An Angel Called Eternity

Faetales and Forgotten Stories - A Promise Fulfilled: The Jay and the Jackdaw

Gráigdeireadh, Eastern Aurinsay, the Brythonic Isles.
The Twelfth Day of the Second Moon, 600 AD.

Gráinne didn't understand why the other kids were acting like the newcomer was weird. He seemed relatively normal to her. His voice sounded different to the rest of the villagers, but it wasn't like she couldn't understand him. Arwel, she'd heard him called. He seemed relatively quiet, though she supposed that the boys he was training with would make a direwolf seem quiet. They had a particular talent for making a lot of noise when doing very little.

Arwel was nice, by her estimation. He was different to the rest of the village, except Old Kerwyn, since he was... what was the word the grown-ups had used? Oh yeah, foreign. He was from somewhere else, basically. She thought it was silly that grown-ups had a fancy word for that, but then most of the things adults did were odd. He'd been living in the village for a week or two now, and whilst he was always polite to everyone he seemed to keep his distance from most of the other children in the village, and they from him. Something to do with him being from Brythonia.
Which was stupid. Brythonia was just across the water from Aurinsay. Why did it matter that he'd come here by boat instead of being born here?

Arwel might not have been Aurinsian as she was, but that didn't matter to her. She didn't understand why the men in the village shunned him for that. He kept the same gods as them, didn't he? He spoke the same language, if in a slightly weird way, and was already a better shot than the other boys in the village.
That last point didn't seem to be making him any friends, which was quite evident when it came to swordplay. He wasn't a particularly bad swordsman compared to the other boys, but it was clear that he was more at home with his bow than any blade. She watched from the side as two of the other boys ganged up on him again and he was sent back into the dirt almost as soon as he'd gotten up, and she resisted the urge to go down their and fight them herself.
As the huntsman called the bout and walked away, Arwel remained on his back in the dirt looking somewhat dazed. She couldn't make out exactly what was being said to him, but she thought it might be best to make sure nothing bad happened.
"Oi, you three, the bout's been called. You can bugger off now."
The two boys on their feet looked at her, somewhat surprised by the language coming out of her mouth, as she marched her way towards them.
"You got rocks between your ears or something? Scram, go!"
They might not have looked like they enjoyed being ordered around by her, but eventually one of them tugged on the sleeve of the other's tunic and motioned for them to leave. She watched them go with a feeling of satisfaction as she turned and offered her hand to the Brythonian boy.
"Thanks," he started, his voice somewhat hesitant, "my name's Arwel."
She scoffed a little before responding, pulling him to his feet.
"I know that; you've been here for a little while now. I'm Gráinne."
He smiled at her.
"Thanks for that. I still think they aren't used to me being here yet."
"Used to you being here? Arwel, they've had what, two weeks to get used to you by now? They've had time enough to know better. Do they do that often?"
He blinked at her.
"Do what?"
She rolled her eyes.
"Pick on you."
He shook his head hurriedly.
"No, of course not! They don't pick on me, I just... I just need a bit more training in swordplay, that's all!"
She raised an eyebrow at him, and he looked away with reddening cheeks.
"I don't believe that, and neither do you. Come on, dust yourself off then lets go play something. We're friends now."
He blinked a few times in surprise.
"Huh? Oh, okay! That sounds nice to me!"
She smiled at him, and he smiled back.

