Page 75 of A Winding Wave of Magic
“Like a fae who had their childhood stolen by magic,” I corrected him. “A seer who found ways to reclaim it in the ‘waters and the wild.’”
I could see the photocopied reader in my mind’s eye, then the well-worn copy ofThe Wanderings of Oisin and Other PoemsI had found at a local bookshop. I’d replaced that collection four times in the last ten years.
“I see why you identify with it. The water and all.”
I nodded. “I started to devour Yeats. I read everything he wrote, and then I started to learn more about him. I suspected he was a seer when I started, but I didn’t know it—not really—until I touched one of his early handwritten manuscripts. I Saw his thoughts, Saw the memorieshesearched for and tried to record. Saw his search for his history. And I Saw myself in that history too. This girl, so lost in the world most of the time. I found a way to root myself in something, and I wanted more.”
“And did you?”
I thought about that for a long moment. There was more to it than that, I decided.
“Yeats wrote a lot about water,” I said. “And, of course, the Greeks. So much so that my advisor recommended I take a few seminars in the Classics department just to understand him better. I liked Heraclitus the best. I used to write some of theFragmentson Post-Its and put them around my dorm room.” I chuckled. “Reina hated them.”
“‘You cannot step twice into the same rivers,’” Jonathan quoted with a cheeky grin.
I grinned back “Everyone knows that one. It’s not my favorite, though.”
“What would that be?”
“It’s a tie. The first is ‘the death of earth is to become water, and the death of water is to become air, and the death of air is to become fire, and reversely.’ That one helped me a lot when I thought of my dad. He was on my mind a lot in those days. This idea—that all things become something else, rather than just disappearing into nothing—I guess it was comforting at the time.”
I looked into the fire in front of us, which suddenly made me feel even more warm and comforted in this house that used to belong to Gran. The blue-black center of the flames arrested my gaze for a moment, and I thought that anything might fit into that tiny spot.
“And the other?” Jonathan’s voice brought me back to the room, and I looked up to find him watching me expectantly, his chin perched atop a casually bent knee.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s Fragment Eighty-Five. It goes, ‘It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desire, for…’”
“‘It will pay with soul for what it craves,’” Jonathan finished. His eyes, mirroring the orange, flickering light of the fire, watched me intently.
We stared at each other for what seemed like at least a minute. I swallowed, hard, and forced myself to look back down to my cup as I raised it to my lips for a long drink.
“So, yeah,” I continued when my heart had stopped beating quite so hard. “I remember marveling at how these lines, these silly, little lines written thousands of years ago, spelled out everything about me, everything about the experience of, well, life, I guess. It’s a naïve thing to think, but I was young.”
“You’re still young. And it may be naïve, but not necessarily wrong,” Jonathan said. The fire flickered again in his eyes. Or were they glittering because he was Seeing me in that way only he could?
I swallowed. “Perhaps.”
He cleared his throat and looked away. “Did the Greek help? With Irish, that is?”
“In a way,” I admitted. “I took an independent study on Yeats, focusing on the archives. The Burns Library has the largest collection of Yeats’s papers outside of Ireland, in case you didn’t know.”
“I did not,” Jonathan admitted, though he seemed happy to let me go on.
“They also had borrowed a copy ofA Visionas an original manuscript.” I sighed. “I remember opening the page to a section where he talks about Heraclitus. Not the water quote, but the other famous one about gods and man.”
“‘Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life,’” Jonathan recited.
“That’s the one. And for whatever reason, I decided to take off a glove. I felt so drawn to it, but I didn’t understand why. And when I touched the words, I Saw him.”
Jonathan sat up straight. “What do you mean, you ‘saw him’?”
I shrugged. “No, I mean ISawhim. Yeats. As in, I touched the page, and he had touched it too at some point. And I felt his intent. His knowledge. His confusion. His struggle. Yeatswasfae.”
“Yes, I knew that.” His voice was a bit sharper than I would have expected.
I frowned. “Oh. Is it common knowledge?”
Jonathan peered at me carefully. “He was a seer like you thought. A famous one. I’m surprised Penny didn’t tell you, since he visited the Aran Islands.”
