The January Dancer

An Craic

“And what is it you know, or think you know?” the scarred man asks, so suddenly that the harper at first does not realize that he had broken the thread once more.

“I am the one come seeking to know,” she temporizes, and teases a tune from her strings. The scarred man watches her fingers dance for a time and waits for a true answer.

“You knew her then, this Bridget ban?” she says.

It is not an answer, but only another question. Yet, the scarred man treats it as an answer. “Of course, I knew her. How do you suppose I learned her part in it? I knew all of them, the gods’ curses that I did; for the knowing of this tale has been a hard burden.” The scarred man plays a little with his bowl, spinning it, and pushing it from hand to hand.

“And what of Bridget ban?” the harper insists.

The scarred man bows his head. “She was a witch-woman. She enchanted men and used them as casually as a workman uses his tools, and as casually puts them aside when the need is past. You could not measure the arrogance in her—nor could you notice it, when she chose that you did not. What you do with those strings, she could do with a glance and a gesture. Give me Gwillgi and his tight, explosive ferocity, or even Grimpen and his implacable persistence. No one will ever love them.”

The harper is surprised to find genuine tears in the old man’s eyes. She hadn’t thought him capable of it. “And did she love as greatly as she was loved?”

“How much do you already know?” the scarred man asks again. “What was your purpose in coming here? She may have loved hugely or not at all. When one can feign love as well as she, who could ever tell the dross from the gold? That was the horror of it.” He bows his head and dabs at his tears. The harper sees him tense, and a shudder like a small earthquake passes through his frame. His hands shoot out and grab the table’s rim.

When he raises his head, she sees the same distant, mocking quality in his eyes as when she first met him. And there are no tears.

“Have you begun to see the pattern yet?” he asks with the old curl back in his lips. If a portion of him mourns the memory of Bridget ban, that portion has retreated out of sight for now. The glimpse of it had pleased the harper. It had proven him capable of feeling.

“I’ve seen that two of the three who possessed the Dancer have died terribly,” she says.

“Is there another way to die? I hadn’t heard. Who can face the endless dark and not feel terror?”

“The Molnar.”

“He never faced it. His madness was his blinders. It was those looking on who saw the face of it—the bright blue eye of Sapphire Point in the broad black face of the Rift.”

“There is another side to the Rift,” she pointed out.

“Take no comfort from flawed analogies. If there is another side of death, none have come back to tell us of it.”

“There are ancient legends that, once, someone did.”

The scarred man laughs like broken glass. “Are you one of them?”

“If one may believe one ancient legend, of a Twisting Stone, why not another, and more comforting one?”

“Because comfort is a lie.”

“But the Fudir seems to have been a clever man. He would have seen the pattern…Ah. Yes, he knew only of Jumdar’s death, not of the Molnar’s. Only a madman draws kolam from a single point.”

“And a man caught up in the immediacy of events may find it hard to step back and appreciate the pattern. That requires a distance that the Fudir did not yet have. Even the cleverest man may be blind.”

The harper plucks a sharp chord from her strings. “But two points make no pattern. Jumdar and the Molnar died for different reasons, not because they had possessed the Dancer. Jumdar may have been the modern, careful sort of soldier and the Molnar the ancient, careless sort, but neither of them could have supposed Death to be a stranger. Besides, January has not died, and he possessed it first.”

The scarred man smiles horribly. “All men die,” he answered. “It is only a matter of when, and how.”