#frayja

Six days late.

The first time, panic had latched onto her branded scruff and shaken her until she’d nearly shattered. This time, the knowledge was a malignant pulsing pit in her belly, a placeholder for the little parasite itself.

“It helps,” Dag said from the bench behind her. “It’s pretty noise, with or without him.”

She shook her head. “Not me. I can’t even touch the guitar without…” she made a noise in the back of her throat.

A whisper of bare feet on stone, and cloth against skin. A presence slipping down beside her. Angharad’s scent: graceful and full and sweet.  Plooploop; Angharad’s feet in the impluvium. A gentle, sad smile lived in her presence like sunlight.

They were quiet for a time.

“My mother used to tell me a story about a woman who became a crow,” Angharad said. “The sky would look down on the woman and get jealous of her hair, because it was blacker than night and shone with blues and purples more brilliant than the day.”

Keen said nothing, resting her elbows on her thighs.

“The sky wanted the color of the woman’s hair, so one night it sent a piece of itself, flecked with starlight, down to her as she slept. Because the magic was old and the sky had been separated from humans for so long, it would take a long time for the sky to take the woman’s colors. The woman slept for many years, and when she finally woke up, she found she’d grown old, and her hair wasn’t the color of night anymore; it was the color of glimmering starlight. She turned her face to the sky and saw that the day was bluer; the night was blacker. She cried, because the sky had stolen her colors and her life. ‘Why did you take my colors,’ she asked the sky. ‘I didn’t take them,’ the sky said. ‘I traded them. Look; your hair is just as beautiful now as it was then. It’s just a different color.’ But the woman wanted her black hair back; she’d grown it herself, and it belonged to her. So she spent the rest of her life learning the sky’s magic. Or trying to. She practiced and practiced until her back bent and her hands gnarled and her eyes dimmed, but all she could make was small bunches of black that gleamed beautifully but made an awful croaking racket and pricked her with sharp, demanding beaks.”

Angharad fell silent. Keen brushed the tips of her fingers across the surface of the water, miraculous for its simple existence. The piano bench creaked quietly under Dag’s seat.

“The sky, meanwhile, had been filling with her creations, their wings broad and black, so shiny that they painted the sky with rainbows every time they beat their wings. The sky was dazzled and filled with gratitude for the woman’s generous, colorful gifts.”

Keen heard the subtle scrape of skin on even stone, and Angharad sat behind her, legs folded on top of a worn, threadbare cushion. She gently tugged Keen’s shoulders straight, took up the length of Keen’s hair in her hands and began to comb it gently through her long fingers.

“On her deathbed, the woman gazed at her failed experiments surrounding her in a rustle of shining, cawing blueblack, and wished only to become one of them, to have a little bit of her stolen beauty back.”

Keen’s milkwhite eyes slipped closed. She filled her lungs with lavender-scented calmness and sighed as it infused her. The mournful sweetness of Angharad’s voice lulled her, and Angharad’s hands in her hair slowly untangled the knot in her belly.

“That night, the sky sent a piece of itself, moonless and starless, down to the woman. And thanks to her diligent practice, the magic didn’t take as long. The next time she woke, she was shining, silky black, from beak to talon, and her wings shimmered and caught the sun when she spread them. She turned her face to the sky and croaked ‘thank you’ over and over, and flew as high and fast as she could, full of joy, full of color.”

Silence roosted comfortably in the high places of the Vault, broken only by a tongue of water licking the lip of the impluvium. Angharad twined Keen’s hair into an undulating rope, and Keen felt little tugs as she tied it off with a rawhide strip. “Thanks,” she whispered without turning, not trusting her voice.

Angharad’s thin, warm arms looped themselves around her shoulders. Keen leaned into her embrace and snugged her arms around Angharad’s. A vise clamped around her heart.