Later that day I finished grinding down all of the food waste inside—bones, small shells, rinds, pits, and cartilages—that could not be put to another purpose. I carried the waste in a large, hollowed-out tree root to the middens pile, east of the village, near the coast. I was shocked to look up and see it was getting on toward midday. We had slept longer than I had thought. I’d have to hurry in order to gather the day’s herbs before the springtime sun burned the essential oils off.
The sun felt warm on my shoulders, and I noticed the thickening and darkening of the spring foliage and birdsong. I couldn’t help but have a skip in my step, even doing something as mundane as visiting the middens dump. As I reached the pile, I felt a familiar shiver up my spine; I sensed someone was approaching. I lost my breath completely, so when I was abruptly spun around to find myself face-to-face with Ros, I was luckily too short of breath from sheer surprise to give him a tongue-lashing for sneaking up on me. But it wouldn’t have mattered. He knocked the tree root bowl from my hand, pulled me to him so tightly I couldn’t move, and kissed me, even as I pulled away. He was in one of his moods – as hot with anger as he was with lust. I wriggled like an eel from his grasp and slapped him to awaken him from his trance of madness. He seethed and boiled in front of me like a hot cauldron, eyes filled with steam. I closed my mouth, which had been open like a codfish’s during most of this encounter, deciding not to scold Ros in his clearly maniacal state, and instead bent to pick up my bowl and its spilled contents.
“Why are you doing this?” he said in an exhale of breath, deflating himself a bit.
“You really can’t be so careless, Ros. You risk someone seeing us. Aric or anyone could be around here.” His pain-filled expression didn’t change. “Why are you lurking by the middens anyway? Did you and the dogs miss your breakfast this morning?”
I stood, leaving my bowl safe on the ground this time, laughed, and gestured to the dogs sniffing the middens’ edges for accidentally discarded mollusks or oysters. I was attempting to get an old friend to smile with an old joke; instead he seized my wrists and whispered, spitting through clenched teeth, “Why do you say I’m lurking? What have you been doing this morning?”
Ros was unable to see over me, and I was strong, very strong, but the force of his personality and his passion were enough to overpower my will to get away.
“Have you been around our roundhouse, Ros? If so, that’s dangerous too, and you’ve clearly reaped your own punishment by overhearing us, so I won’t say anything else about it.” I glared at him, letting all my aggression out in one long look.
“You love him, don’t you?” Ros asked. “I can tell by the flush in your cheeks and the look on your face. It’s not just your wifely duty anymore, is it?”
“Of course I love him in some way; we’ve been married over a year. I can’t just remain indifferent or cold.”
“Do you love him as much as you love me?” Ros asked, like a child, desperately seeking approval, loosening his grip on my wrists.
More than I love you, at this very moment, I thought, but I couldn’t say that out loud. I was surprised I even thought something so cruel about my dear friend, and so I simply said, “Of course I don’t love him as much as I love you, but you can’t lurk around our house; you can’t kiss me in public. You can’t lose your head to jealousy.”
“Ailsa, you can trust that as surely as I stand before you, when I have the right opportunity, I will kill him.”
I didn’t change my expression when he said this because I didn’t feel fear or surprise. My instinct had been right that Ros was losing control, and I had to do something, but there was no way that Ros could best Aric in any fight. If he could, then he would have challenged him when our betrothal was announced. The memories of the overwhelming sadness of that morning came flooding back, and something hardened in my heart, looking back at him, knowing that he hadn’t protested the betrothal. He hadn’t spoken up about his feelings until our wedding night, in fact. I set my jaw and clenched my teeth.
“Who do you think you are to talk about me lying with my husband, Ros? You are free to do so with whomever you choose, just as you did with many girls before I was married.” I walked to the middens to dump the bowl.
If Ros had seethed with jealousy before, now he raged with much more than anger—it was that deep sadness of being misunderstood by the person you love most. He followed me and held me by the waist this time. “Free? How could I possibly ever be free? I’ve been beholden—no, indentured—to you since the day I was born.”
“You got around pretty well for someone with that kind of burden,” I spat back at him, fighting to release myself from his iron grip. “Stop holding on to me,” I said loudly through clenched teeth, realizing that I couldn’t yell because someone might hear. The dogs heard the rumble in my voice, though, and began to growl themselves, sensing an alpha struggle.
