Solstice Barter by Caitlin A. Quinn

Thunder pounds, and the winter sky’s bitter heart breaks.

My riders await the signal, eager to spill blackness across the longest night of the year, the Wild Hunt’s most bounteous. Hooded faces, bodies hung with feathers and fur. Mounts snorting and dancing beneath them. Snarling hounds straining at their leads. I give a nod, and my riders understand: there are other ways to reap a soul. Cries of crimson excitement buffet as they rush past me, taking the sky.

The girl kneels beneath an ash tree twisted with time and grief, its bare branches struggling to spare her the worst of the rain’s flogging drops.

Which is it she thinks she hears as I approach: thunder or hoofbeats?

Her pale, wet fingers clasp the wedge of black bark. The answering gift I had left for her on the river’s rock in that sliver of time between day and night—the Hour of the Wolf—in exchange for the dead wren she had gifted me that morning.

Our first barter.

Looking down at her from my mount’s back, I stroke the bird, which hangs from a cord around my neck. The softness of feathers. The rigor of death.

My horse, yet unseen by the girl, blows cold breath from his nostrils onto her cheek.

O, merch melys…sweet, sweet girl, my mount says, though he knows she cannot hear him. This night is the longest and darkest of all. No good does it bring. 

Steed of pure white. Blood-red eyes and ears. Terrible. Wonderful. Once, long ago, he was a man, and slips back into memory on solstice nights. Miserable with nostalgia. Tortured by tenderness. I threaten with the whip, and he speaks no more.

My feet rustle dead leaves when I dismount. She looks up. Sees me finally. Fights to keep fear in check.  But she wanted this. Sought me.

She shudders under my gaze of wild eyes, blue as robin’s eggs. Sees my crown of antlers, majestic, cruelly barbed. This body of mine wrapped in the pelts of wolves, their eyes burning spite. The skins of snakes wrapped and wriggling about my groin and legs.

The name?

She blinks, starts at my voice. It sounds different to all: Twigs cracking underfoot. The bark of a fox. A bough creaking in the wind. The muffled rush of water under ice. I wonder what she hears.

Her own voice, when it comes, is soft as peat moss. Siôn, the Gamekeeper’s son. Here is his knife.

I take what she offers, pull the blade free of its sheath. I’m careful not to touch the iron, that glimmering bane. It’s then I see and remember the boy who wielded this knife: fallen in battle. Beardless. Crying. Old or young, they all cry.

Lover? I ask.

Brother.

What will you give me?

Nothing but myself.

Our second barter.

I consider her offer. I’ve had plans for the boy. More warfare means more dead. More dead spawn more souls. Culling souls requires hunting hounds. And the boy’s already changing. Stooped on the ground. Nose lengthened into snout. Crying become whining.

It’s then she sings:

Winter-kissed, son of mist,

Gwyn ap Nudd leads the Hunt

Her voice, a reedy timbre, rises in pitch. I smile, dreaming of the cage I’ll build for her, where she’ll warble for me forever. Willow reeds of the kindliest browns to show off the verdant feathers she’ll have.

Something inside calls to me. Strokes me with spring’s buoyancy. A greening need felt half a year too soon.

The girl is pliant when I reach for her. Answering to lips and fingers. Her body sleek like a weasel under layers of damp wool. A scruff at the back of her neck. I’m careful. Nearly gentle. We’re entwined and entwining.

Bliss is shattered by the searing pain of cold iron around my neck. Our mouths are still pressed together when it happens. She swallows my scream.

A chain, tightening, pulls me from her. I’m dragged on my back through wet leaves and mud, the Gamekeeper’s face above me. A new, terrible moon.

No warning came from my mount. The betrayer already changing back into a crouching, withering man whose dust will soon mix with mud.

I’m dragged and dragged. Choking, flailing. Nothing from my throat but a lowing moan, too soft for my riders to hear and rush to my aid.

I have too many legs. They stumble as I’m led to a wooden pen, where straw and a bucket of murky water waits. The flame-borne silhouette against the wall shows horns instead of antlers. Cloven hooves, not feet, kick at walls. The eternal weight of iron presses against my throat, murdering words.

I low at the cloud-wrapped moon. There was something I meant to tell it, but memory fails, brushed away like a cobweb.

She comes to me then and sings:

Winter-kissed, son of mist,

Gwyn ap Nudd leads the Hunt.

I drop my head, heavy with the burden of remembrance. My snorting breath fans hay dust.

Her gaze is cold. Cold as iron.

They say you will forget and be like any other beast of the field. But I will sing to you, so you will always remember what you were, what you have done, and what it has cost you.

Our final barter. No barter at all.

Caitlin A. Quinn’s short fiction has appeared or is upcoming in MEAT FOR TEA, A THIN SLICE OF ANXIETY, and BENDING GENRES, among others. She is a member of Stony Brook University's BookEnds Novel Fellowship program, working under the mentorship of Meg Wolitzer and Susan Scarf Merrell. She lives in Northern California with her partner and two badly behaved Airedale terriers. Website: caitlinaquinnwriter.com.