Lasrua looks into the deeps

Lasrua had been walking for so many hours that even after she stopped, the muscles of her thighs continued twitching in tandem. Her head had been so long bowed that her icy hair crackled over her shoulders as she looked up, and the straggling locks that had frozen to her fur collar yanked on her temples before coming unstuck.

She did not stop long. The sudden disappearance of the fawn had made her pause, but she understood it had completed its task. She had arrived.

Lacking her guide, she advanced slowly now through the stone-​​strewn fields of the castle’s crumbling, picking a path through rubble the snow obscured.

When she reached the stairs, the unfamiliar effort of climbing made her feel weightless and leaden by turns as she lifted her legs and her legs lifted her body after.

Her shins and ankles were battered by the plaques of frozen snow that caked the front of her cloak, and her calves by the clumps that hung and clattered from her trailing hem. She made only a half-​​hearted attempt to shake them off, and thumped and scuffled gracelessly through the door.

In this roofless room, she was scarcely more “indoors” than before. A living tree grew up in the center of the tower, and the fair blue-​​white snow around it sloped off into the ugly blackness of thin ice lying over a pool of stagnant water.

Nevertheless, Lasrua heard water dripping from unlikely places as snow fell on warm casements and beams. She heard the high-​​pitched whine of stones strained by ice and fire, and once a sharp crack as one surrendered and found ease.

And she heard footsteps hurrying out of a hidden corner: eager feet that crunched lightly through the snow in perfect tandem.

They did not limp.

Lasrua wilted with sudden weariness. She put out her hand, but her fingers slipped ungrasping over the rough stones of the wall. Her snow-​​matted hair swung away from her cheek and smacked her sharply as she swayed, startling her to attention just as Eithne skittered around the corner.

“Rua, I knew you would come!” she squealed. “It’s not too late!”

Lasrua tried to call her name, but there remained of her voice only a hoarse gasp. Like a dreamer awakening she remembered she had not had a drink since the morning.

Eithne pounced on her and pulled her close to kiss and kiss her cheek: delirious, hungry little kisses such as were ordinarily reserved for babies. Eithne’s mouth was so warm and Lasrua’s cheek so cold that they seemed to scald.

“You’re safe!” Lasrua croaked.

“And so are you!”

Eithne squeezed her with one arm and ran her other hand over Lasrua’s body, crunching through her frozen hair, rubbing her shoulders, and finally tightening around her waist to draw their bodies tightly together.

Lasrua relaxed and snuggled into her smoke-​​scented warmth. She had found her dear friend again, whom everyone had feared dead or worse. Only one thing could have made her gladder.

“Is Malcolm here?” she mumbled sleepily into Eithne’s braid.

Eithne straightened and pushed her away, but she hesitated a moment before speaking, smiling sadly. In the breathless silence Lasrua heard a distant breath, ragged and wet, and she was pierced by a thin icicle of fear.

“No, darling, but how I wish he were!” Eithne whispered. “And someday he will be – and what a happy day that will be! Just the four of us!” She leaned her hot forehead against Lasrua’s and giggled naughtily. “And only two chairs will we be needing by the fire, as you shall see!”

Lasrua laughed weakly with her before stopping to count. “The… four of us?”

“You and Cousin Malcolm and I, and Cian!”

She took Lasrua’s hand and turned to lead her away.

“Come see him!” she said eagerly.

Lasrua dragged her feet, and Eithne marched ahead without her.

“Cian’s here?” she asked dazedly.

“This is our castle! Come! It isn’t too late!”

“Your castle?” Lasrua staggered after her. “Too late for what?”

“To save him!”

Eithne opened a door and stepped into a billow of bright, hot air that reeked of wood-​​smoke and urine.

Lasrua hesitated, and from the depths of the room she heard another agonized breath clatter through a man’s lungs.

“I thought I must have been sent to save you…” she whispered to Eithne.

Eithne did not seem to hear.

She tiptoed down the short hall and waited when she reached the room, her hand stretched back in search of Lasrua’s. She did not speak when Lasrua stepped up behind her. She did not say a word until Lasrua’s hand was safely in hers.

“Sister,” she said reverently, “this is my man.”

Eithne’s man was the color of a corpse. Only the terrible rattle of his breath proved he was alive. Just as surely it proved he was dying.

Eithne released Lasrua’s hand and tiptoed to the bedside.

“Never be fearing, Cian,” she murmured sweetly, “this is my sister’s sister Rua, and the friend of me. It’s to help you she came.”

She bent deeply over the bed without daring to lean her weight on one arm. From the jerky movements of her head Lasrua could guess the strain in her shoulders and tautness of the backs of her legs, but her arms moved gracefully like fronds, swinging as freely as her long braids.

