Chapter 02
In the way of the village, they buried Lily’s father that evening, despite the storm that continued to rage around the point where the cemetery had stood since the first inhabitant had died and been laid to rest there, looking out over the sea, her grave swept clean by endless winds. It was there that the people gathered at dusk, the lanterns they held in their hands casting a golden pale over the hole that had been dug as soon as news of the drowning had spread. Beside the hole lay the body, wrapped from head to toe in whitest linen, and tied around the chest with a red cord.
The village had no priest, as they followed nothing that would be called a religion by anyone who happened upon them murmuring into the waves before launching their boats or saw them pinning small bags of salt or bunches of mistletoe inside the pockets of their greatcoats before setting out after dark had fallen. Yet they were possessed of rituals as dark and as strong as any performed by the servants of God, and it was Alex Henry who led them through them. He stood now beside the mouth in the earth, looking out at the sea and waiting. When the last of the sun had fallen behind the horizon and the first and brightest star of evening was visible even through the cloud-washed sky, he turned to the assembled villagers.
"It is time,” he said, and nodded to the two men on either side of him. Moving like ghosts, they took the head and feet of the body that lay on the grass and gently lowered it into the ground. Then they stepped back, and all eyes turned to Lily, who stood at the opposite end of the grave from Alex Henry. Her mother had refused to come, locking herself in her bedroom when they came for her, and so she stood alone looking down at her father’s shell.
"It is the child who begins it,” said Alex Henry, and Lily walked to the pile of earth beside the grave and took a handful of dirt. Clutched in her fist, it was cool with rain, and she felt it compress into a ball as she squeezed it tightly. Turning to the open hole, she held her hand over her father’s chest and crumbled the earth in her fingers. It fell in a fine rain over the linen, dusting the body as cinnamon might fall over freshly-baked bread. When her hand was empty, she turned away.
One by one, the villagers filed past the grave, each one taking up a handful of earth and passing it over the body of Lily’s father. This much of the death ritual they shared with those outside their world; even the children understood the importance of covering the body with earth from their hands. Lily watched as fathers led to the grave little ones barely able to walk and helped them cast their offerings into the darkness.
When they had all passed, Alex Henry nodded once more to the two men beside him, and they began to fill the remainder of the hole, their shovels working like clockwork arms as one lifted a spoonful of dirt, turned it into the hole, and then swept away as his companion echoed the sequence. Lily knew that they would be done quickly, as tradition demanded, and that before the moon rose to its highest point her father would be wrapped in earth.
The villagers began the walk back to the small group of houses, and as the last person passed by her, Lily fell into step with the others. Moments later, the song of death began, the first high keening note sung by the woman with the most beautiful voice. The others joined in after her, and soon the night air was filled with the sounds of many voices. Lily sang too, taking comfort in the words of light and love and renewal. Her heart was sore, and she knew that she would cry more tears in the days to come, but as she watched the procession of gentle light wind its way down the sloping path and into the welcoming arms of the village, she sang with joy.
They came to the doors of the great hall, and went inside. As they did at each death, they would spend the night together, eating and drinking around the fire. The youngest would be told stories of the creatures that came out with the moon and of things that danced beneath the sea. They would hear of the fair folk and the selkies, of the White Ladies and the kobold. They would be told of foolish Sarah, who had followed a man with the feet of a goat into the forest and returned seven years later, her mind half gone, and of the young man who listened too closely to the promises of a vodyany and been drowned for want of a kiss.
Like the funeral, this was the way of the village. Lily could remember with great accuracy the first time she’d sat in the hall, on a winter’s night when the sea wind hurled snow sharp as razors and they gathered to celebrate the death of old Elsbeth Applegrim, almost two hundred years old when finally she’d turned from her baking and crumbled into dust on the kitchen floor. Lily had sat, eyes wide with terror and excited wonder, as Alex Henry had told the children why the villagers wrapped their dead about with red cord.
"The soul,” he said in a voice like wine seeping from its cask, “is tied to the body like a lover to a lover. When one dies, the other wanders alone and afraid. We bind the soul to the body so that it remains at sleep. If we did not, the world would be crowded with souls looking for their missing selves.”
Lily had seen ghosts. Everyone had. They appeared at moonfall and in the hours afterwards, pale forms that walked the fields and peered in windows. In general they were stupid creatures and not to be feared, but Lily knew that sometimes they gathered someone who looked like their missing selves into their arms and carried them into the next world. They did it for love, that was sure, but still their touch could bring death.
Sitting by the fire and looking into the dancing flames, she thought about the red cord wrapped tightly about her father’s chest. She imagined digging through the earth and cutting it, freeing his soul so that she could see once more what he looked like in motion. But she knew also that it would bring pain. Years ago, a young man had done exactly that, sneaking away from the safety of the great hall to the cemetery and unearthing the body of the girl he’d loved. Her spirit had risen, and he’d reached out to her, only to feel the life taken from him as she reached cold hands into his chest to warm them.
