Ailsa
Eight years earlier
“Those two trees over there on the hill. They grew up together, my great-grandfather said.” Ros nodded over toward the bare winter alder trees, standing side by side on the hill to the north, looking like skeletons holding hands in the gray, twilit evening. We sat in the grass, pulling thick blades to blow between our fingers, buying time, escaping evening chores. Father had sent his dog with us, as he often did when we left in the late afternoons, and the dog’s head rested on my outstretched feet, eyebrows raised in constant questioning of when dinner might be.
“Do you think their roots are intertwined?” he asked.
The moon rose like a pearl over the distant hills and peaks. I looked back and forth, from north to south, over the landscape. There was no forest nearby, no grove. The hills rose into mountains to the north, the cliffs dropped off into the wild sea to the south, and between that was only the open ground where the stone circle had been built by our great-grandfathers.
“Well, they’re black alders. They are often lone trees, not part of a forest.” I paused to scan the rich blue sky, quickly fading into indigo and black at the edges. If we weren’t back soon, father would worry, and so would Ros’s parents.
“How can you recognize every tree so well in the winter? Without the leaves?” Ros smiled as he asked, adding, “Sometimes you know more than the adults. Well, at least about trees.” We laughed.
“No, it’s just that it’s my tree.”
“I thought that old oak in the Druids’ grove with a hole from the lightning strike was your tree. How many trees do you have?” Ros laughed again; his infectious, bubbling laughter always made me laugh too. “They can’t all be yours, Ailsa. You have to pick one.” I looked at the freckles covering his nose, memorizing them like I did the stars in the night sky.
“I like alder trees because they grow better alone, and I think I would too. They are beautiful in fall, when you were born, Ros. I know a lot about them, and about most trees, since Druids are supposed to.”
“Most girls like hawthorn trees because of the flowers,” Ros pointed out and I ignored him. “But maybe these roots are intertwined, or they could even have one root ball and be essentially the same tree, just growing separately to look like two. Like us,” Ros said as he laced his fingers between mine, imitating the roots of the trees. My father’s wolf dog raised his head off my feet, eyeing Ros, but he knew him too well to make a fuss. “Sometimes I think I’d grow better away from everyone else too. But I’d want ye with me.” He smiled at me, and I smiled back at him.
“Where would you want to go?” I asked. “If we could escape anywhere in the world?” I leaned back on my elbows.
I had never truly thought about leaving the island permanently. Sure, people traveled for trade and ceremonies, but it was mostly men who did that. It wasn’t that the thought wasn’t enticing. I often wondered what it would be like to travel the open sea or even just venture across the small sea that had brought my father from the north mainland. It sounded strange and different, like faraway lands should. But father said it was also much like this place and that the people were not so different. Father came from a place with green rolling hills as far as the eye could see, where the animals were fat with grazing. It sounded like a dream land, but then I looked around at the steep black cliffs, dotted with black and gray goats that were almost indistinguishable from the craggy promontories they sheltered in. I loved them almost as much as the dramatic cliffs, especially the ones on the western side of the island where you could stand for hours and listen to the roar of the ocean below, wind whipping your hair, wondering what or who could be out there on the other side.
Still, there was no place I could imagine more magical than the Druids’ oak grove. Any ground that wasn’t covered by moss was so thick with fallen leaves that shoes were never necessary. In fact, you could be much quieter and go unnoticed without, which was one of the reasons Druids wore green cloaks, dyed to match the thickest part of the woods. We were invisible, a part of the forest. Some of the moss was so dark green it was almost brown, and some was bright with yellow like the sun. The trees were many and varied, all coming together with their distinct properties to create a fluid harmony. Some were tall and evergreen. It felt cool to stand in their shade, and they never shed their leaves, only their seedlings in varied cone shapes. They smelled the best to me and had the most textured trunks—some were red, others dark or hairy. Some of them seemed to go on forever, right up to the clouds, but they were impossible to climb because the branches didn’t start near the bottom; they were only at the tops of the skinny trunks, so instead we would just stand at the bottom, looking up in awe. Then there were the trunks that were ten feet wide. Six of us children could stand around them, reaching to interlock our hands; these trunks were knotty and gnarly and often had beautiful mosses growing up the sides or even mushrooms and varied animals and critters living inside. There were trees that seemed to sprout from the ground with three trunks, limbs extended wildly everywhere, like a circle of dancing women. There were fragile young trees, just saplings, trying to exist in the shade of giants. Just like I was. Yes, I wanted to travel and see distant lands, I thought. But I would always have to come back to my forest. The land was clearly a part of who I was, the same way my brown hair or big hands were.
