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She had given her son away once. Sometimes she thinks this is where the trouble started. They had taken the sick child out of her hands and returned with a healthy one.
And It looked the same, it acted the same! She should not dwell on it.
Witchcraft is not a thing that exists, neither do fairies. She knows that no one is as powerful as God. It’s within His power to heal the sick, within His power to raise the dead. But knowing something is not the same as feeling it.
Her son looks like her father, soft features, a proud nose and eyes, beautiful like a flower. When he had been younger, she had feared he would wilt away. She never feared that much for her daughter. There is an irony to that, she knows, now with her daughter below the ground, wilted away so quickly in the bloom of her life, while her son is still living and strong.
After the sickness, he never grew sick again. She found that odd back then, but Alfred’s dismissing words made her bite her tongue.
Why are you angry at God’s blessing, he had asked one day over dinner, as she had informed him that despite spending their afternoons together only Aethelflaed had gotten a cold.
But what if it’s not God’s blessing? What if it is something else? The words had fallen out of her mouth before she could control them. Fear had ruled her heart.
It had grown eerily quiet, and there had been this scolding look in his eyes. For a moment she had felt small again, at her father’s table as he chided her. Her husband did not know it, but he had the same stern expression.
I will pretend I have not heard that, he finally said and that was the end of it.
She had given her daughter away once. She never returned the same. That’s how marriage goes. Although she knows deep down it should not leave scars like this. Her daughter did not grow into a flower as much as into a thorn, always calculating, rarely at ease. Her daughter had always in some ways resembled her husband, in body and mind, but it was hard to see a young woman resemble an old dying bitter man. When her husband was young, he had hopes and dreams. Her daughter seemed too busy to tend to them to have any of her own.
Her marriage had been part of this. Unions are needed to strengthen the bond between the different kingdoms, otherwise England won’t emerge. She knows this.
But even in her death, her daughter did not allow herself to cry, still thinking about the future, about Merica, Wessex and England. Even from her bed, she had tried to keep her kingdom together, tending to this dream.
Of course, she is proud, England had been her vision as well after all, so proud to know that all her sacrifices have been worth it, but…
When she looked into her grandson’s eyes for the first time, she sensed it immediately: Another child which had been given away, only to return changed forever. Even back then he had looked like his father and thus her father. His eyes were so big and vacant. She remembers that stare, her son’s stare. He had but been a babe. How can a babe feel so different?
But this is what happens when you give something away and with her grandson it has been her conscious doing. She had ripped him out of his mother’s arms, away from a father who cared. There had been reasons of course, but as she stood there in front of the child, they all seemed meaningless. How could she have abandoned him, as she had abandoned her son? Would she ever learn?
She tried to make amends of course, tried to repent. She still does, but you cannot mend what you once gave away, it can never return unchanged.
After she had recovered from poisoning—recovered enough to be moved at least—her son arranged her journey to Aylesbury. Mercia would help her make a speedy recovery, it would be familiar, adequate, calming.
She looked at her son with sad eyes, trying to retain some sense of poise and dignity. What her son did not mention was that Mercia was the safer option. Her poisoner was after all still residing within these walls and the need for this union, its money and power, was still needed and always would be.
Still she wanted to ask her son if he knew what he was doing. What if they met again, and she had changed, become unrecognizable, distant? How often had they given each other away by now? How often had a piece of them gone missing? Why not let her stay? Aethelhelm’s intrigues be damned. But her son’s expression had been unmoving.
He knows of the consequences, maybe he is the one to know best. After all, he was the first one to be taken. Sometimes she wonders if that is the reason, he pushes his children aside, gives them away, to their mothers, to loyal men. Someone else to tend to them, anyone but him. Maybe that’s what love is to him.
There is kindness in leaving, in untethering and coming back changed. After the witch took her son away, she never let him out of her eye, always kept him close, always worrying. As if a tight leash could undo what had already been done, or undo what had been planned.
In her dreams, she still holds her son in her arms crying, and there is her husband coming with outreached arms, wanting to take him away. She fights, she screams. Do not give him to the witch! You don’t know what she is capable of!
And her husband rips the child out of her arms and answers: I am not giving it to the witch.
She had given her children away many times, over and over. Always for the same cause. That’s why you have children in the first place. She fed them to the cause and so they did with theirs. They never returned the same.