“Soft, soft. Go softly now.” Sive placed her hands over his and cradled his calloused fingers. Her own were dry, nails chipped from farm work, but they were still softer than his. Daniel croaked a response as his fingers shook against her palms.

“My parents do think more of my honor than to let me lose it in the hay, Daniel. And I do, as well.” The words were easy on her lips as she answered in the Gaelic in which he spoke. Whenever they were alone, they spoke the old language. Sentiments sounded sweeter when they weren’t butchered by either of them trying to remember English.

Daniel sighed.

“Then will you finally marry me, Sive? I have worked your lands for many years now. Your father must trust me by now and I do wish to retire to a gentle plain.” His hand drifted down her neck as he spoke, a finger trailing over her collarbone. Sive pretended to ignore the implication.

“There are plains enough to the south of here much more fair,” she answered.

“I do not agree. Here they are softer and the hills more plentiful.”

“If it is hills in plenty you are wanting, Daniel, go to the West.”

“They are too filled with rocks, Sive. I long for gentle grass on which I may rest my head.”

“For soft grass, try the North. I hear the rains are more frequent there.” By now his hands had drifted to her waist and his words were a rasp.

“I do not wish the South or west or north. I do not even wish for the East. What I do desire I already see.”

Sive looked away and stretched her arms wide to indicate the hay behind her. “I do not think my father would begrudge you a share of what you help to crop.”

“I have not harvested, yet, what I wish to share. Your father may not so kindly give me the price I seek.”

“My father has always been known to be a generous man, Daniel.”

“Yes, more so than his daughter, as I do know quite well.”

Sive laughed. “My mother did raise me a good woman. I give my fair share and do believe in marital debt.”

“But you will not marry me.”

“Wisha, Daniel. You have not asked correctly.”

Daniel’s hands trembled against the curves of her waist and he looked down at this woman who would not relinquish her games—not even for him.

He sank to his knees and pulled her close with a sudden, tight grip until his forehead pressed her stomach and his lips grazed her abdomen.

“Sive, all my life I have drowned in your laughter and followed you as my sun. Where you rise, I turn, and where you set, I follow. In your smile I have found more comfort than any feather bed could ever offer. You have bound me, whether or not you know this, and I am destined to be forever servant to you. Why would you sever the chains you so completely set, my Sive? Do not release me. Marry me.”

Sweat trickled down the back of his neck as he waited, every muscle straining to catch her answer. The rough smell of her léine filled his nostrils and a muffled shout of some worker still in the fields pushed at his ears. When the echo of labor died off and she was still silent, Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath against her stomach. He would die this way if she refused him. The hissing roar of his own breathing began to slow in its rhythm and rush inside his head.

He felt a slight touch against his hair, spider-light before it grew heavy with a caress.

“You do well with such words, Daniel. Do tell me, have you learned to read?” Sive’s words were soft and he had difficulty hearing around the rumble of blood in his ears. But he knew she hadn’t answered.

He pressed his forehead harder against her stomach, afraid he would lose her in this moment, forever, if she did not tell him yes.

Daniel felt her muscles recoil as she gasped at his rough handling, but he dug his fingers into her waist, keeping her so close her breaths were shallow—a gentle pulse of abdomen against his eyes.

“Sive,” he breathed. The heat of his breath fanned back against his mouth as her name was muffled in her léine. Spots began to dance behind his eyelids and he knew he would have to draw back soon and breathe again—and leave behind this one moment where she could, she might, say yes.

Her hand grew heavier against his head and it felt as if she tried to push him away, to allow herself a chance to escape his desperation for an answer.
And then the pressure against his crown abated. He felt her sigh.

“I will marry you, Daniel.” Her words were faint around the light ringing that had begun in his ears, but he’d heard. A few hot tears escaped his eyes and melted into her dress, but he did not move back or relent his desperate grip. “Daniel? Have you heard me? I did say I will marry you.”

Finally he stirred and leaned away; cool air rushed into his lungs and made the sweat on his flushed cheeks chill as he tilted his head back to squint up at her. The sun made her hair a fiery halo and he believed from that moment he had finally found salvation.

“I did hear you, my Sive. My Sive.” He lingered over those two words together until his somber look melted into a grin and he stood, knees wobbly and numb from kneeling for so long. “My Sive!” She screamed as he wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her, but the startled sound melted into laughter as he spun her and set her down gently again, without releasing his close hold. Sive smiled up at him and he kissed her forehead.

“Aye, I am your Sive as you are now my Daniel. But I am sure you are able to do better than that. Let us see if the hay is as comfortable as the look of it promises.”

***

“She did bewitch him, mother! I do swear on the true faith: she bewitched him. Daniel was to be mine!” Sionnan fumed and flopped into a chair that creaked and wobbled with her careless weight, threatening to collapse beneath her—as she assumed the rest of the world had done.

