Iylaine is kissed

Now that he had her here, beside the pond, Malcolm did not know how to begin. He had her hand in his hand, it was true. It was the first time she had allowed him to hold it in several weeks, but her hand was limp and even a little cold. Still, it was his. She was his. But he did not know how to tell her so.

It was Iylaine who broke the silence. “I wish we were children again,” she whimpered.

He scarcely comprehended the words at first, so chilling was her voice. One might say “I believe I am dying” with such a voice.

He leaned closer to her and studied her face in concern. The crimson twilight falling hard upon it did not erase the dark shadows that had returned to her eyes in the last weeks.

“Why?” he asked. “Don’t you remember how we always wished we were older when we were young? We couldn’t do all of the things we may do now. Why would you want us to be little again?”

“I don’t know,” she mumbled.

“Is it because I go away all the time now?” he asked softly. Perhaps that was it. He hoped it was.

She shrugged.

“Do you miss me?”

She nodded, but she still watched the sunset, and the dying light fell hard upon her pale face.

“Does that make you sad?” he murmured. The questions were idiotic, he realized, but he wanted to make her answer.

She nodded again.

No, he wanted to hear her answer. He would have to ask a different sort of question.

“Why?” he asked.

She looked over at him at last, confusion showing on her half-​​shadowed face. She seemed to find the question nonsensical.

“Why do you miss me?” he prompted.

“Because…” she said slowly, casting her eyes around as if in search of an answer. “I… miss you.”

It was not much of an answer, but it was more than a nod.

“I miss you too,” he said.

She nodded and turned her gaze again to the horizon.

“Look at me,” he commanded.

“I thought you wanted to see the sun set.”

“How many times will you see the sun set before you have another chance to look at me, Babe? Sixty times? A hundred? You will see the harvest in and the leaves turn before I am come home again.”

“A hundred?” she asked softly and looked at him, surprised, as if she had not considered the matter in terms of numbers.

“It may be.”

“The leaves will have fallen.”

“It may be.”

She looked away, and her expression changed and changed again like flowing water.

“Baby…”

“What do you want, Malcolm?” she asked wearily, miserably, as if defeated. When she looked at him this time, the corners of her eyes were wet with tears.

“I want to say goodbye to you.”

“It would be easier if you could simply stay and everything could go on as it was. Or if you could simply go. I hate saying goodbye.”

“I know,” he said. “But it’s important to say goodbye.”

“Why?”

There were surely any number of pretty things he could have said to her then. He was a rather plain-​​spoken boy, and she was not a romantic girl – and he admired her for it – but he suspected that this was one of the occasions for which poetry had been invented. He had always mocked Bertie because he went to Dunstan for compliments he might pay the girls, but now Malcolm regretted not having similarly armed himself.

“Well, I… I don’t know,” he said. “So that, if two people don’t meet again, they have something to remember.”

“It’s only a word.”

“Saying goodbye is not simply saying the word, Baby. It’s a chance to say anything else you want to say, in case you don’t meet again.”

She closed her eyes and grimaced as if in pain. The shadows beneath her eyes shone with traces of tears. 

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Say anything.”

“Baby…” he sighed.

“I knew you would come back tonight,” she whined in a childish, plaintive voice. “I knew you would want to say goodbye again.”

“I always do. I can’t say goodbye to you as I say goodbye to everyone else. Open your eyes. Please.”

“I should have stayed with Gunnie,” she whimpered, her eyes still squeezed shut.

“Baby! You don’t think I brought you out here to hurt you, do you?”

“I don’t know.”

She was drawing her body together, her knees up against her chest, her arms around her legs, as she had done once when he had been fool enough to tell her he sometimes wished she were not an elf. She was trying to make herself smaller. She was trying to make herself disappear.

Malcolm sat up on his knees. It made him seem larger even as she shrank away. He had to lean close to her only to look up into the face she was trying to hide.

If anything, he had thought she would shriek and stomp and slap him away. He had not expected this shrinking passivity. He was not certain he would not have preferred being slapped. That would have been the girl he knew. He would have known what to do with that girl.

“You know I would never hurt you,” he whispered.

The last time he had said goodbye to her, on the old bench behind Gunnilda’s house, he had noted that whispering was an excellent way to approach one’s head to a girl’s – never mind that in her case it wasn’t necessary. And this time there was no Gunnilda to interrupt them.

He had kissed other girls before, but not truly. Those were only quick pecks in the course of rough games of chase and submission among his herd of black-​​haired cousins, such as the colts and fillies played before they were old enough to realize they were stallions and mares.

“You know I wouldn’t,” he insisted. His face was close enough to hers that he could feel his own breath coming back upon his mouth from her cheek.

She flinched, but she did not pull her head away.

And then he kissed her. He tried! Her pretty lips were clamped together, as if she were a child refusing a spoonful of medicine. His mouth could only move over hers. He thought there might have been a way to kiss a girl even under those circumstances, but he had not yet learned to kiss even willing lips.

He was certain now that he would have preferred a slap. She often slapped him. This hurt more.

“Don’t be cruel to me, Baby,” he pleaded. “You may be cold and cruel to me when I come home, but not now, Baby. I’m going away.”

She moved no more than a graven image. Her face was perfectly smooth, perfectly blank, perfectly beautiful, like a statue’s. Frustrated, he pressed his cheek against hers, dragged it across her face so that he could feel her warmth and feel her flesh sliding over her cheekbone. He wanted to prove to himself that she was alive and real. She could not withdraw so far into herself as to prevent that.

He released her and fell back onto the grass, hard enough that his head smacked the earth and gave him that queer, momentary tingling in his teeth and nose that he remembered from the many tumbles of boyhood. He too was alive and real. He breathed heavily as if he had been wrestling with her. In a sense, he thought, he had been. She had won.

The sky above him was deeply blue, and he could see the first stars. The bright jewel of the harp was still high overhead at this season. The fortress of Dana would be so high when he returned. Perhaps he would not return.

“I shall walk you home,” he said. “It’s getting dark.”

He heard her unfold her legs and smooth out her dress. He heard her rise. He only lay with his arm across his forehead and stared up at the bright summer star until her head appeared in front of it, looking down at him.

“Do you need a hand?” she asked quite calmly.

“If I may keep it for the walk,” he muttered.

He did not expect her to agree, but after a moment’s hesitation she held out her hand.

She let him hold it as they walked, and she talked to him, quite calmly, as if he were not going away at all – as if nothing had happened at all.

He walked beside her, sullen-​​faced, barely speaking. Something had happened, though she intended to forget it. He had kissed her. But not truly.