Ireena's Song

We walked back into the Blue Water from the Wachter dinner and found a band on the little stage, the bard among them, and Ireena singing with them. The words were passed round so that we could keep them. Afterwards she jumped off the stage and ran over to us, flushed and happy: "Oh, friends, friends. You came back in time to hear me sing." Her brother had never let her perform with a band behind her.

Where did she learn it? "I don't know. I've had it in my head forever. I think I dreamed it." She went back up and sang a couple more, none of them as ominous.

We have been trying to decode it ever since. It says they're brothers. Someone suggested monks. We wondered whether the bard knew more than he was playing. We have not agreed on an answer, and we have not stopped thinking about the last line.

Two brothers at the altar and a bride between the two,
One wore the morning golden and one wore the midnight blue.
The dark one went a-begging to a whisper in the stone,
And came back down the mountain with a hunger of his own.

He toasted at the wedding and he drank his brother's wine,
The morning fell to nothing and the evening learned to shine.
He hung his cloak across the sun and nailed it to the sky —
This valley's had no summer since, and none of us know why.

The three at the window are laughing as they spin,
They tie a thread around my heel wherever I begin.
So I run, and I fall from the wall of the world —
They snip it, and they spin it, and they send another girl.

A bride, and then a widow, then a girl beneath the lake,
A name the valley whispered once and dropped for pity's sake.
He's hunted me through harvest and he's hunted me through snow,
He knows this tune by heart, my loves. I wonder how I know.

Red thread, dead thread, snap it if you can,
A raven on the shoulder of the shadow of a man.
He drank the whole of morning and he swallowed up the sun,
The thread slips through his fingers and it never comes undone.

The three at the window keep laughing as they spin,
But laughing sounds like weeping when the wheel comes round again.
So I'll run, and I'll fall from the wall of the world —
They'll snip it, and they'll spin it, and I'll wake another girl.