Stars in the Well

If the magnificent stand of trees had not been located so close to the great island strewn bay, they might never have met.

But it was, although when Brigid first discovered the forest her eyes barely noted the beach beyond it. She was too busy inspecting the great crag jutting up through the trees and admiring the view. The teal blue sea was part of that view, but only part, a complement to the green hills spreading in the other direction. Her iron shod staff of rowan rang against the rocks as she climbed the crag, each tap shattering a slab of rock and slowly forging a stairway up the mountain. As she reached the top, the wind whipping her flame colored hair around her face, she lifted her arms in joy and gave a wild howl of triumph that echoed for miles in every direction.

When the echoes had died away, she combed the hair out of her eyes with calloused fingers and grinned. “This is where my new workshop goes,” she announced.

It took the better part of a year to build. The timbers went up as the autumn leaves came down, the hearth was mortared in a night before the first frost, and the first pale flakes of snow found her on the great peaked roof hammering in the last shingle. All winter the building rang with noise as if in contrast to the silent earth hammering, sawing, carving. Brigid stalked from end to end of her great den like a restless lioness, adding a room here, a carving there, a tapestry here, a great iron staircase there. When spring broke through the slush, she cleared out some of the trees and began to build her smithy. The urge to make, to manifest, to work change, was on her and would not be denied. Building the open shed was no hard thing, but it took all her power to move in the great iron anvil on which she worked her craft. When it was finally settled into place, she rolled up her woolen sleeves, heaved her hammer out from beneath her bed, and went to the shed with the joyous reverence of a woman approaching a long lost lover. This year will be the best yet, she promised herself.

This year would be different, indeed. When the spring tides slowly bore Lyr to the surface of the ocean as they did every year, he awoke to the jarring pound of hammer blows echoing from the crag. Something is happening, he thought slowly, shaking his head to clear the fog from his brain. The motion stirred his long black hair and it whirled about him in the water, tangled with seaweed. As he broke the surface, though, it hung limply and clung to him wetly, forcing him to scrape it from his face with salty fingers wrinkled from his winter sleep at the bottom of the sea. Nothing is ever as beautiful out of the water, he thought irritably. My dreams are never as good when I lie on the land. And now this noise...He squinted up toward the crag, half blinded by the morning sunlight. “What a way to wake up,” he grumbled.

Water dripped from his sodden clothing as he climbed up the path to the crag; it trickled down the rough hewn steps that hadn't been there last time he had climbed it; how many years ago had that been? His dreams often stole the time from him; it might have been a decade or five times that. The great dark hall loomed above him; it seemed somehow wrong and frightening, a blot on the greening landscape. The pounding came not from the hall, though, but from a rough shed at the very top of the crag. Trembling with apprehension and the chilly spring wind in his wet tatters, Lyr made his way around to the open wall and stopped, the words freezing in his mouth.

A woman was pounding on an anvil with a great hammer, working some long straight piece of metal. She was a good head taller than him, with taut, muscular arms and a long braid of sunset red hair down her back, wearing only a worn leather apron around her hips. He watched the muscles on her back flex, webbed with old burn scars and slick with sweat, as she wielded the hammer. Gathering his courage, he called out to her to stop, his voice barely audible over the pounding. She ignored him. He called again, and again, and on the third time her arm froze in midair and fell with a grunt. She looked over her shoulder at him, green gold eyes glaring from under bushy red brows. “What?” she demanded.

“I - the noise ” he stammered.

“What? Speak up. I can't hear you.” Her voice was loud and rough, grating on his ears.

Lyr took a deep breath. “Could you please be quiet,” he said as loudly as he could, but it came out sounding like a bleat.

“Quiet?” Brigid stared at him blankly. For her own part, she had been jarred out of the hypnotic, trance inducing sound of her own work by his faint voice, and her usual reaction to the interruption of her creative urges was irritation. The figure standing in the doorway was slender, almost too thin, and dripping wet, dressed in tattered rags with a necklace of shells. Great dark eyes looked out of a thin, pale face made starker by the blue black hair plastered to the sides of his head. “Who are you?” she grunted.

“I’m - I’m Lyr. Please, the noise...It’s terrible. I can’t think, I can’t hear anything else, I can’t sleep...”

She frowned. “I don’t forge at night,” she said.

“I like to sleep in the daytime, sometimes,” he murmured.