“You said it yourself,” Ros continued. “You don’t exist without me. And I can’t exist without you.” Tears filled his eyes, which had never been so bright.
I softened; his grip softened in response. I let out a deep breath. “Why did this only occur to you after I was married, Ros?”
“Ailsa, what was I supposed to do? From the moment you were called a Druid and wore the green robes, I told myself then that my dream of us sailing off together was unimaginable. I couldn’t step between you and who you were born to be, so I silenced my heart. And yes, sometimes I found comfort or reassurance with other girls.” I raised my eyebrows at him. “Don’t look down on me, Ailsa. Being a Druid doesn’t make you perfect. The decision of the Druids to support your marriage to Aric was a political one; they were using you to further their own aspirations. You’re as much a chattel as the daughters born to kings and lairds on the mainland.”
“You speak about my family when you tell lies about the Druids, Ros. Don’t do it again.” I was starting to care less about the volume of my voice. If people found me and Ros fighting by the middens, rather than locked in a lovers’ embrace, they wouldn’t think twice about it. We had argued insatiably since we began to speak.
Ros smirked. “And here I thought I was your family.”
I couldn’t help but be affected by what he had said, and I felt the sudden need to speak to Ray about it. I decided I had to find him.
“What about the twins from the island with the Lughnasadh stones?” I asked. “Are you and Rasha going to marry them?”
Ros stared back into my eyes, searching for something. “Yes, we’re supposed to at the harvest celebration. At the Lughnasadh ceremony, which you’ll be leading.” I nodded, unable to hold his gaze. His hopeful thoughts filled the silence. “But I thought we would sail south instead. Everyone from our island will be there for the ceremony, and it will give us a chance to get away.” I took a deep breath and started to walk away. “Please, Ailsa!” Ros called to me, but I broke into a run down the beach toward the stone circle, where I knew Ray would be.
Ros escaped to his cave on the beach, where he was working on his new crab claw sail. The technology mimicked the shape of a crab’s pincer, with long, curved spars, and allowed for the sail to engage the wind, not only from the rear to push the boat but from multiple angles so that the boat could gain speed without rowing oars no matter what direction the wind came from. He had seen a couple rudimentary sails like this during his island-hopping expeditions, and a couple other boat makers on neighboring islands had shown him basic drawings. He had spent much of the last year focusing on perfecting the sail. This was his eighteenth iteration to achieve the perfect shape and perfect curve of the spars. He felt lucky that he had so many sisters who were talented seamstresses, providing him with different textiles and helping him to sew and resew the sails in different parts.
The experimentation was the only thing that took his mind off Ailsa, distracting him as he worked with his hands. Still, she was ultimately his muse. He was fashioning a sail that was faster than any other on the island so that they could get away without fear of being followed or having to go in the direction of the best wind, so they would truly have the freedom to go wherever they chose. He felt her slipping from his fingers and knew he needed to offer her this luxury in order to entice her away. He would take this sail out soon, and surely by the nineteenth or twentieth iteration, they could run away together.
As Ros set to work, he couldn’t get out of his mind how things had felt different with her that morning. What has changed? he thought. He and Ailsa had been friends their entire lives, but her heart had secret shadows, and she was able to hide feelings from him in a way that he couldn’t hide from her. She had told him that she wanted him, that she had loved him all their lives, but her actions were different this afternoon. Ros’s mind raced as his body deftly went through the motions of preparing ropes, hull, stern, and sail. The calluses on his hands burned from steering the large boat, and his biceps screamed as he pushed on the gunwale to move the boat from the cave to the rising tidewater outside. He jumped in, felt the sea breeze on his hot, sweaty face, and breathed in a sigh of relief.
I’m just going to keep working on the boat and hope she doesn’t change her mind, he thought. “Nothing can stop true love,” he said out loud to the open sea. “Not the gods and not the damn Druids either.” He pulled the rigs, tied the halyards, and with a loud pop, the sail opened and pulled him deeper into the blue bliss stretched out before him. He beamed with pride, smiling into the late afternoon sun, with the winds of freedom, and change blowing through his auburn hair.