Vash and Iylaine cover untrodden ground

There was a shepherd amongst the sheep, perhaps tending a late-​born lamb. Vash stopped at a distance and watched the hunkered silhouette rise to its feet.

There was no chance the man would see him, but Vash decided to head west and cross the brook before turning for home. His usual path over the downs veered around the scattered shepherds’ huts without taking him too far out of his way, but tonight it hardly mattered how far he detoured. He had all night.

He changed course, and so did the man. He stopped, and the man kept coming.

Two nights after the Equinox, was it possible he could still be seen? There was nowhere to hide on the windswept downs. Should he walk faster? Turn back?

Then the man—whose pale face was too slender to be a man’s face after all—lifted her heavy robes and ran.

Bright Mother. The blessed earth seemed to tip, and the stars of the sky slipped free and wheeled overhead. Weightlessness strove with gravity. And a profound emptiness swelled where always before life had flooded and burbled at the merest glimpse of Iylaine.

O Mother of Beauty. He felt nothing but emptiness and fear.

Iylaine raced over the hummocky terrain, trailing jagged, jouncing, breathless laughter behind her head like the flapping end of her scarf.

Vash braced himself. She ran right at him, and for a terrifying moment he believed he was invisible to her after all. She only dropped her skirts and threw her arms wide at the last instant, when she stopped short and fell forward to crash against his chest.

She laughed, “Vash!” against his shoulder, in a last throb of wild joy before she went shivering and still.

Vash wrapped his arms around her. He was numb with shock and only trying to do what was required of him, only trying to keep them both on their feet. The emptiness so swelled and ached inside that he was frightened by her squeeze.

Then she stepped back, and her nervous tittering reassured him. She was not as certain as she had first appeared.

“I knew you would come this way!” she panted. “You went to see Paul’s baby, didn’t you? And I knew you would come back across the downs!”

“I went to see Paul’s baby,” he repeated.

Iylaine flung the end of her black scarf behind her shoulder and straightened her twisted cloak. “What did you think of her?” she asked. “Is she cute? Connie attended the birth, but of course I wasn’t invited. Oh! You don’t know Connie, do you?”

“She is Cat’s sister. We have met.”

“Oh! Of course you have. You’re quite friendly with that family, from what I hear.” She cocked her head and smiled up at him with an unappealing twist to her mouth. “She used to live with us before Malcolm went away. I suppose you know Malcolm went away, since you helped him get free of me!”

O Mother. Vash knew she had meant the words to sting, but it pained him more to see her wringing her hands while she leered at him: twisting, yanking, as if she wanted to tear herself to pieces. She was hurting herself more than him.

“I know, Iylaine,” he said gently.

He stepped forward, resuming his walk, but he paused at her side and held out his arm for her to take. She untangled her fingers and laid a hand on his elbow.

“But I do not think,” he said as she fell in beside him, “that we should meet here. Even if Malcolm is away.”

She laughed. “Don’t you? Where should we meet, then? I waited for you on our birthday, you know, but you never came. In the day and in the night, too.”

Vash sighed. “You should not have.”

“I know that now, because you didn’t come, but how was I to know then? But tonight my guess was good.” She skipped a step and flapped her skirts. “The only flaw in my plan is that my shoes and stockings are soaked with dew. I don’t suppose you could help me with that, good sir?”

They stopped and turned to one another with Iylaine’s hand still crooked in his arm. She curtseyed low with the other hand, smiling down, as human women did at the start of a dance.

Unwilling to let his senses linger around her legs, Vash simply whisked away all the water beneath her knees, including a broad swath of dew on the grass.

Iylaine hooted and laughed. “Oh! that’s cold! That gives me the shivers!”

Then, for the first time, she left off her brittle, bitter chatter and asked softly, “Do you remember when I fell in the pond and you dried my dress?”

The crushing emptiness contracted slightly, and a flicker of warmth flashed through the steely cold. Vash turned towards the hills and began walking again.

“Of course I remember.”

He did not mention that it was not the pond water he remembered so much as the tears he had dried that day. He remembered the unhappy, hiccuping, beautiful girl who had closed her eyes and lifted her face to him, as if she believed him a breeze.

He walked, and Iylaine bounced along at his side, chattering again.

“I suppose you were often nearby when I was outside, weren’t you? Paul says you were. It seems a little unfair, doesn’t it? Looking back?”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw her white face peering up at him, framed in her severe black scarf. Vash frowned and searched for an evasive reply.

“You saw me all the time,” she explained, “and I saw you once a year if I was lucky. You probably got your fill of me. But I never got my fill of you.”

