Eithne says the words

“My father is dead.”

Eithne’s voice cracked like a burning log, but at least she was speaking. At last she was speaking. Dantalion was so relieved that he scarcely minded she had just said the dreaded words.

“I’m knowing it, my little jewel,” he whispered. “Sweetdew told me.”

When she struggled to free herself from his arms, he was careful to let her go, on past advice from the cat.

“You promised!”

Her little hand wavered mothlike between them, and spiderlike he longed to catch it and lift it to his mouth, but he guessed it would have been the wrong thing. Her hand was raised not in appeal but in accusation.

“It was already too late when I promised,” he said. “Else I would not have failed.”

“It’s on my wedding day he died,” she muttered softly, accusing herself.

He put out his hands hesitantly now that hers had fallen away. “Eithne…”

She avoided his hands by clasping her two together and lifted her eyes sadly to look on her sleeping sister. “How shall I live?” she whispered.

Dantalion seldom slept before she. He liked to feel awake and watchful beside her: a ferryman guiding her safely between nightmares as she drifted off into dreams. He could do that much for her, and it was the only time she ever truly relaxed in his arms.

But there were nights when he was watchful too long. After marveling over her gemlike beauty and preciousness for a while, he would begin to notice instead her steady breathing that could have been stilled with no more than a pillow. He would notice her blood beating in her wrist, perfectly channeled through sheaves of tiny veins, needing no more than the swipe of a claw to tear them open and spill her life out across the sheets. The skin of her back would grow hot and damp pressed against his chest, she so glowed with warmth as she slept, but a mere quarter hour in icy water would chill her to death.

He could protect her from murderers and wild animals and drowning, but less than that would have sufficed – a bump on the head, a hunk of bread in the throat, a sudden fever – and he could not stop her from going up and down the stairs, or eating, or being rained upon.

Dantalion did not know how she lived. Nothing more than this little body kept her here on earth with him, and he who had seen so much death knew how precarious were these processes that kept it alive and kept her safe inside. And at the core of her own body were the tiny bodies of his children, delicate as webs, and still more tenuously trapping their souls.

Now she hesitated at life’s threshold, and like a good mother, she would take her babies with her if she fled. He could not make her stay. No amount of roaring or shaking or slapping or strangling could force her to live. He could not terrify her into remaining with him.

“You must, please,” he whispered stupidly.

Still she stared at her sister on the bed. “The blame is on the head of me,” she said, “if her father is dead. And eight sisters have I.”

“It is not on you, Eithne. The blame is mine.”

Her skin was smooth and her cheeks round, but her dark eyes glinted for a moment with the wisdom of an old woman. “You make me wear it, sir.”

“Eithne,” he pleaded, “you know I cannot face your family yet.”

Sweetdew sneered, “You might be sorry, for all you cannot, sir.”

“I am sorry!” he hastened to add. “I am sorry I cannot stand before your family and bear the blame.”

He glanced over her shoulder at the cat, who only twitched her whiskers.

“I am sorry I did not think to protect your father – your family – at once.”

Eithne dropped her head, which told him nothing, and Sweetdew simply stared an enigma at him out of slitted eyes. He began to panic.

“Forgive me!”

Merely pronouncing the words was like vomiting spiders. Hordes of many-​​legged horrors shivered across his skin, down his shoulders and back where his wings should have been, and out to the rigid fingers of his hands.

For a terrifying instant he felt the urge to slay every living creature in the house who might have heard them – his wife among them – and rip off this skin, and be himself again, safe in his hatred, in his self-​​righteous solitude.

But they came again: “Forgive me, please!” His clawless hand plucked at the sleeve of her nightgown. “Eithne, I am begging you – you aren’t knowing how difficult it is for me to ask!”

Sweetdew leapt down from the couch, spitting in outrage. “Would you have her thank you for asking her to forgive you?”

“No…” he whimpered.

Eithne finally looked up at him, but only timidly from beneath her hair, and only to ask, “What did she say?”

