No More Yielding than a Dream

With a basket tucked under her arm, Amardal reached the top of the hill just as a pale mantle of fog rolled over Nenuial. The Hills of Evendim, rising blue as twilight on the far side of the lake, vanished into the mist; the water itself turned lusterless and gray. It was not the view she hoped for, but it would have to suffice. 

Sitting down on the grass, Amardal uncovered her basket. Sprigs of violets, crocuses, and mountain roses rested on a bed of half-dried rue. Water whispered against the shore below as she began paring thorns from each rose’s stem. It was tedious work, so simple that she could let her mind wander without fear of nicking herself, but a hair-thin scar on her thumb served as a reminder that her fingers had once been clumsy. After she stripped the first flower, the sounds of summer began to fade away. After the second, she could hear nothing but the lapping of water and the rasp of her knife. Only when each stem was smooth as satin could she start mindlessly braiding them together to weave a garland of flowers.

She was knotting the last stems when her reverie was broken by the sound of grass crunching underfoot. The mist had crept up the slope below, obscuring the muddy shore. Dread unfurled in Amardal’s stomach as shadows shifted in the fog, coalescing into a familiar shape: a girl, perhaps seventeen years old and not particularly pretty. With her trousers rolled up to her knees as if she had been wading in the lake, she stepped soundlessly onto the slope.

Plucking up her basket, Amardal stumbled back. “Hello?”

The apparition took another coltish step toward her. Her gait only reminded Amardal that she should be a woman by now—perhaps an old woman by the standards of her own people, married with many children and expecting a grandchild soon. Yet Amardal was the one who had grown older, even if she had no gray hairs to show for it. She had survived the waters of the same lake only to outlast an apprenticeship, bear a child, and outlive her husband. The girl appeared just as she was during that languid, golden summer. Dew beaded on her forehead and her cheeks. Her audacious smile took Amardal back to sun-dappled paths and glimmering streamlets; to shadowy dells where two friends, each ignorant of the other’s reputation among her kin, had traded secrets without fear of suspicion until each knew the other as well as herself.

Morvoran’s voice sounded at the edges of her mind, seeping through the cracks like water through stone. Although he had called the events of that summer an illusion, he had listened to her account with bated breath. How prescient of him. The memory of his curiosity, subdued as it was, made her lips curl into a rueful smile. Would he laugh now, or would he weep for me? He must be too old to talk to ghosts. 

As the girl peered up at her, Amardal knew she could not banish her by looking away. “I know not what you want.” She held out her garland. “But perhaps I could offer you a gift?”

Instead of accepting it, the girl withdrew into the mist. With each silent breath, she grew hazier, her features melting into the fog until all that remained was the vague suggestion of a figure standing straight as a spear. Standing on the slope until her feet ached, Amardal watched the last vestige of her vanish as the fog finally dissolved into dew. 

Sunlight coruscated on the lake’s surface as Amardal stepped down toward the shore. Buttercups, revealed by the retreating fog, grew by the water’s edge. Their cheerful flowers, shocks of yellow between the violets and mountain roses, were the final touch for her garland. On another day, she would have kept it. 

Setting the wreath on the water, Amardal pushed it out with a sweep of her hand and watched it drift toward the west. When she closed her eyes, she could imagine it floating down the brown waters of the Brandywine and out to the Great Sea.