BY
KAT HOWARD
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I cast a curse.
Young. I barely even know how to think of the word now. Young is seven when you are nine. Young is twenty when you’re twice that age.
Through my own fault, I have lived over nine hundred years.
There are few mercies in a life stretched so long. The greatest has been one I thought at first to be a horror: that I too am cursed out of my own self, and into the shape of a bird. A black-winged war raven, one of Morrigan’s own daughters. It is a different sort of witness, this one with wings.
The other mercy is this: The story is finally ending, and I have survived to see it.
* * *
Niamh’s flight into Shannon Airport had been a misery, storm-plagued and sleepless. Not content to simply harry her across the Atlantic, the storm chased her overland, hissing down rain and setting a chill into her bones. The trip to Ireland wasn’t a happy one to begin with, but this truly seemed excessive.
On the drive there, windshield wipers scraping uselessly against the torrent, knuckles white on the wheel, she thought she saw a swan, lightning-white against the clouds, blown on with the wind. She shook her head as if to clear the image and focused more fiercely on the road.
The small house on the edge of nowhere smelled like her great-uncle Aífraic, a combination of wool and peat and pipe tobacco, like his ghost still rocked in the old wooden chair near the hearth. Everything had happened too fast and too far away, and now all she had left of him was an empty house, his boxes of papers, and a promise she had flown thousands of miles to keep, a broken-hearted bird on her loneliest migration. Niamh poured a glass of whiskey and sat in the rocking chair and wept.
* * *
It’s fitting that the end of the story comes in grief. That’s how it began as well. The grief of a husband, for a wife lost. The grief of a sister for a sister gone.
For a moment, it seemed like he and I could pass through our shared grief together. That we could both honor her memory and make it our own. But then I asked him for a child, for one that would be ours. He refused, and my grief turned to acid in my heart. It turned to a curse on his children, the ones that were his and hers and never—never, as he told me again and again—mine.
I am the only one left living who knows all the pieces of this story. That, too, is a curse.
* * *
When Aífraic had asked Niamh to come back at the end, at his end—“come home,” he’d said—he’d told her it was because there were things she needed to know.
“Then why not tell me now?” she’d asked, speaking the words through the salt of tears.
“I can’t tell the story until it’s over,” he’d said. “It’s not rightly mine to tell until then.” He’d given no more of an explanation, other than to tell her the answers were here, in his house on the edge of the sea.
And now, here she was. Too late to ask any questions, too late to hear the answers in Aífraic’s low, warm voice. Another sorrow, to set stone-like on her heart. But she had promised, and she was here, and so she would search for the echoes of whatever stories remained.
She found the notebook of poems half a glass of whiskey later. Tucked in a box full of crumbling papers and notebooks gone thin with time, Swan Poems in pencil inside the front cover, less a title than a category. Three downy white feathers were pressed beneath it.
The pages were worn and yellowed, and all covered with words. Some had numbers as well, dates meant to mark the span of their writing. Or no—something else. If they were dates, those numbers in Aífraic’s looping scrawl, they would have made him impossibly old. Niamh pushed that puzzle aside, and read.
Aífraic had always been fascinated by swans, and he had passed that fascination on to her when she was a child. Niamh remembered a summer when she was perhaps thirteen, walking the sand in too-big borrowed wellies, even the extra socks she wore not thick enough to quiet the sensation that at any moment her feet might go out from under her.
“There used to be swans that lived there.”
Her eyes had followed the direction of Aífraic’s hand. It did not look as if anything could live on the island of Carricknarone, its jagged outcropping sharp as ravens’ teeth in the frigid Sea of Moyle.
“Swans? Out there?”
The cloud-chased sun sparked off the foam of the waves, the water moving like ripples of shattered glass.
“Not recently. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago. A strange enough occurrence that people still speak of it.” That was the sort of thing that mattered to him: people telling stories.
“Have you ever seen one?” she’d asked.
Aífraic had laughed, a great bark of sound that startled seagulls into flight. “And how old is it you think I am, girl?”
Still, every time she looked out onto that water, Niamh also looked for swans, imagining the white of their feathers reflected in the white of the waves.
She built up the fire, and read the poems.
* * *
I barely thought of them, those transformed swan children, for the first three hundred years I had set the curse to run. We were separate things, and their story was no longer mine, or so I thought.
Besides, my powers were growing. As punishment for what I had done to his children, my husband had cursed me into the shape that terrified me most: a raven, an avatar of blood and war. But war is a story that is always told, and the more times a story is told, the more power it has. So I flew, and I witnessed, and I counted the dead until I no longer knew the numbers for their counting, and then I counted again.
