OR
SOME LIES ABOUT FLOWERS
BY
AMAL EL-MOHTAR
“You can’t have flowers made of claws.”
—Alan Garner, The Owl Service
HER FIRST MEMORY IS A loss of sun. Where there was warmth on the white crown of her head, there is now cold shade, and two round shapes blotting out her light, blinking.
Her second memory is a loss of thorns. Where she was sharp, fierce, protected, she feels now smooth, soft, and vulnerable, pressed against green and yielding grass.
Her third memory is a loss of height. She has never felt so far from the sky, so lost to the wind.
Threaded through all this, the loss of roots unspools in her like a scream, the loss of rain, the loss of earth, the loss of everything she knows as food, and she has never, not in the bleakest midwinter or the driest midsummer, felt so hungry.
Small wonder, then, that she kissed Lleu Llaw Gyffes at their first meeting.
She was only trying to eat him.
* * *
Blodeuwedd lies naked in the orchard earth, trying to grow roots.
The day is miserable and gray, but not cold; her skin warms the mud beneath it. She breathes in long, deep breaths, and wills the hunger blooming in her center to still.
The hunger is always an ache, a shadow pushing against the inside of her skin. Today it is her head that hurts, her brow that pulses with pain; other days it is her calf, her breast, her belly.
She has been a year in the house of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, and has learned many things: how to run a household; how to use needle and thread; how to receive guests. She eats meat fresh from her husband’s hunting, drinks beer from her women’s brewing, listens to music from traveling minstrels singing the praise of great lords and wizards making marvels of the countryside. She has learned to endure her husband’s presence and make use of his absence, and she has learned to treat the hunger in her like a sucking wound.
But she does not know how to cure it. All she can do is pack it with wet earth, fragrant air, and grit her teeth against being turned inside out.
Lying in the orchard helps. Whenever Lleu leaves—as he often does—to hunt, or fight, or do whatever else men do, she slips from the house to find a corner where none will seek her for the space of an hour. Whether it is the touch of loam against her body, or the fact that it is hers alone, her secret, she can’t say—but it helps.
Bees thrill to her fingertips, buzz their puzzlement at her shape. She opens her mouth and lets them sip from her there, tastes the pollen on their dainty legs. She imagines the fields they’ve scoured for her; she imagines them carrying the wetness of her tongue over the walls, across meadows and arbors, spreading her across distances farther than her eyes or voice can reach.
The thought trembles in her like light on water, and she feels something release. She licks her lips and lies there, perfectly still, and does not stir when it begins to rain.
* * *
On their wedding night, Lleu told her the story of his birth, and hers too.
“. . . and when Arianrhod was made to leap over my uncle Math’s wand, I tumbled out of her, and my uncle Gwydion scooped me up. But because I was proof of her shame, my mother, Arianrhod, decreed that I would never have a name unless she named me, nor be armed unless she armed me, nor wed to any woman of any race on earth. But my uncles were cleverer than she. Between them they tricked her into naming me without knowing who I was; they tricked her into arming me by making her fear invasion. But last, and best, my uncle Gwydion gathered the blossoms of oak, meadowsweet, and broom, and he shaped them into you, Blodeuwedd, and that is how we come to be married, my love, and why we lie together this night.”
His eyes were like clouds that bore no rain, like stone begging to be broken through.
It sounds, she thought, as if your uncles forced you on the body of Arianrhod, and when she tried to deny you, made me for you to force yourself on.
But his hand on her arm had the strength of a gale, and she knew this thing, this man, could kill her as easily as his uncles had plucked her from the fields—unless she swayed with him, kept quiet, and smiled.
All her words bent into a flower budding from her tongue. She bit it back. When he kissed her, she filled his mouth with blood and petals, planted her silence in his body like a seed.
“Blodeuwedd? Blodeuwedd!”
She hears the name as if from a distance, as if filtered through dark cloth. She opens her eyes: Lleu, in the mizzle and the gray, his face flushed so hot she fancies she can see steam rising from his cheeks.
