, she pictured Vash telling Malcolm, “I want to be free of her.” And the thought pierced her straight through.
For as long as she could remember, in her loneliest, most unloved hours she had comforted herself with the idea that Vash always wanted her and was always thinking of her, even if they could not be together. And now he wanted to be free of her. He wanted to forget her.
Her blubbering turned into the keening howl of a wounded animal. She felt as if her ribcage were collapsing.
Frightened, Gunnilda pulled her closer, squeezed her shoulders, and rubbed her arm.
“What about me?” Iylaine sobbed. “What about what I want?”
It did not much matter now, if Vash no longer wanted her. But like an animal with a mortal wound she still fought and flailed.
Gunnilda asked ominously, “Well, what do you want?”
“I don’t know! How should I know if nobody ever asked me before?”
Gunnilda’s voice was no longer so very sympathetic. “Well, Iylaine, I don’t know but I guess somebody did ask you what you wanted once. And that somebody is Malcolm. He asked you plain: will you marry me? And Father Brandt asked you again in the chapel: will you take this man? And both times you said Yes.”
“But that was because I thought Vash was dead! That was because I thought I was going to die!”
Gunnilda sucked in her breath and stepped away from her, as if she had said a horrifying thing. Iylaine felt a twinge of shame. Perhaps the truth had not been quite so bold.
“Well,” Gunnilda said shakily, “I’m sorry to hear you say that. That doesn’t seem like such a good reason to marry a man. Malcolm loved you.”
“And because he loved me I had to marry him?”
By now Iylaine’s mouth was trembling. By now Gunnilda’s voice was stern.
“No. But because you married him, you have to love him. And to honor him, obey him, and serve him. You made an oath before God and your family, Iylaine. Keeping yourself to him only, as long as you both live.”
Iylaine blinked. Her eyes were thick with tears, and Gunnilda’s wavering face seemed both unfamiliar and true.
“Is that so?” Iylaine asked softly. “And so I mayn’t even secretly love another man? Not even in the depths of my heart?”
“The Lord doesn’t expect perfection from us, honey. But he expects us to try.”
“What an odd thing for you to say.”
A pair of deep creases appeared between Gunnilda’s brows, reminding Iylaine that she was growing old, and becoming weathered by care. For a moment Iylaine longed only to smooth her foster mother’s forehead with her hand, and lay her blonde head in her apron.
But a wounded animal she was still, with a wounded animal’s instinct to lash out and bite.
“When you were in love with my father all those years.”
Gunnilda’s tanned face bleached white. It immediately flooded with color, and Gunnilda tried to stammer out a denial, but Iylaine had seen.
“Stuff and nonsense! What on earth ever gave you that idea?”
Iylaine’s eyes filled and spilled over with tears. She had not expected to hurt herself.
Gunnilda said, “Stuff and nonsense!” but she put both arms around Iylaine and held her tight.
“The two people I loved most in the world!” Iylaine blubbered. “We could have been so happy! What happened? Did you fight?”
“Nothing ever happened, honey. Nothing ever happened between me and your Da. We never even kissed.”
“Well, I never kissed Vash, either. Except once when I was only a little girl. And I still—”
Iylaine hesitated, as she habitually drew back from even the aching thought. But now that one unspeakable thing had been said between them, she thought she could say the other.
“I still love him. Tell me how to stop, Gunnie! Tell me how you stopped!”
Gunnilda held her tighter than ever and even rocked her, though Iylaine was nearly a head taller than she now. But she did not tell her how.
“Did you ever stop, Gunnie?”
A frail new hope rose from Iylaine’s devastated heart, light as a flake of ash, then skidded away on the wind.
“Do you think he’s still alive?” she whimpered.
At last Gunnilda spoke. “I pray God every day he is, honey. Every morning and every night.”
“Me too! And I pray he’ll come home someday.”
“Me too. Now.”
Iylaine could have talked about her father all day, but Gunnilda pushed her away and held her firmly at the length of her arms.
“Let me tell you something about loving somebody you can’t have. It doesn’t matter what you want, honey. You already know you can’t have it. There’s only one thing left for you to do, and that’s wanting him to be happy. It means being glad for him when you see him happy, and not sorry that it’s not because of you. And if you can ever help him be happy, even if it takes him farther away from you, you have to help him.”
Iylaine wondered what Gunnilda might have done to help her father. But Gunnilda was not thinking of her father at all.
“And that’s just what Vash did for you,” she said. “He saved Malcolm’s life so Malcolm could go home to you: his wife, and his children. Not because he likes Malcolm, but because he loved you. And now, Iylaine, it’s time for you to show him how much you love him. He wants to be happy, too, and he knows now it can’t ever be with you. He wants to have a wife and children, too. And I don’t know, but I guess he can’t do that the elven way until he does this thing with you. I don’t know anything about that, but I guess he wouldn’t ask it unless it was something he had to do.”
Iylaine lowered her lashes as Gunnilda spoke, hung her head, and finally flopped into Malcolm’s chair. It did not matter what she wanted. It never had.
“And, Iylaine, you love Malcolm. You know you do. Don’t make the mistake I did and figure it out after he’s gone. And when he comes home, I want you to do something for me. No matter how mad he looks, I want you to go up to him and hug him with all your might. I want you to kiss him just like I would kiss Alwy if he walked in that door today. He’ll melt for you, Iylaine. Love your man while you still can. Do that for me. Do that for Alwy, too.”
My objection to his statement is the “the fonder a man’s heart” part. That’s Alred’s vanity speaking: he still believes that his jealousy is proof that he loves more deeply than ordinary men. He knows the jealousy is wrong, and yet I think he’s a teeny bit proud of it too. He tends to cherish his negative feelings too much as it is.
Wouldn’t their bodies reject the blood if it conflicted with their own? 
I didn’t think too much about the biology of the thing when I started this story, and it’s a little late now. For most elves it’s only a couple of drops of blood anyway, so it wouldn’t be an issue. I guess Malcolm and Vash and Cat and Paul just got lucky that way. Or maybe when you’re talking about elves and fairies, normal rules of human biology don’t apply. 
Vash and Malcolm … together .… be still my heart!! 
Chapters
Now, if only Alred could just bear that in mind in regards to his own situation… *sigh*
Hmmm… is this a hint of some potential reemergence of the Egelric/Gunnilda romance? Providing he comes back to Lothere at some point, of course. It was also great to hear that Gunnilda really did love Alwy, even if she didn’t realize it until it was too late.
As for Iylaine… I don’t know. I can see where she’s coming from—she’s right when she says she hasn’t been given many choices in her life—but it’s still difficult to sympathize with her. She makes such a huge fuss about everything, but never actually does anything to try to improve her situation, nor does it seem to even occur to her to take matters into her own hands (I realize that there’s not much she can do now, but perhaps if she had done something about all this before…) In any case, she just sort of reminded me of a child throwing a tantrum over a Christmas present that’s just not quite the same as the one she wanted in this post. If she really wanted to choose Vash that badly, she could have just said so at any point—khirron rules be damned, since she had no reason to just blindly follow them and we all know how well those ended up working out anyway.
And even now, with all the water under the bridge, it’s unfair of her to expect Vash to just hold out for the rest of his life, loving her from afar and being all alone. Does she have regrets? Sure. Is the situation unfair? Fine. Would she have been happier with him? Maybe, maybe not. But the fact of the matter is that she made her choice, and if he wants to move on, then all the power to him.