She so well knew the body beneath the mounded blankets that the stroking of her gentle hands revealed its form. It was a loving touch, unafraid and unashamed, though no sisterhood nor daughterhood shielded her from the raw male.

Lasrua had never touched or been touched in that way. She spread her fingers out over her frosty cloak and moved her hands in slight circles over her thighs, trying to imagine how it would be.

It would be hot and bright, she told herself, like the sun shining through ice and slicking its surface. A cold drop fell from her melting hair onto her cheekbone, and she let it trickle down her cheek undried. She imagined it would be like melting.

Then Eithne’s hands reached the blue-​​white face. She bent more deeply still to kiss it, and she caressed the high forehead in a gesture so loving that Lasrua brought her own cold hand limply to her brow. She wanted to be touched like that even more than she wanted hot hands on her thighs.

At last, however, Eithne stroked back her man’s dark hair, and Lasrua was transfixed by an icicle of terror so towering that it might have pierced her through the top of the skull and slammed into the floor between her feet: The black stripes on the man’s face were not merely locks of sweaty hair.

She had so often been warned by Vash and her father of the dark elf Dre and all his forms – so often heard Cat wake in the night to gibber the substance of her nightmares to Paul – her fear was immediate and instinctual.

“Eithne!” she moaned.

“Come be meeting him, sister,” Eithne said sweetly.

“Eithne, that is no man!”

“He is my man,” Eithne corrected.

Lasrua whispered, “Eithne!”

Eithne’s man took a slow breath that rattled like five thousand tiny dice in a thousand tiny cups.

“You can help him,” Eithne said with a weirdly childish assurance.

“Help him? No!”

She reached out to tug at Eithne’s sleeve. Eithne would not be moved.

“Listen to me, Eithne! The elf Dre! The – the demon!” From Cat’s blubbering she knew the word in Gaelic as well as English.

“He is not a demon,” Eithne chirped. “He is an angel. A demon is quite another thing.”

“An angel?” Lasrua asked hoarsely. “Is that what he was telling you?”

“Aye, and it’s the truth, for I’ve seen the wings of him. But he took this mortal body for the love of me. Come help him breathe, darling, and when he wakes he will explain it all to you.”

Eithne’s eerie calm stunned Lasrua into something like calmness herself. She did not even start when a clump of frozen snow melted free from her cloak and thumped to the floor: she merely felt that she was already beginning to fall apart.

“Eithne,” she whispered. “Are you truly bound to this creature?”

“Before God,” Eithne said proudly, as she always had.

“But, darling,” she pleaded, “come home with me! You’re only bound till death, and if he’s dying…”

Eithne smiled strangely. “But Cian cannot die. He will come again and again until I do. But I am fond of this body. You shall see how fine he is when he’s well.”

Lasrua finally yanked on her straggling hair and stamped her foot in frustration. Another clot of ice thunked onto the floor beside her boot.

“Eithne!” she groaned. “After what he did to your sister!”

“He never hurt my sister,” Eithne said.

“Going to… Eithne! Going to rape her in her bed, disguised as that–yidtsakh!”

Eithne shrieked, “He never hurt her!”

They were both breathless for a moment in surprise. The dying man breathed loudly beyond them. Then Eithne settled and smiled.

“He never went to hurt her,” she said sweetly. “Never was he hurting the kith or kin of me. He was only trying to learn what she was!” She laughed as though Lasrua were only being silly.

“What – she–was?” Lasrua choked.

“Aye, darling, for we’re fairies in my family. Only he wasn’t knowing it then.” She glanced fondly at the bed. “The Sidhe,” she explained, “just like in the stories. Only we were never knowing they were stories about our clan!”

“Is that what he told you, Eithne?” Lasrua pleaded, though she was beginning to fear her dear friend was worse than misguided. “He’s an angel, and you’re a fairy? And Sweetdew is a unicorn?”

“Sweetdew is only a cat,” Eithne pouted, “but Cian’s an angel, sure and certain, and I a fairy am, too. For I have magic – look!”

Perhaps she only meant to make the smoldering logs flare up from afar, but rather than concentrate her magic on the wood, she carelessly flung out a billowing flame all around her in a wave. The outraged candles spat wax all over their tray; the logs burst and fell into sparking chunks of coal; and Lasrua was burned hollow in an instant like a barn lined with thistledown and strewn with chaff.

In an instant she was laid bare like a bride before her husband, raw female. Her body slumped towards strong arms that were not there. Patches of slush dropped wetly from her cloak, and the back of her neck streamed with icy water. She was melting. The muscles of her thighs trembled in tandem with a terrible need.

