Aengus and Caer Ibormeith

Aengus dreamed of a girl whose hair was like the long night and whose laughter ran like water over bells. Each dawn he woke with her name on his tongue and the shape of her missing in the bed’s other half. Poets say longing is the beginning of a road. Aengus walked it to the lake of the swans.

There he found Caer Ibormeith, who was a girl only half the year and a swan the rest, for such are the bindings of some loves and some spells. On Samhain, when doors between shapes stand politely ajar, she would come with others to the lake and sing a song that turned the cold to pearl.

Aengus stood on the shore with his heart held carefully in both hands. “I have seen you in dreams,” he said. “Will you come where the dreaming ends kindly?”

“You must know me as I am,” said Caer, “in both my shapes.”

“So be it,” said Aengus. He was a godling and could take a swan’s shape if love asked nicely. He did so, and the two of them rose from the water like white thoughts. A silver chain bound them neck to neck, which is not a yoke if both choose it.

They flew over the sleeping fields and the ringforts like curled hands. People who woke that night heard wing-song and turned on their pillows with smiles they could not explain. At dawn, on a small island nobody owned, Aengus and Caer stood side by side on human feet and did not unlearn what they had learned as swans.

Later, when they returned to the lake each year at Samhain, the song they sang mended a dozen quiet griefs in the listening. Lovers who argued walked home with their hands finding each other in the dark; old enemies remembered bread shared long ago. Aengus learned that love, like shape, can be chosen and re-chosen, and Caer learned that being seen in all one’s forms is a kind of sacred.

If you pass a winter lake and see two swans with a silver gleam between them, let them be. Some knots are not for untying; some songs are for hearing through the ribs and not the ears.