“Spring Herself, When She Woke at Dawn” // One Quirk Later

I’m not even sure that pretentious-literary-allusion of a title is accurate, but it stuck and I cannot get rid of it. So Spring Herself, When She Woke at Dawn it is, for the title of this quirk.

Which, by the way, has context! It’s a scene from a novel I have mostly not written. This scene takes place well into the story, which means there’s all sorts of backstory and world-building and things you don’t know about leading up to it.

So it may possibly not make sense, and it also may possibly not mean things to you the way it does to me, because you don’t know the characters and what has happened to them…but ah well. I thought of this scene immediately upon seeing the wonderful prompt Jem cobbled together for us this month and…simply couldn’t not write it.

It’s also really long. Like definitely too long to qualify as flash fiction. Oops?

Well, enjoy, I guess.

Or don’t.

But you should enjoy it if at all possible. It’s spring, a time to enjoy yourself. (Or…fall? Is it fall in the Southern Hemisphere? Is that how that works? At any rate, also a time to enjoy yourself.)

Does anyone else adore this graphic? It is the perfect blend of quirky and whimsical and mysterious and the color scheme is just *chef’s kiss*

Spring Herself, When She Woke at Dawn

As it was the first dance of spring, Eden wore white. Eden loved white (like Easter lilies and the rarest daffodils), and she knew it fit her – even without looking in the mirror to see the way her skin bloomed against it: vivid rose and cream, and the light gold-brown given to it by the sun. She knew by how free she felt, by the flash of her hand across her vision, and (when she felt like admitting it) by the way Jeffrey looked at her. And tonight she wanted to be beautiful. She took the necklace from its drawer.

The door burst open.

Closing her hand around the chain, Eden twisted to look over her shoulder. She grinned happily. “Jeffrey!”

He flailed to a stop. “How many times do I have to tell you my name isn’t Jeffrey?”

Eden spun on her stool to face him all the way. “Yes, it is. And you shouldn’t really barge into my room without knocking.”

“Oh, sorry.” He looked as rueful and flustered as his hair, which could never decide which way to grow or whether to lie down or stand up and was hence always full of the wildest compromises. “Sorry, Eden.”

“It’s okay, I’ve got a lock.”

They smiled at each other.

“Anyway,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets, “I came to tell you it’s important what you wear tonight.”

“How?” asked Eden, despite knowing the general uselessness of such questions.

He shrugged. “That’s all I know.”

She looked down at the necklace, clutched and many-times-folded in her hand. She lifted the hand and opened her fingers to show him. “I was thinking of wearing this.”

That was why she didn’t wear it often, despite the strange, grave beauty it lent her. That sudden flicker of expression in his eyes – it was the same every time. A little puzzled, a little sad, like peering through a window into a dark house.

Eden was not a dark house. She was an Easter lily, born under one sun, come through darkness to greet another. She had been a finder of hidden doors and an explorer of secret passages, and now she was a girl who’d come home. That was how she knew, whatever sun it was, the sunlight was all the same, and it was all sunlight. Even the fall of dusk meant sunlight: for it to fall into.

“I don’t understand you sometimes,” she said to him, and realized as she said it she was frowning. She hadn’t meant to frown – still less to say it.

He returned her gaze (but not her frown) and, after consideration, nodded. “I don’t understand you sometimes.”

Pique flared in Eden. “I’m under no obligation to—” She paused, and said, less icily—“explain myself to you.” Then she felt wretched. “And you’re under no obligation to explain yourself to me,” she added wearily. “Of course. Sometimes—I just wish we knew things. And weren’t always guessing and being considerate. Of course, I want to be considered—only—”

He smiled at her.

She didn’t smile back, yet. She put her free hand on the dressing table, her fingers sliding down the grain of the wood. “I do understand the thing that matters. We’re friends.” She raised her eyebrows, as if it had been a question, and when he nodded she finally returned his smile.

***

Dusk fell in sheets from the mountains, filling the bowl of the valley. Eden thought how nice it was to know the dances, so they could stroll down the path together now, and talk, and wait and feel the rhythm of the dance growing in their hearts. No need to practice or count the rhythms or ask Jeffrey to teach her the next step. (“My name isn’t Jeffrey,” he would say.)

“I hope you’ll dance with me some,” he was saying now, gravely.

“Of course I will,” said Eden.

“You didn’t last time.”

“Dance with the churl who insulted my abilities? Ha.”