“Iylaine…”

Vash squeezed his eyes shut until his lashes were wet. He could have told her that he had never had his fill of her. Even their hours together had been hollow, because he had known they were only hours. But what good would it do to tell her so now?

Iylaine lifted her skirt in her free hand and swished it through the dewy grass as she pranced beside him.

“Besides,” she said, “how would you like it if someone was watching your every move sometimes when you went outside? Not even every time, so you wouldn’t always be on your guard? How would you like that?”

Vash licked his lips. His feet plodded along.

“What about when I squatted down behind a bush?” she asked. “Did you watch me pee?”

“No!”

“Why should I believe you? You could have easily done it.”

“Because I would not!”

Vash stopped and tugged on her arm to make her turn to him. She turned, but she withdrew her hand.

“Iylaine! I knew you would not like it. I tried to give you… what do you call it? Your—your privacy. When I thought that you wanted to be alone, I left you alone.”

“I see. When I wanted to be alone, you left me alone. When I wanted to be with you, you still left me alone.”

“Oh, Iylaine!”

“It’s all right,” she assured him, suddenly all smiles. The moonlight slashed across her face, bringing out her resemblance to her unhappy mother in high relief. “I know you didn’t want things to be that way. It was your father’s idea.”

She took his arm and made him stroll on.

“Where are you going tonight?” she asked. “I suppose you have a lot of cousins waiting for you, as usual.”

“Now, I am going to take you home.”

“What?” she cried in mock astonishment, startling the sheep at the edge of the flock. “Don’t tell me you were on your way to my house when I met you.”

“No, I am taking you home because you should be at home. It is night, and you should not be outside alone.”

“Oh, pish! What can harm me when you’re with me? Maud won’t be up before dawn. No one even noticed when I was out all night on our birthday. Maud’s my daughter, you know. I don’t know what Paul and Finn and Alred and all your friends tell you. Isn’t it funny how I’ve never spoken with you long enough since my daughter was born to even tell you her name?”

“Iylaine…”

“It’s all right.”

She released his arm and danced a few paces ahead of him. Those sheep already on their feet began a nervous retreat.

“You can’t make me go home, though,” she said. “You’re not my father. You’re not my brother. You’re not even my husband anymore.”

The savagery with which she spoke the word stopped Vash in mid-​stride.

Iylaine laughed. Vash had never seen how the elf Pol could say she resembled her mother, but tonight the moonlight made it plain. The lines of her bitter laughter were just like Lira’s—Lira, who had once been so carefree, so hilarious, so kind.

Iylaine laughed again to see his pained reaction to her laughter, and then she whirled about and ran. With one hand she held up her skirts as she skipped and scattered the sheep, and with the other she unwound her scarf from about her head. She trailed it behind her for a few paces before letting it float free and fall onto the wet grass.

Vash jogged after her, frightened and confused as the sheep. He did not know how to stop her. She was no longer a child. She no longer worshipped him.

He dared not shout. The sheep were anxious; the wether was on his feet and jangling his bell. If a shepherd came out suspecting elves among his flock, there was a chance they would be seen.

He called softly, “Iylaine! Cousin!”

Iylaine whooped and ran. But she was leaving the sheep behind and approaching the beechwood at the height of the downs, so he chased her without attempting to catch her. It was Iylaine who finally whipped herself around and let herself be caught.

“You like rules too much,” she panted. “‘You shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t do this, you should go home.’ Every single time we met, I had to hear about how many rules you were breaking, and how you had to hurry away, and what your father would say. You might have at least kept all that to yourself, and spent your breath telling me how happy you were to be with me instead.”

She slipped a hand into his elbow and dragged him onward, up the hill and towards the trees.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I thought I told you that, too.”

“Oh, I don’t know. You must not have been very convincing. All my life I had the impression you never cared much about me, or I was nothing special to you. I was just another cousin you paid your respects to when it occurred to you, or it was convenient to you.”

Vash tightened his arm, pinching her hand in his elbow. He dragged her to a halt.

“Iylaine.”

Iylaine pursed her lips and turned her face away.

“Iylaine.” He waited. “Look at me.”

Still he waited. The wind tore through her hair and whipped the loosened locks against her cheek, but her face was frostily immobile. Only her eyelids moved, sinking lower and lower with each blink.

Vash wanted her to look at him. He needed to know whether there was anything to see. He was not certain he was feeling anything—only a mean rivulet where once there had been a roaring stream.

But Iylaine did not look, and he did not know how to make her.

“You were something special to me,” he said. “The most special thing. I cared about you more than anything.”