And the worst was that all through the counting, through that terrible subtraction, I felt myself grow stronger.
* * *
Some of the poems were in Irish. Niamh’s heart clenched as she looked over the unfamiliar words in the familiar handwriting. She had taken the required classes at school and remembered how to say a phrase here and there—small talk about the weather, or the cuteness of someone’s dog—but not much more than that. She had always felt there would be time to relearn, later, and now it seemed that later had snuck up and tapped her on the shoulder when she wasn’t looking. She thought, though, that she could make out what must be the word for swan, eala, from the frequency with which it appeared.
The margins were full of swans, sketches in smudged and fading pencil.
The poems were works of hardship, of longing. Of deep-felt desire for a place where one could fold their wings and rest, could take shelter from storms, could know small and quiet comforts. They didn’t seem like poems about birds, but rather poems about exiles:
Imagine a story as you would imagine a bird on a great migration. One that passes out of sight for so long as to be forgotten. One whose return is a herald of some great newness.
Imagine a story as something that returns.
Reading them, she remembered something Aífraic had told her once: that some swans had human speech, those that had been enchanted into their bird form rather than born into it, but as part of their curse, they could speak only poetry.
“Why would that be a curse?” she had asked.
“Who ever listens to poetry and believes it to be true?” Aífraic had smiled his answer, but it was a smile like a knife, sharp-edged and keen.
* * *
Something in me shifted after that. A change of heart, if not of appearance. It is all well and good to be an avatar of war, to glory in the blood and the battlefields, but after so long, and so many dead . . . The Morrigan may have been made to endure such witness, but I was not.
There had been new stories told in Ireland for years, stories whose telling drowned out the older voices, that rewrote old truths to serve new ideas. Stories that changed goddesses to saints and everyday magic to holy miracle. Stories of a God of Peace, who offered forgiveness. I wasn’t sure I believed them all—I myself was a story, and I knew how little truth was in my own—but this forgiveness happened after a journey to a place. And the thing about a place is, you don’t need to believe in it for it to be there. And so, unbelieving, but desiring forgiveness all the same, I flew.
They called the place a Purgatory, and gave its keeping over to their Saint Patrick. I flew there and stayed the required time, but had no visions of my sins or my redemption, only of time, stretched out and silent before me.
Even now, they tell the story of the raven who flew to Purgatory. It has been twisted and metaphored into nothing I recognize beyond the journey, but it matters to those who hear it, and so who am I to say that the story they tell is wrong?
* * *
Aífraic had been a collector of stories, always. He was as interested in the laughing ones exchanged at the pub, embellished and altered for dramatic effect, as he was in those written down in formal cadences. He listened to them, and shared his own, trading one for another, using words to warm a cold night. “I’ve always felt that stories die a bit, when they aren’t told,” he’d said. “So this is how I make sure they’re remembered. This is how I keep them alive.”
The stories Aífraic had loved best were full of birds—a king cursed into bird-shape for angering a priest, and a great goddess of war who sometimes took the form of a raven. Niamh’s favorite had swans: a witch had cursed four siblings, a princess and three princes, into swans and then forbidden them from landing on Ireland for nine hundred years. It was a sad and lonely and beautiful story, and hearing Aífraic tell it had made her heart ache in the same way that a slant of light on water or the shine of white feathers in the sky did.
But visits had fallen off after the summer she turned thirteen, and then stopped altogether. Her parents had decided to emigrate to America—to join the flock of wild geese that were constantly flying from Ireland’s shores. And while she called Aífraic her great-uncle, there was no actual tie of blood between them. Their ties had been those of proximity, a kind neighbor and an eager audience, the shared love of a place and its stories.
After the move, they wrote letters sometimes, sent holiday cards, but it wasn’t the same, and silence filled the spaces where the stories had been.
Still, she thought of him occasionally, particularly during the fall migrations when flocks of birds would cloud the sky, and she missed his stories, and so she’d tried to find them on her own.
She learned that the swans in her favorite story weren’t cursed by a witch, but by their mother’s sister, and that the curse lasted long enough to see the conditions of its fulfillment made impossible. The fact that they turned human again at the end—just long enough to be baptized by an extremely convenient priest—before crumbling to dust . . . Well, she wondered who would ever want to hear a story like that except for possibly a priest.
Everything she loved about the story was gone.
She had almost stopped reading then. The betrayal of the story felt like a kind of death, like a curse that overwrote her memories. Someone had taken magic, and turned it into nothing more than propaganda. But then she’d thought back to something Aífraic had said once: that sometimes stories got so old, they forgot the truth of their telling. So she looked to see if there were other versions of this story, ones that remembered.
