I think I should have put a last option for myself... "Team Still can't make up my mind". Whenever Osh is being his sweet, painterly, poetic self, I am totally Team Osh. At the beginning Araphel/Brude just didn't treat Flann with as much respect as Osh.

We might bicker about whether Osh shows her "respect" by treating her a bit like a child, but I don't think he ever pushed her into anything she wasn't ready to do. The few times he tried, he backed off. Brude obviously led her into something she wasn't truly ready to handle. Brude was obviously very smooth.

But Araphel is just so...

And Flann so obviously isn't over Brude...

And if she really truly believed they were the same...

But I voted "it's too late". Flann and Osh don't literally have a child together yet like Malcolm and Iylaine do, or Alred and Hetty do, but I think Flann would be better off settling down with the man (elf) she has rather than continuing her frantic struggling against her fate. And as much as Liadan likes "Light Man", she loves Osh, and she needs some stability and a happy Mom.

And Araphel had a chance there, between the moment she asked the Abbot to marry them, and the moment she asked the Abbot to marry her and Osh. Maybe he thought he was being kind -- and maybe it truly was the kindest thing to let her marry Osh -- but he blew it for himself.

However, I have no idea what's going to happen when New-New Light Man comes to town.

Well... marrying Osh was better than suicide, though, wasn't it?

Sure. I was just trying to remind you that she wasn't exactly in good-decision-making-mode at the time.

There was perhaps a certain element of snubbing Sebastien by marrying Osh that night, but she did, at that moment, literally believe that he was a demon. She really is frightened... what she said to Osh about being glad there was no window in her new bedroom was the plain truth.

However, now, as we recently saw with the Abbot, she believes that Sebastien really was (at worst) just an unhappy, unfortunate, harmless man. If the Abbot thinks he's OK then she's more than happy to believe he's OK. And so she is now wondering again whether he really was who he said he was.

I voted Team Osh despite his autrocious behaviour towards Aia I have always liked him for taking care of Flann and Liaden.

So do I! Thanks for the insight.

I voted for Araphel, because I feel that Araphel and Flann were more MADE for each other than Osh and Flann. But sometimes even true love can't overcome circumstances...it seems that they could never really be together. Osh just seems like a really boring character to me. But, I guess marriages also have to be realistic, and Osh can give her the financial and social support she needs. The romantic side of me is still rooting for Araphel though.

Wow, I am so glad I asked this question. It really proves how much these characters are the product of my unconscious, because sometimes it takes reading other people's opinions about them to help me understand them.

Yes, marrying Osh is "settling", in a way, since Flann had to give up more than Brude to do it. She is back to thinking, as she did once:

Love was not as it was described in the great Celtic romances she had only come to appreciate when she had begun to live her own.  Now she scoffed at them again: Love was not as it had been for Aillinn and Baille, for Liadan and Kurithir, for Etain and Midir.  Love was not stronger than distance, time, or death.  Love was folly, and she was a fool.

A little pragmatic of her? Maybe. She has "figured out" that great romances are for stories only. Therefore she just wants a man/elf who will love her bunches and take good care of her and her baby. But like any good Celtic woman she is probably going to continue hearing the call of romance... and now she will have to actively resist it whenever she hears it.

Seiza, I love how you have summed up Araphel's recent failing. That was niggling me. Maybe it was "kind" of him to give her space and let her make up her mind, but that was not what she needed. She needed a man who would take charge of her and take care of her. Now! No questions asked, lady. And if Sebastien would have done it, I think she would have gone.

She flailed around a bit at the end, asserting herself way beyond what 11th century women were supposed to do -- demanding that this guy, and then that guy, and then the other guy marry her, Now! No questions asked, sir. But that is not what kind of person she wants to be.

Araphel knew that, too, the idiot:

She went to God as shyly and as sweetly as she had used to go to him, and he knew it was the true Flann.  It was the Flann she would be again when he stood between her and the world and she had nothing left to defy.

Gah!!! You dummy. I wonder how much of his hesitation and his wishy-washiness was actually due to Sebastien's nerves.

As for Flann handling Araphel's "family" and relations... hrmmm... If he was really, really strong and sheltered her from the burdens of that, she might do OK. If she had found herself in Eithne's situation she might have been no better, or perhaps even worse off. Dantalion occasionally does idiotic things like dropping a demon on her like that -- "Here's your servant -- have a nice time, honey."

But the fact is, I don't think Araphel is the "man" Dantalion is, so she would potentially be in a situation worse than Eithne's. Dantalion is all evil and stuff, but he is a very strong, very serious, very determined guy. Whereas Araphel is playful and cute and easily distracted by shiny things. He has already been the author of quite a few screw-ups lately (and luckily he had his "brother" Dantalion to bail his ass out), and it's safe to say he's not done doing and saying the wrong things to the wrong people. With the best and noblest intentions of course...

He's also not particularly powerful as angels go, and low down in the pecking-order, and if his brothers decided to help themselves to his wife, there's not actually a whole lot he could do.

I vote for Osh. He's not as pretty as Araphel, but I like him more.