“I know you had to keep up appearances till he left, but you didn’t dance with me then either.” The stream flowed at their feet, its clear throaty murmur as cold as the touch of the night wind on their arms. (After all, it was only the very, very beginning of spring. Eden hadn’t even gone looking for hyacinths yet.) When he spoke again, his voice seemed (to Eden) to have grown together with the stream and to run with it. “You don’t have to. It’s just I keep thinking – sometimes – a little – you don’t want to. I just want to know.”

Eden shivered involuntarily. He stopped quickly, took off his jacket, and put it around her shoulders. Eden stood still in the warmth of it, looking downstream into the deep shadows – and up, barely lifting her eyes, to the velvet purple sky, washed with the watery shadows of shadows. Very soon the first stars would be out, and the dance would begin. For now, though, she was out here in dusk’s last deepest purple with the boy. Her boy. And he wanted to know.

Eden could appreciate his directness. She had been direct, after all, that afternoon. But she was wary, and her childhood was slipping from her shoulders like snow from the thawing cedars, and that was why she didn’t always dance with him now. Only it would be either very cruel or very foolish to explain it all to him. Cruel if he was as innocent and happy as she was. Foolish if he wasn’t. She said, “Do you think I’m pretty?”

He stood just behind her elbow, and because she was looking down the canyon she couldn’t see him, but she would have felt him move, and that was how she knew he didn’t. “Yes.”

Eden laughed and turned to him. “You’re a dumb fish, rising to bait that obvious.”

He grinned widely at her. “Some compliments like being caught.”

She narrowed her eyes, listening to the stream. “Jeffrey.”

His head lifted.

“I would rather be happy than pretty.”

Down in the canyon, from the lake’s edge, frogs sang out.

And Eden, looking into the sky above the mountains, brought her gaze back down, down, to the path and Jeffrey’s face, waiting to see if it ought to be anxious. “Fortunately – ” she said, with a smile that crinkled her eyes like a laugh – “unless I find you have lied to me – I don’t have to pick.”

And Jeffrey smiled back, believing her, yet unconvinced.

They turned to walk back. Eden brought her hand up within the cover of his jacket and uncurled her fist. She poked at the necklace all crunched in her palm, till the single pendant uncovered itself. It glowed with strange potency in the twilight.

Eden realized she had stopped walking. She looked up, into Jeffrey’s watchful gaze. Her lips tightened. “Why did you give it to me, if you don’t like it?”

When he laughed, Jeffrey’s face looked seventeen, just like her. When he was grave, he looked younger, much younger even than when she’d met him, younger in a different way. An ageless way. This was the same beauty the necklace gave to Eden, and she was afraid of it. She was afraid of Jeffrey’s face now, like a twelve-year-old’s, impossibly simple. Again his voice ran with the voice of the stream, so that they came low and swift, deep and sweet, clear and uncapturable, to Eden’s ears bearing the same words. “I gave it to you because you wanted it.”

And she had.

Only – she was realizing – she could only have it by losing it. Either way. If she kept it forever, adorned and set apart by its alien beauty, she herself lost the mortality that made it potent. And if she could go back, and have it – have Margo, have the Kowalskis, have the blue hyacinth blooming in the purple dusk at the edge of the soccer field (her breathing and Margo’s, her small and battered purple Converse cocked next to Margo’s spiffy new black ones, the grass tickling their legs, the moist warm press of coming summer against their bodies) – then she would lose it too, because that was what it meant to have it.

The first star was out, overhead. The small drop of light swimming in the pendant’s lilac (it was the same warm color as the lamplight in Mrs. Kowalski’s house) shimmered brightly up into her eyes. She squinted.

“It’s starting,” Jeffrey said.

Eden knew. She wasn’t afraid to be fashionably late, attired in white and wearing her necklace – if she was going to wear it. It did more than make her beautiful.

In her hands, the blaze of the little star ebbed. She could see its shape clearly again.

“Come on, Eden,” urged Jeffrey, half laughing.

Eden, giving her left hand to him, ran in his wake. To the door, where they stopped. Music floated out to them, merry music that teased at the stars. Eden gave him back his jacket.

He looked up at her, from under half-behaved hair, fixing his buttons. He was grave again, but not so young. Eden wanted to push his hair out of his eyes and make it lie down properly. “You should wear it,” he said.

Eden looked down at the necklace still in her hand; her mouth tightened again.

“I really think you should.”