“Hush, child. Sive has been a good daughter to her family and a good worker to her father. Do not speak to me of her and witchcraft in the same breath.” Étaín paused in her sweeping to look up at her daughter, meeting Sionnan’s stubborn look with a disapproving one of her own. “I will have you say no more on it.”

“Mayhaps she is not a witch, but a Protestant,” Sionnan retorted, her tone snide.

“Sionnan!” Étaín pointed the end of the broom handle at her daughter and glowered. “I did tell you no more and I do expect respect for my wishes in this house. Dirty your tongue elsewhere if you still wish to speak on it.” Her daughter gave a proud shake of her head, imitating some wild filly refusing to be saddled, and her uncombed hair clung to the shoulders of her léine, the ends black claws where they curled. Sionnan’s eyes were equally dark, so deep a brown they almost mirrored the black of her hair, and an odd look overtook the annoyance in her face.

Étaín looked away and began sweeping again, not wishing to know what her headstrong daughter had planned in order to avenge some childhood promise Daniel had made Sionnan and then broken.

“I will go elsewhere and think on it, mother.” Sionnan stood, her stature small, but her pride twice her height. As her daughter left the house, Étaín had an unsettling thought: if any witchcraft still resided so near in Ulster, her daughter had found it.

“Daniel!”

The shout was faint across the fields and he didn’t hear it at first, intent as he was on pitchforking the hay into small piles. He worked with an avid energy, revived by Sive’s answer and her warm mouth.

“Daniel!”

This time he looked up into the sun’s glare, eyes stinging with sweat, no more than a vague, dark blob visible as he squinted against the light and pain.
Daniel swiped at his eyes and then shaded them with a hand, the bobbing spot of darkness taking on the shape of a person, a stark contrast to the shorn gold fields surrounding it. As Sionnan drew nearer, Daniel smiled and called out a greeting to her, leaning on his pitchfork as he waited for her to reach him.
“Daniel, heavens be praised I found you.” Sionnan smiled up at him, tilting her chin up so she could see his eyes since she was more than a few hands shorter than he.

“Are you and your mother well, Sionnan?” Her urgent voice made him worry slightly and he straightened from his lean in concern.

“Aye, we are both well, Daniel,” she answered tersely, dismissing the question. “I have important news for you.” Sionnan leaned a little forward as she spoke, her eyes drifting from him to the expanse of field around them.

“Sionnan, you do worry me. What is this news?” Daniel smiled, certain her news could be no more important than his own.

“Not here.” She looked up at him again with her dark eyes as if she were frightened, then walked around him, glancing over her shoulder once before she walked off, heading toward the barn.

Daniel frowned and watched her until she again became a dark spot in the middle of a gold backdrop, then sighed and stabbed his pitchfork into the pile of hay he had been building, following reluctantly in Sionnan’s wake.

“Plantations now lie to the south of us, Daniel.”

“What?” They stood just inside the barn, the large door open wide enough to allow a person to pass, but Sionnan retreated into shadow, studying Daniel’s reaction where he stood in the warmth of the sun. He looked away from her for a moment and seemed to look at a pile of hay in one corner. Sionnan followed his look in confusion, frowned and opened her mouth to repeat herself when he spoke. “Know you this for certain?”

“Aye, Daniel. They are moving nearer to us.”

“How is it you know this, Sionnan?” Daniel finally looked back at her and her knees went weak with near-confession—but his first concern was not for her as it once had been. With an annoyed clench of her jaw, her resolve snapped back into place and she grabbed his arm, pulling him fully into the shadow in which she stood.

“I heard my father discussing it with the men on our farm.”

“How does your father know?”

“A man escaped from his farm when the English came to take it. My father offered him refuge since he ran such a long way.”

“Nobody escapes, Sionnan.”

“He did. I have seen him. He is very skinny and blistered, I think because he has come so far without rest for food and shade.”

“How did he escape, then? You know as well as I that the English kill everyone who works a farm they want for plantation. They replace us with more English, sometimes Scots, to work the fields. How did one man run away from many mounted ones?”

“You ask too many questions!” Sionnan’s voice was an angry hiss, frustrated that Daniel did not trust her implicitly. “Ask him yourself at the next meeting.”

“Meeting?”

When Sionnan did not immediately answer, he frowned.

“Sionnan, what meeting?”

“I cannot say.”

“Sionnan.”

“Daniel, I cannot explain.” She watched his frustration grow, and only moved when he turned to leave the barn in annoyance. Sionnan grabbed his arm quickly, tugging him around again insistently. “Please, you must understand, it is dangerous if the wrong people hear.”

Daniel glared down at her. She swallowed.

“I will tell,” she whispered.