Her peace shrivels, and her head pounds with pain.
“What are you doing, woman? What were you thinking? You’ll catch your death—”
He drapes her in the wet, muddy robes she’d shed, scoops her up off the ground and covers her with his body.
She lets him. She does not ask why he’s returned earlier than expected, and makes herself very small in his arms.
“The shame of it, my lady, if anyone but I saw you thus—”
She looks at him, and looks at him, and thinks, You don’t see me.
“What’s this,” he says, lifting a gloved hand to her brow. “Have you bruised yourself, my love? Best you go to bed and warm up. I’ll call my uncles—”
“No,” she says, with her whole body. “No, no need to trouble them,” in a voice like the rain. She reaches up, twines her fingers through his, and slowly draws his hand back from her cheek, smiling. “I will rest, as you say.” Then, mechanically, “It is good to see you home so soon.”
He relaxes. “I only returned to accompany a visiting scholar from the abbey, and must leave again quickly to make up the time.”
She nods, winces as he kisses the dark space on her brow. It darkens further.
He sees nothing in her green and gold-flecked eyes of how much she longs to tear his gentle face apart.
* * *
A month after the wedding, Lleu’s uncles, Math and Gwydion, came to visit.
Blodeuwedd felt the candles flicker at their arrival, remembered her world dimming in the shadow of their heads. But she received them as a lady should, calling for food and drink and entertainment, then drew back with women’s work between her hands.
“Are you happy, Lleu?” asked Math, as if Blodeuwedd weren’t there. “Is she everything a wife should be?”
Lleu, who was indeed happy, smiled. “I am; she is beautiful, gracious to guests, and keeps the household in order.”
“That’s as it should be,” said Gwydion gruffly. “That’s how we made her. Meadowsweet, useless but for its scent; broom for humility and neatness; oak for hospitality.”
“I always wondered about that,” said Lleu thoughtfully. “Has not the broom thorns, and the oak great strength?”
Blodeuwedd’s hands hovered over her embroidery.
Math laughed. “Aye, Nephew, but we only took the flowers of each. Soft and pretty and fragrant they were, like cutting roses off at the head. Whoever heard of a blossom with claws?”
She pushed the needle through the fabric on her lap, and said nothing.
* * *
Lleu leaves again; meanwhile the purpling on her forehead spreads across her pale skin like a storm, and the pain hoods her eyes. She dresses her hair to cover it, and goes to the library.
It too is an orchard, after a fashion—full of dead trees, dead skins, dead plants, dead insects mounted on pins. She feels this in common with them. The library offers a different comfort: if she can no longer grow roots to sate her hunger, perhaps she can learn to die. To catch her death, as her husband says, by lingering with the dead.
Often she comes here to read of Arianrhod—gleaning, from half-mentions in tales and ballads, some sense of the mother-in-law she has never met. Arianrhod is almost as much a mother to her as to Lleu, after all; Blodeuwedd would not exist without her interdiction forbidding wives. But she has never been able to hate Arianrhod for that—only to feel, deep where her roots aren’t, a fury that her life is a cheat, and to so little purpose.
She picks up a herbiary, opens it, looks at the drawings within. Some feel familiar, though she can’t read the words beside them—a strange, toothy script in a language she hasn’t been taught, proceeding from the wrong margin.
“May I help you, my lady,” murmurs a voice from her side. She turns to look.
Dark hair and eyes, skin brown as branches. Beautiful, feels Blodeuwedd suddenly, in the heart of her, where her breath vanishes; beautiful, a strike and a searing, a jagged line of light.
She feels all this before she thinks to ask, “Who are you?”
“My name is Adain, my lady, lately of Penllyn.” She smiles. “I am a scholar—I arrived today with your lord, to consult the library. I had heard you were . . . indisposed—”
Blodeuwedd nods. “My apologies for not meeting you on arrival. I’ve been unwell.”