The flames warmed Lily’s skin, and the voices of the people talking around her provided a soothing murmur upon which she let her tired body rest. She thought about her mother, locked in the bedroom of the empty house. She pictured her huddled against the wall of the bedroom, staring at the locked door and fearing any knock that might come against it. She wondered if her mother would open the door should her father’s wraith come calling for her, or if she would put a pillow over her head and scream until morning drove him away. Her mother did not believe in such things, she knew, but she also knew that belief had little to do with whether a thing was true or not.
She was woken from her half-sleep by the touch of Alex Henry’s hand on her shoulder. “I have something for you,” he said, handing her two packages wrapped in blue paper and tied with string.
Lily looked at the bundles. “What are they?” she asked, turning them over in her hands.
"Your father’s birthday presents to you,” he said. “I brought them from the house.”
Alex Henry walked away and rejoined the children waiting for him to tell them another story about Black Hannah or the silver-eyed foxes that darted beneath the fir trees on Midsummer Eve carrying messages between the worlds. The other villagers were busy about the hall, tending the roasting meats, sewing, and remembering other nights like this one.
Lily picked up the larger of the two packages. It was surprisingly heavy in her hands. As her fingers worked at the knotted string, she imagined her father wrapping it, his big hands deftly knotting the thin twine as though he were mending a tear in one of his nets. Even more clearly than she remembered his face, she could recall the look and feel of his hands, so often had he held her close or lifted her up, laughing, and spun her around until the sky and sea melted together and she felt the pounding of the earth’s heart in her own. His hands with their long fingers, the skin cracked from pulling the rough nets into the boat and from lifting heavy tangles of fish, flapping and dripping, from the ocean.
Finally, the knot came free, and the string fell away from the package. Lily tucked it carefully into the pocket of her dress before pulling apart the paper to see what lay beneath. It was a hand mirror, a small round of polished glass set in a silver frame. It looked very old, and Lily wondered where it had come from. It looked like something that would sit on the dressing table of a very rich woman, for her to hold in her hand and look into as she fixed her hair or applied color to her lips.
Lily picked it up, feeling the warmth of the metal in her hand. The back of the mirror was decorated with seahorses and the outlines of crashing waves. She traced her finger over the fine work, feeling the ridges and valleys of metal beneath her fingers. It was fine work, done with care, and it was one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen. She turned it over, and saw in the glass her own reflection. The edge of the frame was also worked up into waves of silver, and her face was ringed by falling crests of water. She looked at herself, and was surprised to see that the glass reflected nothing of the room behind her. Only her face was visible, and no matter how she turned the mirror, she saw nothing else. The glass itself was very old, its surface seemingly thin as paper. Yet within it her features were shown perfectly, as though her mirror image were even more alive than she herself was. This disturbed her, and she turned the mirror over in her lap and picked up the second parcel.
The smaller gift turned out to be a small wooden box. It was perfectly smooth, with no inscription or design marring the deep red skin of the wood. Nor were there any hinges or locks; the top was carved to fit perfectly over the bottom. Lily lifted the lid and found inside a seashell. It was unlike any she had ever seen before, perfectly round and about three inches across. It was pale blue in color, and its surface was swirled with violet, like the color of the clouds just after a rain. She picked it up, and found that its sides curved back under itself, forming a hollow shape. Around the sides were tiny holes forming intricate patterns all around the edge.
Also inside the box was a note. Lily picked it up and unfolded it. Written in her father’s clear, fine hand was a short letter.
Dear Lily,
I found this shell many years ago, when I was the age that you are now. I have never seen another like it, just as I have never seen another like you. As is so with other shells, when you listen to this one you will hear the sea. But sometimes you will hear much more. I took it with me when I left the village, and when I needed to return its sound led me back.
Always remember that I love you.
Lily folded the note carefully and put it back in the box. Then she lifted the shell to her ear and listened. The sound of the sea roared through its emptiness, carrying with it the sharp cries of gulls, the slap of waves, and the whistling of the wind where it sang freely while tossing the waves into the air. It was the familiar sound of her life, and she had heard it many times echoed in the hollow of a shell. But somehow the sound from this shell was more alive than it was in others, as though instead of merely capturing the voice of the sea, the voice originated from within the simple curve of the shell’s walls. She put it back into the box and replaced the lid.
It was nearing midnight, and the villagers were gathering in the center of the hall to dance. The frenetic movement of hands and feet, they knew, kept away anything that might wish them harm. The rush of bodies moving about the room was sure to create a circle of love and warmth into which nothing dark could pass. And in movement and dance and laughter, they were reminded that they were alive, that their arms and legs could still respond to the sounds of fiddle, flute, and bells.
Joining the others, Lily stood in a ring of women, forming a large circle around the center of the hall. The men stood outside them, also in a ring, their faces bright with smiles as they stamped their feet and prepared to begin. In the corners, children laughed and giggled as they made their own small circles in imitation of their elders.
