It tastes like desire—to listen to herself, to trust her own instincts. Whenever she’d done it before, she’d been right. The ones you love will leave you: it was the rhythm beating in her veins, in her ears, all her life; it was her terror, but it was true. She knew it as a shaman knows, as a visionary priestess, a mystic. A wobbling table from Dido’s attic, the vermilion wall he pushed it against, the stratified coats on the rack, typescripts and carbons and Shakespeare—his proselyte’s Bible. The red leather binding had ripped cleanly in half, brittle as an old sheet. She waited for the door of the flat to open, furious, bits of white paper fluttering down. The walls gushed like blood. He pasted the handwritten pages of The Calm back together, his only copy, his first play. He sat there and glued each flake into place. But she’d sensed something, and she was right. If not then, some day: she would always be left. She knew. That intuition, that deep vision of her self—it was her gift, as words were her gift. It was her fate, her wyrd: what is to come. Her weirdness, something to be proud of. Ariel: spirit of poetry, lioness of god, sacrificial altar, birth of the immaculate soul—it was all coming together, now and now and now, hoofbeats pounding. Her god is dead, again. The muse hangs over her life like a moon. She will ride this fate right through to a fiery ecstasy, to a resurrection on a hill, a self that was naked and real.

As she rounds the ascending curve of Cawsand Hill, the lowest stones of the triple row come into view, above the acres of rime-whitened bracken, now melting, and the swampy outline of treacherous, emerald peat bog tufted with cotton grass. Sylvia takes a deep breath and stills her hips: she simply stands, her weight in her stirrups, pelvis steady, shoulders back, her breath no longer misting under the sherbet-colored sky, the sun’s forehead burning as it finally rises over the distant oak-scattered range she rides toward. The wind plays her face. She fills her lungs with it, this cellular hit of liberty, the heady elation of steering her own life. She is stripping off expectations, the dead rules, the hands of all who would hold her back. With almost no encouragement but the shift of Sylvia’s weight in the saddle and on the reins, the mare slows her pace as she approaches the stone rows. Sylvia holds her balance: the sun bursts free of the skyline, blazing, enormous, the whole sky a fever of red, lighting her hair, spinning it into golden filaments that fly about her face as she drops lightly back into the saddle and eases Ariel to a walk, turning her up the hillside, westward, to follow the stones.