She can’t stop looking at Adain’s face.
“This book,” she says brusquely, holding it out. “What does it say?”
Adain accepts it, looks at the open page. “It is a Levantine treatise on the oak; see, here it speaks of the different parts of the tree and their uses.”
“What,” she says, pointing, “does this part say?”
“Ah—that the oak is more likely to be struck by lightning than any other tree.”
Blodeuwedd grabs the book back suddenly, shuts it with a snap. Her forehead throbs; she turns away, closes her eyes. “Forgive me; I have a terrible headache, and should rest.”
She sets the book down, and walks away before Adain can say another word.
* * *
“Husband,” said Blodeuwedd, hair spread over her pillow like a season, “were you not a man until you had a name, a weapon, and a wife?”
“No, my lady,” he said, smiling, running his thumb along her cheek, “I was only a boy.”
“You gave me a name; if I had a weapon, and a wife, could I also be a man?”
His laughter scythed a bright, hot line along her chest. “No, my lady.”
She wet her lips, and smiled. “Why not?”
“Because you were made by magic, my lady, from flowers.”
“I do not understand, my husband,” she said carefully. “Magic made you a boy, from your mother, and now you are a man. If I won myself a weapon and a wife, why should I not be a man, and conquer lands to reign over, as you do?”
Lleu thought on that. “It is because,” he said finally, “you were made for me, belong to me, and I have decreed that you are my wife. And once you are my wife you can be no other thing.”
* * *
Blodeuwedd spends a full day abed, sleeping fitfully, twisting her long yellow hair into her fists. The dull ache of hunger in her sharpens itself against thoughts of Adain—she hears her voice again, over and over, saying “my lady,” so unlike when Lleu says it, the same words but the meaning as different as day from night, as bird from worm.
How could the same words mean so many things? Rain was rain, and sun was sun, and earth was earth. Only wizards could change one thing into another—honor into shame, maiden into mother, a mother’s curses into a wife.
Her head hurts so much.
She instructs her attendants to have breakfast brought to her the next morning, and to summon Adain to share it with her.
When Adain arrives, a book in her hand, the noise in her head subsides.
“I apologize,” says Blodeuwedd, gesturing for Adain to sit down, “for my rudeness yesterday. Is there anything you lack?”
“Nothing at all, my lady,” says Adain quietly, looking at her. “Except to know the cause of your pain, and whether it is in my power to help with it.”
Blodeuwedd shrugs. “It is a small matter that is always with me. But tell me of yourself, of your studies. Where does your interest lie?”
Adain holds her gaze a long moment. “In plants and animals, my lady. The study of natural history.”
Silence lengthens like a shadow between them.
“How interesting,” says Blodeuwedd at last, politely. “I hope you find many books on the subject.”
“My lady,” says Adain, lowering her voice, and her gaze, “I came especially because I heard of your own history.”
Blodeuwedd holds very still.
“The marvel of Gwynedd,” says Adain quietly. “A meadow made maiden. The fairest woman the world has ever known.”
“And you wanted to see for yourself,” says Blodeuwedd, trying to swallow the thorns in her throat, to keep the bitterness from her voice. “Well—I am as you find me. The work of wizards. A singular specimen.”
Adain winces. “My lady, it is I who should apologize—”
“It is well, Adain,” she says curtly. “I must beg you to excuse me—it goes ill with me again, and I would lie down.”
Adain looks briefly miserable as she stands, and the glimpse of it lashes at Blodeuwedd, a mix of sorrow and triumph. To have caused her pain. To have spilled her own into her.
“I brought you this, my lady,” says Adain, holding out the book she brought—a slender quarto volume with a bouquet of lilies embroidered into the cover and spine. “I hoped it might interest you. It speaks of the language of flowers.”
Blodeuwedd stares at her. “What do you know of the language of flowers?”