“Lazy,” she grunted. “Well, it’s my work. I can’t work without making noise. If it bothers you, go somewhere else.” Lifting her hammer, she set to work again with a determined flurry of blows that sent him fleeing from the smithy in despair. Hands over his ears, he ran to the cliff just overlooking the ocean and leaped off, his form changing into a dolphin just before he struck the water.

The next day, though, he gathered his courage and came again to her smithy. This time she was facing the open wall and paused when she saw him. “Oh, it’s you again,” she grumbled. “What do you want now?”

This time he squared his shoulders and glared back. This isn’t for me, he told himself. It’s for my friends. “I must speak with you,” he said softly but firmly. “When Saille comes, you must not make this noise from the new moon to the full. It is very important.”

She leaned her scarred elbows on the anvil. “Why?”

“Because that is when the whales come into the bay. Every year they come here, here and nowhere else on the coast. They come to mate. The noise may upset them.” He paused. “Please.”

Brigid frowned for a moment, trying to concentrate on his words. His voice was low and mellifluous, like the murmur of the waves, and his great dark eyes....you could get lost in eyes like those. “Well, I suppose,” she said slowly. “It’s only for a week or two, after all. I suppose I could find other things to work on then, my woodworking perhaps, or blow some glass.” She shrugged. “Let me know when they come, and when they go.”

He smiled suddenly, a wide, delighted smile that made her heart suddenly flutter beneath her ribs. “Thank you, milady. And as for the rest of the summer, I shall have to resign myself to retreating to the ocean's depths when your noise disturbs me.”

She shrugged again, strangely embarrassed, an emotion she rarely experienced. “No lady. I’m just Brigid, that's all there is to me. I’m Brigid, and I make things.”

Lyr began to wander about the smithy, fingering the various tools and implements hanging about. “You made all these?” he asked, an odd tone to his voice.

Brigid gave a grunt of assent and plunged the piece of iron she was working on into a tub of seawater next to the anvil. It hissed and steamed, and she pulled it out with a snort of satisfaction. “Not bad,” she said, laying it down on the wooden bench that stretched across the back wall. “Not a bad day’s work.”

“What is that?” He stared at the cooling metal, but was afraid to touch it. “A plow, to turn up the dirt and plant things like the farmers do?”

She laughed, a long and lusty laugh that made him flinch. “Stars above, no! It's a sword.” She went to a far corner and lifted down something long and narrow, swathed in soft leather, and unwrapped it. The blade she hefted out was a long gleam of sunlight on steel, the hilt glowing softly golden. “This is the best one I ever made; I’ll never give it away,” she said proudly, her green eyes shining. Turning suddenly in midstep, she lifted it and gave a few practice swings. The steel edge sang through the air.

Lyr instinctively ducked. “That’s one of those things to kill people with, isn’t it?” he growled accusingly.

“Yep. Isn’t she a beauty?” Brigid sheathed the blade and frowned at him. “Why are you looking like a scared rabbit? Haven’t you ever been taught to fight?”

“No. Never. I hate fighting.” He was trembling. “Do you actually enjoy it?”

She tossed the red braid back over her shoulder. “Oh, I can do it well enough if I have to, and there is a certain beauty to the movements of a good combat, but it’s not my first calling. It never held a candle to making.”

Lyr turned away, trying to look at anything besides the gleaming deadly blade. His eye caught an odd thing hanging on the wall and took it down. “What’s this?” It was a V shaped piece of metal with a number of wire strings of different lengths strung across it.

The artisan grinned broadly. “Something I created a while ago. It’s for finding the proper temper of the metal. See?” She picked up a small hammer and struck the newly finished blade; the cooling metal rang like a clear bell. Then she reached out and plucked the longest string; a matching tone echoed through the shed. “That means I got it right. This is a guide for forging temper - see, I’ll show you some others ” She went fishing enthusiastically for other bits of metal, eager to share her accomplishments, but she stopped at the sound of the faint notes echoing in a haunting pattern. Lyr was plucking them with an intent fascination, picking out a strange sound on the scant five strings. An odd lump swelled in Brigid's throat and she plucked the gadget from his fingers. “That’s not what it's for,” she said resentfully, trying not to look at those dark reproachful eyes.

“Oh.” He turned and began to wander slowly out of the shed. “Sorry I interrupted you.” His slender form made no sound in the trees as he went into the woods, but Brigid stood silent as a post for a long time as if she was listening for something. Her eyes were gazing absently at the wet footprints on the floor.

