Dunstan stirs up Iylaine

“Dunstan? May I come in? It’s Iylaine,” the elf girl called in her thin, high voice, adding a knock for good measure.

Dunstan sighed and closed his book. “Come in!” he called.

He tried to be especially patient with Iylaine these days, remembering his own experiences of the prior January, when he had witnessed—and helped to bear—his father’s grief at the death of his mother. Of course Iylaine had never loved nor even met Sela, but she too witnessed her father’s grief and—Dunstan supposed, at least—helped to bear it.

When he managed to put aside his own involvement in their lives and study them with a poet’s deep-​seeing eyes, he was amazed at the different ways in which men could react to the loss of the women they loved. Their griefs seemed far more distinctive than their loves, for love always appeared much the same to him from the outside, with much silliness and single-​mindedness at first, mellowing into an easy affection among those who continued to love.

But in grief, every man was his own man again and showed his own character. Sigefrith, Cenwulf, Egelric, his own father…

His father’s grief had been tempests of tears, storms of sobs, until his body had been exhausted and he could be quiet and calm a few hours before the next storm hit. Then had come nearly a year of flight from place to place, from England to the islands to the continent and back again. Dunstan himself had seemed to be the only reminder of his old life that he could bear to see. It was only lately that his father had taken up that old life again. Only now did his laughter seem real.

Egelric’s grief was nothing like this. There were no storms; there was only the wind whistling through a wasteland. His voice that Dunstan had always known either sharp with bitterness or booming with merriment was now dull and flat—when he spoke at all. His body listed like a wreck; the skin of his face hung loose and his wrinkles had deepened; and even his eyes drifted always to the side, as if he could not bear to look the world in the face.

The only signs of enduring life in him were his occasional smiles for his two laughing little boys or for Iylaine, and the flare of his eyes when he was reminded that Sela’s killer had not been found and that there was yet revenge to be had. Even then, the smile was like a bed of flowers planted before the rotting wall of an abandoned house, and the flash of his eyes was like a fire kindled in its crumbling hearth.

Sensitive as he was, Dunstan could not bear to spend much time with Egelric now. He preferred even Egelric the wolf to Egelric the phantom.

And so he pitied Iylaine.

“What are you doing? Working?” she asked as she sat before him. Even dropping herself carelessly into a chair, her long-​limbed grace was something to behold. However, he knew she would have snarled scornfully at him if he had mentioned it.

“Only reading,” he said.

She sniffed.

“What about you? Bored?”

“I suppose so,” she sighed.

“You should learn to read. It’s not too late. Even if you only learn English, we have plenty of books to read.”

“Oh! Not that again.” She rolled her eyes. “As if I should like to sit around and do nothing but read all day.”

“You like to sit around and do nothing but nothing all day!” he cried.

“That’s not true! I sit and think.”

“Ohhhh! I see,” he smiled.

For all the hours she supposedly spent thinking, he was often disappointed by the relative shallowness of the thoughts produced. It seemed only natural to him that such a lovely girl who spent so much time in pensive silence should come up with something profound from time to time, but he was learning how seldom poetic justice applied to real life.

“You should try it sometime,” she sniffed.

“I sit and think all the time!”

“No, you don’t. You sit and write poetry, or sit and read, or sit and talk if there are people around. You need to learn the value of simply thinking,” she said as if she were giving him sage advice. “And the value of silence.”

“I beg your pardon?” he smiled, as much at her imperious expression as at her words.

“I think you need to learn how to sit quietly with people, and not try to talk if they don’t. You need to learn the value of silence. You know, Dunstan: silence isn’t simply a lack.”

Dunstan bit his thumbnail and considered this for a moment. Perhaps Iylaine was growing deeper as she grew older. It was true she was several months younger than he.

“I wonder…” he said. “Perhaps silence isn’t the lack. Perhaps speech is. Perhaps we’ve defined everything all wrong. Perhaps speech is the lack of silence. Perhaps depth is the lack of shallowness. Perhaps joy is the lack of sorrow…”

“What?” she squeaked.

“If that’s true, we’ve been living all wrong.” He was growing excited with this new idea. “We’ve been seeking the wrong things, or at least in the wrong way. Do you suppose—”

He stopped when he saw the look of bemusement on her face. He would have to ask his father later. Iylaine did not seem capable of germinating the seed of the idea she had produced.

“Did you know Sir Osfrey is here again?” she asked after a moment of the silence she supposedly loved.

“I know. He came while you were out on your walk.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Visiting.”

“I know, but why?”

“I don’t know. To see Eadwyn, perhaps.”

“Did you know his wife didn’t even have her baby yet?” she said, apparently outraged.

“I know.” He was surprised to hear her speak of babies at all. Ordinarily the mention of anything related to procreation would get her into a huff. One could not even say that a kitchen cat was expecting kittens—much less speak of how it came to be in that condition.

“Can you believe it? I should be furious if my husband ever went out visiting when I was only days or weeks from—” She stopped short, apparently only then realizing herself of what she was speaking.

“Oh, so you’re planning to have babies now, after all?” he laughed.

“No!” she cried. “I was only saying—Dunstan,” she added scornfully, “that he is not a nice man. He acts nice, but… Anyway, I don’t like him.”

“Well, Iylaine, don’t tell anyone I said so, but I don’t like him either.”

“Oh!” she said eagerly. “Why not?”

“I don’t know…” he mused. “There’s something about him.”

“I know! I wish Malcolm were here. He could tell us.”

“So do I. It’s funny,” he smiled, “how much we depend on Malcolm to tell us what to think about people. We have lost the ability to form our own opinions.”

“He’s almost always right, though.”

“That’s why.”

“Do you suppose he’s all right?” she asked wistfully.

“I suppose so. He has nine lives, like all cats.”

“I wish you would stop comparing him to a cat,” she complained. “His eyes are a lot darker than they were when he was a child. They’re almost quite brown now.”

“I call him that more for the way he moves than for his eyes,” he said with a lightly wicked curve to his smile that he did not expect her to detect. “You should watch how he moves some time—if you don’t already.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I—” She eyed him warily. She had detected something.

Dunstan laughed. He felt a certain boldness meeting her here in his territory, with his books about him. “Don’t worry about him,” he said. “He has at least eight of his lives still. He’ll come home, just as cats always do, even when you try to kick them out. And I’m certain he will never go out visiting when his poor wife is expecting kittens.”

She leapt from her chair, her face white with fury, but she said nothing. He knew she would not dare to speak the words required to ask him whether he thought of her when he spoke of Malcolm’s wife and Malcolm’s kittens.

Truly, he spoke more to tease Malcolm than to tease Iylaine, but there was also a charm in her pale face, her tiny scowl, and the small fists she clenched gracefully at the ends of her graceful arms. He enjoyed stirring up her many passions, only to gaze upon her in their grip. She was as exquisite as any poem. He was almost sorry that there were some passions he would never be able to evoke in her, but he knew, as sensitive as he was, that he could never bear to live with the others.