Eithne meets a cat

Eithne had promised herself she would not sleep. She had only meant to keep herself warm beneath the quilts…

When she awoke, he was already in the room.

“No, no, no!” she sobbed as she scrambled out of bed. “Be gone with you! I don’t want you!”

He hurried around the bed to meet her. “Eithne! You’ve not even seen me yet!”

Her body stiffened in shock. His voice was soft and earnest – too soft, too earnest, too young. It bore a fine Highland accent, but it was not even Cormac’s voice. The nightmare was only darkening.

“Can you light a candle?” he asked.

It was all she could do to swallow and exhale without sobbing again. The sound of her own ragged breath filled the room and faded.

After a moment’s silence, the candle behind him flared into light. He was only a silhouette then, nearly as black as when he had first come to her.

Eithne had promised herself she would not forget what he had done to her then, but it was difficult to divorce her revulsion from the body that had raped her, and this slender, wingless stranger was nothing like.

“Your turn?” he asked. “Have you been practicing?”

She hesitated, thinking it perhaps best to deny it, but at last she muttered, “It doesn’t work.”

“Ach! But it could. It is why we practice, my dear. I shall help you.”

He held out his hands as he had the night before. His gestures were more graceful, his figure leaner, but it meant he had lost the trust he had earned with Cormac’s body, and she did not move.

“Try, Eithne,” he said. “Even if you aren’t wanting me, your magic is your birthright, and I shall see it returned to you. There may be but the nine of you in all the world.”

“The sisters of me?” she whimpered, thinking of Condal sleeping in the next room, and young Ligach and little Saerlaith down the hall. “You’ll not be harming them?”

“It is you for me and no other,” he said solemnly.

Cormac’s laconic self-​​assurance had been replaced by this stranger’s youthful intensity. Something in her began to hum softly, like one string of a harp to the plucked string of another, perfectly attuned.

Perhaps he was an angel. There was no denying he possessed powers surpassing even those of Catan’s elf husband.

Perhaps she was a fairy. She had always fancied herself a little different from the other girls, a little misunderstood.

And everyone said it was a strange thing that her parents had had nine daughters and no sons, almost like their great ancestor Black Colin, with his eight sons and no daughters. And was not Black Colin himself said to have possessed almost supernatural powers? And why had men called him Black?

She turned her back to the angel and lifted her arms, trying to remember how he had held them last time. As if it had been an invitation, he strode silently up behind her, and his body was warm against her back and his breath cold upon her ear.

He delicately lifted her elbows and hands with his fingertips and whispered, “Gently… no fuss. Think of the candle…”

The idea of a lit candle seemed to swell up in her and roll smoothly out of her, but when it reached the candle itself, a spurt of flame shot up from the wick, splattering her bedside table with wax. Her gasp of surprise was accompanied by a startled yowl from the floor on the opposite side of the bed.

“I beg your pardon – Did I say a torch?” the angel asked dryly.

For answer there came a meow.

“Ach!” Eithne twisted away from his cold breath and asked, “Is there a cat in here?”.

“Eithne…” he whispered.

She knew he was trying to meet her eyes, and she looked away, granted an excuse by the hidden cat.

“Here, puss puss puss!” she called.

“Aye, then,” the angel sighed and turned away. “Come out with you and say your piece.”

After a moment a cinder-​​colored cat sauntered around the bed, lifted her eyes to the angel, and let out such a long and obviously disdainful meow that Eithne could not help but giggle.

“Aye,” he replied, “but she’s not understanding a word of it, so you needn’t be bothering.”

He leaned down and scooped up the cat, who contrived to purr and look insulted at the same time.

“It’s a lord’s liberties she’s been taking with me this night, since she learned I wanted her for you.”

“Ach! You cannot be leaving her here!” Eithne gasped. “The father of me…”

“Are not cats the friends of the Sidhe?”

“Aye, it may be, but not all the Sidhe are the friends of cats!”

She smiled briefly at her own cleverness, but then she came to the dizzying realization that her father must be a fairy as well, if she and her sisters were. And her grandparents? And her cousins?

“I think he will find her charming, my dear. Allow me to be introducing the two of you. Eithne, daughter of Flann, I present you Her Exalted Ladyship Sweetdew Honeynose the Grim, Eminent Companion of the Order of the Bloodtooth, and Eighty-​​third Successor of the War Cloud Dynasty.”

“Ach!” Eithne giggled. “A noblekitty!”

“On the contrary, it’s a common little shrew-​​catcher she is. If I had brought you the War Cloud Empress herself, it’s a jug of wine I would be needing to wet my throat a few times in the telling of her titles. It is the way of cats,” he sighed and shrugged his shoulder awkwardly beneath the purring feline.

Her ladyship meowed smugly.

Eithne could not stop smiling. “Is it truly the name of her?”

“Aye, but all cats are having three names, you see. Only she is knowing her true name, and then there is this fine name by which the other cats are calling her, and then there is the wee name we shall use, you and I.”

His voice softened suddenly to its fervent tenderness of earlier, and her breath came shorter at the sound.

“Her Imperial Majesty would not have been too fine for you, Eithne, but Sweetdew is the cat for you. It’s the very perfume of your hair she’s wearing in hers.”

He buried his face in the cat’s fur and breathed deeply, turning away from Eithne almost as if he did not want her to see.

“Did you ever smell your hair, Eithne?” he asked dreamily. “I had not known how to describe it until her ladyship explained it to me. It is the odor of dew drying in the sun, in a meadow with many sorts of flowers. She won’t tell me which sorts, and it’s as well she didn’t, for I would be finding me such a meadow and laying me down, never to leave.”

