Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [50]
Those allies were coming back into the village, quietly and unobtrusively, but he was sensitized to them. He could feel them like a slow seep of water into a dry well. The people could feel it, too—they were standing a little straighter, breathing a little more freely. There was a strong strain of magic in the blood here.Without the old powers in the earth and water and air, they had been subtly and spiritually starved.
He would do penance for what he had helped to do. So would Pegeen and her Aunt Mary Margaret Murphy and maybe the Monsignor, too. Still he could not wish it undone. If that meant his soul was corrupted, then so it was.
It did not feel like corruption at all. It felt like such lightness and freedom and dizzy joy that he could barely keep his feet on the ground. He was lucky there were no men waiting for him with a straitjacket.
A warm hand slipped into his. The lady of the Sidhe stood beside him as easily as a mortal woman, watching as they all watched, while the Monsignor said good-bye to Mrs. Murphy and her brother the tavernkeeper. Pegeen had tried to get the hermit to put himself forward, but he would not. “You take the glory,” he had told her. “I’ll take the peace and quiet.”
“I suppose I will have that,” he said to Deirdre as the wagon rattled into motion. The priest was singing at the top of his lungs, as happy a madman as ever made his way to an asylum.“Now that all of you have your homes back.”
“I suppose you will,” she said, “if you wish it. Or . . .”
“Or?” he asked when she did not go on.
“Or you might have a visitor now and then,” she said. “Maybe more now than then.”
His heart beat in the old familiar rhythm, fast as a faerie dance under the moon. This time he did not want to stop it. The magic had possessed him. He was fully aware of it. He could cast it out—he knew how; Father Timothy had shown him. But he did not want to.
“In the old days,” Deirdre said, “a hermit could be a great friend to us. He could be a lover, too, with no fear of sin and no need of repentance. It was only long after that Rome turned all sour and narrow, and declared love a sin when it had been a sacrament.”
She could be lying or stretching a slippery truth. She could be tempting him with diabolical skill. But his heart insisted that this much she did truly mean: she loved him. And he loved her. In her presence he had forgotten even poetry. She was the living essence of it.
The wagon had gone away down the road, with the Monsignor in his buggy behind it. The crowd had melted away. The rain had stopped; the clouds were breaking.
The sun came out as the hermit began to walk toward his tower. His fingers were still laced with Deirdre’s. He did not answer her directly, but she could read his smile—none better. Her own smile exactly mirrored it.
They walked hand in hand through the village of Ballynasloe. As they walked, they noticed that certain things had changed since the hermit came through that morning on his way to the church. The charms were back on the gateposts. And on every doorstep was a bowl of cream.
The Merrow
BY ELIZABETH HAYDON
J une 2, 1847
Like the other men in his family, young Patrick Michael Martin was color-blind.
Given that he could claim most of the small farming village of Glencar in County Kerry as family, Patrick was in good company in his inability to distinguish red, yellow, purple, or green from the miasma of grey tones that served as the landscape he saw out of his diminished eyes. Aside from the blue sky above, the world appeared to him as one long expanse of colorlessness in varying intensities. Having nothing to compare it to, however, he did not feel the loss.
In the early years of the Great Blight, just before the