Leanan Sidhe's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

The Leanan Sidhe crouched at the edge of the black water and watched the bog man walk past her for the third time. He did not see her. He should have. She had worn this shape for a thousand years, and mortals had drowned themselves to reach it. Tonight her hair hung wet against her wings, her mouth was painted the color mortals loved best, and the bog man walked by whistling a tune that belonged to another woman. She needed him. That was the whole of it. She fed on love the way other things fed on blood, and she had chosen him before he was pulled out of the peat. The witch had gotten to him first. The witch was teaching him earth-magic now, quiet and rooted, and every day it thickened around him like moss. If the Leanan Sidhe did not claim him before the lesson finished, she would never claim him at all. She stepped onto the path in front of him. She made her eyes the color of the sky before rain. "Stay a while," she said. He stopped. He looked at her the way he might look at a stone. "You're not her," he said, and stepped around. Her glamour slid off him like water off oiled cloth. Peat did not want silk. Peat wanted peat. She followed him at a distance, thinking. Near a small pond a white swan turned its head toward her and did not look away. Further on, a cracked ferry sat half-sunk in the reeds, its wood carved with old marks of grief. She understood then. He was already fed by sorrow and devotion. Beauty meant nothing to him. She needed a lure shaped like loss. She went to the witch's telescope, the tribute the bog had grown for the priestess no one believed. The witch was there, barefoot, yellow at the hem, adjusting the lens. The Leanan Sidhe did not hide. "Look," she said, and tipped the glass toward the witch's eye. "Every woman who was ever right and ever burned for it. That's your road." The witch looked. Her hand tightened on the wooden frame. She did not speak for a long moment. Then she said, "Get off my hill." "I only came to warn you." "Get off my hill." The Leanan Sidhe smiled, because the seed was in. She turned to go and stopped. The elk stood on the path. Antlers wide as a doorway. It did not paw or snort. Its eyes held a light that was older than her, and it looked at her the way a judge looks at a name already written down. "Move," she said. The elk did not move. She understood, cold and clean, that she had been seen. Not by the bog man. By whatever the bog answered to. Her old shape would not work here. She would have to become sorrow itself to take him. She stepped off the path and began to plan it.