Part 8

The footfalls of hushed words, bending dewed grass, each step imprinting earth, pressing flowers into mud... tiny bootbeats woke the lady of the castle. Saoirse sat up on her mattress of goathairs, frowning at the sunlight and pausing her breath. Was someone outside her window? In her room? Crouched behind her ear? She closed her mouth and kept her questions inside, swallowed down and hidden in her belly.

But Brighid, with feary ears, could still hear them.

And Brighid continued to call her name, seerhshaa, under imperceptible decibels quietly camouflaged in the red rustle of autumn leaves.

Saoirse shook the sounds from her hair and left her bed. The latch on the window was hanging open and she secured it with a click. Through the smirched pane, she could see Gavenleigh standing on the lawn below, waving. He dropped a now unnecessary handful of pebbles.

She rushed downstairs to meet him, but her insistent seneschal caught her elbow in the long hall.

“My lady! At last, you stir!” Miss Sally Forth pulled her lady by the hand to the kitchen, looking as if she would now win this argument. “Your cook,” she pointed at Nádúrtha, “was about to waste a basket of hen eggs on those gallowglass. I told her you wouldn't see them more than two, in a batter!”

“Waste?” Saoirse frowned. “What else would we be needing them for, if not to eat?”

“Gormless--” the seneschal's face soured, “men. Nothing but knaves with knives. Offer a bun and let them make good use of their teeth!”

Nádúrtha turned back to her cauldron, eating her grin.

“Miss Sally Forth,” Saoirse straightened herself a bit taller. “I should think the men defending Faodail have a right to the yolk of an egg! Carry on, Nádúrtha.”

Hearing her own triumphant tone, Saoirse smiled. Words... they held a power. A power she'd not before tasted. Each word housed its own yoke, a powerful protein, an embryo of potential, encapsulated. Messy, breakable, filling. Her joy at this found her feet, and she almost danced over the kitchen’s hearthstones. But she calmed them both with a quick summon of jeweled mental regalia and quit the room with a swish.

Out on the lawn, Gavenleigh turned from Saoirse's window and blinked at finding wee Brighid standing behind him, sipping tulip nectar through a rolled leaf.

“What now, little poet?” he asked, a honey'd harmony infusing his voice.

The faery smiled. “I've met your twin.”

“She's not my twin, not even related.” He set off toward the stables, and the small faery rushed to catch up.

“No.” Brighid dropped her flower. “But she's one of your halves, isn't she? That's why you're here.”

“She's but one of many friends I've met in my travels.” Gavenleigh stopped to see her, the lens in his eye correcting for her defraction. “I could ask you the same. That old fellow, Tewey, is he yours?”

“He's useful. Nothing like me, though.”

“No, he's human.”

“Only half! But no, he's not my twin. For one thing, he doesn't understand money.”

“So you're putting him in charge of your bank?”

“He's not in charge; he's in change.” She looked up wistfully at the clouds whisping eastward. “Tellers needn't understand what their bank managers are up to. In fact, it's better if they don't.”

Gavenleigh’s pumping heart felt a tug. A harp-ful of invisible strings were pulling from the direction of the village in Aduaine. A braided rope of chords connecting his chest with the plucked notes of their busy day; maids and merchants and mothers, busy at their work, deaf to the violence minted into their toiling.

“Well, there's a whole town full of people who fail to understand the faeried ways of a fiat currency. So when will your bank begin molesting them?”

“My bank will correct the corruption of Balor's treasury! He's the one clipping coins, Gavenleigh, not me.”

“The villagers think it's the merchants in Dea Verdoya.”

“Those people are fools.” She turned her back on the village to face Gavenleigh. “But I'll stop Balor, for their sake.”

“Their sake? Mark your own words, Brighid: 'Peace is a problem for bankers and kings, their advisers wage war for the wages it brings.'”

Brighid slowly dimuned until she was again the body of a bumble bee, buzzing in the ear of an angel. “If a little war can stop the corruption of Balor, then yes, I'll be happy to wage it,” she said. “And anyway, the worker is no different than the warrior: both rather disgusting, I think.”

Gavenleigh began again toward the stables, the small bee clinging to his earlobe, reciting verses to verify her point:

A toe did Dame Dwenndis indent on the head
of the monster there garg'ling his phlegm.
An eye slowly opened as gas fleed the brute.
“Play not for auntie on thine anal lute!”
He knew not his aunt, for she rarely came by,
so he asked, “Who the uncle are you?”

“I'm your aunt, matronymically blessed with a name
while my sister, who's lacking the same,
was the woman who bore you and often implores you
to practice the tactics of mauling you learned.
My kin-sister, she loves you, but honestly, lad,
the rest of your kin is concerned.”

His Nephilim build housed insanitized brains,
as his blood was descended from Cain.
He lived near the poisonous Lake Mon Santeau
where the waves bore the scum of ill oysters below,
where a fam'ly of eelpout, enslaved by the smelt,
Taught the tuna to torture the trout.

Dwenndis avoided nephew-ious monsters
who pharted their way alongshore.
For Grendel was fond of the gaseous bean
And his sphincter analus was muscled and lean.
The horns on his head grew from rectums instead
and his snot was unsure where to exit.

“Walk with us, Grendel, and hear this knight's planning
to play out a fictional war.”
At the heard word of war Grendel quickened his gait,
for destructive desires a war will instate.
The three strolled the cesspool of Lake Mon Santeau
and voiced the deception's potential.”

Gavenleigh stopped at the stable door. “You'll kill their very culture with your war.”

Brighid buzzed away. “The only culture here worth preserving is their fermented milk.”