That night, though, she heard him. He was sitting on the cliff above the water, singing a strange melody, trying to recreate with his voice the sound of the wire strings. The haunting call tied a knot beneath her ribs, and she clutched herself to get rid of the hardness in her belly, but it did not dissolve. She couldn't sleep with the sea sound and his echoing voice in her ears, no matter how she covered her head with pillows. Finally she gave up and went to her writing bench. “Might as well do something constructive as long as I’m to be kept awake,” she grumbled, but she sounded very much as if she was trying to convince herself. She had created an alphabet of her own some time ago, and used it to write about the processes used in her various work, so that the secrets would not be lost should she perish. Tonight, though, as she put pen to paper with Lyr’s song in her ears, her hand moved as if of its own accord and she began to write strange things, words that flowed together and made no sense, things that hurt, words that cried even from the paper. Frightened by her work and the pain deep inside herself that all her carefully labeled salves and bandages and healing techniques could not help, she leaped up to throw the parchment into the fire. At the last minute, though, her hand stayed. Foolish to waste good parchment, she scolded herself. Better yet to put it away and paint over it another day.

So she laid the paper back in its drawer and went to bed. The music had ceased, but she lay awake for a long time. The truth was that she could not bear to burn what she had written, although she was even more afraid to read it again.

When Lyr arrived at her workshop the next day, she was not there. Instead, she was still in her hall, sipping bark tea with dark circles under her eyes. He knocked timidly on the door and she beckoned him in without looking at him. He stared around at the magnificent yet unpretentious hall in awe. “You did all this,” he said. The odd tone was back in his voice as he surveyed the elaborate wall hangings with their intricate knotwork designs, the carved and cushion piled furniture, the oaken dragon's head adorning the stairway banister. Everywhere was bits and pieces of her work; you could hardly sit without knocking some unfinished thing to the floor. She swept a pile of embroidery from a bench and motioned for him to sit. “What,” she said dully.

Lyr sat uncomfortably, staring at the embers of the fire. “I want you to make something,” he began, feeling very out of place in this lioness’ den.

“That’s what I do. What is it.”

“That thing you have, with the strings on it...I want a bigger one, with more sounds, more notes. I dreamed of it all last night.”

“What would it do?” She stared at the bottom of her mug.

“Do? I would make those wonderful sounds on it, better than I can sing. You must help me. I can see it in my head, but I don’t know how to make it real, to make it be. You’re the only one who can do that.” I have never wanted anything like I wanted this music, he thought to himself. I lay awake all last night writhing, I wanted that music so much. I haven't known want like that in centuries.

“What price should I set on it?” she asked.

“I’ll - I’ll bring you pearls from the bottom of the sea, and coral, and anything else you want....I’ll go away forever and not bother you again, if you want that,” he trailed off. “What price would you ask?”

Don’t sing, she thought to herself. Don’t make that music that tears my heart open. But she said only, “I can’t promise it’ll work. I don’t even understand what you want, really; it will take a long time and a lot of work and you’ll have to be there the whole time, to tell me if it’s right.”

He looked down at his grimy bare feet. “If you don’t think you can do it, milady...”

“Can’t do it!” Anger welled up in her. Who was this layabout, to tell her what she couldn’t do! “Of course I can do it! I’m Brigid, and I can make anything! But first!” She rose from where she was sitting and pointed an imperious finger at him. “If you're to be hanging about my house, you’ll have to be better attired than that! Come with me.” She dragged him unwillingly into her bedroom, where she dug through a chest until she found a tunic and trousers of sea blue, and new sheepskin lined boots, which she tossed at him with the threat that he’d better get out of those rags because she was going to burn them in ten minutes whether he was in them or not. He decided it was better not to find out if she was serious.

So it was that Lyr invented the harp, and Brigid made the first one for him. It took weeks to get the design right, and longer to fashion it properly. They argued about it frequently, but the arguments always seemed to go the same route: he would insist on having it a certain way, and she would insist that it was impossible, and he would remind her that she had said she could make anything, and she would go away grumbling at his impertinence and come back the next morning with a way to do it to his wishes. When it was finally built of hard maple, carved and joined and stained, and the strings had been forged, strung, and tuned, she presented it to him formally as she presented all her assignments to her clients. He grabbed it gleefully, turned, and ran like a deer out of the shed without so much as a word to her.

