Speir-Bhan by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee [Lee, Tanith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epic, Historical, Folk Tales, Fantasy fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, American, Fairy Tales, Legends & Mythology, Ireland, English, General, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780765344236
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2005-01-25T10:00:00+00:00

ALL FRIDAY, all Saturday, there we were, we twain.

Saturday afternoon I went out to the shops, and she went with me, hooking her loathsome, withered, iron-tough arm in mine. A tourist herself from another time, another country, another dimension, oh such pleasure she had among the market stalls, and in the supermarket. No one else either saw or heard her, but once or twice, when I forgot and spoke to her, as when I told her to leave the cabbages alone, then I got the funny looks the crazed receive.

Perhaps that was it. Had I gone crazy?

“Hoosh,” said she, “that is not your fate, my soul.”

When we were coming back from the shopping, she dragging on my arm like a bundle of whisky-damp laundry, the next thing happened. In fact, it had happened before, and I knew it had and that it must, if not quite yet what it was.

“Who are they?”

“Who do you think, my soul?” said she.

“The Faerie Folk?”

“Hush, never call the Gentry that, keep a wise tongue in your head, so you must. But no, nor they are.”

At which I must know, for what and who else was left then that they could be?

They darted through the crowds, the three of them, silken-lithe and gorgeous. I recollected I had seen them before on the escalator, and today in the market, and taken them, as you would, for three Goth girls of unusual beauty. They were clothed in fringed black down to their ankles and to their little black boots, and on their hands were black gloves and bracelets of gold that might be Indian, and off their milk-pale faces, the black hair poured like three black rivers to black seas, and to the backs of their very knees. Unlike my old woman, these were not truly invisible. Some people did see them, and turn and look admiringly at them, but I doubt in that case anyone noted their sunglassless, kohl-ringed eyes, just as I never did till we were nearly at my door. For if any had—

“Run—run, old lady—”

So we ran, and she, bounding along at my side, the eldritch wretch, as if she staggered now on the limber springs of a kangaroo. Up the steps, in the door, away and away into the upper rooms of the flat. Door slammed and locked. From the window I squinted down. There they were still, out on the hot summer pavement of London’s Russell Park. Three beautiful young girls, loitering.

Irish eyes—I said: Who, that doesn’t have them, can resist. Put in by a smutty finger, they call that smoky ring around the iris. Colum had it, and my mother did, and her father, too, and I. She had it, the Speir-Bhan—And they did, down there, the trio of Goth girls in black, who were not. For inside the smoky rings, the irises of their eyes were sulfur-smoking-red—the fleer-fire optics of foxes in a nightmare I had once as a child, about that fox-fur cape of my grandmother’s.

Scathing eyes, cruel

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