“I know,” she says, holding her gaze, “that they hunger for depth and height, for sun and rain, for the touch of insects, and that all men see of them are their pretty colors and sweet smells.”
Blodeuwedd looks at the book for a long time. When she senses Adain about to withdraw, she says, “Wait.”
Adain does.
“Come closer,” she says, and Adain obeys. Blodeuwedd reaches for her and draws her closer still, till she sits near enough that they can bend their foreheads together. Blodeuwedd lifts her hair from the spreading bruise at her brow.
“What can you tell me of this?”
Adain hesitates, hovers her fingers above the bruise. Blodeuwedd watches her, then closes her eyes as Adain touches her.
She shivers, and Adain gasps as petals push past Blodeuwedd’s skin, unfurling toward her hand.
The relief of it is unspeakable. Blodeuwedd all but goes limp from it.
“It is an anemone, my lady,” breathes Adain, tracing its edges.
Blodeuwedd shakes her head, dazed with how light, how clear, it feels. “That can’t be. I was only made of three flowers.”
“Aye, and people are made of flesh and blood and bone, but that isn’t what comes out of our mouths in speech. You—” Adain looks at her with such tenderness that Blodeuwedd can’t bear it, looks away. “Have you been biting your tongue all this time, my lady?”
Blodeuwedd bites her lip in answer, hardly hearing Adain over the peace of her body, the absence of pain. She fixes her eyes on the book Adain brought. “Tell me, then—what do anemones mean?”
“They signify fading hope and loss. But”—Adain brushes Blodeuwedd’s hair away from the flower, smiles—“they are also said to mean anticipation.”
“How,” whispers Blodeuwedd, looking back to her, “do we know which it is?”
Adain holds her gaze while her fingers work delicately beneath the bloom.
“Context,” she says, and plucks it.
* * *
There came a day when Lleu was knocked from his horse in war, shot through with many arrows, but he survived, prevailed, and his borders widened.
There came a day when Lleu was gored by a great boar during a hunt, but he survived, slew it, made a brush of its bristles for Blodeuwedd’s hair.
There came a day when Blodeuwedd watched Lleu’s naked body as he slept and made a knife of her eyes, a tusk of her teeth, and imagined unseaming his belly, imagined ripping into the meat of him and feasting on his heat. She made a noise deep in her throat, and his eyes opened, and she murmured, wanting him to hear—
“Can nothing kill you, Lleu?”
He smiled at her, and when he spoke his words had the ring of enchantment, incantation.
“I cannot be killed day or night, inside or outside, on horseback or on foot. I cannot be killed clothed or naked, nor by any weapon honorably made.”
Blodeuwedd’s chin trembled before her mouth made a smile of it.
“Then my husband is immortal, and shall never be parted from me.”
“Just so, my lady.” He laughed, bright as his name. “Unless the Almighty sees fit to dress me in netting and have me straddle a goat’s back and a bathtub’s edge by the side of a river at dusk, with a thickly thatched curve of roof above the tub, while a man stabs at me with a spear made of a year of Sundays. But if I were meant to die, would Fate have made my killing so difficult to arrange? Rejoice, then, Blodeuwedd, for you’ll never be rid of me.”
* * *
In the weeks that follow, Blodeuwedd and Adain are inseparable: reading in the library, walking along the grounds, sharing meals, sharing beds. Blodeuwedd cannot get enough of her, seeks always to be touching her, murmurs questions over their clasped hands and into the warmth of her neck.
“What does this mean,” she asks, leading Adain’s fingers to every ache in her body. Under her touch a deep red rose buds from her wrist, a bluebell from her breastbone, a heap of lilacs from her ankles, a crush of sweetpeas from her nape. Adain opens her mouth in answer against each bloom, until Blodeuwedd’s cheeks flush from the heat of her breath, the tip of her tongue tracking light along the petals. Blodeuwedd feels every part of her clamoring to be read.
