Page 77 of A Winding Wave of Magic
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.
I nodded, rather impressed. I could recite a few poems, but this was what I did for a living. Jonathan had a very good memory indeed.
“Why that one?” I asked. “I’ve always found ‘The Falling of Leaves’ rather melancholy.”
“And you a seer,” Jonathan chided.
“What do you mean?”
“The next stanza,” he prodded. “Think about it.”
I tipped my head back, trying to recall what came next. “‘The hour of the waning of love has beset us’…”
“‘And weary and worn are our sad souls now,’” Jonathan continued.
“It’s sad,” I said. “Fall has come, and it’s pretty obviously mourning the loss of the summer.”
“Well, of course, he’s sad. He’s losing that summer tryst. But think about what comes after,” Jonathan said. “It’s only a seer, someone acutely aware of the power of memory, who would talk about the impressions the lovers leave on the world to carry forward rather than what they will take with them, don’t you think?”
I closed my eyes, trying to remember the next verses. “‘Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us’–oh, you’re right. I’d forgotten about that. He’s more worried about passion forgetting the lovers than the other way around, isn’t he?”
“‘With a kiss on a tear on thy drooping brow,’” Jonathan finished quietly.
Again, we stared at each other across the room, once again transfixed by Yeats’s melodic words.
This is how it begins, I found myself thinking.This is how people fall in love.
It’s not a lightning bolt or a clap of thunder. It’s slow and uncertain, when words and thoughts connect, and the unique magic they create makes two people one.
I wasn’t in love with Jonathan Lynch. Not anything remotely close to it.
But for the first time in my life, I understood how it might happen. And oddly enough, it didn’t scare me like I would have thought. Here, in the haze of the fire and the odd spell of poetry, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
Jonathan slid onto his back and crossed his feet, now outstretched completely on the hide. I recognized the signs of a scholar sinking into his mind as his hands began gesturing the way most of my professors did when they were deep in thought.
I folded my arms behind my head to think with him. Of philosophy. Of poetry. Of love instead of loss. I wasn’t yet readyto let the evening go. And that, I realized, was a memory I wanted this place to hold when I was gone.
It was nice to realize I had a choice.
24
THE RIGHT WORDS
Do not think me besotted:
Bend not again thy head
— SÉANTHRÚN CÉITINN, “O WOMAN FULL OF WILE”
“Ican only tell you what we do,” Jonathan began after we had traded our empty mugs for wine and a bowl of mandarin oranges, the last edible food in the house.
We’d lapsed into the familiar cadence of academics—questions answered with questions, followed by highly quantified statements and hypotheses. I was pushing him more on the subject of his own peculiar Sight. Specifically, its connection to language.
The evening was setting in, the horizon beyond the ocean burnished a mauve reflection of where the sun lit up the clouds.
“I told you that sorcerers sort of…make requests to the energy we detect,” he said. “The problem is, the language used to do that is dead—or has been lost, for, gods, eons, as long as anyone can know. That’s why we started speaking, you know. Itwasn’t to communicate more complex ideas. It was to use our magic. Plain folk just picked it up from us as we learned.”
I snorted as I returned our little picnic on the rugs. We both sat with our backs against the couch now, facing the fire, which was blazing again.
