From the story shelf
The Swan Children
In the old days, before there were bells in Ireland, there was a lord among the people of the hills named Lir, and he had four children whom he loved better than his own eyes. The eldest was a girl, Fionnuala. After her came a boy, Aodh. Last came twin boys, Fiachra and Conn, and in bearing them their mother died.
Lir's grief was so great that the king of his people, wishing to comfort him, gave him another wife: Aoife, the dead woman's own sister. She was clever and handsome, and at first she was fond of the children, as anyone would have been. They were good children, merry and kind, and they slept in beds beside their father's so that he could hear them breathing in the night.
But that, in the end, was what turned her. She saw that Lir rose before dawn to go and look at them sleeping. She saw that every guest who came to the house asked first for the children. A jealousy came into her and grew there, the way damp gets into a wall. For a year she kept to her bed and said she was ill. When she rose, her mind was made up.
She told Lir she would take the children to visit their grandfather. She put them in her chariot and drove out across the country, and on the road she ordered her servants to kill them. The servants would not. She drew a knife to do it herself, and found she could not do that either; whatever else she was, she was not that. So she drove on until they came to a long gray lake in the middle of the land, and there she told the children to go down and bathe.
They went into the water laughing. And as they swam, she stood on the shore and struck each one with a wand of the old craft, and where four children had been there were four white swans, turning in confusion on the water.
Fionnuala swam to the shore. She had kept her voice, and she used it.
"What have we done to you," she said, "that you should do this to us? And how long must it last?"
Aoife answered her, and it seemed to give her no joy to say it. "Nine hundred years. Three hundred on this lake. Three hundred on the Sea of Moyle, between this country and the next. Three hundred on the wild western sea. You will not be free until a woman of the south is married to a man of the north."
Then, because something in her was already sorry, she gave them what she could. "You will keep your speech," she said. "You will keep your minds, and know one another, and know what you were. And you will have the gift of song, so that no music in the world will be as sweet as yours, and all who hear it will be comforted." Then she turned the chariot and went away.
Lir came looking for his children and found four swans on the lake who spoke to him in his daughter's voice. He stayed on the shore that night and many nights after, and they sang to him, and he slept for the first time since they had gone.
As for Aoife, her own father heard what she had done and asked her what shape she would most hate to wear. She said: the wind. So she was made a thing of the wind, and she is in it still, they say, and is never warm.
For three hundred years the swans lived on that lake, and people came from all over the country to camp along its shores and listen. It was a hard fate, but it was not a lonely one. Their father came every evening while he lived. When he was gone, others came.
Then the three hundred years were over, and Fionnuala gathered her brothers, and they rose from the lake and flew north to the Sea of Moyle.
No one came to listen there. It was a narrow, cold, quarreling sea, all current and spray, with nothing on it but rocks and seals. In their first winter a storm came out of the north so fierce that the four of them were blown apart in the dark, and in the morning Fionnuala was alone on the rock they called the Seal Rock, singing out over the empty water for her brothers.
Conn came first, with his feathers soaked and broken. Then Fiachra, so cold he could not speak. Then at last Aodh, who had been carried farthest. Fionnuala took Conn under her right wing and Fiachra under her left, and Aodh she drew in under the feathers of her breast, and she said, "Now, whatever comes, we will meet it like this." And that is how they lived for three hundred years.
When those years were done they flew west to the open sea, where the coast is bare and the wind comes all the way from the end of the world. That was the hardest time of all. There was a winter there when the sea froze along the shore, and their feet froze fast to the rocks, and when they pulled free they left the skin of their feet behind. Still they kept their speech. Still, on the worst nights, they sang, and the seals came in close to the rocks to hear them.
At the end of the nine hundred years they flew home, all four together, to their father's house. They came down out of the sky over the place where it had stood, and there was nothing there. There were green mounds, and nettles, and a few stones in the grass. No one living remembered Lir, or his house, or that he had ever had children.
They did not stay. They flew back west to a small island, and there, one morning, they heard a sound they had never heard before: a little bell, ringing thinly across the water. It frightened them at first. Then Fionnuala said, "That is a new sound in the world. I think our time is nearly done," and they listened, and were not afraid.
A holy man had come to live on that island, with his bell and his small stone cell. He heard them singing and went down to the shore, and they told him who they were. He was kind to them. He linked them together with a fine silver chain so that no storm could part them again, and every day they sang while he said his prayers, and for a while they were content.
It happened then that a king of the north was married to a queen of the south. The queen heard of the singing swans and wanted them for her own, and the king came to the island to take them. He seized the silver chain and dragged them out of the holy man's cell, and as he did, their feathers fell from them like snow.
There on the ground sat four people, very old: a white-haired woman and three white-haired men, thin and bent and wrinkled past any age the world had seen. The king was afraid and went away. Fionnuala looked at her brothers, and they at her, and it seemed to her that they were all quite beautiful.
"We have not long," she said to the holy man. "Bless us, if you will, and when we are gone, bury us as we lived. Put Conn at my right side, and Fiachra at my left, and Aodh before my face, where I can see him."
He blessed them, and they died that same day, quietly, one after another, with the light coming in at the door. He buried them as she had asked, in one grave. And the people of that coast said afterward that they heard singing over the grave for a long time, though there were no swans on the water.
Pieces in the stacks are written under pen names. Personal pieces are composite accounts that gather experiences commonly described by therians and otherkin, and are offered as illustration, not as testimony about any one person. See the editorial principles.