Adain reads her—but tells her, too, of what’s outside her body, of all the plants and animals beyond the walls. Blodeuwedd listens keenly to her stories of the silent flight of owls, the cleverness of crows; the healing to be found in yarrow and willow bark, the soothing properties of raspberry leaf and mint. Blodeuwedd listens, but most thirstily for lessons on foxglove and mistletoe, hemlock and yew.
“These are plants that kill,” Blodeuwedd says, astonished. “Plants that hide weapons inside them.”
“In a sense. Though many poisons can heal if properly diluted and applied,” says Adain. “A needle can stab and it can stitch; the same property can harm or heal. It is all a matter of context, of degree. Some poisons even heal each other’s effects! Belladonna is dangerous, but it’s also an antidote to wolfsbane.” She smiles, just a little wan. “And anything is poison if you have too much of it.”
The silence that follows her words has a shadow beneath its skin. Blodeuwedd sees it, reaches for it, gently.
“Is this too much, Adain? Am I poisoning you?”
“No,” she says, swiftly, “no. Only I know this cannot last beyond your lord’s return.”
Blodeuwedd stills—then shrugs. “He is more often away than he is here. I am told he is at war, and while he will never die, he may yet be months, perhaps even a year away.”
“But while he is here—”
“I will be bored, and hungry, and in pain, as I was before. But I will know you are here, and that will be—something. Better, if not enough.”
Adain looks as if she would say something else—but Blodeuwedd’s face is smooth, pleasant, any pain folded away behind it like a crocus in rain. But when Adain rests a hand on Blodeuwedd’s shoulder, a whole hood of aconite stretches into her palm like a cat.
* * *
Blodeuwedd took to playing a pillow game with Lleu: she would hold a knife to his neck or stomach, spit her hatred of him, and cut into him while he moaned. The cuts never went deeper than paper, no matter where she dragged the blade. Sometimes they played with rope, sometimes with fire; each time, Lleu trembled and cried out, lay spent and panting and infuriatingly alive.
He loved the games, though, and how she never played the same way twice.
* * *
“Shall I tell you,” says Adain one day, as they walk together in the orchard, hand in hand, “about the flowers of which you were made?”
Blodeuwedd shrugs. “Those I know—meadowsweet for scent, broom for tidiness, oak for hospitality.”
Adain shakes her head. “Those are only parts—”
“They only used parts. The blossoms, they said. There is nothing in me of root, thorn, branch—nothing that digs, cuts, climbs.”
Adain looks at her sidelong, then back ahead, frowning.
“That may be, my lady,” she says finally. “But blossoms carry seeds, and in that contain the whole of the plant. So I shall tell you all the same.”
She stops walking, and Blodeuwedd stops with her; Adain crouches down, indicating Blodeuwedd’s feet and legs.
“Meadowsweet is always underfoot, but the more it’s bruised, the more scent it gives off; there is defiance in that, I think, like a song that won’t be stopped up.”
Adain touches Blodeuwedd’s legs through the fine cloth that covers them, standing slowly, working her way up. Blodeuwedd closes her eyes, feeling something like a breeze rustling the leaves and stems inside her.
“Broom,” Adain continues, gesturing to Blodeuwedd’s middle. “You know about the thorns, and it has a sweet smell too, but it’s most notable for thriving in poor soil. It survives where little else could.”
She places a palm over Blodeuwedd’s heart. “And oak—”
“Is more likely,” Blodeuwedd whispers, opening her eyes and covering Adain’s hand with hers, “to be struck by lightning than any other tree of the same height.”
“Full marks,” says Adain, and stands on her toes to kiss her. “You were made of flowers, my love, but those are only pieces of you, the seeds from which you grew. You—you cannot be pressed into a book. You are so much more than the work of wizards.”
Blodeuwedd is quiet for a space. Then she asks, “Are you a wizard, Adain?”
Adain blinks, then laughs. “Not at all! Why do you ask?”
