She was beautiful against the black sky. The lack of moon on this festival meant that the stars shone as brightly as the fire, and the entire night was bright and dazzling, the more so with her at the center of it. Aric felt on fire himself looking at his young wife perform her priestess rites across the fire. They had been wed for over a year now, but he could count on one hand the number of times they had lain together. It was true that his responsibility to travel to neighboring clans and villages often pulled him from their shared marital bed, but if he was honest, he had also been overly cautious.
There were so many reasons to be cautious with Ailsa, and he found himself listing them over and over in his mind, repeating them to himself as a mantra to relax the urge that was pulling on him watching her perform her Druidic rites underneath the stars. Her body was undulating with the sound of the drums, and despite the cold he could see the sweat glisten on her collarbone from the exertion of dancing and, of course, from her proximity to the sacrificial fires where the goat would soon be roasted on a spit and passed around for nourishment. Female goats were revered in the village and kept for their milk. Only male goats were typically eaten, so this female was a huge sacrifice, one that would hopefully pay off in an early spring and abundant summer.
Ailsa had never seen a human sacrifice, Aric thought. She had been born under stars of peace, and that was all she had known in her lifetime. She hadn’t witnessed the constant war and fighting that he had grown up around in the north in the decade before her birth. The Druids that Ailsa knew and had grown up with were gentle. They sought answers through wisdom, deepening their worldly knowledge of medicines and infrastructure through trade and travel. As a leader, the head Druid Ray sought to build, create, and connect with their island neighbors, whereas many of his predecessors had believed in taking and destroying. When Aric had come here as a child, he was taken in by Ray during his first days in the settlement, and the ways in which this culture differed from his own were thoroughly explained to him. He and Ray had spent many years earning one another’s trust, and part of that divulgence had involved his hearing the elder druids gathered at Ray’s house to discuss Ailsa—and the role she had to play in the coming shift away from peace. Aric had heard the talk surrounding her birth since the day he arrived on the island, and he had always been intrigued with her, maybe a little afraid of her, as strange as it was to be afraid of a four-year-old when you’re sixteen. But this feeling of love was brand new, something that surprised him.
And thusly, he had come up with his list of reasons to exercise extreme caution with her. First was the obvious: he had been alive over thirty years; he was practically an old man. He didn’t think he would marry again after he had lost his first wife to a sickness that had spread through the village in their first year of marriage, and so he had let the years pass him by in the company of his friends and fellow warriors, without thought of retaining his gentleness and the tender touch a woman needs. Ailsa had been just a girl when his wife had died, running around with Rasha and Ros like triplets, Aric thought. He noticed the pang of jealousy that the thought of Ailsa with Ros gave him.
And then the other pain, not as sharp, more distant, yet still there like a hole in his heart. Poor, sweet Iona, Aric thought. It had been nearly twelve years; the same amount of time he had lived with his father and his native Norse culture had passed since his young wife died. Her red hair splayed out around her perfect pale face like the fire that consumed her in her sickness. He remembered her green eyes losing light as he watched her die, helpless. Ray had done everything to save Iona. Losing her, so young and perfect, felt like the pang of losing his mother all over again. He was so young then, and he had vowed never to love a woman again. It had weakened him too much, seeing the woman he loved so fragile, her unearthly beauty intensified by the paleness of her skin and the blue tint at the corners of her once-rosy lips at burial. Aric remembered the chill of Iona’s hand as he held it one last time before Ray had wrapped her face in her shroud, a thin flock of wool, and kissed her head. He bade Aric do the same, and reluctantly he had, before carrying his bride off to her funeral pyre.
So there it was. The truth of his caution was a fear of losing another wife, a wife he hadn’t thought he would have. Aric had been with many women since Iona’s death, both women in the village and women elsewhere on his voyages. He could set himself free with them and let go because he didn’t love them, but he was realizing more and more how much he had allowed himself, against his better judgment, to truly love Ailsa, and that truth was his second big reason for exercising caution. He wanted Ailsa to feel comfortable and at peace. More than anything, he wanted Ailsa to choose him, and for that she needed more time. She was like fire, he thought—volatile, powerful, and sacred, but she could burn him. It took care, caution, and intelligence to use and wield fire, and it was the same with his wife. He wouldn’t push her for fear of pushing her away.
