Author's note: Exploring the undocumented lives of two second-tier characters from a famous legend. (I never had much sympathy for the primary players in this particular love story, after all.)

The young man kneels at the graveside, legs folded beneath him and his chin resting in his hands. It is a cloudless day along the Breton coast. He thinks perhaps he should be more grieved, thinks he should weep, instead of feeling the December sunshine warming his back, glowing from the pink granite cliffside and sparkling off the seafoam at the water's edge below. But a deep breath will not be a sigh, no matter how he tries; he fills his lungs with sunlight instead of sadness.

They are lovely indeed, the graves: in the spring, lush grass has softened the turned earth, and a scattering of wildflowers are still clinging to their edges, bright like short-lived butterflies. And the legends are true, it would seem; two trees, strong and slender, grow entwined where their headstones might have been. Their leaves have fallen but the wood is young and strong-- hazelwood and honeysuckle; chèvrefeuille et coudrier. Even the words are sweet to the ear.

Try as he might, he cannot think them anything but beautiful.

What sort of branch, he wonders, will grow from the earth that buries me? It might make a song, he thinks, a fine lament for a lonesome fireside. "When Ankou comes for me, my mourners soon will see-- the bitter absinthe tree."

"Who goes there?" A new voice rises along the cliffside, interrupting his melody; a pale woman walks along the narrow pathway, her milky-white dress moved about her by the salt breeze.

He had not anticipated company, but rises and brushes the dirt from his knees. It is a poorly-kept secret that he is not the son of a king, but he is yet the rightful son of a queen, and he minds his manners. The woman who is approaching him is obviously someone of importance; though she travels alone, without attendants, and her clothes are plain, there is wealth in the lace of her hem, and pride in the carriage of her head. He bows deeply.

"Good day to you, lady. I am a pilgrim to this land, come to pay my respects to the dead. I pray I have not offended."

"You must be lost, then," she said, and in the sharpness of her voice he knows he is not mistaken; she is the child of kings, and perhaps old enough to be queen in her own right (twice his own age, at the least). "If you were looking for the tombs of the seven founder saints, you are leagues out of your way. I believe I asked for your name."

"Forgive me," he says. Again he feels that he is strangely empty; where there should have been grief, perhaps now there should be affront. He should think her arrogant and presumptuous. Instead, he notices how fragile she seems, how proud and taut and shivering beneath her careful poise. "I am Ysaie, called Ysaie the Sad, and I am not lost."

She crosses her arms and the sea wind blows the hair back from her brow. She is curious, he can see, in spite of her misgivings. It is a common enough reaction, and he might admit to himself that it is one that he has learned to appreciate. The woman has forgotten her anger, and she draws near without aggression or hauteur. "The Sad?"

Ysaie nods. The late grass has left stains in the knees of his loose trousers; he has no clear idea just how long he knelt there, in the leaf mold and the smells of the ocean and the coming winter, before the sunlight stirred in him, before he heard her voice. "So they say. I was raised by a mendicant brother of Saint Columbanus, and the monks say I never smiled as a child."

"Son of sorrow, raised by clerics." Something in her face has hardened again. If he felt such things, he might be frightened of her. "I know who you are, come wandering here from Cornwall, to kneel at my graveside, uninvited."

It is his turn to be taken off his guard, and all the nothingness inside him has swiveled around to burning curiosity. You knew them, he thinks; you knew the man and the woman buried here, you saw their living eyes, heard their voices, felt the warmth of their skin in a way they never gave to me. He says, just the first of his questions, "Your graveside?"

Curtly she nods. "I buried them, yes." Then she eyes him keenly; her pale eyes draw hot lines in the air between them. "Or did you think I would say I died that day, and that I am a ghost come to stand at your side, to mourn the dead and haunt the living?"

"If you were to say that, I would believe you," he says quietly. "May I have your name, lady?"

"I am the Duke of Brittany," she says. He wonders if she is mad, but she continues. "My father fell in battle this springtime past, and my brother has left this land, never to return. My father had no other issue. And so Brittany falls to me."

Ysaie thinks he ought to know her name, daughter of Brittany, but memory has flown away from him. The Duke, his son, his family; all names elude his grasp like slippery fish in a swift-moving stream. In another lifetime, he might remember, but this one life is all that any of us are given, and for the first time he feels that lack keenly.

"I owe you my thanks, lady, for laying them to rest, and giving them their due."

"Thanks?" She is genuinely surprised, and draws still closer to him. Her face is neither comely nor homely, her hair no particular color that he could name, but her hands are lovely. Expressive, fingers curving just so as she draws her wrap more tightly around her shoulders. "Can it be that you do not know me?"