Sionnan waved him nearer as she stood on her toes, balancing herself with both hands against his chest. She felt the warmth of his body and the dampness of his sweat and smelled the pungent musk of labor mingling with the warm smell of hay. She placed her mouth near his ear.

Her own breath grew short when he placed a hand against her lower back for support and she closed her eyes, pretending it was a lover’s embrace and not one of conspiracy.

“Sionnan,” he mumbled near her own ear and her legs went weak again, thinking he spoke her name with affection. “Sionnan,” he repeated, annoyance creeping into his tone and breaking the ruse.

“There is a revolt being planned,” she whispered into his ear. “My father and the men of his farm are involved. I do not know all the details for they do not let me stay at the meetings, but I have overheard enough at the door. You would be welcome, Daniel.” She spread her fingers gently over his chest. “You are welcome.”

Sionnan floated, disconnected, when his hand suddenly left her back and he retreated from her touch. She almost stumbled, but sank back to her heels and wrapped her arms around her torso, looking up at him as if he’d just struck her. Then her jaw tightened again.

“My father invites you to dinner tonight, Daniel, if you do not have other plans.” She knew he would understand the invitation for what it was and left it at that, stepping around him as she walked toward the door.

“Sionnan.” She looked back briefly as he smoothed his brown hair in a nervous gesture she long ago memorized. “Tell your father I accept his invitation.” Daniel suddenly smiled despite the awkwardness Sionnan had created. “I have news to share as well.”

“Oh?”

“Aye. Sive and I are to be married.” The lines of worry further smoothed away from his face as his smile broadened. Sionnan looked away and sucked in a breath, her ebbing anger flaring anew and her determination forming up the anvil on which she beat her betrayal.

“I will tell him you accept,” she whispered.

Sionnan fled the barn before Daniel could say another word.

“Daniel, no, please.” Sive’s hand trembled against his face, tenuous to touch though she desperately wanted to press herself against his whole length, hard enough she would absorb his heartbeat into her own; hard enough he would become part of her, all of her; hard enough that clinging would become fusion, a destination, a filling of space.

His face blurred before her eyes and she choked, angry that her last glimpse of him would be unclear, beyond focus, beyond touch or memory or prayer.

“You must not, you will not leave me.” Her words were angry, coughed out between breaths as she abandoned herself to the sweet and terrible ache in her chest that seemed to pulse whenever she thought of life without him, a life beyond him.

“Sive, I beg you, do not do this. You know I must go.” Daniel laid his fingers over her own where they still fluttered against his cheek, afraid to take hold and risk rippling away what little she could see of him, as if the unfocused image of his face became a reflection and her tears the lake—her hand the careless stone that dropped and made it all disappear.

He pressed her hand harder against his cheek, turning his mouth to kiss the palm and breathe in the smooth lines that had so often met the ones on his own hands, creating a map that lead toward some destination only they could know.

“I must go,” he whispered against her palm.

Her voice was lost to the tears and she tried to scream, tried to force out the torture he was twisting in her chest, but she could only sob and cough, fighting for air and finding none. She could feel the space between them more than she could feel the curve of his cheek—more than his own fingers pressing hard her own. It ached, the whole of her, where he did not touch her.

“Why, Daniel? Why make this your fight? There are others, many others, to defend us. Let us leave and allow them their pride and glory. I wish none of it.” Her words were breathless, spouted out in great rushes broken with long pauses into which she could not pour all the more important things she wanted to say.

“Where would we go, my Sive?”

She could not see clearly the expression on his face, but she heard the kindness, the regret, the sorrow, the forgiveness in his voice. He took her hand where it trembled between his own and the corner of his mouth, lowered it until he cradled it in both of his own between them.

“We do not have money or a home beyond this one. If the English take it, what would become of us? I have thought of all of it, Sive. I must fight to keep this home, this life I want to begin with you, the life I promise to begin with you. You must allow me this, my wife.”

Wife.

The word sounded honest and sweet on his lips, untrue as it was. Sive stared down at their hands, tears falling away from her cheeks and dampening her arms, tickling whenever they trickled over the contours. She could see clearly his hands where they held her one, but if she lifted her face to his, she knew the tears would again blur her sight.

Sive thought it a cruel torture that she could so clearly see his hands and have them to remember when he left—how they felt so many times in the past when he caressed her hair, kissed a finger over her mouth, lay the fingers into the curve where shoulder lifted to the neck so her head would tilt away, as if he had become her marionette and controlled every response with just a slight change in position, in pressure, of his hand.

“If you do not return to me, my Daniel, I will lose my love with you.”
Sive tore her hand from his and threw herself against him, aching to feel and hungry to know his embrace. Her fingers curved against his back, gentle talons of some kinder bird of prey. His shoulder was hard against her cheek and his chin gentle as he rested it upon her crown.

“I will return to you, Sive. By my faith, I swear it to you.”