She lifted it to her neck – cold, thin iron bars and ribbons like ice laid on her skin, the chains were – and breathed in the scent of his hands as he took it from her (they smelled like dirt; he must have been gardening, and he’d better not have planted any of the bulbs without her) and the tight cold scent of the spring night. He fastened it in the back without any fumbling—the only boy Eden had ever met who knew how to accomplish that—and then they went in.

***

Eden didn’t dance as much as usual. She danced with Jeffrey; she danced with just Maralee, and with Maralee and her friends. She exchanged smiles with the grandfather, her favorite dancing partner, but of course he rarely danced in spring – that, when she first came, had been an exception. And she was not unaware of the people – mostly boys her age and a little older – who saw her as she passed by, smiling gravely, with a cup of mead in her hands, and who paused, and hesitated, and would have asked her to dance. But she didn’t need to enact silly dramas with Jeffrey to discourage them tonight (on another night, she wouldn’t have wanted to discourage them). In fact, she was keenly aware that as the necklace gave her that power of drawing them, so it was that power she turned to her own use now – the measuring glance from gentle eyes, the slight turn of a shoulder at the proper time, the fall of a hand to her side, the imperceptible lift of an expectant chin. So no one stopped her. No one approached her but her friends. Wherever she stood, at the foot of the hall or the head of the stairs, or lingering (as she did for a short time) with the grandfather behind the mead tables, people looked at her: people she didn’t know well and people she didn’t know at all.

It was like being Queen of the Fairies, she thought; that was what it was like. Well – no – it was the King of the Fairies who was always a mortal. But perhaps it still worked in a mixed-up way. It didn’t matter.

Now the evening was late. The strings played softly; the night outside pressed against the windows like ink squeezed into too small a bottle. To Eden’s tired eyes, the lights seemed to lengthen and leap across the floor and the air. She smiled at Maralee, Tom, and Rosalind, chattering beside her about the picnic planned for tomorrow; then smiled at Jeffrey, standing quietly on her other side. It was only certain lines in his face that made him look seventeen. You would know him at once for the same fourteen-year-old he had been. Eden had thought she wouldn’t dance anymore tonight, but now she changed her mind: before the night ended, she’d dance again with Jeffrey.

If he wanted to, but she wasn’t exactly uncertain on that point.

He looked over – pretty quickly, really, if one considered how long it sometimes took him to realize she was there when he’d been absorbed in something else – and smiled quickly back at her.

“Do you want – ” Eden began.

A movement at the foot of the hall caught her eye. She mightn’t have paid it any attention – or would have finished her sentence before she did – if it hadn’t been for a suddenly renewed consciousness of the coldness of the necklace around her throat (the thin chain-work trailed melted snow-drops across her skin, and the curve of the lowest loop touched the hollow of her collarbone like a bead of ice) and, entirely un-physical, of the tiny lilac pendant in the midst of all the cold. It wasn’t cold. Even when she thought about it, she couldn’t feel it.

At the door, the porter was letting someone in, with curiosity as obvious as his reluctance. The someone – the two someones – were coming in – the taller one looking about her; the shorter, stouter one looking up-hall – both drab in jeans and T-shirts and ripped jackets and hair in unwashed ponytails – Eden hadn’t seen anyone wear jeans in so long, and these were so dirty – and the short one was looking at Eden’s necklace. That was all she was aware of, Eden knew: the sweet, humid, lilac-flavored evening at the park, burning with a blaze as orange as Mrs. Kowalski’s study lamp, fierce as her hugs.

And then her eyes came up a little. They saw beyond Eden’s throat and saw Eden.

The music didn’t stop, but all the dancing did, when she ran across the floor. She didn’t run much faster than she ever had, so Eden had a moment to be frozen: untouchable, stolen away and changed as little Kay in the story. But with a fierce, quick tightening of her mouth, she broke the spell and stepped forward to meet Margo. Margo (impossibly, really here) galloped up the steps. She was out of breath, and so she sounded half-strangled as she shrieked, “Eden!” She barreled into Eden.

Eden had never hugged anyone so tightly, not even the grandfather.

Well, kids, that do be all for this time around. Many thanks to Jem for doing this linkup! It’s one of my favorite things, and I really look forward to it every month. Which isn’t to say I manage to write something every month…but I do get to read the scrumptiously angsty things other people write (I mean, they’re usually angsty), so it’s a win-win. Happy spring to you guys (you know…the ones for whom it’s spring)! I hope your spring is full of robins and dancing and excitement!