He does not watch her lips as she speaks, or the smooth column of her throat as she swallows, but he cannot help but see the fluid grace in her hands as she holds herself. How is it that he had not noticed her hands sooner? They are the most elegant he has ever seen.

She sees him watching, and she looks him in the eyes as she says, "I killed your father with these hands."

It is a peculiar sort of cold that takes him then, bone-deep and familiar as the grave, long as winter nights. She is only more beautiful, for his recognition and what should have been his horror. Instead, he goes down on one knee. "I know you, lady."

The shock and confusion that should have been his are hers now, and she stands riveted to the spot, wide-eyed. With a desperate sound, she lashes out, "And I watched your mother die for love of him! I did not raise a finger!"

"I am not afraid," he says, to her feet, slippered and pale against the dying grass. "Nor am I angered. Do you think I bore my parents any special love? They who sent me, as a babe, into the arms of strangers?"

He looks up, and she is weeping, her brittleness broken, her exquisite hands held before her mouth. "I loved him," she says, as though to herself. "I would have done anything for him."

Something stirs in Ysaie's breast, alien and yet welcome, a sensation of emotion on another's behalf. He feels his face warming, the blood moving more quickly through his veins. He wants to reach out a hand to her, to still her shivering. "Was my father cruel to you?"

The sunshine illuminates her tear-wet face; she meets his eyes as if she is seeing him for the first time. "You favor him, Ysaie the Sad. Son of sorrow, cursed child. You have his faraway eyes." She shakes her head, and the wind catches at her hair. "He was never cruel, only distant. Tristan of Cornwall gave me nothing, neither love nor hatred. All I wanted was for him to look at me, and see me."

"For yourself," says Ysaie. "And not for your name."

"Yes. You understand." She looks away, gaze moving out over the restless sea. After a moment of sunlit silence, she says, "I did not mean to kill him."

Ysaie says, "I know."

She rushes onward, as though her words might propel themselves to suicide over the cliff face. "It was not poison, or knife, or aught else. I cared for him, as a wife should. He had not spoken for days, nor touched food. I knew the fever would take him. I-- I only wanted him to meet my eye, and call my name." Her voice breaks, but she is the Duke of Brittany, and still standing, if not strong. "I touched his face, and it was as if the touch of my hands robbed him of his life. He was my husband! I-- I had never touched him before. Not once."

"You blame yourself," says Ysaie, learning the truth as he speaks it. "And you have waited all these years for someone to punish you for it?"

It seems she is out of tears. She straightens, and her breathing evens. "Yes." When she lifts one shoulder in a shrug, again he is watching her hands, her beautiful hands. "I await my penance."

"Don't." Ysaie surprises himself with the forcefulness of his tone, but even more so when he strides to her side, takes up one of her hands. It is cold as marble, smooth and strong. She is staring at him, wondering. "I never knew them," he says. "My parents. All I know is what I have heard. But I do know that they were selfish; in their love, capable of seeing only one another. I was born of that love, created solely between them. And yet they discarded me, who ought to have been the joy of their youth and the succour of their old age."

"I did not know I was not the only one wounded by the flight of their true love's arrow," she whispers, watching their fingers intertwine. Not hazelwood, not honeysuckle, but skin on skin, chilled and chafed. "Perhaps you have suffered more than I."

"I did not know that it was suffering," says Ysaie, "until I learned to compare it to what it could have been."

"That may be my tragedy as well. Given everything but the thing I wanted most," she says, with a humorless laugh. "And never even beautiful. It will be a bitter wormwood tree that grows at my graveside when Ankou comes for me."

A weight lifts from him, then, all unexpected. Not a lament, after all; not a lonely lay for a winter's night. Instead, a chanson discant, one singer to another, two voices and one melody. He says, "I was writing a song, as you were coming up the cliffside. Did you hear? I sang-- I sang just that."

His sudden startled smile is echoed, faint and ghost-like, on her face. "I had not heard," she whispers. "Will it make a song, do you think? Will it be beautiful?"

He shakes his head. "I believe... it already is."

She straightens her shoulders, and though he can tell she is trying not to weep, it is a different sort of sadness. Some of her frailty has passed from her; she speaks as the Duke of Brittany should. "I should welcome you to my lands, Ysaie the Sad, and show you the hospitality of my house. There will be feasting for the saint's day on the morrow, cider and mead, and bright apple brandy. Will you stay?"

"I would be honored, Iseult of the White Hands." He would bow again, but she will not let go his hand, as a wounded man in a rudderless boat prays to the wind and clings to the stern.

Together they walk from the graveside, along the cliff and into the cold and golden afternoon.

- fin -