Not even a word of thanks.

Brigid was so tired from working the whole night before that for once she was too weary to be angry. She fell into her bed expecting to sleep and instead heard the sound of the harp, accompanied by Lyr’s voice singing. Singing, as he hadn’t done since that day he had come to her.

She tossed and turned and cried. She hated him. The music wandered all over the room, uncontained, drifted out over the open sea, through the trees....Everything seemed to be hushed and still, listening to him. The harp sounded like the waves of the ocean, and his wordless song was like the cry of the gulls.

That night the whales came.

Lyr, on his perch above the bay, was delighted and sang a mating song just for them. They must have heard me and come for my music, he thought, intoxicated with the beauty he was now able to make.

In her room, her face tear streaked and her nose red, Brigid lifted her arms and prayed for something to happen, to make him stop, to make him stop making her feel.

Something happened.

It rained for ten days.

During the rain Lyr sat gloomily under a shelter of trees, his harp carefully wrapped in sheepskin to protect it from the damp, unable to play and too depressed to sing. The whales frolicked in the bay; the rain made no difference to them. He could see their tails splashing in the water and absentmindedly ran a finger over the elaborate embroidery at the edge of his sleeve. The tunic Brigid had made him was the first good clothing he had worn in a long time, but did she have to make it quite so fine? Did it have to remind him every time he wore it how competent she was, how many wonderful things she could do? He had dreamed the harp up, but it was she who had made it. Without her skill, he would still be writhing with longing on the beach. If I could have done it myself...But I couldn't. I have wonderful dreams, my life is spent for the sake of dreaming, and that's exactly what they stay. Dreams. You can’t play a dream. She sits up there in her warm house in front of her hearth and she makes things, real things you can touch and hold. All I have to touch and hold is dreams. I hate her.

In her hall, Brigid wandered aimlessly from one project to the next. Her needlework did not hold her interest, nor her weaving nor carving, and she had promised not to forge. Her mind seemed uncharacteristically foggy and she could not seem to concentrate. Maybe I’m coming down with something, she thought, and dosed herself with willow bark and chicory tea just in case, but it didn’t help. Things, I’m surrounded by things, she thought, dropping gloomily into a chair. When I’m sad, I work, When I’m afraid, I work. When I feel as though my skin will soon peel off from frustration, I work. It’s my answer to everything. And what have I got for it? Things. And not one of them does me any good now.

It was then that she remembered something she hadn't thought about in months. No, she said firmly to herself. I won't look. It's no good for me, dwelling on these maudlin things. But her usually iron will was as soggy today as the outside earth, and she found her feet carrying her to her writing table, found her hands opening the chest, found her eyes scanning the parchment she had written in the middle of the night.

The first line was all she had read when the parchment fell from her fingers, but it had burned itself into her mind for all time. Written in her own shaky handwriting was: “A craftsman works with her hands. An artisan works with her hands and her mind. An artist works with her hands, her mind and her heart.”

I am not an artist, she thought to herself, eyes filling with tears. Of all the hundreds of things she had made, how many had she let be filled with love or hate or rage or joy? How many times had she let herself be filled with those things, until Lyr’s music had stripped the steel from her soul? Or had she rather mapped out everything in her head first, making each creation safe, with expected results? Safe and lifeless. In a fit of enraged tears she tore through her house, dashing everything in sight to the floor. Crockery shattered and iron candlesticks clattered against the shards. Weeping loudly, she flung herself face down on the hearthstone and beat her fists against its hard roughness until they were raw and bleeding.

An hour later, she lay there still, spent and emptied. Although no harp played outside her window, she could almost hear its sound through her head. There was something not quite right about that music, she thought to herself. Something missing. Just as there is something missing from the things I make. Something.... Oh, I wish it were sunny and the whales gone and I could forge. The sound of my hammer beating always makes me feel better, like everything is moving along properly.

The rain beat down on the roof, one, two, one, two, like the beats of her hammer, and Brigid’s green gold eyes grew large and thoughtful as she lay staring at the ceiling and listening to it. One, two, one two. “Yes,” came a faint whisper from the stuffy hall, and then there was a sudden banging and clanging as she began to search through the piles of her many things.

