Part 6

In the kitchen, Saoirse found some of her men supping soup and making mirth near the fire. A chorus of m'lady's erupted between slurps. One man burped. Gavenleigh was spooning bog butter onto his bread when he saw her standing by the cauldron, shoulders squared over hips, hands unsure and hanging limp. “Sister!” The two were siblings by decision, friends who finished the phrases of the other. Gavenleigh offered up his bowl.

She shook her head. “Come. I have business of my father's to discuss.” Gavenleigh followed her down a fire-lit corridor, into a dark storeroom packed with foodstuffs. Saoirse's candle dripped tallow to the dusty floor. Its dancing flame revealed clumps of dried thyme hung in dead, ravaged bouquets that seemed to pulsate and breathe from the rafters.

Saoirse flopped onto a wheel of tanag. “I despise him.”

Gavenleigh laughed and pulled down one of the brittle bouquets. “My lady,” he offered it with a flourish. “What did he do?”

“I will not thank that man for monies I earned him!”

“Saoirse...” Gavenleigh sighed. He paused to plot out his verse. “There is no strategy in anger.”

His pack dropped to the floor. He rummaged and pulled out a pouch, not unlike the coin purse Leannán had presented at supper. Inside Gavenleigh's pouch were runes of pale marble and deep ochre. They tinkled like coins. “Let's play a game. Something all wives should know how to do.”

The faery Brighid, a honeybee now perched on a sack of milled grain, watched the pair with a frown.

Saoirse gathered herself. “I've seen you men playing this in the stables. What is it?”

“Brandubh, an old Viking game.” He spread a parchment of black and white squares on the floor.

“And how is checkers going to help me hold sway with my husband?”

Gavenleigh smiled. “In checkers, players have the same goal, the same pieces, the same moves. But in this game, Saoirse, players have different goals, different pieces, and different moves.”

“I've never played a game like that before!”

“Oh, you have,” he assured her. “Just not on a board. Now this,” he held up the largest white rune. “This is Leannán, the king. He starts in the center.”

“And where am I?” Saoirse gathered her skirt under her knees.

“You, sister, are hiding in the storeroom making plans and strategies. Women rarely do their fighting on the battlefield.”

Saoirse laughed. In her mind's window, she saw Aoibhneas waving small hands and directing white runes over the rolling hills of Ulster.

“These eight pawns are your gallowglass.” Gavenleigh arranged the black runes on the board. The stones formed two lines intersecting at the center square of the white king. From the center, both lines extended fore and aft with one white pawn and two black. “He will defend himself with these four pawns and you must--”

“Kill him!”

“Corner him,” Gavenleigh corrected her.

“Like he's done to me,” she said slowly. “I must beat Leannán at his own game.”

“No,” Gavenleigh leaned back, his threaded hands a hammock for his neck. “Corners are where you negotiate. This game will never wend a winner.”

“A game with no winner?” Saoirse sneered. “Gavenleigh! Speak sense.”

“Winner take all, that's Leannán's way: zero-sum game.”

“What does that even mean, brother-mine?”

“Two players bet a fiver. Winner takes ten. Loser takes none.” Gavenleigh sat forward and placed his finger on a white rune. “That's his way, but I'm going to teach you something else, entirely.”

Brighid tensed her wings. This blasphemy would require undoing.

Stinger down, the faery rose on frantic wings to a dislodged stone near the rafter. She folded herself through its crack and out into the misty evening's blue. Her wings evolved in a flap: boning, branching, and feathering to the size of a well-traveled raven. On them, she banked up on thermals to the gusty thoroughfare running just above the trees, a current of airs on which all birds and breathed words, seeds and done deeds did ride. An ancient shout echoed as she flew, a long-forgotten call to arms from a multitude of mouths, a wail that wound through time and wafted down to just a whit of a whisper.

Still. She heard it.

Alighting on the doorstep of Draíocht's public house, Brighid turned the knob and penetrated the room, with just a hint of her stinger remaining.

“All right, Tewey?” She pulled out a bar stool and smiled at the barkeep. “Ginger cream. Easy on the cinnamon.”

He nodded and grabbed a hot copper saucepot of thickened daisy milk. The smell of an innocent spring morn, even on this jaded July evening, bubbled out. Tewey drizzled its stream over a bowl of fresh ginger shavings, still moist from the chop. He threw a pinch of spice to float on top and set it, steaming, on the bar in front of Brighid. “That'll ginger your tail,” he laughed. “What's troublin' ya, wee poet?”

She took a long, warm sip. “It's that angel.” She hissed the word as though she could change its definition.

“Gavenleigh? What's he been up to, then?”

She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “He talks too much.”

As her ginger cream began its intoxication, Brighid's forehead-ful of ideas softened and loosened until they began to flow, down from her brow and out from her lips.

“I need to hire a monster.”

“You may be many things, wee faery, but you're not a businessman, like me. And I can tell you that a good businessman hires one laboring well, not laboring bad. Monsters don't support the bottom line.”

“Silly human. A monster can be just as good for business as... an angel. Notice.” She closed her eyes and picked up her poem where she'd last left off:

In a shell on Llyn Ogwen, he spied from behind
a most beautiful lady’s coiffure:
golden cilia, lengthened, like seaweed it swam.
His step on a twig, prick’d her ear to the sound: quickly
toward Hymm she turned the sad face of a hound:
She was startled and morphed into bird!

“I am Dwenndis the Tuna-Tailed, Keeper of Gytha.
I manage these waters corruptly.”
She turned toward the bay, nothing further to say,
so this stanza will end now, abruptly.

“Good evening, good lady,” spake Hymm to the fowl.
His tone held the tamest of timbres,
and gently he started his meek introduction:
“I’m Hymm.”
“You are he?”
“It’s a common malfunction.
My mother did name me a personal pronoun
in hopes I’d be harder to track.”

The mermaid return’d, melding scales with her feathers,
her face now a lady’s, and fine.
“You seem harmless enough. Grab my wrap and my muff
and we’ll stroll through the shallows. We’ll gorge on some pysk!”
“No, I only eat pysk o’llyn boiled in a bisque.”
“Don’t like pysk? Well then, why are you here?”

“My quest is to locate a monster for hire
to increase demand for my skill.
This troll, he will travel to Mundt to attack
and to pillage their daughters on Daffodil Hill, then
I'll stride in to save them, and values for peace
I'll instill as he strikes for the kill.”

At this, Dwenndis tapped on her fingers and thought,
as her thumb feckly fondled her chin.
“Peace is a problem for bankers and kings,
their advisers wage war for the wages it brings.
A treaty creates unemployment for knights
and perpetuates rage in the mages.

“My nephew might fit” she continued to spit,
“to supply your demand for a brute.”
Now, this nephew in question, nefarious Grendel,
the seed of her sister descendant of Cain,
was a monster whose drool filled a marsh full of moule
and whose breath spored infective murrain.

“Where can I find him? He sounds just the part!”
shouted Hymm, now excited to meet him.
So they trudged themselves down into bowels of miry
and boot-squished through foul-smelling swamps of perspiry.
The fetidness beckoned, of Grendel, that knave, and
they found him asleep in his cave.

Tewey opened his eyes, as if waking from a dream. “I love to hear you recite.”

“My poems don't recite, Tewey. They incite.”

“Well,” he said, toweling up the bar. “They are alovely. And I suppose there's a job out there for everyone, even an ogre.”

“Funny you should say,” Brighid giggled. “Because I have a proposal for you, my funds-fopping friend.”

Thanks to everyone in the MSP Fiction Workshop for their help, red ink, and encouragement!