The morning of the equinox came in slowly, the way all important things do, with a pale trembling at the eastern edge of the hills and the smell of something sweet and green drifting across the meadow before anyone had yet named it spring. Elan had been awake since long before the light changed, sitting on the low stone wall that divided her grandmother's land from the forestry commission track, watching the darkness thin like wool being pulled apart by careful hands, listening to the first birds negotiate the hour with one another in languages she had almost learned to understand.
She was thirty-one years old and had come home to Gwynedd in November, when the grief was still new enough to be sharp at every edge, and had stayed because the thought of leaving again had felt impossible, like trying to fold the sea into a bag. Her grandmother had said nothing about this, only made up the small bedroom at the back of the house and left a hot water bottle in the bed each evening, and this kindness had been almost unbearable in its quietness.
The man she had been going to marry had not died. That was the thing she found hardest to explain to people. He had simply decided, with a gentleness that she suspected he believed was mercy, that he loved someone else more than he had ever loved her, and because he had told her this honestly, without cruelty, she had found that she could not even be properly angry with him. She had only been bereft, which was a different and more difficult condition altogether.
The equinox light came fully over the brow of Mynydd Mawr and the meadow below the wall ignited suddenly with it, and it was because of that sudden brightness that she saw the woman standing among the flowers.
She was standing very still, the way a deer stands when it has heard you but not yet decided whether you are dangerous, and she was dressed in something the colour of oak bark, and her hair was the pale yellow of primrose petals, and all around her the meadow was in full extravagant bloom, which was wrong, which was months wrong, because it was still the early end of March and the meadow should have held only the first tentative celandines and perhaps a little wild garlic along the wet ground near the stream. Yet the meadow blazed with broom, meadowsweet, oak blossom, wild orchid, and a dozen other flowers that had no business being there together at all, let alone at this hour, in this season, and the woman stood in the centre of it as though she had grown there, as though she was the reason all of it had come.
Elan did not call out. She found, rather to her own surprise, that she was not frightened, only very still and very awake, the way she sometimes felt just after a piece of music had ended and the silence was still full of it.
The woman turned and looked at her. Her eyes were the dark amber-green of old water, of the kind of light that comes through a canopy of new leaves, and she looked at Elan with an expression that was not quite sorrow and not quite welcome and not quite recognition, but something that moved between all three without settling anywhere. Then she crossed the meadow towards the wall with the unhurried ease of someone who has never had to hurry anywhere, and she sat down on the stones an arm's length away, and she smelled, overwhelmingly and unmistakably, of flowers.
"You know who I am," the woman said. It was not quite a question.
Elan thought of the stories her grandmother told, of the woman made of blossoms by two magicians for a man who had been cursed never to take a wife of human birth, of the woman who had been given a name that meant flower-face, of what that woman had done with her freedom when she had finally found it and what she had been transformed into in punishment, the owl screaming in the dark, and how some people said the punishment was the cruellest part of the whole story and others said it was not.
"Blodeuwedd," Elan said, and her voice was steadier than she expected.
"I am what is left of her," the woman said, which seemed to Elan like a carefully honest answer. "I come back on this day, every year, while the light and the dark are equal. Before the flowers are fully out. I have been doing it for a very long time."
The sun was fully up now and the meadow was extraordinary in it, the colours almost painful, and a bee moved through the broom with a low concentrated happiness that seemed to belong to a different, simpler world.
"Why are you here?" Elan asked, and she meant here at this wall, here with her, though she half-suspected the woman would answer a different question.
Blodeuwedd tilted her head a little, the gesture birdlike and quick, and regarded Elan with those old-water eyes. "You are sitting on a stone wall at dawn on the equinox," she said, "mourning something that isn't even dead. The living are harder to mourn than the dead, I have found. The dead, you can at least say goodbye to."
Elan felt something loosen in her chest, the way a knot loosens when you find the right thread and pull it gently.
"I made a terrible choice," Blodeuwedd said then, not unkindly. "I chose desire over duty, which some people think is the same as choosing wrong over right, but it was more complicated than that, and the stories have not always been fair to me. I do not regret loving. I only regret the blood." She paused. "But I have had a long time to sit with it."
"How long?" Elan asked.
The woman smiled, and the smile was sudden and genuinely warm and made her look momentarily like someone's younger sister, someone running across a field on a summer afternoon a thousand years ago. "Long enough to know that grief is not a wall," she said. "It is more like a field. You have to walk through it. You cannot go around it and you cannot go over it and you cannot stay at the edge of it for ever, however reasonable that feels."
The flowers nearest to her were moving slightly though there was no wind, as though breathing.
"You were made from flowers," Elan said, understanding it differently than she ever had before. "But you became your own person."
"Yes," said Blodeuwedd simply. "That is the part they usually leave out."
The sun was climbing and the meadow was beginning, already, to return to itself, the extravagant blossom fading at its edges, the ordinary early-spring grass reasserting itself at the margins, and the woman beside her was growing less distinct in the brightening light, not disappearing so much as becoming part of the general luminosity of the morning.
"Walk through it," Elan said.
"Walk through it," the woman agreed, and the primrose-yellow hair caught the full sun for one moment and blazed, and the amber eyes held something that was unmistakably kindness, and then there was only the meadow, quiet and ordinary and washed with spring, and a single owl feather lying on the stone wall where she had been sitting.
Elan picked it up carefully, and held it, and let the morning happen around her, before she went inside to make her grandmother a cup of tea.
And so, the darkness and the light stand briefly equal, and then the light begins to pull ahead, slowly and then all at once, the way spring always does. Even if the cold lingers a little longer than we wish, the promise of Alban Eilir stretches across the land once more, the sun rising due east, the old goddess stirring, the meadows remembering what they know how to do.
From me to you, whether you honour the turning of the year, the old Welsh names for things, or simply the particular quality of light on an early spring morning when the world feels poised and possible, may this equinox bring warmth, wonder, and the quiet courage to walk through whatever field is waiting for you. And to rise, as the sun does today, a little further into the light. π
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