“I told him to have a little humility,” Sweetdew grumbled as she turned around and around to calm herself before sitting again, “if he means at last to admit he’s not perfect.”

“Does she think I should forgive you?” Eithne asked him.

The cat answered for herself with a hacking cough that threatened a hairball or a half-​​digested shrew.

Eithne smiled slightly, though not at her husband.

“You only understand her when she insults me,” he grumbled.

She did not laugh, as he had hoped, but she fell against him, sobbing, “Cian! Cian!”

It was an invitation to put his arms around her and to comfort her – better than a laugh – almost more than he had dared hope. At last she was getting the hug Sweetdew claimed she had been wanting all evening.

“He will never meet you!” she blubbered. “Nor our babies! And I could have made him forgive me… but now no one will…”

“Eithne, Eithne, my pretty pebble, my pearl…” he soothed, with just the sort of nonsense she cooed to her cat, and which Sweetdew had informed him she would like to hear herself.

“And it’s far from my mother he lies, forever and ever! And he loved her so!”

“Now, Eithne,” Dantalion scolded gently, pleased to have something sensible to say. “That isn’t true at all. He’s with your mother now, and forever and ever.”

“He is?” she sniffled. “In Heaven?”

“Aye, in Heaven.”

She lifted her face from his shoulder, granting him the opportunity to wipe her tears away, over her cheeks and back across her temples into her black hair.

“Is it true?” she asked hopefully. “Heaven, and all?”

He snorted. “You’re loving an angel, and asking whether Heaven is?”

To his disappointment, she paid his words little mind. “And my father and mother are there?” she asked.

“I am certain they are.”

“And they’re seeing everything? Everything that’s happened?”

“Certainly they are.”

She swallowed bravely and pulled away from the grasp of his arms. He let her go.

“Then it’s sorry I am to hear it,” she announced. “My father died believing me good and maidenly and true, and now he – knows – how bad…” Her little act of defiance dissolved in her tears.

“Eithne, Eithne,” he sighed, “now you are being a very silly little person. You certainly are seeing nothing at all.”

“What?” she protested, but she allowed him to pull her back into his arms with only a token resistance.

“If the father of you is seeing everything, do you not think he’s seeing you now?”

She sniffed.

“Do you not think he knows how much you love him, and how sorry you are? Do you not think he forgives you? Do you not think he knows how you came to flee, and how I came to you the first time, and how brave you were, and how brave you have been?”

She shrugged a thin shoulder beneath his hand.

“Do you not think he’s seeing you with me, and I loving you, and you loving me?”

She shivered and snuggled closer to him as she did sometimes – but only at dawn, half-​​asleep, so he had never known whether she meant it. “Is it true?” she asked childishly, picking at the front of his tunic with the hand she held between them.

He was about to say it was, and heartened by the sly question, he would have dared asked her whether she loved him too. She had never, never said the words.

But she spoke before he found words of his own, and then he saw he had simply misunderstood. “Are they happy in Heaven?” she asked.

“Aye, Eithne,” he sighed.

“Do you suppose I shall ever go there?”

“Aye, Eithne. Aye…”

The words came easily enough, but they came accompanied by something that caught in his throat – something that did not tickle like spiders, but that clung and soured, that he could not swallow, that caused his entire face to contract in an unfamiliar grimace.

Eithne sniffled and laughed softly, and though she spoke like a child, her voice had been deepened by tears until it seemed that of a woman of four times her years, as if she were already old and nearly gone away from him.

“Now, it’s a silly big person you’re being,” she scolded breathlessly. She wiped a tear across the mark on his cheek as far as the stubble of his beard. “I’m not meaning tonight, lad. It’s hand-​​in-​​hand we shall go, someday long hence, and you showing me all the fairest places on the way. And we shall meet my mother and father together. Look, Sweetdew: I’m loving an angel, and he’s sorry because I shall go to Heaven!”

Dantalion was so heartbroken that he scarcely noticed she had just said the long-​​awaited words.