Osh looks into the deeps

Osh had believed he would never again know an anguish like that of the night Sora had been slain. What had brought him in from the woods was not that pain, but an echo of it, like a sudden twinge at the site of an old wound. The true anguish only returned at his first glimpse of his daughter’s limp body.

Lasrua had always had her mother’s pointed chin and moon-​​pale cheeks, and now she also had her mother’s lolling head and vacant, glassy eyes. Once again Osh had lost the lady he loved most in the world. The anguish was the same.

Then at once they all moved: Lasrua turned her face more fully into the light of the fire, Eithne leapt away from her body, sobbing, “I only help her!” and Paul threw up his arms dramatically.

“My father! Look!” he wailed, with little despair and much of the grim satisfaction of someone who has predicted the worst and been proven right.

Osh was bewildered. His first terror had been that his daughter was drowning. In spite of its near-​​impossibility, and in spite of the startled Flann he had left behind in the woods, he had run as he seldom ran at his age, and followed his unlikely fear as far as Eithne’s bedroom door.

But Lasrua had not been in the water at all. When Eithne drew back, Osh saw the gleam of his daughter’s white shins and ankles splayed beneath a tattered mass of charred fabric: the ruins of her gown.

Nevertheless, he was confused enough that he did not understand what he saw until Paul howled, “She’s burning herself now! Just like Vash!” At the mention of his friend, his voice went ragged with despair.

Lasrua tipped back her head and sighed, “Vash…” just as Eithne whimpered, “I only try to help…”

“And she keeps asking for Vash!” Paul added fretfully. “If only! It’s all because of that man!”

“Is she hurt?” Osh finally whispered.

Paul stood and brushed his sooty hands on the front of his tunic. “She’s not hurt,” he grumbled. “Eithne put the fire out.”

Hearing her name, Eithne clapped her hands over her face and squeaked, “I only help!”

“I know, Eithne,” Paul sighed in English. Then he said to his father, “It’s not even the season. I don’t know what that man did to her…”

Here was a detail that Osh knew, and on account of its rarity in his jumbled mind, it seemed important enough to insist upon. “He has a name, Paul.”

“I shan’t pronounce it!” Paul snapped.

“Paul…” Osh sighed.

“Cat pronounces it often enough for two!”

Osh shook his head, though Paul was not watching. He liked neither Cat’s constant teasing of Lasrua by way of mentioning Malcolm at every opportunity, nor Paul’s absolute refusal to hear him spoken of, which Osh knew for a sure way to render a man still more attractive to a sixteen-​​year-​​old maiden. Between the two of them, it was no wonder his poor, husbandless daughter was reduced to scorching her ankles as a pitiful substitute for the love she craved.

“She needs to be married, that’s all,” Paul continued, as if his sister was not lying before him. Indeed, she seemed barely aware of anything beyond the fire. “Once she has a baby to keep her busy… And a husband. With fire nature.”

Paul lifted a foot over his sister to violently kick a burning log back against the inner wall of the chimney. He nodded grimly at the shower of sparks it produced.

Osh supposed he knew whom the log had briefly embodied to Paul’s mind, and he thought his son’s self-​​righteousness needed a pricking. “I suppose Malcolm must have fire nature…” he mused. “Since Cat and Flann do.”

“Never!” Paul snarled.

Osh glanced over at Eithne, still huddled against the tall chest and shuddering with anxious fear. He remembered the poor girl understood not a word of their language.

“And Eithne, too, probably,” he said in English, and he smiled at her and stroked a hand over her dark hair.

Lasrua rolled her head away from the fire and sighed, “Vash…”

“Vash is not here!” Paul pleaded. “I daren’t send for him, Lu!”

Osh reached out again and stroked a hand down the hair draped across Eithne’s arm. She looked up at him gratefully, as a dog who has expected a blow would receive a caress.

“I only help,” she lipped.

“I know, I know,” he whispered.

“Why don’t she rise?”

“She is a bit… tired…”

Osh paid little attention to her question or his answer, but he knew there was something wrong with both – and something wrong with Eithne, too.

“Paul?” he asked weakly, but a part of him hoped he would not be heard.

He often ferociously scolded his son for looking into the natures of men and women without leave, seeming to think that because they did not even know, it could not harm. In fact, the people whom he did tell did not seem to mind, but Osh longed to tell them that it would have been more polite if Paul had the habit of stripping people naked so that he could inspect their bodies from every angle.

Nevertheless, it was what Osh was about to do.

Paul had told him that all those in Cat’s family, even distant cousins like Egelric, had a spark of fire hidden down deep inside of them. But Osh did not have to search deeply into Eithne. Eithne was the deep.

Her nature was not merely close to the surface – it was not merely flush with her skin – it was bigger than she, broader than the room, wider than the horizons, and it extended up to the farthest reaches of the heavens. And she was all water. There was no light in her, no fire, no air, and no earth.

She was vash–the first, dark water that had preceded everything in the time before there was even time. The elf Vash might be said to have vash–nature, but if it was so, than he had no more than a drop from its boundless sea. Eithne was the sea.

There was no room for even a bubble of air in this place, and Osh released her almost as soon as he had touched her, stunned and awed and terrified.

He had seen the Bright Lady once with Sorin, and spent hours afterwards in a beatific daze, but the Bright Lady seemed only a charming and approachable young lady compared to this greater god.

Eithne blinked at him with her black eyes, growing frightened at the sight of his fear.

“Paul?” he croaked. “Have you ever looked into the nature of this girl?”

Paul hesitated, but he too noticed his father’s distress and admitted, “Once, when she first came. She has fire nature, too. Like a tiny sun.”

He gave Eithne a fond smile, to which she replied with a feeble whisper: “I only help…”

“Don’t try it again, my son,” Osh murmured. “She has vash–nature now. I think it is what Rua was trying to say…”

“What? Now?”

“What do we know about her husband?” Osh asked ominously.

They both looked at Eithne, who paled and drew back, though she could not have understood a word of what they said.

“Did he leave her with a child?” Paul whispered.

Osh had loved Flann and little Liadan long enough, believing them his own, that he scarcely stopped to think of the baby’s father these days. He had thought it enough to know him dead.

But all along he had felt a dull aching that was like a twinge in a wound he had not yet received. Now his unuttered fear sliced into him, all the sharper for having been held off for so long.

He knew nothing about Liadan’s father, and he was coming to believe Flann knew little more. Eithne too had been touched by something bigger than elves or men.

Osh knew nothing about either of them, except that they were similar, if they were not the same.