I walked backwards, saying goodbye to the farm. Even bare in the late fall, the place had charm, and I had always liked visiting when I was a child. The water was sweet and the exposure of the barley fields was favorable. The land went up to the ridge and the wild boars were plentiful on the hillside in the forest past the plum trees. My uncle had brought in his barley, dried his plums, and cut his wood; but it would go to whoever decided they wanted to live up there. It was a little far from town but a good living situation at that.
Sidoney had come back from the stream with her hair dripping. I loaned her my comb and she worked at the tangle as we walked. Her skin looked soft from the grease, but she still appeared pale as a corpse, and as her hair dried and she plaited it down her right shoulder, it was clearly going to remain colorless as well. With the blue of her eyes, it gave her a strange beauty, like a stormy sky with a single patch of blue, a sapphire among ashes.
Her gait seemed slightly unsteady at first and I imagined that after being tossed about the sky like a feather for however many years, she needed to get her sea-legs back. I was eager to put some miles behind us, especially if Eradis decided to come sniffing around. He would have his beautiful brown horse to ride. Only he would expect me to go downriver, to the town, not upriver. I had never mentioned any connections there. I wasn’t even sure my shirt-tail relations were still alive, or in Gloswin. But my uncle had spoken of them many times; his cousins.
We passed numerous small farms and traded stories of Eradis and how we had come to be his followers. I told her my “gold-skill” was spinning silken thread from mermaid’s hair growing from rocks in the stream. She laughed and told me in her day all the money came from forging weaponry for the old king’s insatiable armies. She herself could make a mean spearhead from the icicles that hung from the caves on the mountainside. Too bad it wasn’t winter, I thought.
Our shared dreams had given us a sense of intimacy we both knew was false. Neither of us knew what the other would do in the real world. I knew her name, what anxieties entangled her, and the cold tug of the wind for a hundred winters over the land until it blew her over the sentinel pine on the ridge. In her dreams she flew over and over that pine, never quite catching my uplifted hand. She also knew a little too much about my fear of drowning, and that I still missed my twin brother who died when we were five.
We slept the first night in a woodshed, in exchange for stacking wet wood almost to the ceiling. I could see she tired quickly and told her to collect twigs instead for our bed on top of the wood. The next afternoon it began to rain and we entered a small public house. As Sidoney huddled by the fire, waiting our food, I noticed again her strange scent. It was natural and lovely and repulsive all at the same time. I wondered if she were actually human, or genuinely alive. But I had been inside her dreams and there was nothing unexpected there, in the least.
I paid for hot baths, something I had been some days without, Sidoney for who knows how long. After a hot meal it was like taking a sleep drug. So we were both dead to the world and who could blame us if we didn’t hear hoofbeats come up the road. It was the subterranean smoothness of Eradis’s voice that pulled me suddenly from sleep. I shook Sidoney’s shoulder and we both arose. I pulled on my uncle’s shoes and Sidoney my uncle’s sandals, and were out the window in a few heartbeats.
We were out of sight of the inn, hurrying down the wagon track in the meager light of the red moon, when a claw-like hand gripped me around the upper arm. “Harshbag!” he cursed me. “What dried-up husk have you found for me? No sweetness left in this one.” He cast Sidoney aside to the grass at the edge of the road. “But you still have something of summer left in you, boy. Don’t think I don’t know how you poisoned the others against me. All my fair ones saw the look in your eyes before you flitted off, and they did the same; I find myself short of the liquor of youth. I will drain you to the last glint of your eye.”
Eradis closed his arms around me—even starved for the nectar of youth, he was still powerful—and my consciousness began to flicker. But before it faded away I felt something else. Something pulled his head back and his grip loosed me. I staggered, shaking my head. The beams of the red moon between the trees were just enough for me to see Eradis, struggling to loose Sidoney, whose arms were wrapped around his neck from behind and her legs around his waist. She was groaning with the effort, almost croaking.
I was still woozy and it was easy to fall into the semi-trance in which Eradis had taught us to do our various transformations. In this state I could see that the more Eradis struggled, the stronger Sidoney became. They tumbled in the wagon-tracks and into the grassy margin. Eradis grunted and choked while her death-grip only tightened. Her limbs glowed with vitality. And she laughed musically.
By the time he fainted onto the grass, a shriveled man impossibly old, Sidoney was no grey girl anymore. When the white moon leapt suddenly over the treetops in its hurried transit, her cheeks glowed and the dead grass stood out white against the brown of her hair. Her limbs were pink. I reached out to pull a twig from her braid. I saw that she was smiling.
But her mouth crumpled and I realized there were also tears brimming over and trailing down her fair cheeks. Without thinking I brushed one away, and Sidoney fell against me. I circled my arms around her. She was laughing and sobbing, both. We walked back to the inn some time later, and climbed back in the open window through which we had left.
I curled myself behind her on the bed, and together we dreamed of Eradis’s ancient body crumbling in the ditch, the mead of five hundred summers drained from his bones. We dreamed of faces we had known who had mysteriously vanished from our lives, Eradis saying “When they’re ready, they leave”. We dreamed of dances and cider and roasted meat eaten on autumn afternoons, of winter fires, of spring’s multiform burgeoning. We dreamed of slow aging, and even death come welcome after a life fully lived and surrendered. We woke, and she no longer smelled of smoke or lilacs or death. Just soap and skin and a hint of rosemary. I was awkwardly aware that the grey girl was a young woman with me on the bed. I arose, and stood over her; she was blushing and pulling the blanket up to her chin. Her lips were rosy and smiling.
There was nothing left to do but buy her a proper dress and visit the village priest, who tied a red cord around our wrists and waved us away as we walked back to my uncle’s farm, where the water was sweet, and there was barley and dried plums for the winter, and wild leeks blooming in spring by the bathing pool.
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