“And Cousin Malcolm does too,” Eithne chirped. “So you see, you and he are meant and made for one another!”

She grinned over her shoulder at Lasrua. Lasrua made a sound she had never heard.

“Now come help my man, darling,” Eithne commanded blithely. “And when he wakes he will be able to find Malcolm for you – anywhere in the world! You shall see. But come help him.”

Like a newborn fawn Lasrua slid her feet closer together and shakily tried to stand tall.

“I’m not wanting him if he’s not wanting me,” she said with hoarse defiance. Her right knee buckled and she nearly fell.

“He cannot make him love you,” Eithne giggled. “If you could make fairies to love,” she said pertly to the man on the bed, “it’s an easier time you would have had with me, good sir!”

Lasrua took a staggering step and got both feet beneath her again. It brought her closer to the bed.

Eithne smiled encouragingly at her. “He’s loving you already, darling. You shall see. And when Cian’s better he will send a message for you, and he will come.”

She took Lasrua’s hand and pulled her stumbling to the bedside.

“Malcolm was made for you, sister,” she whispered reverently. “He is your man. And Cian is mine. Now help him breathe. Make the water come out of him.”

Lasrua gasped, “Water!”

Water, water! At last something she could understand!

Eithne brought Lasrua’s hand down upon the mounded blankets and then stepped back, smiling benevolently.

Lasrua did not know this man’s body well enough to guess its form. She only knew bodies obscured by the veils of fatherhood and brotherhood, thicker than any blankets.

She leaned closer, and her wet hair slipped down off her back to hang over the man’s shoulders, dripping icy water, water, water.

“Help him, and he will help you,” Eithne said.

Her voice and smile were strained like the stones of the wall, trapped between ice and fire. Lasrua was on the fire side, but she felt the chill of an unspoken “And if you do not help him…”

She spread her fingers and rubbed her hand in a light circle over the blanket. The man’s chest rose and fell beneath it as he took a pained breath. She could hear the water crackling high in his lungs, but deep down they had the ominous silence of caverns already flooded.

He was close to death. His lungs were filling. His capillaries were weeping the water out of his blood. His mouth, his sweat, his mattress all had the ammoniac scent of the poisons his failing kidneys were returning unsweetened to his veins.

“Touch him,” Eithne coaxed softly. “Make the water come out.”

Lasrua slid her hand up to the hem of the blanket, copying Eithne’s caress, and then gently, lovingly onto the water-​​streaked shoulder – onto the hot, naked skin of the raw male.

At once the water in his lungs began trickling gladly up to meet her water-​​seeking hand, but she saw that it was no more than a foam upon his deeps. He was all water, and his water was all that was. There was no wind to mar his dark stillness with the merest ripple. There was no air at all, no earth, no fire – only a black shadow gliding over his surface forever.

It was not merely beauty – it was perfection. He was not merely an angel – he was God.

Then the first rising rivulets of water reached his throat, and his body stiffened and shuddered and jerked up with a spluttering cough.

Out of his dark stillness there reared up a Beast of water: a whirlpool erupting into a hurricane, a wailing worm, a howling dragon. It clamped its teeth over Lasrua’s face and sucked out her self like a droplet of water, and then it began to spew her full of its own blackness, inflating her like a bladder.

Her own underwater screams were unfamiliar, like a sound she had never heard. She heard him clearly hiss with hatred: “Elf!”

Then she heard Eithne squealing, “Cian, Cian!” and abruptly the towering wave crashed back into itself.

Cian slapped Lasrua away and croaked, “Eithne!”

It was the voice of the elf Druze: the wheeze of rotting lungs. It was the heartrending cry of the elf Druze calling out for his sister, a hundred years dead.

Eithne threw herself down across the foot of the bed and hugged his legs.

“I’m here, lad, my own love!” she soothed. “I’m never leaving your side!”

He waved his head blindly like a panicked kitten. “Eithne!”

“I’m here, lad,” she gabbled, “and that’s my darling Rua here to help you, if you’ll just let her, now. She’ll just be helping you breathe…”

He coughed painfully as if reminded, spluttering bloody phlegm over the blankets. Eithne laughed shakily as though she found it fair to see.

He fell back and moaned softly, “Elf…” He was speaking Lasrua’s own language.

He threw out an arm and clutched Lasrua’s sleeve with clawlike fingers to pull her hand back down to his chest.

“What–are you?” Lasrua stuttered. Her entire body trembled with a terrible fear.

“The Abyss,” he lisped soundlessly as he sank back beneath his own black surface. “Don’t look down.”