by Niabh » Fri Dec 28, 2018 2:37 pm
Glenn,
I have been foolish. I was frightened, and I am frightened yet. But never should I have pleaded to you without my wits about me to temper it, and never without explanation. Betimes it is so hard to slip a word sidelong against you, my shunna, that when the opportunity presents itself, I fling them all any which way and hope a few will stick here and there. If I have imposed or caused you undue alarm, I beg pardon.
Here I have paused to wonder if I am truly begging your pardon or if I only say so to save you from worrying, if indeed you do worry. It is both, I think. It is very late and I am a little drunk. I will try not to make the whole letter like this.
However, if by futility you mean your letter to Ainrid, be assured your efforts were not in vain. She has written me as well, a full swarm of questions—so many that it might be simpler to strike out what does not apply than to answer each in its turn. From my mother I have received medicines and powders in such abundance that I believe the only reason she did not include a wooly muffler was for fear of overtaxing poor Benedict. To be fair, it was such comfort to have word of either of them that I have almost forgiven you for being so impudent as to write them in the first place.
Almost, but not entirely. I would not have you known in our courts at all unless and until I introduce the matter myself. They are not a place for mortal men, my shunna. In truth, I wished to keep you separate in large part because I fear it would be temptation too great for you to resist, and as susceptible as you are now, with spies or enemies that we know not, I fear it all the more. It is bad enough to have a whole country to worry about without having a country plus you.
But as much as there is nothing I can write to warn you away from the courts, there is nothing you can write that will keep me from Him. You are too late for that. It may have been too late the very moment I met Him, but now it has most certainly gone too far to undo. I fear I shall have to write as a woman for a moment, my shunna: He has become my sanctuary. With Him, I find I can bear being alone here. I have never been much a solitary creature, Glenn. If I want for company, I find it; if I want it not, it never crosses my mind. But this one is like a fever in the blood. I am too hot, too chill, never satisfied until I seek Him out again, and the more He offers the greater grows my capacity to receive. There is no bottom to either of us, Glenn, and that troubles me some. I am still enough myself even to resent it, for He has usurped what was once my province; I am the one who has always
I strike out that last line as I realize that what I meant to write verged on an affront to your vaunted prudery and making you blush is wasted when I am not there to see it. (I did warn you I was going to be a woman.) Suffice to say, the ganconner’s spirit still dwells in me. I do not know if He could undo it even if He wished. Myself He might destroy, but not that.
The ganconner is banaheen, too pure and complete within itself to be reckoned curse or blessing. What curse there is, is of ourselves, punishment for the sin in daring to meddle with it, for we are to the banaheen as unfit and defenseless as you would say your people are against ours. Yet your folk and ours are more like one another than any of us to them. Being human, you do not understand the boundaries in the world, for that knowledge is not part of you. We know better, and still we transgress, always to our own sorrow. Of the two of us, our sin is greater, for we should know better. Your own folk merely blunder into great wickedness on occasion, like a child who reaches into a fire. Such knowledge is its own responsibility. I feel that of all I have said, that one thing you might understand.
When I was very small, I used to go and play in the ganconner’s forest because I was the only one who could. It was not truly safe, and no one wanted me to, but once I was within, no one could rightly fetch me out again save for my father, who never bothered. He, too, had gone into the forest when he was little, and he knew the way of it. The ganconner knew me as its own blood and would look after me. I used to go into the river and stick my face under the water while it stood above shouting at me, for it knew that living things could drown. It also understood that living things must eat, only it did not understand that we do not have to eat all the time, so it would try to feed me woodlice and worms, uncooked roots I could not even chew, and once a whole stag’s head still steaming. I would have to pretend to eat to make it cease its fussing, and when I was a little older, I got into the habit of bringing a handful of dried curds or cake with me so that I could nibble them in front of it.
I thought it funny, you see, that I, this little child, could tease something so great and ancient as the ganconner, whom all others feared. I began to think that that everyone else was foolish to fear it because they did not know it as well as I. And I felt very clever and special to have been so brave.
But there was a time, Glenn, when I was lost. The ganconner led me back to the path, but by that time it had grown late, and my mother so worried that she came in herself to find me. No sooner did the ganconner lay eyes upon my mother than it abandoned me and went to play its wiles upon her while she stood helpless before it. I was too little to understand what was happening; I knew only that I did not much like the ganconner putting its hands all over my mother, so I picked up a felled branch and swatted the ganconner right across the backside. And all I remember after that is that my mother snatched me up and ran with me and did not stop until we were safe back at camp.
For the rest of the summer, I was too afraid to set foot in the forest. But the next year came, and I had time to grow bold again, so I ventured in to seek out the ganconner and see if it had forgiven me. It had not forgiven, because it did not remember. More than that, for the first time I saw that the ganconner did not know me for myself, only that I was kin to it. For all it knew, I was some other child, and for all I knew, it had thought me a different child every time I came to visit. My father had known this all along, for later he told me that in his day, the ganconner always called him “grandchild,” just as it called me.
The lesson here, you would say, is that by now I should have learned better than to dally with things in the woods that are greater than myself.
Now it is near morning, and I seem to have writ myself sober. Doubtless I will regret having been so forthcoming, but Benedict is plucking at me to be away. He shall have to wait a moment longer.
Very well, then: Gloria.
The handwriting, those crisp black spires, gradually grew jagged. By the final line they were but stabs and sketches of words.
She was coming toward your door just as I was leaving. I became very curious if you would let her in and lingered near enough to see what would happen. When she did not knock at all, I tried to move on, but she
She spoke His name. Black vines came out of her throat and snatched at me, tried to take something of mine, but instead it hurt me. I tried to get away from her, but she would not cease in following. I ran away, tore my shoulder on some iron, and lost my glams. When I could no longer hold her back, she took me away to a healer. I did not wish to be there, so I fought. A woman came and demanded a tooth of me for safe passage. She was very rude about it, so I struck her. I would not have killed her, but she twisted her head and cut her own throat against my blade. There was a fight, and in the end only Gloria and I were left to make our separate ways. I did not care to see if she escaped, but I suppose that as you have spoken to her, she must have done.
You may tell her that if I see her again, I will have her bowels for bowstrings.
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.