Egelric meets a magpie

Egelric dismounted at the edge of the forest and tied his horse where it might crop the scrubby grass of the downs. He couldn’t stay long, of course, and he did not like to meet her when the sky still glowed with evening light, but he had to see her before he went home.

He hurried down the deer path that had narrowed again in his month’s absence, down into the clearing whose ferns had grown and then yellowed since he had been away.

“Good evening!” he called softly.

He waited until there could be no reply. The trees and brushes trembled constantly in the faint breeze of evening, creating a low racket that prevented him from listening for her arrival, and it maddened him.

“Good evening! Who’s there?” he called again.

Was it because she feared to come out while there was yet light? Was it because she was not expecting him so early in the evening, or so early in the year? He wasn’t sure he had succeeded in explaining to her how long he meant to be away. Had she understood only his assurance that it would be before the autumn?

“Good evening!” he called more loudly. He dared not call her by her name, but she knew to come at the sound of his voice, whatever nonsense he might say. Her ears were remarkably acute. He had never had to call three times.

A few birds still twittered as they returned to their nests and settled in for the night. The rustling of their tiny bodies among the leaves maddened him.

He would come back later, after dark, if he must, but he would be sick until then. Had she understood how long he meant to be away? Or had she…?

He scarcely dared think of it now, but he had lain awake all through the night of the new moon in anguish for her. If he could have ridden home in one night, he would have done it then. He and Malcolm had not returned through Thorhold, and so he had not been able to ask Theobald whether he had dreamt, and Sigefrith did not know.

If she had not understood how long he meant to be away? If she had come out that night of all nights to wait for him?

The rustling and the twittering and the distant snapping of twigs was maddening.

“Sela!” he shouted, regardless of the elves and regardless of the men. “Sela!”

A magpie scolded him for his foolishness with piercing cries from its high nest.

“Where’s your wife?” he called at once, automatically, as he had since he was a boy, to avert the ill luck carried by a single magpie. “Go tell her I’m here,” he pleaded with the bird. “Where is she?”

He might have meant the bird’s mate – he might have meant his own. It only shrieked at him again.

He stopped his staggering search through the glade, stopped looking high and low and all around, and simply stared up towards the hidden nest. All of the fears he had briefly harbored over the past month came swarming back over him.

The magpie left its roost and descended to a lower branch from which it might scold him more easily.

“Where’s your wife?” he asked again desperately. The old rhyme began, “One for sorrow, two for mirth…”

He was about to shout Sela’s name again when he heard a distant crashing in the brush. The sound moved towards him more quickly than brush allowed, unless it were a stag fleeing for its life who reckoned not the bruises and the thorns.

The magpie chittered, and a second bird flew down to join it. Egelric smiled in relief at the two of them. “Good evening,” he said politely and laughed to himself.

He turned as the crashing reached the clearing, and Sela bounded through the bushes and into his arms almost before he had seen her appear. Her hair and dress were ragged with burrs and thorns, and she panted fiercely. When he pulled her head away to allow him to look at her, he saw that her very face was scratched and bleeding.

“You little fool!” he said and squeezed her again.

“Why you don’t come?” she sobbed. “I wait for you, I wait, wait, wait in de night!”

“Sela, Sela,” he whispered. “I told you, I could not come for a month. I told you I could not come until the moon was again full.”

“No moon, I don’t look at moon, I look at you, you don’t come,” she babbled.

“Whisht, Sela,” he said, trying to stroke the back of her head, but finding himself picking the twigs out of her hair instead. “I’m here now. I come now. You didn’t understand, did you? Poor girl.”

“You stay here now.”

“I can’t stay long now,” he murmured, “but I shall return tonight when it is dark.”

“You stay here now,” she pouted. “I see you now.”

“Now it is evening. I come in the night.”

“You come in de night, you stay all night?”

“Aye.”

“You go home in de morning?” she asked, beginning to smile.

“Aye.”

“I go sleep in de tree,” she laughed softly. “I wait for you.”

“Aye, you wait for me. I come in the night.”

“Now you kiss me.”

He kissed her, and the magpie couple chittered approvingly. A second pair flew in from a late foray onto the downs and stopped briefly to gossip with the first. All four birds laughed heartily before flying up to their nests and leaving the foolish, featherless, flightless creatures alone in the glade.