“I’d go anywhere with ye, Ails,” Ros answered, rolling over on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, looking over at me. “Let’s take the southern sea; it’s warm. We can swim and live on the beach somewhere where the sun shines all the time.”
I giggled, longing for the warmth of the summer sun on my skin. “We’ll be adventurers then, you promise?” I asked.
Ros took his flint dirk from his pocket and made a neat prick on his palm. “I swear,” he said, extending his palm out to me with the sharp flint knife balanced between his two longest fingers. I took it, delicately. My father’s dog made a guttural noise. I poked my palm until I felt the sting that signaled blood, and then when I felt a warm drop of it on my wrist, I brought Ros’s hand to my lips and kissed his wound before we sealed our promise in blood, palm to palm.
We said nothing after that and just began the long walk home, which relieved Father’s dog. We had walked back entirely in silence, something only best friends could do with ease. We had both been thinking. And we had both made decisions. Ros kissed my cheek at the door of my roundhouse and walked to his house without a word. Those were our first kisses. That was the first time I told myself I would leave this island one day.
Present day
It was fully dark now, and the clouds had covered the moon, allowing only pinhole glimpses of its brilliant light. Ros’s fingers tickled my palm, lightly feeling to grasp my hand; we interlocked our fingers as we had done since childhood. The bits of moonlight led us through the tall grass on the western coast, but we could’ve found our way in complete darkness. We had been there so many times. The village was closer to the eastern part of the island, thus our venturing west for privacy. We walked on, a few more steps to the edge of the cliff. I sat down first, far enough back, as always, that I knew the edge would not give and I couldn’t lose balance. He sat close to me and asked the question that had been inevitable since the beginning.
“I’m sorry, Ros.” Those words lingered between us as thick as the late summer air. My throat felt thick too, suddenly, and I forced myself to swallow. I pulled my fur shawl and green cloak tighter against my goose flesh skin. It was the end of summer, and the night breeze off the ocean bore a deeper chill than I was used to. But even in the coolness of the night, I was unsure that the goose bumps that rippled over my body were solely from the wind blowing down the front of the dress, not mostly from the feeling of panic I had at the possibility, the likelihood, of letting go of Ros.
“If we left and made a life somewhere else, then we wouldn’t be hiding. We would just be living somewhere else, like people do all the time. Your father, Ray, Aric, your aunt. People move. There would be no shame,” he said.
“No shame in abandoning my husband?” I asked. He snorted loudly in disgust at that. “And what about Grandmother?” I asked him. She had been a grandmother to him as well. “Everyone we love is dead, and she has no one to take care of her but me.”
“She has Ray and Jord,” Ros protested quickly, as if that was the excuse he had been expecting. “If you’re staying, it’s for Aric, isn’t it?”
Several moments of silence passed like dead weight. My heart was beating faster and faster at the tone of this dismal conversation, and I knew exactly where it was going. Maybe it was because I knew Ros so well, or maybe I had just already lived this conversation in my mind over the weeks I had practiced it.
I had known that I had to let him go since we were young. Our roots were intertwined, but we were two separate trees. The letting go had already happened long ago on some alternate plane of existence, and the knowledge I had of what was coming, when Ros had no idea what was coming, was making me feel dizzy and breathless. Maybe I didn’t have the strength to do it.
