by Niabh » Thu Jun 20, 2019 4:42 am
His reply awaited two towns up the road, precisely the next place they arrived at sundown. In spite of the raven’s insistence that he didn’t spy, it seemed an irresistible conclusion that some amount of well-choreographed timing had been involved.
My shunna,
The gods are opposed to having you for Midsummer. At least, they are silent about it. I choose not to take silence for assent in the matter of their favor, which is safer for us both. In your honor I will arrange something more suitable so that when you are old you can say you participated in our secret rites and lived to tell the tale. (Our secret is that we drink a lot.)
I have warned Him that you are coming. I could not rightly say how He took the news. He seemed frightened, but just as quick to assert you as His friend. I find I cannot write much about it without waxing wroth. I hate when He is afraid; it makes me want to lash out at whatever it is He fears. But there is so much, and betimes He fears me, too, so that I have come to accept That is a fib. I will never accept it, but I tolerate it. In any case, be aware that He may seek you out. In His mind He has endowed you with wondrous power, and has even warned me away from you. I do not think this will interrupt any meeting we might plan, particularly with Benedict as an intermediary, but He has His own breed of guile which you well know, and He is jealous.
Glad I am that you did not forget these poor people. My way would have been more exciting, true, but it is all to the good so long as they were not forgotten. Duty is seldom exciting, though it may be satisfying, and the obligation of knowledge oft turns itself into duty, which is annoying but cannot be helped. I am very pleased with you that you should take the initiative.
In the end I care not one whit for your people. I care for you and for your well-being. But I feel that your well-being will lead to theirs, even if not in so great a part as you wish. If nothing else it may stay you from doing so great a harm as you have done before, thus saving time that would be wasted in healing the wounds you leave. Like me, you are impatient in your way; you cannot trust action to anyone but yourself. But this way leads to progress too, for you and for them. Most fortunate I have been that I have always been surrounded by those I could trust: all my baird through the years, my good ladies and allies, my mother. Even my father can be trusted in his way, for no matter how much I disagree with his methods, he loves Knockna Niall and in his heart he will do whatever he must to serve her.
You have seen what comes of reaching outward. It has brought you thus far. Though the path ahead be unclear, come a little further.
Glenn, the only ones who need not worry about survival are the ones who are surviving. People who fear for their next meal or what lies over the next hill cannot imagine anything beyond that meal or that hill, and these become desperate and ill-suited to think of much else.
What I cannot understand why there need be any of that here. To me, this place is wealthy beyond compare. Never in my life have I seen such plenty, fields full of food, fruit in every season, so many children, so much land that to cross it is like walking through every season there is—winter in the mountains and high summer at the sea. I picture the innumerable troubles this would solve for my own people and I cannot see why your own do not utilize these resources more equitably, except that this is as much as I expect from letting men make laws. Men by their very nature have no reason to be invested in anyone’s well-being save their own and tend to toward irresponsibility and short-sightedness, whereas women, who must be mindful of birth and the raising of children, are better suited for planning ahead. Anyone with sense knows that when children are well-tended and secure, it benefits all, for they are inclined to grow as they are first bent. My advice would be to stop treating your women as imbeciles and broodmares and instead become their servants. I promise you, you will not have to contend with a paradise of peace simply by assuring that your children are fed; the same system has worked for us for many years and we have no shortage of other strife to keep us occupied.
Which is why I say heal what is before you. Heal what you can heal in a day. When people know what is to come tomorrow, then they can plan for it. When every day is a struggle to reach the next then there is no time for reflection.
Still, I do understand your difficulty in the potential of people versus working with the actual article. My father says a person is a sheepdog, capable of understanding instruction and knowing what must be done, but people are sheep who must be herded along to keep them from drowning in a rainstorm. I fear to say I have seen this too often to entirely dismiss the notion, though in his case it is implied that he thinks them as witless and disposable as sheep as well. Betimes it feels the mass of them are stubborn while the few bright points are selfish, and the few can be quite as troublesome and frustrating as the many. I have no answer for myself, and none for you, either, save to say that when the many can finally be urged to pull together in a single direction, they can accomplish great things. I have seen them do it, oftentimes to my own surprise. But then they always forget and become obstinate again.
My mother has her own saying: there is no horizon, but that it moves as we do. It is not a place to be reached, but a journey.
When I first came here, many men told me they loved me, even though they knew me but an hour, which was much confusing and made me wonder if my glam was having some ill effect we could not have foreseen. But then I learned that men here will tell any woman they love her in order to bed her, for your women expect it. (This is why I have such trouble wooing women. I will lie about many things but not that.) For that matter, if you had told me you loved me because you wanted to bed me, I would be less alarmed by it—a little surprised, but not too concerned. These new moods the glam seems to have brought up in you are still shifting, and it would be reasonable to assume your ability to love had also been reawakened. I would not love you back. Things between us are complicated enough without adding that. But companionship and ambition and striving toward a better end I will share with you, and that right gladly.
With Him, it is not obsession. I wish it were, for then I would not see the truth of it. It is elation and futility, faultless justification in itself and against the order of all things beyond it. It is a sickness of which I do not wish to be cured, a perfectly conscious delirium. I know the difference, Glenn. I know.
With my old lover, the one who betrayed me, it was much different. At first the only time we could be alone together was riding, with three armed patrol riding in back of us lest he try to carry me off. You may imagine there was little opportunity for conversation then. He had known my grandmother when she was alive, and my father when my father was a child in the High Court—all the sort of stories I longed to hear but that my father would never tell me. He loved horses as much as I and he knew everything about them; to this day most of what I know of horses comes from him. In his youth he had once gone to the human lands (not here) and he told me all sorts of queer things about your folk, some of which have proven false, others true, and on some I think he was mistaken, or else things have changed greatly between then and now.
After a time, I began to feel I offered nothing in return. All I did was hang onto his every word. Now I feel almost as if I convinced myself by degrees that I loved him, because I felt I was in his owing, or perhaps this is what I tell myself. He had a very ruthless lady with whom he was unhappy, and I began to fancy I might steal him from her, though I thought it more a rescue. I told myself I was more beautiful and amiable than she, that she was barren and I was not, that our clan was far richer and our cause more noble, so that in every way he would have been better off. Moreover, I saw the way he looked at me. Men have looked at me that way since I was a child.
I began orchestrating ways for us to be alone together. I introduced the idea and he protested, though eventually I convinced him. Now of course I must wonder how much convincing he truly needed, and how much of his reservation was feigned to make me feel I had to overcome it. By the time I knew he was false, I no longer had any say in the matter.
That is where I am with Him. I fear I have had no say from the start.
Of your esteemed regard, Benedict says that you could not have one of us without the other.
Finn
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.