“You . . . changed me, as they did. They saw plants, and made a woman—soft, sweet, biddable. You see the same plants, and make a different woman—hard, sharp, strong. How?”
“I like to think I see you as you are,” she says, “and they see what they want to see. What flatters their vanity.”
“Or am I the one thing when they look at me, the other when you do?” She chews her lip.
“Which do you want to be, my lady?”
“I want,” she says, her voice a husk. “I want to eat. I want to change others. I want no one to tell me who or what I am, what I can or cannot be. I want”—she draws closer to Adain, wraps her arms around her, snakes her fingers into Adain’s hair and tugs until she gasps—“to take what I please when I’m hungry, to ask no leave. I want a wife, and a weapon.”
She releases Adain’s hair, steps back. She looks at the ground.
“I want to be a wizard, though I hate them as I have never hated anything else.”
“Is it a wizard you want to be,” says Adain, looking up at her, “or a wizard’s power you want to have?”
She chuckles. “Can I have the one without the other?”
“Certainly. Wizards—their power lies in naming. They shape reality because they tell a good story. Tell a different one—one of your choosing, one of your desire—and teach it to the world until it learns your truth and makes room for it.”
Blodeuwedd raises an eyebrow. “That sounds like a pretty story itself.”
“You were flowers, and they made you a woman,” says Adain firmly. She hesitates for a moment, like an autumn leaf in a stiff wind before resolving to fall. “I too was once other than I am. I had a different name; I threw a mighty spear; I was lord of Penllyn, and did not want to be. And I gave them up—my name, my weapons, my lands—to be a woman among books, a woman among women. To be the blossom on the gorse instead of the thorn.”
Blodeuwedd listens, and there is wonder in it, that Adain could ever have been other than she is; that Blodeuwedd, for all her failed hours in the orchard mud, could yet be something else—could be what she desired, instead of what she was before choice was taken from her.
“Teach me,” she says at last. “Teach me how.”
* * *
When Lleu returns from his business abroad, Blodeuwedd receives him as she never has before: there is a spark in her eyes she knows will thrill him, and her smile bares more teeth than she usually shows. She sees him surprised, and pleased.
“My lady,” he says, “I’ve missed you,” and leans forward to kiss her on both cheeks.
As he does, she whispers, “I’ve thought of a new game to play.”
His eyes widen, and he grins, and sheds his armor as swiftly as is seemly, then follows where she leads.
“Not to the bedchamber,” she says, coy. “I’ve thought of something much better.”
She leads him out past the inner walls, and the outer; assures him there isn’t far to go, until they arrive at the river.
There is a cauldron there, half covered with a thatched roof; next to it is a placid goat, an old fishing net.
“Blodeuwedd,” he whispers, “what’s this?”
“I want it to feel more real,” she says smoothly. “The possibility of your death. Take off your clothes, husband.”
He does as she says, tensing with desire and fear. She drapes the fishing net over him.
“Now,” she says, “onto the goat.”
“You don’t have a spear,” he observes.
She smiles. “I don’t need one.” She dips a tin cup into the cauldron, offers it to him. “Drink, my husband. We have thirsty work ahead.”
Lleu does as he’s told, keeping his balance on goat and tub the while.
As he drinks, she says, “Do you know what today is, husband?”
He hesitates, wiping his mouth. “Sunday, my lady.”
“So it is. I’ve had much more than a year of them, you know, in your house—biting my tongue, speaking in flowers neither of us could read. I could have made you a whole other wife,” she chuckles, “from the foxgloves I pulled from my fingers, the aconite I brushed from my hair. But I have learned something of my roots, while you were away.”
Lleu frowns—coughs. He shakes his head, makes as if to step down.
“Stay,” she says, “exactly where you are.”
“Blodeuwedd—”
“Have you ever heard me speak so many words to you?” she wonders. “Have you ever thought to ask what I thought, what I wanted, what I needed, when you took me from my home and planted me in yours?”