“It’s so dark when the clouds are out like this at night.” He spoke softly now.
“It is. It’s beautiful. And it’s so nice to be walking in the dark with someone you trust so much. Someone to follow to the edge of the earth, guided only by their hand and a sliver of silver moonlight.” I rubbed his hands, which felt frozen, between mine to warm them. He stopped me, took my right hand, and moved it up his thin forearm, over the sinewy, knotted muscles of his biceps, then up onto his shoulders, which just barely glinted in the moonlight. Even in this darkness, his blue eyes still shone and met mine as I curled both hands into his salty, straight hair and kissed him long and deep. Our mouths fit together perfectly. His breath tasted like mine. Kissing him felt as natural as breathing. And it had been so long. It had been so long since I felt I could breathe. My heart rate slowed to relaxation as we intertwined there on the ground. It was gentle, easy, and safe, and being connected with him in this way calmed me in a way nothing else could.
As if reading my mind, he pulled away and took my face in his hands, sweetly, like a father might. “Ails?” he searched my face, his oceanic eyes in shock, and then his hands fell from my face to my ever-so-slightly protrudent belly. The safety and calm I felt in our embrace dove off the cliff in that instant and crashed into the jagged rocks below. I tried to say something, but my mouth wouldn’t form words, so Ros continued, “Is it—am I?” but he broke off, unable to complete the question. Unable or unwilling. “No. It doesn’t matter, Ails. If it is my child in your heart, then it will be the child of my heart as well, and it truly won’t matter.”
My heart soared at this, and for a moment I actually thought of leaving in that boat with Ros. In a flash, I imagined our whole departure, during the next quarter moon, enough light to secure us down to Ros’s boats and enough time for me to store up food and water while Ros finished the crab sail that could get us speedily away, fast enough to not be caught up by the rowboats that would come to look for us. And then I thought of being without a midwife for the birth, and I thought of dying shortly after, like my mother did, and of my grandmother left alone, and what Aric might do to himself or anyone else. And I thought if I resented Ros now for making me lie and run away, and hide, then how might I resent him for banishing me from my home? I didn’t say this, though. I placed my hands on my barely swollen belly.
“I do know it’s a girl,” I answered, hoping that secret would be something intimate enough we could share in the moment, since I couldn’t grant him fatherhood.
He just smiled a huge, knowing grin and touched his forehead gently to mine. “How do you know for sure?” he asked, and then his huge smile dissolved into giddy laughter. “I don’t know why I’m asking you that. I must have asked you that a thousand times in our lives together since we were kids. I should just learn to accept your knowing by now. And be thankful for your wisdom.” He curled my hair around my ear and kissed the pink tip of it, cold in the wind. “You must also know, wise Druid, that I will love you both forever, no matter what.”
My throat tightened, and my eyes spilled over with emotion. These days I couldn’t help being overcome by it. I looked into Ros’s questioning face, his brow furrowed, and though we were close—best friends for our entire lives—I realized then that there was something deep inside him, a piece that I couldn’t quite grasp or understand. There was a part of him I could never possess, as much as he loved me. I reached into my pocket for the black pearl Rasha had given me earlier that year. I had decided that if we ever parted ways, I wanted him to have it to remind him of me and to protect him on his travels.
“You make love sound like it’s so simple,” I said, holding his stare.
“It is, but the situation is not,” he insisted, wrapping my arms around his neck and tickling me by nuzzling the curve of my inner elbow before tracing his lips up to my cold, pink ears and whispering, “Never let me go.” We swayed and danced like that for a long time, to the music of the earth; the whistling wind and crashing waves.
I kissed him as hard and purposefully as I ever had. And in our passionate embrace, the pearl was lost.
A few days later, I had been sitting among the trees, making my offerings, and collecting herbs for almost the entire morning. I had risen before dawn, and the sun was now high in the sky, though I hadn’t noticed through the thick summer foliage that kept the summer sun shaded from me.
