The night wind was bitterly cold and blew fine sheets of rain into Edana's face. She drew her ragged clothes more tightly around her, but the wind passed right through them and they were already saturated with the fine but persistent rain. It made pale streaks through the darker dirt and dust on her face.
Each step was painful. Her father had beaten her again earlier that night for not coming home with enough money from begging in the streets. Her arms were bruised and her back was laced with an intricate pattern of fresh welts. One eye was beginning to swell shut, but she thanked God that he hadn't broken her nose.
Even when she wasn't bruised and her scars were healed, Edana wasn't beautiful. Her nose was too wide for her face, and her worst physical flaw was her canine teeth, which started too far up and jutted out too far forward. She did have attractive features, like her long chestnut hair, usually shiny but currently matted to her back and causing her extreme discomfort. Her only true claim to beauty was her eyes. They were long-lashed and expressive and their colour changed from blue to green to grey and every shade inbetween, like a stormy ocean.
Despite the cold and wet misery of the walk down the shoulder of the dark dirt road, she was happy. Jonathan was waiting less than a mile away, kind and gentle and strong, and after the bruises she had faded, there would never be any more. She smiled, and forgot the rain.
"Come, Richard." Jonathan clucked to the gelding whose rains he was holding. The horse has hesitated at a sudden sheet of rain. "I am sorry for the rain, but I cannot change it," he sighed. His own mount, a grey mare, shifted under him. "Come now." He clucked again.
He urged the horses into a canter, anxious not to keep Edana waiting. She wouldn't have a cloak like he did, and he was worried that the combined cold and wet might make her sick later.
Jonathan was a good-looking boy nearing his twenties, with longish black hair and large, clear blue eyes. He was tall with broad shoulders and a kind, open smile. Many women of his own rich class would have jumped at the chance to be with him, but he had fallen in love with a poor beggar girl instead. It was strictly against mediaeval convention for them to be together so they had met many nights in the last year in secret, although their love would remain unconsummated until they were married.
They were going to run away together; the other horse was for her to ride, and there was food and money and clothes for both of them in the saddlebags. As his father's youngest son, there was nothing that Jonathan could inherit- and there was nothing for Edana in the city except starvation, pain, and a bleak future of beatings, eventual marraige, and near-constant pregnancy. Jonathan swore to God that he would never hurt her.
"Goddamn it," Rowena muttered as she saw Jonathan's horse break into a canter. Her mother would have slapped her for being so unladylike.
Rowena was not the type to care what her mother would do.
She eased her own mount into a trot. She had to stay well back of him and make sure he didn't notice her. The rain was fortunate: it made the path muddy, and the mud muffled the sounds of her horse's hoofs.
He was going to see the street girl again, and she knew something was happening because of all the saddlebags and the extra horse. She had to stifle a laugh. How romantic and gallant of him... how stupid.
She was sixteen, as Edana was, and very beautiful, all golden curls, innocent brown eyes, and a figure that was the envy of every woman she knew. She had tried to get Jonathan's romantic attentions many a time, but it had never worked. Now she knew why: he was hopelessly in love, or felt a pity he mistook for love, with an awkward peasant girl- a dirty, lice-infested, common, ungentlewomanly peasant girl- who could never even pass for beautiful. She moved completely without grace, wearing old, filthy rags. Rowena could have any man she wanted except for Jonathan, because he loved that disgusting... thing.
She had never been able to bring herself to cast a love spell on him so he would want her. She told herself she was above using such artificial means to inspire love in a man. The option had slipped her mind as she conceived a far more damaging one.
It was Edana who would suffer with all Rowena's pain over Jonathan's indifference to her. For as long as time continued.
She saw him dismount at his uncle's stables. Rowena too dismounted, tied her horse to a tree, and followed his figure as best she could through the darkness.
Edana thought she could see him standing by the stables and walked faster. She could see the breath of the horses in the stalls drift into the colder air. She'd always liked horses. Jonathan had promised her as many horses as she wanted. She stopped to touch one- a big Clydesdale, a work horse. It nickered softly, searching for food in her outstretched hand. "Sorry, love, you'll 'ave to wait for the morning." She kissed its snout and walked quickly toward the dark, nearly invisible figure standing at the end of the third row of stalls.
Jonathan wrapped a thick cloak around her shoulders and then looked down into her face, cupping one side gently with his hand. "He's hit you again, hasn't he?" She nodded, and he put his arms around her and held her awhile while she looked ridiculously small, only up to his shoulder if that. "Everything will be better now," he whispered. "I have brought you fine clothes, ladies' clothes, and we'll find a priest to have us married, and I'll take care of you, and no one will ever hurt you again."
She laid her head trustingly on his chest. He was warm and beautiful and kind, and she knew she was safe with him. She loved the smell of him too; it was a mixture of sweat and horse and fireplace smoke. "And we'll 'ave horses?" she murmured, her accent much rougher and stronger than his.
"Oh yes. Lots and lots of horses."
Edana looked up into his soft, smiling blue eyes. "But how am I supposed to ride in all these fancy dresses?"
He laughed. "Sidesaddle. I will teach you."
They were quiet for a moment.
"Are you sure you want to leave this? Everything you 'ave here?" she asked.