A week later, the rain left, and so did the whales. That night Lyr sat on the still damp beach and took his precious harp out of its wrappings. His heart beating with anticipation, he lifted his fingers to the strings and began to play. The music lifted him, entranced, into another realm deep inside him, where he was one with the drift of the waves and the whirl of the wind. This was better than dreaming. Much better.

Then he heard the tone of his music begin to change in spite of him. There was a sound in the distance, like rolling thunder, and it was forcing the undirected wandering of his music into a pattern. He couldn’t stop it. It was like dancing with a partner that would not let him go. Coming out of his trance abruptly, he turned and looked for the source of the noise.

It was that woman again, sitting on the sand not ten feet from him. She had come quietly while he was playing, and she was beating on an odd looking wooden thing with hide stretched over it; its sound was like booming thunder and its rhythm made him feel jerked about like a puppet, as if his limbs were going to move in spite of themselves to the beat. “Stop that!” he yelled at her, louder than he'd ever yelled in his life.

She looked shocked, taken aback by his voice; she had been in a trance of her own making. “Why?” she asked. “Don’t you like it?”

“No!” he yelled. “It makes me ” He broke off; it had been a long time since he had felt this angry, and he was not sure what to do with the feeling. “You’re ruining my music. Go away,” he said between clenched teeth. “Maybe you think you can make anything, but you can’t make me do anything you want!"

“I - I was just trying to make it sound better,” she said, bewildered. “It’s a drum; it makes music, like your harp, I thought since you liked music you'd like this ”

“Not like my harp,” he grated out. “My harp sounds like the wind on the water. That sounds like a herd of elephants.” He picked up his instrument and stalked off down the beach. “The goddess of noise,” he flung back at her. “Make your noise in the daytime. Don't bother me when I'm making real music.”

Brigid sat on the sand half in tears. She had worked for a week to perfect her creation; had worked, she hoped, with her heart as well as her hands and head. The drum was carved with runes and symbols, real birds and animals and not just her usual abstract designs. It didn’t have the sleek asymmetry of the harp, but it was something....She had hoped so keenly that he would be impressed, would see that she, too, could touch the place inside you. This time, however, she got angry. What right had he to tell her what was real music! This stretch of beach was as much hers as it was his, anyway! She felt like setting something on fire, but instead she set her hands to the drum and beat out a rhythm, loud and angry, a challenge. Come back and face me, the drum cried. Don't run off and hide in your deeps. Come face me and you will see power!

He did come, of course. When Brigid put her will behind something, very little could resist her. He came, harp dangling limply from his hand as he stumbled down the beach toward her. As he came close, she saw that more than the salt sea stained his cheeks. “Stop,” he whispered. “You’re hurting me.”

She felt like making him do something, just to hurt him more, but his eyes were large and dark and she stopped with a grunt. “You deserved that,” she said accusingly.

He stared at her. “I wondered what force it was that drives you. Now that I’ve heard it, I....it hurts.”

“I wondered why there was no dream in my work. Hearing your dreams hurts me even more.”

Lyr slowly dropped to his knees next to her, trembling. “It makes me want to leap up and move, to do something, anything. It frightens me.”

She looked down. “It makes me feel unsure, as if nothing is certain and there are no rules. That frightens me even more.”

“You can’t be as frightened as I am,” he grumbled.

Her green eyes flashed at him. “Oh? Why not?”

“Because you’re not the sort of person that gets scared. If something scared you, you’d just go after it with a sword.”

She laid a hand on her chest. “How can I go after my own heart with a sword?”

He didn't say anything to that, and she began to drum again, but this time she drummed her pain. It was a jerking rhythm, spasming her body over the instrument, but her hands kept moving. Lyr lifted his hands to his harp, and played along with her, the strings working the beat with a poignant melody. The music welled up in Brigid until for the first time in her life, she began to sing. All the words that she had not written came forward, and she sang of life and death and pain and joy, knowing them for the first time as familiar. Lyr’s voice soared above hers in a wordless descant, the cry of a gull, a wolf, the wind. It was better than dreaming, better than making.

Afterward they lay panting on the sand, not speaking. Brigid’s body was tight with joy and she instinctively flung her arms out in triumph. One hand touched Lyr’s pale fingers, and to her surprise they closed on hers. Eyes widening, she looked over at him. He was regarding her with an unreadable expression, and then he brought her hand gently to his lips.

