Litha 🌶️🌶️

The festival sprawled across the old commons and into the bordering woods like a dandelion crop: nothing but green one day, a cacophony of brilliant yellow the next. The air was rich with woodsmoke, crushed meadowsweet, meat roasting over open fires, and the acrid tang of honey mead. Rhiannon had paid her ten dollars at the gate and walked through with her shoulders loose for the first time in weeks.

“RhiRhi!” Roselyn waved eagerly as she approached. Of course she’s in costume, Rhiannon smiled to herself. Roz was at every ren faire she could attend all summer long. She was wearing an unbleached cotton shift dress beneath an absolutely gorgeous green over-dress with a lace-up front. It did precisely what Roz probably wanted it to do: emphasise her narrow waist, wide hips and comically large bust.

“Roz!” Rhiannon felt under-dressed in her ‘Hartendale Veterinary Services’ t-shirt and faded jeans, but Roz was Roz. If Heather was her sister who always had her back, Roz was Rhiannon’s Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy all in one. She pulled Roz into a friendly embrace and kissed her cheek. “This is amazing! How’d you find out about it?”

“Isn’t it awesome? Tony—you remember Tony—” Rhiannon did not. “—he told me about it! I knew you’d love it! Do you love it? You love it, right?”

It’d been a very strange year for Rhiannon, but this place just felt right. “Love it!”

“Oh! There’s Tony!” Roselyn hiked up her skirts and was already running.

“I’ll catch up,” Rhiannon called after her, laughing softly.

Instead, she drifted away from the merriment. Something here wants me. The thought seized her, but she found the idea comforting.

It had begun at Pharaoh Lake—unmarked paths opening for her, brambles drawing back if she walked with intention. She crossed a meadow gone gold with buttercups and stepped through a gap in a hedge she would have sworn wasn’t there a moment before.

Nine stones stood in a hollow she should have seen from the festival grounds. Each was draped with garlands of chamomile, yarrow, vervain, St John’s wort. Bees worked the offerings with single-minded devotion.

Inside the circle, a woman knelt among the plants.

She was tall, even kneeling; Rhiannon could tell. Her hair was the colour of river-water—neither blonde nor brown nor silver but like all of those. She wore a simple shift of unbleached linen and a silver serpent coiled around an egg at her throat.

She didn’t look up when Rhiannon stepped between the stones, but Rhiannon noted a hint of a smile. “I’ve been waiting since the snowdrops appeared.” Her hands moved with a gentle rhythm as she tended the plants all around the circle.

“Waiting for me?”

“Mm.” The woman pinched a sprig of yarrow free and held it up to the light, scrutinising. “The Wood gave tribute. The Ploughman before that. I’ve been patient. Summer does not hurry, summer luxuriates.”

“Who are you?”

The woman finally looked up. Her eyes were the pale green of new willow leaves, and they had no whites, just that shifting, sun-shot green from lid to lid.

“You know me, witch.” The way she used that word, Rhiannon thought she heard The Pumpkin Lord’s voice. But from her, it was different.

Reverential.

“Sirona. Of the serpent and the egg. The long healing.” She tilted her head, considering Rhiannon the way she’d considered the yarrow. “And you, little vessel, are late. But Litha still has hours.”

She rose in a fluid, unhurried motion and closed the distance between them. When she brushed a fingertip along Rhiannon’s jaw, the touch was warm and faintly damp, grass on a summer morning.

“What do you want from me?” Rhiannon whispered.

“Today is the healing, the offering.” Sirona was a full head taller than Rhiannon. “Today is for the cup to learn it is a cup.” The nymphic woman’s breath stirred against Rhiannon’s cheeks, smelling of lilac and pine gum. “I will share this with you: You were known before you were born. You will be known when this body has returned to the earth. The summer has always loved you.”

None of this made sense, so Rhiannon latched on to the most concerning word. “Offering?”

Sirona smiled. “An offering. Yourself. Body, breath, and the quiet space you hide. Given freely. Not bargained in drink. Not taken in startlement.” The impossible green eyes held hers.

“What if I say no?” Breathless.