She found them, variant texts and preferred versions, but they all shared that same unsatisfying ending—the brief transformation to something flightless and ancient, just long enough to be baptized. As if that was the point of the story. As if there were more magic in priests than in the old gods of Ireland.
* * *
There was a blessing, inside of the curse. The children would wear swan-shape for nine hundred years, but that shape would also protect them from age and its related mortality. But unaging is not undying.
It was Fiachra who died first, blown from story by wind and storm, and by my curse, which kept him from safety. When the news of his death came to me, I flew on a pilgrimage across Ireland, to the shores of the Sea of Moyle. It was a journey of atonement, though I knew such a gesture was too small, too late. Half the time of the curse was gone, and neither that nor their brother could be returned to those who were left.
The three remaining swans were there, and with them one other. A fisherman, Aífraic, who took to the sea and sailed his boat among them and listened to their stories.
* * *
Aífraic had flown to America when her parents died. He was the only one from Ireland who had. “I thought you needed someone here who knew their stories.”
After the funeral, they’d gone to a local pub, held their own private wake. Aífraic knew stories that Niamh didn’t, like that of the local terrier who vigorously hated laundry hung out to dry. “Sure, he’d steal anything he could reach, and then run off with it. One day, he managed to get ahold of a whole line, and ran up and down the street, your ma’s delicates flapping like flags behind him.” Niamh had laughed until she cried, but these tears were easier than the funeral ones.
Aífraic’s presence at the funeral had been enough for her to reconnect with him. She visited when she could, and each time, they’d go to the beach, and they’d watch for swans. She asked him once about the swans in the story she had found, the priest and the baptism that seemed so alien to the magic that the rest of the story had. “Who’s to say what the right ending is? Maybe it’s the one that sounds like magic, or maybe it’s the one people want to hear. Maybe only those in the story know the truth of it.”
“But it doesn’t fit. It feels like two different stories stuck together by someone who didn’t care.”
“Well, maybe someone wrote an ending because the story isn’t yet over, and there’s little comfort in unfinished things.”
He had always seemed impossibly old to her, as adults do to children, but in these last visits, she could see the patterns of age on his face and in his step.
“I’ve no right to ask this,” he’d said, “but I hope that you’ll come back. Come home. At the end. When my story finishes.”
Niamh had squeezed his hand, and promised that she would.
* * *
I wonder sometimes how things would have ended, had not Aífraic transformed himself from fisherman to guardian of stories. Ireland changed and changed and changed again in the years after I spoke my curse. The old gods faded from memory, and their stories faded with them. Even my name—Aoife, Eva, Eve—is now better known in another woman’s story.
But the swans and their story had Aífraic. He listened and he recorded and he made of himself a witness. He wove his thread into their tapestry, and kept it there through will. He lived hundreds of years past his span because of this, outliving even Aodh and Conn, both shot from the sky in the years that Ireland tore itself apart.
Through it all, through war and time, and even until the end, until the cancer that burned through his blood extinguished his life, Aífraic listened. And he wrote. And he remembered.
* * *
The cry of seabirds woke Niamh with the dawn, the sun striping gold across the waves. She pulled on a jacket, boots, and stepped out into the crisp morning air.
There, out on the rock of Carricknarone, was a swan. Elegant and lovely, and utterly alone.
Niamh closed her eyes at the pinch of her heart, at the full-bodied wish that her great-uncle could have been with her there, to see this.
When she opened them again, the swan had left the island, and was swimming, very near to shore. She opened her beak and spoke in poetry: Imagine a story as something that remains.
Then the swan stepped between the tide and the sand. As she did, her bones shifted, her feathers fell away, revealing a human woman. “Thank you for being here, Niamh. Aífraic told me so many stories of you.”
Niamh realized then that Aífraic had seen this before, had heard the poetry spoken by this very swan. That he had told her a true story, one that only now was ending.
“I think,” Niamh said, her voice windblown and rough, “that he told me your story, too.”
“It has been long in the telling,” the woman—Fionnghuala—said. “I am glad you are here, to see me through its end.”
“He meant, I think, to be here, too.” Crying now, the tears mixing with the salt spray on her skin.
“If you will remember me, remember this, it is more than enough that you are.”
The woman fell quiet. Niamh took her hand, held it as the woman dissolved into sand and water, and one white feather, floating on the tide. Then she went back inside, to that final part-written notebook, and she wrote of the death of a swan.
* * *
And so the curse I cast was no more. All four of those children who were never mine—Aodh and Fionnghuala, Fiachra and Conn—gone to dust and feather and story.
I am still here, still raven-winged, and I do not hear the steps of Death behind me. Perhaps that is a curse. Perhaps it is a story, unended.