“Take your man, daughter,” said my father with a little smile, though his eyes were awake with painful memories. “Find him a warm place to sleep. Time enough in the morning, for further talk.” Then he gathered his cloak around him and went out, with Finbar behind. My brother paused in the doorway, the white swathe of his single wing turned rosy gold in the candlelight; and this time he spoke aloud.

“The tale is finished at last,” he said, in the tongue that we could all understand. “Be happy. You have earned one another. The gift of such love is given to but few. You must make each day count.”

Red pressed his lips against my hair. I watched Finbar slip out the door like a shadow. Then I took my husband’s hand, and led him to my own sleeping quarters, where somebody had lit a fire in the small grate, and placed candles and wine and goblets, and a bunch of dried lavender on the pillow. I could hear what an effort it was for Red to control his breathing, and indeed I was not much better myself.

“I—I’m afraid I will hurt you,” he said. “But—but I need you, Jenny, I ache for you, I don’t think I can—”

“Ssh,” I said. “It’s all right. It will be all right.”

Real life is not quite as it is in stories. In the old tales, bad things happen, and when the tale has unfolded and come to its triumphant conclusion, it is as if the bad things had never been. Life is not as simple as that, not quite. It would have been good to forget, entirely, the damage done to my body and mind that day in the forest, by men who used me without thought. But such things are never quite forgotten, though they fade with the years. And so, as we lay together that first time, there was one moment when I gasped in remembered fear, and my body froze and trembled. But Red held me, and stroked my hair, and spoke to me softly, little words under the breath, and he waited for me. And, at length, my body opened to his like a flower, and we moved slowly together, and then more quickly, and we sighed and cried out and found release in each other’s arms. He showed me that the union between man and woman is, indeed, something to wonder at, and revel in, and laugh over. Until that night, I realized I had never heard him laugh. And as to what the gossips of Harrowfield had delighted in saying about my husband, it was all true, but it scarcely did him justice.

The very first thing Red did, after we rose next morning in a sort of blissful daze, with foolish smiles on our faces and scarce able to keep our hands away from each other, was to come with me to the village, and while I tended to one and to another, he set about learning the names of every man, woman, and child there, and how to greet them courteously in their own tongue. At first they eyed him with some unease. But his stumbling efforts to be understood brought smiles and wisecracks, and they saw how it was with the two of us. Me they knew and loved, and if he was my man, then he must be all right, Briton or no. Soon enough he was being stopped to admire a prize sow, or offering grave advice, by means of complicated hand signals, on replacing rotting wood in a byre, or helping to hold a post upright while supports were driven in around it. In time, they were all won over.