“Found you, finally.” Ros smiled in his beguiling way, walking toward me, then pulled me close to him.
“You couldn’t have been looking for me very long, then. I don’t exactly have that many places I wander off to,” I responded, pushing him off me gently, out of discretion, and giving him a warning look. The oak grove was shaded and deep within the woods, but it was by no means private like the evening cliffs, especially to the Druids, who spent much of their free time away from the village among the trees. Indeed, this is where the name Druid was derived from, and one often ran into one or two of them, having a stroll or a chant or meditation beneath the canopy of wise oaks, ashes, and alders.
“In fact,” he continued, slanting his catlike blue eyes at me in his flirtatious way, “I wouldn’t mind you wandering off to our spot this evening.”
My heart fluttered at the thought of some of the secret meetings we had had. There was something about being vulnerable in the broad and black night, lying open and naked to the stars with the person you felt most like yourself with. I had lain in his arms those nights wishing that the night would never end and the sun would never come up.
“Ailsa, come back to the earth. You’re in the clouds, and I need you to listen to every detail of the plan. It came to me, like a dream, like things come to you—is it intuition? What do you and Ray call it?”
I shook my head like a dog shaking the water off and refocused on Ros’s hopeful face. “Yes, sort of. A dream is a different type of intuition from a vision, and then there are gut or impulse instincts that enable you to make fast decisions, which is automatic intuition.”
“I have the plan for us to leave, and I think your Druid instinct will be that it will be perfect and go smoothly,” he went on, waving away my vision explanation with his hands.
“Is that why you’re acting so giddy?” I asked.
“Well, yes, that and the crab claw sail is ready.”
“Oh?” I asked, faced so suddenly with a reality I was not ready for.
“It’s so fast, Ails. You’re going to love it. I can’t wait to take you out.”
“Ros, we need to talk—” He placed his finger over his lips in a hushing sign and squeezed my hand.
“Can I please finish first? After weeks of thinking about slipping out when the fewest people were around, I realized that we should do the opposite.” I raised my eyebrows at him. “A gathering at the stones! When the village is in ceremony at the neighboring isles!”
“For Lughnasadh?” I asked.
Ros’s excitement mounted as he continued, “Listen, it’s perfect. As a Druid, you would have your hood up during the ceremony anyway. With all the matching green robes, your absence wouldn’t even be recorded.”
“Of course the Druids would notice, though,” I pointed out.
“That’s why you’ll meet with them initially, but then you’ll sneak out and give your cloak to my sister Reina. She’ll stand in for you.”
“Ros, that’s so dangerous! She could be punished for impersonating a Druid or participating in a shamanic event under age. I wouldn’t want Reina to risk that for me.”
“It sounds like there’s not much you are willing to risk. I’m trying to bring the moon and stars down from the sky for you, Ailsa. But rather than think of me, you’re more concerned with Aric, Grandmother, and Reina. I’m not saying we shouldn’t care for them. But I am asking, or wondering—don’t we care for each other the most?”
A leaf fell from the tree just then. It careened its way down, rolling off Ros’s shoulder and landing on my foot. Lughnasadh was upon us. We were halfway between the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and Mabon, the autumnal equinox. I felt like the leaf—letting go of what I was rooted to and careening down into the unknown. And yet the question was never whether or not I loved Ros enough to take the risk. That answer was easy. At the same time, he spoke of intuition, and my intuition kept my feet rooted to this island’s ground like the oak tree I loved so much. I stood under its shade now. Feeling more protected than I had in the vulnerable moment on the cliffs a few nights before.
I smiled. “No one knows me or understands me like you do, and effortlessly at that.” I looked up into the canopy of the trees, searching for an answer. “I hate having to articulate my deepest emotions and thoughts. Some things should just exist without being defined weakly by language.” I motioned to the trees and beautiful forest around us. “Like them.”