A hundred emotions ran through her, making her body tremble in their intensity. Then they stopped, and she could only think one thing. No. This can’t be. I'm too big and loud and clumsy and I have a rotten temper. How can this man with the soft hands and delicate skin want anything to do with my scars and callouses and gruff manner? “This will never work,” she said.

Lyr stared at her in apprehension, his heart beating against his ribs. She’s so strong, he thought. She could crack me in two with her will alone. But then anyone could crack me in two, losing whole decades lying about doing nothing but watching my dreams pass me like birds on their way south. What can she think of me...besides disgust? “You’re right,” he said. “This will never work.”

For a long moment they lay there, staring at each other. Then Brigid said, “But I don’t much care.”

“Neither do I,” said Lyr, and he rolled over to kiss her.

Her lips were surprisingly soft.

His arms were surprisingly strong.

When the sun rose three hours later, they watched it stain the sea violet, then fuchsia, then golden. “Why do you want to change everything?” he whispered in her ear. “Why aren't you ever satisfied with things as they are?”

“Why do you spend your life drifting?” she retorted. “If you float with the current long enough, you get washed up on the rocks.”

He pulled away and sat up. “We're too different. This will never work.”

She sighed and nodded. “This will never work,” she echoed. Then she reached out to brush a strand of his black hair out of his face. “Want to come home with me?” she asked.

He turned to look at her, red hair spread out on the sand like a fiery halo. “Yes,” he said, smiling. “But only if you teach me how to make more strings for my harp, so I can replace these if they break.”

“All right,” she agreed. “But you have to teach me how to swim.”

“Deal.” They went up the mountain hand in hand.

It was a long winter, the first winter that Lyr had spent in front of a fire and not at the bottom of the ocean. They fought a great deal, but the fights all seemed to follow the same pattern - they would irritate each other, Brigid would bellow, Lyr would sulk, both would ignore each other for about an hour, and then someone would pick up a harp or a drum and it would all be forgotten. Neither of them could ever resist the music.

People came to stay at Brigid’s table more frequently now that she was not so absorbed in her work, and when they heard the music they left with something glowing within them that had not been there when they arrived. Stories began to circulate about the house of bards.

When the spring came, Brigid learned to swim, although she had a tendency to keep floating to the surface (“too much hot air,” said Lyr) and Lyr learned some basic careful forging, although he kept burning his fingers (“too little patience,” said Brigid).

One spring day, Brigid was trying to decide on a picture to paint on the front door to symbolize them both. It was a difficult task. “Fire and water just don’t mix!” she said in exasperation.

“Draw a flame over the sea,” Lyr mumbled from where he lay sprawled in the sunlight, dreaming.

“That wouldn’t make sense,” she snapped. “The flame would fall into the ocean and go out. Would you put an icicle in a bonfire?”

“I knew this was never going to work out,” he mumbled.

“So did I.” Brigid sighed and went on into the house. The door stayed blank.

That night, Brigid found she had run out of water because Lyr as usual had forgotten to fill her washbasin. Shouting a string of curses, she threw the bucket at him, bellowing that he had better get her some water or she was going to split him in two and have his skinny carcass for dinner. He wandered out the door with the bucket in hand, still half in, half out of some dream - and came running back in five minutes later, breathless with discovery. “Come quickly! Come on!” he panted, grabbing Brigid and dragging her protesting out of the house. Hauling her to the well, he pointed one slender forefinger at it. “I’ve found it! Look!”

“What, did you drop the bucket in or something?” she grumbled, glancing into the well. “I don't see anything.”

“No, no! Don’t just look! Look!”

She gazed at the well for a long moment. “I see water,” she said. “And stars. Just stars.”

“That’s it,” he said triumphantly. “That’s us. Our symbol.”

Brigid blinked. “Stars?”

“Stars in the well. For me, fresh water instead of the sea. For you, stars instead of flame. We can meet in the middle.”

She put her hand out and touched the surface of the water. The reflection rippled and became distorted. “But they never touch,” she said. “They only look close. It's an illusion.”

Lyr shrugged. “Oh well,” he said. “I thought...But this will never work, you know.” His hand stole into hers and squeezed.

“Yes,” she said. “This will never work.” There will be a circle of stars and water on the door by tomorrow night, if I am still Brigid, she promised him silently, squeezing back.

I’ll try if you will, he promised her wordlessly. Then they turned and went back into the house, already humming the tune for the next song they would create together.