Hrrmmmm... I am not sure Flann is such a very poetic person herself. I wonder if that has to do with anything. Poetry is more for the Eithnes and Condals than the Catans and Flanns.

There are still Ligach and Saerlaith, too, but I don't know them at all. Their Mom died when Saerlaith was born, and Ligach was too young to remember her.

Eithne and Condal remember her a little better -- their Mom was the one who forever associated chicken necks with you-know-what in Eithne's mind -- but probably no more than idealistic memories.

Perhaps because of this, Eithne and Condal have both lived their lives -- just the two of them-- in an imaginary world. Their sisters have mentioned it a few times, as when Flann lamented:

"My mother would be asking her, ‘What are you doing there in your Da’s kilt, with the white knees of you a-glaring?’  And she and Connie would be saying, ‘Playing a story!’  ‘Playing a story,’ they always called it!  And now a man comes calling himself Cian, and the poor girlie thinks she’s ‘playing a story’ with him…"

And we get it from Condal herself in "Condal finds a clearing" and elsewhere:

His expressive face clearly said he had been praying and would continue to do so, as a traveler might say to another met on the road, “I am going this way, and if you are, too, we might walk on a while together.”

And so they would walk a while, neither speaking, neither knowing the other’s destination, but content to share that leg of the journey with a companion… so Condal imagined.

She smiled shyly behind her hand.  They were not on a road—not in a clearing—they were in a church, and she had let her imagination run away with her again.

I don't know about you, but I can't imagine Flann or Cat in any such reveries or story-playing. Cat has always been so outgoing and social and down-to-earth -- she gets all her fun and stimulation from spending time with people in the real world, gossiping and partying and so forth. Flann is more tomboyish and less interested in floaty dresses and gossiping about sweethearts, but if anything she's been even more down-to-earth and than Cat.

The only thing that makes me wonder about Flann is just how much of the tomboyishness and sardonic humor is her true nature, and how much of it is due to being the middle child, trying to find her place in her family by being her father's "son", and also just fitting in and going along with Cat. Araphel saw her true nature as being shy and sweet, and Osh seems to pick up on that too.

So... err... actually I have to conclude I still don't know about Flann.

But it's safe to say Connie is a darling, and so was Eithne before Dantalion got his big black hands on her.

One thing that bothers me a lot about Araphel is that he's put Flann in a terrible position in every incarnation she's known.

As Brude, he seduced her (let's not forget that as a higher being, he definitely knew he was doing wrong) and as Sebastien, he heaped a lot of guilt on her poor shoulders.

I think he had his chance while he was still Brude, but he really blew it as Sebastien.

Guilt over his suicide, yes. And maybe for her demon accusation.

I don't think I was ever Team Araphel, except for the one moment as Brude when he asked how she would be knowing him when he came back - the only moment he really seemed like he cared about her, and before Osh was ever in the picture.

The overwhelming impression I've had from all the angels and demons in the story is that the connection made between lovers is only lasting if there is also a chance of reproduction, and that totally mirrors the creation story that Cian told Eithne. I think Dantalion, Araphel, possibly Malo (we haven't seen enough of his intentions towards Condal yet to be sure either way), and most of the angelic population are just as guilty of the vanity that drove the false creator.

And as for Araphel's feelings towards Flann specifically: To him, it was absolutely a game until the moment he found out about the baby. If he was perceptive enough to see her shy sweetness and the way she came to God, then he was also perceptive enough to know she was falling in love with him, to know he made her uncomfortable having her undress before him, and to be absolutely aware of the way he was messing with her mind my making her love him and then going away to die. That alone is almost unforgivable.

But the way he jumped from the kind of non-caring he showed in the first post or so of them straight to the infatuated adoration of Brude's last moments with her and Sebastien's mistake of a life and death, not to mention this new atrocity of making himself her cousin (!)... it just says to me that he doesn't care so much about her as a person as he does about her as the mother of his child. If he knows her so little and still insists on being with her, I can't respect his desire for the relationship.

Flann's feelings also have to be taken into account, of course, but I don't think she loves the immortal Araphel. I think she loves Brude, the strong, steady, holy man who loved her and whose child she bore alone. She certainly didn't love Sebastien, even before he pulled the angel card on her, and afterwards she was too confused to be making big decisions. As for her feelings for Osh... I think she loves him as much as she can love anyone grieving for a lost love, but I don't think she could have fallen for Sebastien or even Araphel in angel form as anything other than a Brude-substitute, albeit a rather awe-inspiring one in the latter case. But Araphel really doesn't seem to have any of the solid steadiness that Brude did, and I don't think she would have stayed happy with him. I think it's clear that Sebastien could not have been what Brude was to her either, with his nerves, his hautiness, and his impulsiveness. If she must have a Brude substitute right away, at least Osh is a stable kind of guy.

I think I was originally team Osh, but I just don't think Flann deserves him anymore. And technically since they're not really married...

Go get her, Araphel!!

*going through old polls at random*

Through the church, yes. But I got the impression that Osh didn't really view that as a real marriage.