Three Twisted Knots

It was just light when I woke up. I’ve been getting up really early so I can spend time reading, and usually I don’t see anybody. But this morning, I was singing; I don’t know why. Well, I do know why, but it’s for another entry. I was singing a Bonny Swans variant of the Two Sisters, and another voice joined me on the chorus. First of all, it was in tune, and secondly — who knows that song except folkies and their poor, poor children?

Prince Blaise, that’s who. Who knew he could sing? I mean, I guess it’s not outside the realm of possibility that anybody you meet can sing, but I guess I tend to make judgments about people, same as the next person — yes, I know I’m saying “people” a lot — and he just didn’t seem like the singing type. Then again, I guess I got rather a harsh impression of him when we first met, and I’ve been assuming he’ll want to rake me over the coals somehow for my mistake earlier. But that’s a digression. I complimented him on his singing, thanked him for singing along, and then we were talking, just like two normal people having a conversation, same as you would with anybody. He did explain a little more about how so much of the Seelie mistrust of things outside the sithen has to do with history, which many of them were there to see. I can go with that, but I try to take everybody as themselves rather than judging them as a group. I hope I didn’t sound like too much of a bitch when I said that to him, but, yeah. I mean, obviously, you’re thousands of years old or something, maybe you get to make a few more generalisations about people — but aren’t things always changing? Don’t societies change? Don’t all beings have some kind of evolutionary cycle? I know I as a person, a fae, a being, whatever, have an evolutionary cycle. I’m smarter now than I was a week ago, smarter then than I was six months ago, and I feel like I’ve aged 10 years in wisdom in the year since I’ve been away from my first reality.

And there I go again, rambling. I think this happens because I write these things before I go to sleep, and something just turns on my ramble switch when I’m sleepy. Oh, well. At least these pages aren’t all covered in Nathaniel Ballard’s name and little hearts. I mean, at least they’re not all covered in Nathaniel Ballard’s name and little hearts. I can’t think what I did to deserve somebody like him in my life, but I’m going to have to be really good to thank whatever powers there might be in the universe that brought us together.

Note: Get red pen. Scratch that out. It’s really unworthy of me. Next thing you know, I’ll be writing bad poetry.

So, yeah. We talked for a little while, and then he asked me if I knew how to open up my magic and feel someone else’s. Of course I didn’t know that, so he walked me over to one of the pavilions and asked me to lean up against him. This was easier done, he said, if we were touching. He said my mother would have done this with me when I was in the womb, but he would have to put his arms around me so I didn’t get scared and run while we were magically connected. Now, in just about every other place I’ve ever been, including here, if just about anybody had come to me and said something like that (exceptions: Alec, Isabella, Nathaniel, Valene, Aoibh [but she’d never do that] Gwythyr [because he could compel me]), I’d be like, “Creeper!” and I’d just run. But that kind of shit doesn’t happen in the sithen, I’m sure of it. And Prince Blaise, I don’t know. A) he’s getting plenty if the state of dress of the womenfolk he runs around with is any indication; and B) as mercurial as his moods seem to be, I don’t really get a ‘creeper’ vibe off him.

So we sat together on one of his couches, me leaning up against him, him with his arms around my belly. He told me to close my eyes and feel his magic. I know, sounds super-creepy. But it wasn’t. I was just gradually surrounded by this warm, nurturing life energy that felt so supportive — and suddenly I could feel that it was he who’d helped me when I fell during the ceremony the other night. He was the one who helped me up and helped me be part of that. He told me to reach inside myself and find my magic. And then, I was the horse, the unicorn, whatever, and I was on a hill with the moon behind me, and nobody could ever catch me. My granny told me the story of Rhiannon when I was a little girl. I was that horse. Of course, that horse really was the moon, and I wasn’t the moon. But I was like that horse. We looked out over the sithen and saw how everything connected to everything else. We saw how it was built, how it was nurtured like a child and how each one of the sidhe was a part of its construction and its continuing life. I don’t know how to describe how we saw that, but we saw it, and it was all clear to me then. It’s clear to me now as well, but it would feel odd to articulate it — which I’ll take to mean that it shouldn’t be spoken outright. I knew I was seeing a mystery. He showed me how to find him, how to find his magic if I was ever lost, how to get home. Home. That always has and always will be this place, even though this place might move or change, the dancing lights of the sidhe, how bright they all are, the life-giving light of the tree, how everything revolves around it and doesn’t stop, ever.

And then I saw that he was a great lion, impossibly wise and old, and sometimes impossibly tired. And the horse, and me, or me and the horse, or both of us, or the one of us — it all ran together — just walked into the fire, and everything was good. He showed us the gates through which dead souls go so we would know where not to go. And then we were back, on the couch, in the sithen. Everything was different.

I don’t want to admit this part, but that magical closeness, I don’t know. I wanted to kiss him. But I didn’t, and I’m pretty sure it was because was looking out for me in my vulnerable state. And, really, now I don’t want to kiss him. He’s beautiful, of course: I guess we all are. But to tell you the truth, it’s not enough, beauty.

I spent a little while after that just being the horse. It was really nice.