#21 Summer

Nerinai has lived up north for quite some time. There’s plenty to like in the highlands with their austere pines and silvery birches and the twisted, grandfatherly wych elms. There’s plum, juniper and elderberry to eat, and bake pies and brew with. The sheer stony drops that overlook the wine dark sea are staggering.

The problem is: she doesn’t get to enjoy this near enough, with the friendlier seasons being so, so short up here. She misses the long, morose summers from her previous abode near the mid-section of this world, but her duties have brought her here, and here the summers are short and the winters are nothing short of brutal.

Stationed here to watch over the maritime tomb of The Crawler – it’s near the horizon line, but she and the other women of her family have sharp eyes – Nerinai has to find her ways to stay her jolly self, when the world is blanketed in white and silence. In her fourth year of vigil she finished digging a good and proper home underground, complete with an orchard thanks to granny Tyniwe’s visit. She knew how to make a home in a place like this, and she taught Nerinai how to. They toiled happily together until she went back to her own freezing reaches in the south. She left Nerinai three gifts that she should use in due time.

The cutting wind that announced autumn’s end signaled due time. Nerinai retreated with her friends – a wily fox, a brave eagle, a playful squirrel and a cunning wildcat – and placed the gifts carefully in their assigned perches while singing summer back into her lair.

I put sunlight in a glass jar
And warm breeze on a bell
Caught birdsong in a cage
And tied it all in song-spell