Iylaine snorted and took a breath, preparing to snap back an acid retort. But the wind whipped her hair into her mouth, and she had thought better of it by the time she brushed it back with the fingers of one thin hand. She only mumbled, “You might have told me so.”

“Iylaine! How I longed to!”

Iylaine walked on, and he tramped along beside her, trying to make her understand.

“If you had come home with me, you would have learned how much I cared. You would have seen my rooms—every reminder of you I’d saved all this time. Ribbons you dropped, daisy chains you left behind.”

He laughed painfully, remembering the bonfire he had made of it all, how quickly it had burned.

“Everything!” he said. “Even bird nests with your hair woven through them. And all the songs I made for you, over the years!”

She laughed and pulled her hand free of his elbow. “Oh, songs! Lots of boys made songs for me over the years.”

She lifted her hems and danced a trotting step as she walked, singing, “Iylaine and a donkey were tied up to a rail. The only difference I could see: the donkey had a tail!”

Vash stopped, stricken with the old heartache, and the old helpless rage.

Iylaine laughed that bitter laugh again. She did not wait up for him.

Vash did not move until she reached the low dry-​stone wall at the edge of the woods, and he hurried to help her over. Her little hand lay trustingly in his, her slight weight leaned against his strength…

And then she leapt, and she was free of him again, and standing on her own. Vash hopped over the pile. Iylaine was already scuffing off through the rotten leaves.

“You could have protected me,” she said as he strode up beside her, “instead of worshipping the ground I trod upon. The ground and the ratty old birds’ nests didn’t need your love.”

Vash grimaced, but he did not stop walking this time. Iylaine seemed likely to go off without him, and by now he was the one who did not want to be left behind.

“I don’t know why you expected me to love you,” she said. “All you ever did was follow me around, spy on me, watch the children torment me, and pick up my lost ribbons. Oh, and move black pebbles around according to some story you never told me, and compose songs you never sang to me, and which I wouldn’t understand anyway. Sometimes you hid behind a tree and dried my tears for me, but for every time you did that, I cried alone five hundred times, and no one dried my tears.”

“And I?”

The echo of his shout cracked through the cold air. Iylaine stopped. He had startled them both.

“Think of how I felt,” he said, hushing his voice. “I had to watch the children tormenting you. I had to watch.”

Iylaine lowered her eyes, and Vash grabbed her wrist, startling her into looking up again.

“I know it is pitiful,” he said. “I know I seem a fool to you. But do you know why I saved your ribbons? I needed so terribly to touch you that I had to comfort myself by touching something you had touched. I made songs because I had so many things I wanted to say to you, and I was not allowed.”

“That’s what I meant,” she muttered. “You loved rules too much.”

He laughed. “I did! Not any longer. I was told, if I followed the rules, I would have my reward in the end. But nothing is as it should have been. I shan’t have my reward. We should have been together for two years already by now, Iylaine. Always together. Forever together.”

He slid his hand down her wrist until he clasped her hand. A flood of warmth surged up in him, filling the emptiness, welling at the back of his throat until his voice grew thick with it.

“We should have had a little son by now. He would be walking. Just learning to speak. And Paul should have been at home with us, and Osh and Lasrua. My father should have been… better. And my mother was supposed to be there… our mothers…”

He squeezed his eyes shut until the urge to sob had passed. When they opened he saw Iylaine’s face softened and shining. Had her expression changed, or was it only the watery haze of tears?

“You should not wear that scarf,” he blurted. With a fingertip he traced a severe line across her forehead and down her temple and cheek. “Black is not for you. And it hides the prettiest curves of your face.”

Iylaine tilted her head and peeked up at him. “Do I look like your mother?” she asked. “Now that I am grown?”

“You do now, without the scarf. I… believe so. It has been so long.”

He took a sharp breath and let it out in a despairing sigh. The flood of warmth rose up as far as his eyes and spilled over as tears.

“I can’t remember any more,” he choked. “Am I remembering her face, or remembering yours?”

Iylaine tilted her head the other way and studied him out of the opposite eye.

Vash longed to turn away, or at least cover his face with his hand. But he remembered how often he had watched Iylaine sobbing, and out of fairness he let her look. At least the moon shining behind his head must have eclipsed the rawest of his grimaces.

After the first tears had dripped from his chin and been replaced by others, she asked, “Why don’t you dry your own tears like you dried mine?”

He sniffed and gave her a crooked smile. “That misses the point.”

Iylaine twisted her hand free of his. She traced the backs of her fingers along his dripping jawline and up his cheek, spreading his tears into a sheen of grateful coolness, a relief to his parched skin.

“Then I will dry them for you,” she said.