But the truth gnawed at him: he needed her. And as more time passed, his need grew deeper and stronger, in such a way that he had not felt, even at the age of seventeen, when every feeling is intense, as it had been with his first wife.
Aric was transfixed. His eyes were set on his wife as she moved around the fire with the goats that had been given herbs to put them to sleep before their sacrifice. The drum beat quickened, the voices around him grew louder, and the music became more powerful, everyone drunk with the night and the festival, but she remained still as the sun, planets orbiting around her in chaos, focused on her, as she moved, slowly, gracefully, holding the goat gently, sweetly, like a newborn baby asleep in her arms. She lifted its head up to her chin, and the sleeping goat faced her now. The smoke and herbs must have been getting to him, because Aric thought for a moment he saw her feeding their newborn baby at her breast. But then, a quick movement of her long fingers, and the short, sharp, ritual knife fell to the ground ahead of the spill of blood from the goat’s throat. He had seen animals sacrificed before but never in such a way. Everything she did was unmatched in grace. Feeding the goats herbs to relax them during the ceremony was a practice he had seen, but he’d never seen an animal stay asleep, resting so peacefully in the arms of its sacrificer. What was this magic she possessed? He wondered. Ailsa laid the goat at the foot of the altar stone, kissing it, and painted spirals in the stone with her blood-tipped fingers. The ritual would be continued in six weeks’ time at Imbolc, when the dried goat jerky would be consumed with milk, a prayer for a quick winter and an abundant spring. Aric said his on prayer for an abundant spring with Ailsa.
He thought about the beauty of his mother, Gunnhild, and of Iona. He couldn’t imagine a woman more beautiful than either of them—both small and frail, light and fair, with eyes brighter than the summer sky. But Ailsa’s beauty wasn’t celestial like theirs; it was elemental. She smelled of herbs and earth. Her long brown hair, in its many braids, curls, and tangles to her waist, looked like tree roots, and her skin was almost bronze from constant sun exposure. Her feet were large and flat like a man’s and pounded the earth as she took long, intentional strides. It was as if Ailsa calmed the earth and fire and goats as she commanded them because she was such an essential part of them. He had caught her on more than one occasion talking to the trees as if they spoke back to her.
He looked down at her grass- and peat-smudged feet and ankles, showing under her robes as she reached up in the act of purification. Her fingers were red with goat’s blood, and her eyes shone with brown, green, gold, and every earthly color in between. None of the blue of the heavens. Even her wool robe, dyed dark green in the color of the Druids, seemed a part of her body, like she was the rolling hills themselves, and he looked at her long, strong arms, thinking she was akin to some magical tree come to life.
Ailsa had to be purified herself for the ritual, and he hadn’t seen her for days while she was with the Druids undergoing the processes. They fasted, smudged themselves, and prayed for hours on end. The time away had stretched his desperation for her, and he resolved there, in the firelight, the pulse of the crowd around him, that he would take a risk to love this strange, beautiful, wise woman.
“What good is caution where love exists?” he asked himself. He liked that. It sounded like something his father had said to him once. He chuckled to himself thinking of how much his father would have loved Ailsa yet how foreign her ways would have been to him. The Druids were gentler than this people; that was for sure. His time with them, specifically Ray, had made him more gentle and more tied to nature. Yet he smiled at the thought that they were just as formidable in their own way. The things Ailsa and Ray knew about the earth, about the future even, were astounding, and Aric wished he could share them with his father, bragging about his wife as any proud husband would want to do.
Then the dancers came from between the stones into the center of the circle, where they wound around the fire and the Druids, spinning like dervishes, and the earthly beauty of his wife dissolved into the night behind the bright lanterns and white robes of the female dancers. Aric looked up into the blackness of the sky and the thousands of twinkling stars. It was vast and beautiful and reminded him of being at sea with his family so many years ago. “Are you up there?” he asked them—Aric, his father, Gunnhild, his mother, his siblings, and Iona—silently, in his heart. “If you can hear me,” he continued, surprised at himself, for he had never been one to pray, “help open her heart to me.” He closed his eyes tightly, in earnest. “I need to know love again.”