“You are my wife,” he gasps, and stumbles. The goat bleats in sudden panic as he loses his footing, falls backward, half into the river. Blodeuwedd watches him like an owl, but does not move. Lleu opens his mouth to speak further, but his tongue is swollen. His brow is fevered and wet. Blodeuwedd can hear his heart beating in furious rhythms.
“Adain!” she calls. “Adain, come out!”
Adain emerges from the trees, carrying another cup; she hurries to Lleu’s side.
“Not yet,” says Blodeuwedd, sharp as needles. “Lleu Llaw Gyffes, I am not your wife. Swear it now, and Adain will give you an antidote.”
Lleu shakes his head, coughs blood—for a moment. Then he looks at Adain, and looks at Blodeuwedd, and nods. “I swear it,” he spits through swollen lips.
“Swear,” says Blodeuwedd, “that you will never take another wife, never make your manhood from another’s pain.”
Lleu stares for a long moment.
“Swear!” hisses Adain.
“I—swear—”
“Swear,” says Blodeuwedd, “that you will never raise arms against me or mine, nor let your uncles seek to harm us in any way.”
“I swear,” he says in a voice of milkweed floss, more breath than words, and there is a sorrow in his eyes that makes her almost hate him less.
She nods, and Adain tips the antidote into the red of his mouth.
Blodeuwedd steps forward, squats down next to him as he pants. She dips her sleeve in the river, uses it to wipe the sweat from his brow.
“You gathered flowers and read woman. You read woman and gleaned docile, pretty, fragrant, weak. But you misread me, Lleu. I have in me the hearts of great ships, the bones of cathedrals. I have in me the sharpness of claws. And you, Lleu, what do you have? You cling like ivy. You smother like mistletoe. But what are you, besides wizard’s work?”
She stands again, looks down at him.
“I will never again be what I was before you. But I will be more. And you—you will be a rogue, a rascal. You will be anything but a man.”
Lleu cries out, pours his pain onto the air as Blodeuwedd never could. As she and Adain watch, Lleu’s shape shrinks, shifts, blurs at the edges, as the magic called man leaves him, as he fights to hold on to it. A light flares from him, then dims. All that’s left tangled in the net is a hawk, sour of body, sound of wing; no sooner do they lift the net’s coils than the bird springs into the air, crying.
Blodeuwedd watches him go, speechless. She stares at Adain.
“I—did not know that would happen,” she says. “Are all men hawks, without wives?”
“There was magic in his making, and magic in his unmaking,” says Adain, looking up at the sky. “His uncles will know soon enough what happened, but his vows will bind them no matter his shape.”
Then Adain draws her close, kisses her.
“You did it,” she says. “You’re free.”
Blodeuwedd nods, silent, gazing into the darkness after Lleu’s wings.
“Free,” Adain insists, “from everything—from retaliation, from his uncles. You could rule his house if you wanted; you could come back with me to the abbey—we could keep studying together, make a life.” Adain takes her hand. “You have everything you wanted—a name, a weapon—”
“Adain.” Blodeuwedd kisses her. “I think we can do better than that.”
The moon rises fat and bright over the river; Blodeuwedd looks long at its reflection on the water rippling the coin of it into white and silver lines.
“I want to meet Arianrhod,” she says at last. “My former mother-in-law. I want to know what she’s like. Will you come with me? Before you answer,” she says, cutting off the passion in Adain’s eyes, “I cannot say whether I will stay as I am, now that you’ve taught me to read between my lineaments. I may hunger again. I may change.”
“I wouldn’t have you otherwise,” says Adain firmly. “And so long as you’ll have me, I will stay with you to the earth’s end.”
Adain kisses her hand, then turns from the water, and begins calling gently for the goat.
Blodeuwedd takes her time before following; she stretches her hand out in the moonlight, turns her wrist to the sky. She feels no blooming pressure there, or anywhere. Nothing hurts.
For the first time, the blue branches of her veins look like roots.