Picking up his fiddle, Arnson Pimball sounded the rush of light notes that signaled the start of the dance. When Kaylie Featherfew joined in with her flute, the women bent their knees and began a slow walk to the right, their hands clapping a beat. The men moved in the opposite direction, circling widdershins while their heavy boots made sounds as drums.
Lily watched the faces of the men pass by her as she moved in place between Anne Cooper and old Tressa McSnare. Each one was familiar to her, but she found herself mesmerized as she studied the lines and shadows of eyes and mouths, searching for something that would recall her father’s face. As each man passed her, she paused a moment before looking at the next, as though in the time between her father would rise from the dead and come to take his place in the dance, as he had many times before.
When the circles had passed one another and each man had seen each woman’s face, the music began to quicken. Kaylie’s flute ran like a brook beneath the notes twirling from Alex Henry’s fiddle, and the dancers prepared to begin the chain in which each woman grasped the hand of the man across from her and the circles intertwined, with each woman spinning around each man and moving on to the next. Stopped across from her childhood friend Peter Layman, Lily reached out and took his hand in hers.
Immediately, she was struck by a vision of Peter as an old man, his children, yet to be born, gathered around him as he lay dead upon his bed. The image was a peaceful one, and Lily sensed nothing but love in it, but it’s impact was as if someone had struck her in the head with a rock. It overwhelmed everything else, and she could feel every emotion as though it were her own. She knew the confusion felt by Peter’s youngest daughter as she looked into her father’s face. She sensed the separation that was just beginning to soak into the heart of his widow as she gazed into the future and saw herself alone. All of these things exploded into her mind in a single instant, battering her with sensations.
Before she had time to recover, she was passed to the next waiting hand, belonging to Hugh Van Woojin, whose cows provided the village with milk and cheese. As his calloused fingers closed around hers, the vision of Peter’s death was swept from her head and replaced with one of Hugh, his face contorted in agony, stretched in the field while his cows looked down at him with puzzled expressions on their placid brown faces. Lily felt the crazy jump of Hugh’s heart as it beat out of time and pain shot through his chest. She saw clearly the heavy stone he had just attempted to lift, and felt the rawness of his skin where it had fallen from his hands as he’d stumbled under its weight. Then his eyes opened, taking in the familiar faces of his herd and the sun flashing above them, and he died.
Again Lily felt herself passed to another hand, and again a vision came. A vision of death. She closed her eyes tightly and tried to concentrate on the music. She attempted to grasp onto the notes that tumbled from Alex Henry’s fingers and ride them, letting them lift her above the pictures that flashed across the wall of her skull like the ever-shifting images of a kaleidoscope. But time and again she was jolted away from the music as first one scene and then another played itself out in the moments during which she touched the hands of the people she’d known all her life. She saw how each would die, most peacefully, but some in great pain and others by their own hands.
The dance seemed to speed up, and Lily felt as though she were being twirled in seven directions at once as her body spun and swayed, kept afloat by hands that, while holding her up, were also the cause of constant terror. Her blood shrieked in her veins, and she felt her skin grow overheated until she was sure she would burst into flame. Through the haze of her visions, she saw their faces, laughing and gay, dodging in and out of sight. She wondered what she looked like to them, if a bright smile covered the dizzying fall she was taking inside of herself. She wanted to scream for them to stop, but as when she saw her father’s death, her throat was locked tightly. All she could do was surrender herself to the movement around her and hope that it would end soon before she was torn apart.
Tableau after tableau bloomed and died in her mind while the music played on. She saw Gudrun Caster felled by a sliver of lightning and Arles Hewer taken by the vengeful shade of his brother, Shane Egan choking on the bone of a haddock and Molly Pillsin leaping from the cliffs afterwards with their child still in her belly. She saw women and men in their beds, dead while sleeping, their eyes closed as if in dreams. She saw hanged men and women killed by poisons. She saw a woman trampled by a horse and a man whisked into the darkness as the Fair Folk lifted him out of his boat. Most painful for her were the drownings, the faces floating up blue and lifeless as her father’s had. One after the other they came, and she was helpless against them.
Then the music stopped, and Lily fell to the floor. As quickly as they’d come, the visions swept out of her mind, leaving her cooled and empty. She opened her eyes, and saw that people were staring down at her, concern worrying their faces. Maxon Ashe reached down to help her up, and she twisted away. “No!” she yelled in a voice hoarse as if she’d been screaming for an hour. “Don’t touch me!”
Maxon drew back, confused. Lily couldn’t tell him that only moments ago she’d seen him felled by a bear hungry from a long winter of starvation. She only knew that if he touched her the vision would return, and that her heart would tear from any further pain. She lay on the floor and wept while around her people spoke in whispers of madness and enchantment.
Then Alex Henry’s face broke through the crowd, and he was beside her as he’d been that morning. “The visions,” she said softly. “They’ve come back.”
Go to Chapter 03
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