We Remember || ONC2022

Chapter One

Pim and I would bake honey cake and lemon tarts and mountains of sun scones. We'd bring bottles of summer cider to share and drink a toast at the bonfire built on the beach in town. We'd join in mourning Alder Flint. I would probably cry, but that wasn't unusual. We'd be with them and apart, just as it had always been for practitioners of the old ways. At least as far back as our family's stories traveled.

Our oldest books told of a time when magick touched more souls with its Gift, and a real community lived and Worked along this coast. The name of the cape of which Saltash was a part, Crone's Bend—named so for the way that the land arced around the bay, like an old witch's bent back—seemed to speak to this history of witchcraft in the area. But that might have been a tale of Faerie for all it helped me today.

As I contemplated just how alone in the world I felt, I heard a splash and glanced up to see a head of brown curls emerging from a wave. The head became a body and cut through the water, moving towards the shallows. They had brown skin, a broad chest, and—Goddess Below—they were naked! My gaze shot up to a pair of eyes the color of soft green sea glass and with a yelp, I fell backwards onto my ass on the wet, pebbly sand.

Standing before me, naked with a long piece of kelp draped over his shoulder, was a dead boy.

"I...remember you," said Alder Flint. He touched a finger to his temple, as if trying to locate me there. I imagined him calling up my face from the murky depths of memory to the forefront of his mind. I stared up at him, immobile and completely without speech. "Selwyn Blackthorn."

He reached out a hand to me, cold water dripping from his fingers onto my knee. I watched the drip, drip, drip, frozen. Did he mean to help me up? Was he even real? Could Alder Flint be real? I'd been thinking about him, just then. Was he the product of my own unintended conjuration, some combination of salt, sea glass, and longing? Would he break apart before my eyes to be blown back out to sea?

Getting to my feet, I reached for him, gripping his fingers. I am an anchor, I told myself, a silent charm. I wished that my toes were bare, so I could dig them into the ground, tie myself and Alder to this earth. I squeezed his hand and found that his skin was warm. How was his skin so warm? He'd been in the water and, while we'd just celebrated the summer solstice, the bay was still frigid, especially at this early hour.

"You're naked!" I said, my cheeks warming.

"Yes, I am."

"Oh, um, right. I mean, uh, what are you doing here? Can you really be... Goddess, where have you been? How are you...? Alder?"

His mouth opened but he didn't answer. Perhaps I'd overwhelmed him with my flood of questions. Dropping my hand, he took in his surroundings. His eyes swung to the jetty down the beach and then in the other direction to our cottage peeking out from behind the swaying beachgrass of the dunes. He seemed to be looking for something but I knew not what.

"Alder," I said, dropping my voice to a whisper. "Is it really you?"

"Mmm," he said. Tears sprang to my eyes. I was utterly foolish, but standing before me was a man I'd thought dead. "And you're Selwyn Blackthorn, the cunning man."

"Oh, I prefer person. Cunning person. Or witch."

I shook my head, unsure why I'd mentioned that. I was a boy, but recently I'd begun to prod at the idea that sometimes I wasn't just a boy. Sometimes I felt somewhere in between, not a boy but not a girl, either. Only the conviction was as flimsy as a spiderweb torn by a stick. Yes, I was a boy who liked soft things, who occasionally wore dresses or painted my lips and put a flower in my hair, but still happily a boy. Then again, some days the feeling had nothing to do with what I wore, but was just the surety that I was more them than him. I guess I was still thinking these ideas through.