He turned his face back to Eithne, but now his eyes were closed. She could hear the cat purring from where she stood.

“Or,” he said softly, “you could simply lay your hair across my pillow.”

“Ach!”

Eithne rolled her eyes and walked away to hide the quiver that ran over her, the throb of another harp string to the sound of its twin instrument, but a longer string and a deeper note now.

“It’s pillows of clouds the angels are having, I’m certain,” she scoffed. “Do angels even sleep?”

He set the cat on the floor and followed. “I never have, but I must learn how. Else I shall never know what it is to wake beside you at the dawning.”

“Ach!”

She turned away again, but she was running out of space to put between them. Fortunately there was the cat to pet.

“Eithne…” he murmured.

“No…”

She longed to turn back to him, but she could not bear her longing. She reminded herself of what he had done – of the rape – of the wings – of the revolting incongruity of claws on a man’s fingers, and the welts they had left all over her belly and thighs, and the tiny scabs that had only just flaked away…

She remembered, and she was sorry she did. She was sickened by the incongruity of that black monster being this gentle, ardent young man. She did not want it to be true.

Fortunately Sweetdew was mewing insistently at her, providing a welcome distraction.

“That was sounding saucy to me,” she scolded as she lifted the cat into the air.

“You’re understanding that much,” the angel said approvingly.

“Are you truly understanding the language of cats?”

“I shall teach you.”

That, she thought, would be something fine. She remembered how she and Condal would play with their kittens as if they were dolls, making them pad about on two legs and “translating” their squalls into Gaelic. “How is your man getting on of late, my dear Socks?” and “Middling fair, my dear Patches, and how is it with your kin?”

She laughed, and when she peeked up at the angel from beneath her hair she found him smiling fondly upon her.

Now that she had the cat in her arms, she could comfortably look upon him through half-​​lidded eyes while pretending to be occupied with her stroking.

“Does she please you?” he asked.

“Cute, and so forth?” she giggled.

“Ach!” He laughed, but to her surprise, his perfect, pale skin suddenly turned quite pink around the cheeks and forehead.

“Do angels blush?” she asked, justifying her sauciness by shaking Sweetdew’s paw in his direction, as she used to do with Socks and Patches and the generations of their kindred.

“You will be teaching me, I fear,” he murmured.

But truly he was black, she reminded herself, and would never show it if she did. She let her hair fall over her face and busied herself with kissing the cat.

“Eithne…” he began, with that soft voice again.

“Ach!” she cried shrilly. “But you’ve never even told me the name of you! What do we think of that, my lady?”

Sweetdew opened her pink mouth and yowled.

“She disapproves,” he said solemnly. “Eithne…”

“Well?”

If he was annoyed to be so interrupted, he did not show it. Patiently, gently he explained, “Few are knowing the true name of me. I shall tell you perhaps another day, when your destiny and doom are bound up with mine. Then there is the name by which the other angels are calling me, which is Temanyeh.”

Eithne pressed her face against the cat’s fur and practiced forming the name with her lips.

“And there is your name for me, which you have not yet chosen or not yet told.”

Eithne lifted her head. “It is I who shall have the naming of you?”

“If you’re not having any ideas, her ladyship has not a few,” he pretended to grumble. “It’s half the day she’s been insulting me.”

Sweetdew twisted her head around and mewed prettily.

“I shall not answer to ‘Bogbottom’,” he snapped, “even if Eithne herself makes the attempt. Forgive me, my dear,” he sighed, “but I hope you will be finding one on your own.”

Eithne laughed as she set the cat on the rug. “Did she truly say that?”

“My feeble talent for self-​​deprecation does not extend to inventing the name of ‘Bogbottom’ for myself, I assure you.”

Eithne slipped past him and padded across the floorboards to the curtained window, hugging herself in delighted anticipation. Even if she only ever learned to light candles from a distance and to speak the secret language of cats, it would be worth…

Worth what? Surrendering herself to this black-​​winged, cat-​​clawed monster?

He sneaked up from behind her, forcing himself before her eyes – but she could not see the monster in him. He was scarcely older than she, neat and handsome with his slightly slanted eyes, and so quiet, so graceful, so calming – like a cat in every way but the claws.

“Who shall we be?” he asked. His fervor rang soft and low again in his voice like a chord. “When our children’s grandchildren are at the telling of our tale, whom will they be singing? Eithne and whom?”

Eithne and Cian, she thought at once. Eithne and Cian of the old songs, in whose children the two ancient races had been united: the people of Dana – her people – and the giants who had preceded them on earth. And had not the ancient Eithne’s father locked her in a glass tower, a little like Eithne’s corner room at the top of the stairs? And had not the ancient Cian contrived to meet her there by magic? And seduced her? And given her a magnificent child?

She smiled to herself, dizzy at the thought. It was so perfect… But no – it was too silly, too pretentious, too romantic. She was not living in a story.

“Cian,” he said breathlessly.

She gasped. “I thought you weren’t seeing into my thoughts!” she protested.

“I’m not! We must be having the same.”

She smiled hesitantly, and he met it with a hesitant smile of his own that quickly crescendoed into pure joy. Her body thrummed like a harp whose every string has been struck.

“Eithne,” he whispered, “it’s perfect. In times to come, when they’re asking for songs of Eithne and Cian, the bards will know they’re meaning you and me.”