Black Spot — Part 5

Life was beginning to feel like one inside joke that everyone was in on except me. I’d walk into rooms where children had gathered, Fionna sometimes among them, and all would fall into a hush, as if my presence spoilt their fun. I couldn’t blame them. Those days my humour had soured beyond recognition, and long gone were the old jokes and games I’d make up to pass the time.

I started working every moment of the day, until my hands were sore and callused and my mind too weary to imagine what life might have been like beyond the boundless fields that waved like silver flags in the moonlight.

Years passed without Black Spot appearing on our roads. As they did, I became a woman with no purpose but to continue the lonesome routine I’d inherited. Weeks spent without a word or glance to anyone but my work made me disagreeable and restless. Fionna pitied me, so I hated her, but she was the only one who ever made an effort — however feeble — to save me from this fate.

Whenever I looked at her, I could only think of what she took from me.

It was at the end of my sixteenth year that the war began, and the King called up all the men in the country to take up whatever weapons were available to them. Many of the boys in the village were too young to be considered men or soldiers, but I suspected Phillip was of the same humour as myself, bored of the same sights day after day. And so because I couldn’t stop him when he decided to pack up his few belongings and join the war efforts, I helped him.

The night was warm and silent as we waited for dawn. The boys had no plan to sleep and miss first light. We were all kept awake by their pacing and muttering, and the scrape of heels on the floor. Ciara leaned against my leg and laid her crutch on the floor. She’d put the youngest of the orphans to sleep, taking over my job for the night. I overheard her telling them a story and leaned in hoping to hear one I’d taught her, but the floor creaked, and she shut up, and once again I was an outcast.

I turned instead to the boys, who were busy dreaming aloud what they wished to see of the world once the war was over. Phillip seemed undisturbed by the idea he might die, and held his shoulders square like a soldier, as if a guardian angel were perched on either side, or rather he felt too grown to show fear. Months had passed since the beginning of the war, and no news had reached us here. Fionna inquired on the last battle when she went into the other village, but all she found out was that the Lord of the Manor had gone at first call, and not yet returned.

I pitied his wife, first to lose her child all those years ago, and now not knowing whether her husband was dead or alive. Though I hadn’t done so in years, I closed my eyes and prayed for her.

We carried on in our silence, mutely spending the last of our memories like coins, telling each other stories in barely-whispered phrases, that were so familiar to us all we could have read them written in clouds. I was once again involved, being the oldest and remembering the most. And so when dawn finally arrived, bringing a fog with it, we weren’t worried about being forgotten, or forgetting him.

I couldn’t help but envy that my younger brother, as I’d grown to love him, had been given the chance to see the world once I’d resigned myself to the same corners I was born to inherit.

Before he set off we gathered in a circle and prayed together, and as our heads were bowed in silence, and our hands held like they were when we were all children, scared of nothing and everything, we heard that once-anticipated clatter of hooves advancing on the dirt road.

Ciara stuck her head up first and caught her balance on her crutch once her little hand left mine. The rest of us followed, squinting into the sunrise as a black shape drifted between the fallow fields, growing closer and closer by the second.

Fionna sat with her on the porch stair, their golden hair blowing in the soft breeze, dazzling the hot morning. We couldn’t hear their talk, but I knew from the way all the children huddled a distance away, all knew who she was. All but me.

The black horse padded around the field where it had been left, thumping the ground in boredom every so often, but remained obedient and patient, unlike myself. I left the group and walked myself toward the house, and as I did, eyed the black mourning attire of the rider now occupying my old seat beside Fionna.

My shadow loomed between the two, and they stopped talking. The woman’s face was bright, rosy despite her clothes and her grief. The hair tucked under her sheer black shawl matched the braided bracelet on her wrist, which matched the one Black Spot always wore when we saw beneath his glove.

“This must be the one,” she said, smiling with her whole mouth the way my mother used to. Fionna nodded, and stood up before I could say anything, giving me her seat. “The one in the window.”

A cold night walk filtered through my memories, following a silvery trail of ash and moonlight. A Castle at the end of it.

“Are you a witch?” I asked at last, the question that had been on my mind since that night.

“You are clever,” she laughed. “I’m not an evil witch. I only had to get my kids to bed safe and sound. My husband, the one who brought them to me, he was the real magician. Taking care of me all those years… he was a blessing.”

“Were you sick?”

“Oh, for many years, since we lost our child.” She twisted the bracelet on her wrist. “He was so kind, especially at my worst. I look across this village now and see all my children. For a night, they had a mother, and I had my baby again, to watch her growing up.”

“Why did… you never want me?” I asked, the question flying from my tongue with no decorum. She merely smiled again, apologetic as the clouds overhead tinted pink in the sunrise. “The last time he came here… he took Fionna, but it was my turn.”

Her countenance shaded. “The last time he came, I was hours from death.” Fionna shuffled toward the group of children and wrangled them away from the horse. The two little soldiers had dropped their bags and become children again, gazing in admiration at the mother. “She is… she was once my sister.”

I knew that feeling too well.

“I asked for her that night. I was hoping we could be sisters once more, even if only for a few hours.” She sighed, letting the warmth of the morning wash through her hair. It lifted the black shawl up and off her head. It pooled carelessly over her shoulders. “I’m taking my children home now, and my sister, too. Do you think they would like that?”

Ribbons in their hair, pearls under their pillows, full bellies, and a mother. What more could a child dream of? And yet I could not answer.

Would that great house, that I once imagined to be a Castle, become like this village to me, too? I had seen more in one night that I had all my life, was I doomed to be so blind in a castle as in this cottage?

“I might never have been your mother,” she continued, “but I remembered you.”

“What?”

“The girl in the window, who walked all the way alone. It took you almost all night to make the journey that would be only an hour on foot. You must have gotten lost, or walked so slowly.”

“I was… looking.”

She tilted her head to one side, scoring out a judgement. I could leave here, be in comfort forever, have wealth and a mother again.

Anything I could have dreamt of before that night.

“I cannot come with you,” I admitted. “I… I never knew the world was so big until I saw so little of it in one night. I can’t leave this place without knowing I’m going to see the rest of it one day.”

The woman brushed my hair out of my face, the sides of her eyes creasing when she maintained her smile. There was no disappointment.

“The only thing of my husband’s that came back from the war was his horse,” she said, nodding toward the creature blackening the field before us. “It has seen so little of the world, and all the worst of it. He once told me, if it outlived him, it ought to go to the girl who walked the dirt road like it was the road to the rest of the world.”

At her words, the great heavy head of the black horse turned to look at me.

“When we leave this place,” said the woman, “it’ll be yours. You can go anywhere in the world, and have no worry for the rest of us.”

The village laid empty for a year, and then collapsed from the weight of our absence, rotted over and began anew. Another village moved in atop the ruins and grew instead of fermenting in its same ancient shape, filling the fields and the valleys adjacent with people and families — memories.

I never went back to see it, but I saw a thousand like it in all shapes and sizes. I saw harbors and mountains and valleys that giants once bathed in. I saw witches and Kings who taught me more than one person ought to know in a lifetime.

All the while I knew that all it took to take me home was to turn around and twist the reins, and in a beat I would find the same smiles, the same hands, and the same hearts I was born to love waiting for me.

Black Spot had died before I got to know him, but I carried his legacy across the world, telling his story, and mine, and my village’s, wherever an ear was lent to hear it. And I have never woken up and not smelt freedom in the air.

The End.