Florence Welch's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Florence knelt at the edge of the swan pond with a name half-formed in her mouth and could not push it out. She had come to the bog to escape people who called her devil and wife of nothing, and the bog had opened for her like a hand. Two of them had chased her to the first crossing and run from something she never saw. She meant to call the old goddess back into the waking world tonight, to walk the peat beside her. She only needed the true name. She had been circling it for a week and it kept slipping. Hozier sat behind her on the low step of the star-tower, tuning a string that had swelled in the damp. He looked up. His skin still carried the dark of the peat and small green stars of moss. "You've said three names," he said. "None of them were it." "I know." "Say it plain, then. What you want her for." "To walk with me. So I stop being the only one who knows what's under this water." He nodded once. He set the instrument down and picked up the small cracked boat she had built for the drowned, the ferry offering, and turned it in his hands like a bowl. "You're my Isis," he said. "You pulled me up. You don't need her to be seen." She almost smiled. Then the reeds behind the drying shed bent the wrong way. The fae woman stepped through the wort garden without touching a flower. Wings folded tight. Florence had never seen her this close. She was the mistress from the old stories, the one the hags had been whispering about — the one who took musicians and used them up. She was here for Hozier. She was here for Florence too. "Little daffodil," the fae said. "You keep trying words that aren't hers." "Leave." "I can give you the name. I know it. Say yes and I say it." Florence felt the word she had been reaching for rise in her throat — and stop. Held. Something small and cold sat on her tongue where the name should go. The fae had put it there just by standing near. "Get out of my garden," Florence said. "Say yes." Hozier stood. He walked past Florence and pressed a bundle of yellow wort into her hand from the drying rack. The bundle was warm. The cold on her tongue thinned. Florence did not say the old name. She said Hozier's, out loud, into the pond. The swan lifted its head. The salt in her circle up the path hummed once, faint, a mile of thread pulled tight. The fae's smile did not move. "Then I keep the name," she said, and walked back into the reeds. Florence sat with the wort in her fist. She had not summoned the goddess. She had chosen the man. And the one who held the name now knew exactly what to trade for.