"I am certain. It means nothing to me if I cannot be with you."
She flushed with embarrassment; no one had ever talked to her like this before or said such wonderful things. "I'm ashamed that I have nothing to give you."
"You have everything to give me," he whispered.
Rowena thought this all sickening as she hid behind the next row of stalls, but her opinion would have been different if it had been her with Jonathan. A flash of moonlight through the rainclouds made the blade of the small dagger she was holding gleam, and she quickly hid it in the folds of her skirt so that it wouldn't give her away. She decided to wait a few moments longer- after all, this was the last time Jonathan and Edana would be together, and he did lo- no, she wouldn't even think it.
"We'll have to leave before dawn breaks," he said. "My family will be looking for me."
"Mine won't."
He brushed her forehead with his lips. "They do not matter to us anymore."
He suddenly let go of her to flatten himself against the wall, and at first she assumed he'd let go of her because she'd done something wrong. It was then she saw his eyes were full of panic. "I cannot move," he said, his voice strained. "I can't move."
Edana frantically looked around her and saw a strange woman with long golden hair wearing an extravagant dark green dress. She was very beautiful. "G-g-good evening," Edana stammered, trying to remember what Jonathan had told her about manners in his class of society.
"Be quiet," hissed Rowena in a very unmannerly way. She said something in a language Jonathan recognized as Latin, and Edana too was thrown to the wall and paralysed but for blinking, breathing and speaking. Although she couldn't turn her head towards Jonathan, their eyes met, and what scared her the most was the genuine fear in his.
"I apologize that I've interrupted your secret tryst with... this." spat Rowena.
"What in the name of God are you doing out here?" Jonathan retorted.
"You know her?" Edana said.
"Close your mouth!" Rowena yelled. As she turned her attention to Jonathan, her expression changed to one of desperate vulnerability. "Why don't you love me?"
"Because you are a cruel, selfish, dishonest, manipulative cunt, and I would rather die than be with you."
She laughed hysterically. "That is ironic, Jonathan, very ironic." She collected herself. "Do you love him?" she asked Edana.
"W-well, yes." Her eyes met Jonathan's again.
"Will you always?"
"Yes."
"Well of course you will," she giggled. "Especially if you are cursed."
"What?" Jonathan was confused.
"First, with immortality: your body will not physically age, and you may die someday, but you cannot kill yourself intentionally. Second, with your own love: you will recognize and love his soul in each of it's lives- it's reincarnations- but you will never again be with him."
She started to speak in Latin again.
"Rowena, no. Do not do this. Do not hurt her. Please, don't. I will do anything you wish. Rowena, no. No!" Jonathan screamed.
His cries were ignored by Rowena, who was concentrating feverishly on the curse. Soon, her words were finished. There was no visible sign that the spell was finished, but Edana felt a burden of pain and longing and sorrow settle over her.
Rowena moved very close to Jonathan, the dagger still hidden in her skirt. "If I cannot be with you, then neither can she." She plunged the dagger up to the hilt into him with mechanical precision, on an upward angle from just below the left side of his ribcage. She stared at him for a long moment. Then she vanished.
He collapsed to the ground, released, and Edana, similarly freed, dropped to her knees beside him. She covered the wound with her hand, but scarlet still leaked out around her fingers and ran from beneath her palm down to the grass. They both started to cry. She carressed his face and neck, gentle but frantic, needing to know his body as well as she could before he left it empty.
"Please, don't leave me," she begged, knowing it was as useless as covering the gash with her hand. "Does it... hurt much?"
"Yes, but it's numbing." He actually preferred the pain, because that had told him he was still alive. "I'm so sorry." He reached up to touch her face, surprised by how hard it was just to raise his hand. "I love you."
"I love you too." For a moment, she believed that the exchange of and promise in those words would make God heal him, but God would never be that merciful to her in the next seven hundred and twenty-four years.
"Don't I get a goodnight kiss?" He smiled, lopsidedly.
Her crying turned to sobs. She had always said that before they parted and he would kiss her cheek lightly, leaving them both wondering what a kiss on the mouth would be like all the way home.
Edana slid one hand around to the back of his neck and felt the small, tangled strands of hair there. Then she kissed his mouth and he kissed her back, feeling her hot tears fall on his face.
Suddenly his lips stopped moving and she drew away from him in both wonder and sorrow. His eyes were closed but he was smiling softly to himself, lopsided. She tried to smile, but it was a sad smile. "Goodbye," she said hoarsely. "Thank you."
It hit her that his soul and hers would never be together again, and at first she touched his body as if it would bring him back to her until she realized that he was very finally gone. She slowly lifted her head to the sky. The rain had stopped and the clouds had retreated to show thousands of brilliant white stars. "I'll always love you. I promise."
Edana sat, face upturned to the stars, holding his body until she couldn't cry anymore. She set him down tenderly, mounted the horse he'd brought for her, and rode clumsily into the dark horizon.
Wherever you go, whatever you do
I will be right here waiting for you
Whatever it takes, or how my heart breaks
I will be right here waiting for you
(-Richard Marx, "Waiting For You")
*DISCLAIMER: The above scene is historically inaccurate, and no disrespect was meant towards the practitioners of witchcraft/the Wiccan religion, etc.
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