“Ailsa, listen to me,” he began, but I cut him off.
“The more I think about it, the more I feel that marriage or time spent on Earth together isn’t the only thing that is representative of the love between people. Our love is more permanent than our ephemeral lives, and I don’t think we need to defy everyone else we love in order to be together just to prove the worth of that love. It exists and will continue to exist. And even more than that, I’m afraid that we will grow old and resentful. Life and time will erode this passion, and if we’ve isolated ourselves, then we’ll have no one to blame but one another.”
“Oh, now they’re really in your head, aren’t they? You’re speaking in riddles like the head Druid you so badly want to be.” He inched closer to me, which pressed me up against the trunk of my oak.
“We both know that’s not what I want,” I responded firmly.
“Do we?” he asked angrily.
I felt his breath, warm with the fish he had caught and eaten for breakfast. On the nights I didn’t meet him, he stayed up all night fishing out at sea. He sought me out on those mornings after most often, days after nights when we had not seen one another. And he always smelled like the sea then, with dried salt water in his hair and on his hands and arms. He grabbed my shoulders with those callused, salty fingers and dug them in. “If you live so much in your mind, you’re a prisoner of your thoughts and this place as well. Be free with me.”
Reflexively, I wanted to push him off of me, but instead my body leaned back against the tree, inviting his warm, fishy breath to spread over my chest and neck as he spoke. “Our home is not a prison to me. But if it is to you, you should go, Ros.”
“Anywhere I can’t be free with you is a prison to me!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, hitting the oak tree behind my head with his fist.
“You asked me to choose, Ros, and I have.”
He glared at me with the fire behind his eyes that I had seen so many times in the last year, slowly engulfing him. “You’re choosing him and the lying Druids?” he choked out in disbelief.
“No. I’m choosing myself,” I said quietly. “It’s not about you or Aric or even the child. Ray told me once that life reveals who we are; each layer of experience is peeled back like a gooseberry to reveal the golden fruit inside. I don’t feel trapped here because I belong here, but you belong somewhere else, or at the very least, you have discovered that travel and the open sea are calling you, and there is no reason you have to ignore that. You can pursue your truest self just as I am.”
“You’re just making the easy choice.”
“No, Ros!” I rarely raised my voice, but I wanted to be clear with him, once and for all. “It’s who I am. But who are you?”
He snorted air through his nostrils, shaking his head in disbelief and backing away from me now. “What if the Druids are wrong? What if we only get one life, Ailsa, and we’ve spent it apart and you’ve spent your life dancing and chanting about an afterlife and gods that don’t exist?”
I took his palm and pressed it to mine, where we had made the blood promise to one another when we were eleven. “I promise you they’re not wrong. I have peace knowing there is eternity, and our souls will be together there, forever. I’ve come to realize over the last few months that is enough for me.” Then I took his palm and kissed it just as I had years before.
He left his palm on my mouth, firmly covering it and stopping me from speaking further. “Stop. Please, Ailsa. Just think about the plan. Consider it. I even thought about how to prevent your grandmother from worrying, which I knew would be a concern to you. I have someone I trust who can tell her we’re safe, and the babe too.”
He took his hand away, bent down to the ground for a moment, rose to one knee, then slowly, gently rested his head on the small protrusion between my hips and kissed my belly. I squeezed his hand in mine as hard as I could. “Think of the sunshine in the south,” he said, smiling, as he stood up to face me.
“It’s not easy for me to say no, Ros. But it’s enough for me to love you from afar, whether you and Rasha marry the twins and move to their northern island or you sail south alone.”
“Shhh.” He quieted me. “Think with your heart for once, Ails. I’ll see you at the Lughnasadh fires.” He placed a small wood violet behind my ear, looking at the rosy tips of my too-large ears, lovingly kissing the spot where my dark hairline met my pale forehead before he turned to depart. As he walked away, I heard him say to himself, though loud enough for me to hear, “That would never be enough for me.”