In the Dead Month, Brigid goes to the mountain to speak with the hag. She does not know what else to do.
Beinn Nibheis towers black and rimeslick over the Narrows, taller than any peak of Nature’s make, but Brigid’s fear of the climb is a small thing next to her fear of this unyielding winter. It is the coldest in her memory, and her memory is long indeed: she has spent seventy winters in the mountain’s shadow. If the hag does not relent—if she does not leash this storm—Brigid knows she will not live to springtime.
The foot of the mountain is not so far, but Brigid moves slowly in the cold. Snowdrifts snatch at her legs; frost blisters the wolfskin on her shoulders. Her hands begin to tremble around her walking stick well before she reaches the path. A small mercy: she is alone. There is no one left in the village to laugh at a foolish old woman stumbling through the snow.
No, no. There is no one left at all.
* * *
As she climbs, Brigid practices the words she means to speak to the hag. Anything to keep her thoughts steady even when her feet slip upon the scree beneath the snow. Oh, fair Beira, Brigid will say, curtseying as low as her body will allow, will you not make peace with the Summer King? We are starving in the valley. We are dying—
“We are dying,” Brigid cries, unable to hold her tongue. “Have pity! Have pity!”
But she cannot outshout the storm, and the wind whisks her words away, smothering the sound in a snowbank like some sickly winter-born babe.
* * *
Brigid walks through the night. Sometimes she must retrace her steps to find a safe path through the ice and snow, but she dares not stop longer than a breath. The dark makes no difference—it has been months since the hag’s cloud-curtain parted—and no matter how desperately she longs to rest, she knows well that sleep means death.
Once, half-dreaming even on her feet, Brigid thinks she sees a woman on the path.
“This is a sorry sight,” the woman says. “You will not live to see the summit.”
“I am surely close—”
“Not so close.”
“I mean to see the summit,” Brigid says, though her voice comes out slurred, words sticking to frozen lips like wet flesh to cold iron. “I mean to see another springtime.”
Brigid cannot see the woman’s face beneath a frost-laced veil, and if the woman speaks again, well—Brigid hears nothing but the wind.
* * *
When Brigid stands atop Beinn Nibheis at last, she cannot find her practiced words; she cannot curtsey. She can only stare.
The hag peels back her veil. She looks just like the stories: blue skin, black lips, one glinting white eye and a hollow for the other, a creel of stones upon her back. Her face is as wrinkled as Brigid’s own; the fingers wrapped around her staff are gnarled, mottled, cold-swollen.
“I am Brigid of the Narrows,” she manages. “I have come to treat with you.”
“I used to treat with gods and kings,” she says in a voice like rolling thunder. “These mountains were my stepstones, and when my winter lingered overlong, your kind sent offerings of handsome boys and blushing girls. Why should I treat with you?”
“I used to dance the maypole,” Brigid says too sharply. “Now your back is as bent as mine, and there are no handsome boys and blushing girls left unburied in the valley. There is only me—an old woman in search of a little warmth. You must treat with me.”
The hag’s thin lips twitch. “I have no warmth to offer,” she says, “but you are welcome here, Brigid of the Narrows. Come. Rest by my hearth tonight. Tomorrow we shall speak of springtime.”
* * *
No fire crackles in the hag’s hearth, but it matters not: no fire could warm Brigid’s blackened fingertips.
“Frostbite,” the hag says, making the word sound like a lover’s name. She touches Brigid’s arm, leaving a trail of hoarfrost in her wake. “You will lose the hand. Perhaps the arm.”
“Take the arm,” Brigid says. “Call it my offering. In return, end this winter.”
The hag bares a mouthful of rust-red teeth. “And if I do? What will you do then?”
“I will go home—”
“Who waits for you?” the hag asks.
Brigid stares at her ruined hand: black fingers, red-raw knuckles, thin bruised skin. She cannot answer. The hag’s blue fingers curl around her wrist.
When the hag has taken Brigid’s right hand and three fingers from her left, they sit together and watch the sky swell with stars. The hag’s spellwork has turned the stump of Brigid’s wrist as blue as her own. But with the frost of the hag’s touch like lace upon her skin, Brigid does not mind the cold; she does not mind the pain.
“No one waits for me,” Brigid says softly. “I had a son once, long ago. I do not now.”
“I had many sons,” the hag says. “They are lost to me.”
“It is lonely in the valley,” Brigid says.
“It is lonely on the mountain too.”
Brigid takes a breath, filling her lungs with air so cold it burns like fire, and lets her gaze slide across distant, white-frothed peaks. She thinks of the dead beneath the snow; she thinks of her cold hearth and her empty bed. She thinks of the stories of the wicked woman on the mountaintop.
“Perhaps I might wait out the winter here,” she says at last. “If my company would not trouble you overmuch.”
“You will be no trouble to me, Brigid of Beinn Nibheis,” the hag says. And when she smiles, her smile is sure as snowmelt, sweet as spring.
* * *
Ⓒ M. R. Robinson
Thank you.