Summer came and summer went, and the two of them became inseparable. It was rare for them to be seen apart for more than a day, and the two of them seemed to be growing around each other like intertwined branches. She very much enjoyed spending time with him, even more so whenever she got to thump someone giving him shit for being born somewhere different to everyone else. She thought it was stupid. Arwel had lived amongst the village for quite some time now, and had become well-liked by most of the parents for "keeping his nose clean", whatever that meant. She'd also become quite the terror to the boys in the village for her ability to seemingly show up whenever one of them was about to do something that might get them in trouble.
A bit like right now.
There was no real reason she'd decided to walk out to the fields between Gráigdeireadh and Grywhendaigh, especially not this late in the night, or should that be this early in the morning? Either way, it seemed her intuition when it came to catching people in the midst of trouble was still sharp. What she hadn't expected was to find Arwen lying down in the middle of one of the fields, arms behind his head as he looked up at the stars above. Normally she'd call one of the adults to report someone breaking the rules, but then this was Arwen, the boy who never broke the rules, and besides the adults were probably all asleep now anyway and he was only breaking curfew so it wasn't like he was hurting anyone-
She took a deep breath to slow her mind.
"Hey."
She stepped forwards and sat down next to him, his eyes never leaving the night sky.
"Hey."
The two of them were silent for a long time, neither making any real move to talk or even really acknowledge the other. It was... nice, she thought, to have someone she didn't need to do anything around. She could just... well, she could relax for a bit. There was a distant howl from somewhere to the north, answered by another to the south. She turned her head both times as though she would be able to see the hounds if she looked hard enough, and only stopped when she realised Arwen had turned to look at her as she did so, smiling at her.
"The hour of the hound. It's my favourite hour of the day."
She turned back to look at him, an unreadable emotion on his face.
"Why's that?"
"Well... you promise you won't laugh?"
She blinked a few times, a little taken aback by the vulnerability in his voice.
"Of course. If it's important to you I'd not make fun of it. Never."
He smiled up at her again, and something in her chest skipped a little at the expression.
"I'm still... I'm still an outsider to the other boys in the village. It doesn't matter what I do, they never see me as one of them. So I like to come out here for an hour or two most nights, usually at the hour of the hound. No-one's awake, just me. No-one's around to bother me, or belittle me. I like to come here to just... be alone for a little while."
She nodded at his words, the skip in her chest becoming a dull ache, and she resolved to beat some sense into the other boys until they treated Arwen better. But first, she should leave him be.
"I'm sorry for barging in on your alone time. I'll leave you be."
But as she made to rise from where she was sat, a hand gently tugged on her arm. She looked down at Arwen, the dark doing little to conceal the flush of red on his cheeks as he spoke.
"No, you can stay if you'd like."
The next words he spoke were almost a whisper, but she heard them nonetheless.
"I like being alone better when it's with you."
There was another howl in the distance as she slid down on the grass next to him, both of them staring up at the night sky.
"Why are there so many wild dogs on this island? There are some on Brythonia but nowhere near as many as here. The ones here are much bigger as well, but thinner. Why is that?"
"Well, they're the descendants of the greyhounds of Jainé Ó Braidislaigh of course!"
He blinked at her in confusion a few times, clearly trying to make sense of what she'd said and jog his memory.
"Isn't there a song about that?"
"Yes there is, but are you telling me in all the time you've lived here you haven't heard the story of Jainé Ó Braidislaigh yet?"
He shook his head
"Gods, how? I love that story. Here, listen, it goes something like this..."
He turned to her and paid seemingly absolute attention as she regaled him with a tale of a huntress and her two faithful hounds, of how they caught a hart that had evaded all other hunters before them, and of how she had her two faithful greyhounds gorge themselves on the flesh and blood of the hart before they whelped, and fell asleep with her against a tree.
His attention never faltered as she told the tale, and he rolled onto his front so as to look at her as she continued, telling him of how seven other hunters happened upon her and, infuriated that Jainé had succeeded where all of them had failed, resolved to kill her. She told him of how, despite arrows finding their mark below her breast and above one of her knees, she still managed to kill six of her assailants and gravely injure the last, who rode back home with great difficulty as a result.
There was a mixture of tears and wonder in his eyes as she finished the tale, telling of how at the end there was nowt but a slain huntress, a broken longbow, two dead dogs, and eight greyhound pups left alone in the forest.
"And as they grew in their wild homes, with neither mother nor father nor kennelmaster to nurture them, the eight hounds would become the first of the wildhounds of Aurinsay."
"Woah..."
She turned to look back at him, realising with a little start that she'd gotten so invested in the telling of the story that she'd nearly forgotten that she was telling it to someone.
"Sorry, I got carried away a little bit. Would you like me to-"
"Are there any more stories?"
She dragged her gaze away from the waves crashing on the rocks of the breakwater somewhere off the coast, and turned to look back at him. There was a look of wonder and almost a star struck glaze over his eyes as he looked at her. How could she say no to him when he looked at her like that?
"Well, I can think of one or two, if you can remember any of your own from back home?"
He nodded fervently.
"Yeah! I remember loads of stories! There's the ones about the Jay and the Jackdaw, then there's all the ones about the Greystones, and there's even a few about the faerie circles on the ground in the woods."
"Tell me the one about the faerie circles and I'll tell you another."
He nodded again and sat up, his hands accentuating his words as he spoke excitedly.
"Okay, so it goes something like this..."