This week I'd like to bring you another, chronological excerpt from my short story, Legend of M'Rith. This fantasy romance can be found in DCL Publications' Enchanted Fairy Tales.
Set in Ireland in 1844, M'Ruth's tale is one of loss and love as half fairie/half elf M'Rith is abandoned by the other fae. Left near a human village, M'Rith has spent her long years alone, unseen, until she witnesses something shocking.
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"Her kitten companion had not returned from whatever morning task occupied her, so M’Rith the faerie began her daily journey alone. Jays screamed a warning...silly birds, as though she would hurt them...while deer only bounded a short space away, leading little male fawns with their orderly rows of spots and their haphazardly-spotted sisters. A skunk returning from nightly rounds passed her near the stream, heading for a homecoming drink. The industrious little creature, bright eyes fixed on the ground, barely spared her a glance. He couldn’t; he was too nearsighted. Still, even faeries gave a wide berth to skunks searching for provender.
The sun waxed more powerful as she went, causing a fine sheen of dampness beneath her gown. It was the price she paid for growing large, to feel some discomforts as mortals did. Pausing, she drank cool water from the stream before entering woodlands bordering the fields where humans grew sturdy crops of oats and barley. But they were not yet edible. Fruit trees were not bearing yet, either, and M’Rith reluctantly conceded she would need whatever food the villagers had left her that day. Their encroachment upon lands her kind had once inhabited could not be stopped. Forced to subsist on their superstitious offerings, she never willingly let them see her, but drifted along byways and cart paths like a puff of smoke or a vagrant spring breeze, shielded by a glamour.
The ground was wet on the bottom slopes of the fields, where some tree limbs had been brought down by the weight of water on their almost fully-sprung leaves. She touched the trees gently to convey a healing. They were silent friends, affording shelter and edible nuts, and she hated to see them wounded in the course of natural happenings. Seeing them sawed down and made into dwellings was worse. She did not mind that humans took straw for thatch, nor was the burning of dead wood too painful. They could not conjure a spell to warm themselves, after all. But the murder of living trees...oh, that was hard. Thinking of it always put her into a state of discomfort.
The slow tolling of their church bell set her teeth on edge. The religious ones were no friends to her, apparently viewing her as a challenger to their version of the divine being. Her steps slowed and dragged as she approached the village through a tree line offering partial concealment in the unlikely event anyone could see her. That had happened only a handful of times in a hundred years.
The preoccupied humans would be no threat that day. She could see people walking by ones and pairs and small groups in the direction of the building with the bell, but it was not their usual day to go there. Something felt amiss. They were quiet and wore dark clothing heavier than needed.
Tiptoeing parallel to their street, scarlet-clad feet barely touching the ground, M’Rith slipped along behind houses, among gardens and bright clouds of feeding butterflies which parted graciously for her passage. Insatiably curious, she was attracted by the sight of so many people going to the same place. Rarely was there anything interesting to watch. As a rule, they were dull creatures consumed with toil.
Her lips drew back slightly when she saw the man wearing a white collar emerge from the bell building. Many people were friendly to the Fair Folk, but not that one. She paused to watch from behind a venerable old apple tree where she had often taken fruit—only the windfall or the requisite three apples set out by a human seeking a favor. She never robbed. M’Rith had done no injury to any human, though she could.
The collared man was speaking to a younger man. M’Rith shuddered at the sight of that one, too. He was the blacksmith, possessor of iron, which could mortally wound her. She had seldom seen him, only his wife who left her many good things in hope of having a child. M’Rith had sprinkled her path with faerie dust because of it and eventually seen that the woman was increasing. There should be a child by now, but the blacksmith was alone. The collar man put a hand on his shoulder, then took him into the bell building. All the others followed, silently. The doors of the building closed and the village was deserted.
Yes, things felt distinctly odd. But it was a good time to look for breakfast.
There were juicy pickings that day. Beside doors and in gardens she found bread and jam and eggs, milk, honey in the comb, even some mead. There were small cakes, rare treats with delicious sweet icing, and round cookies of ground nuts with flour and precious sugar. It was unprecedented—a banquet. Only a few dogs left on chains challenged her and they were easily avoided. M’Rith had brought a wrap to carry food, but she hadn’t enough room for everything, so she ate as much as she could stuff in her cheeks and tried stuffing the rest elsewhere—in her gown, in her wrap knotted round her neck, anywhere.
Consumed by a haze of gluttony, she was startled by the pealing of the bell a little while later. She jumped, casting her eyes about, but no one was there. Not a single soul. Curtains of homespun and lace fluttered in the breeze through open windows, their owners nowhere to be seen.
The bell didn’t usually ring after the humans had gone inside their building. Now it rang a handful of times, not the long call it uttered on the customary day. When it ceased, birds resumed chirping. The sun shone warmly and rainwater left over from the night pattered from trees onto eager grass nearly growing before her eyes. Though things looked normal, she felt an undercurrent, enormous and implacable. And then, suddenly, she understood.
The doors of the bell building opened with a groan. Several men emerged, a large box carefully balanced on their shoulders, while the collar man and the blacksmith followed closely. Behind them, what looked like everyone living in that village followed, from the oldest granny to babes in arms. Taking careful, constrained steps, they turned not in the direction of the houses, but the other way. Chilled, M’Rith realized they were going to the place of dead humans, which her kind avoided. They barely understood death.
Many people behind the two men were weeping, stumbling as if their legs would barely support them. M’Rith paused to watch, because she had the strongest feeling the blacksmith’s wife lay inside that suffocating box, and her child with her. M’Rith knew the women did not always survive their confinements. Men had spoken of it in the fields, sometimes, with a quiet and terrible grief.
“Return to your beginning, human lady,” she murmured—a warm whisper on the breeze, floating and then forgotten, like a rose petal.
Her pleasure in the brilliant day spoiled, she retreated from that place of sadness as quickly as faerie feet could take her."