The woman’s smile never wavered. “You walk through the hedge, the festival is just a festival, and I am a story you nearly remember. No rot. No bad luck. The summer doesn’t punish. It waits.”

Rhiannon thought of the Pumpkin Lord’s ember-grin. The Green Man’s amber eyes. Both had taken, even as they gave.

It was, Rhiannon realised, the first real choice she’d been offered since October.

“I offer myself.”

Sirona led her to a spring welling up from a basin of pale rock, ringed in moss so deep it looked like velvet. Rhiannon noted the bottom was covered in small, smooth stones.

“Undress. Into the water.”

The water was the exact temperature of her own blood. It closed around her calves, her thighs, her hips; the moment it reached her navel, something in her chest released—a knot she hadn’t known she’d been carrying. She gasped, and the gasp turned into a laugh, and the laugh into a small, surprised sob.

“Hello, old friend,” Sirona murmured. 

As Rhiannon stood in the waist-deep pool, Sirona anointed her with an oil that smelled of honey and rose and something spicy while speaking syllables Rhiannon didn’t know but somehow recognised. Bendith. Ffynnon. Calon. Croeso.

Sirona started at Rhiannon’s forehead. A slow spiral, traced with two fingertips, the oil warming the skin beneath. Then the hollow of her throat. Then her collarbones, each one mapped with the same care, as if Sirona were reading by touch something written there.

Her hands moved lower. She cupped Rhiannon’s breasts without urgency, thumbs tracing circles over her nipples until they tightened and Rhiannon’s breath caught. Sirona’s strange eyes met Rhiannon’s, but she didn’t smile. She simply moved on. Down the centreline of Rhiannon’s belly, the oil leaving an iridescent trail. Into the crease of each hip, where she pressed more firmly, and Rhiannon felt years of small accumulated hurts surface and dissolve—a torn ligament from college, the persistent, quiet ringing in her ears, a grief behind her left shoulder blade she had never been able to name.

“Turn.”

Rhiannon obeyed. Sirona’s oiled palms opened wide across her shoulder blades and squeezed. Something in Rhiannon’s spine relaxed with a warmth she felt all the way to her toes. The hands moved down, tracing every vertebra, every knot of tension. They curved around her hips. They mapped the swell of her ass with the same focused veneration they’d given every other part of her, and Rhiannon’s breath grew louder.

“Face me.”

She turned back. Sirona’s expression was intent, but her eyes had warmed to something that was no longer clinical. She tucked a wet strand of hair behind Rhiannon’s ear with an oiled fingertip, then trailed that finger languidly down Rhiannon’s jaw, her throat, between her breasts, all the way to the waterline at her navel. A question.

“Lie back,” Sirona said, quietly. “Let the water hold you. Let me hold you.”

The water held her weightless. Honeysuckle vines stirred at the spring’s edge—softer than the Green Man’s, almost worshipful—and wreathed her wrists above her head with a gentleness somehow more binding than rope. Rhiannon understood she could break them with a thought and chose not to.

Sirona straddled her. Their bodies met, their pussies kissed, and the contact was an electric, slippery, perfect thing. Rhiannon gasped as Sirona began to grind against her, slow and deliberate. Heat gathered where they met and spread inward, into places Rhiannon hadn’t known were there. Sirona bent low over her. Her jade eyes were inches from Rhiannon’s, and in them Rhiannon read joy.

“You don’t know yet,” Sirona whispered, her rhythm never breaking. “On the day you do, remember I was glad.”

The stones at the basin’s bottom woke one by one, glowing softly. Rhiannon could see some out of the corner of her eye, but she could feel them all. She pushed back against Sirona, grinding slower so their out-of-sync movements enhanced the contact. She tried to speak, but only managed a whimper.

“Come with me, little vessel. Open.”

Rhiannon opened, not with the seismic violence the Green Man had wrung from her, but in a long, sustained unfolding. Petal after petal. Every chamber opening in sequence. She felt Sirona’s pleasure as if it were her own, no edge left between them, just one union of ecstasy.

The honeysuckle bloomed, a string of small exhalations. Gold pollen hung above them in celebration.

Then it was very quiet.

As she dressed, Sirona pressed two fingers to the centre of Rhiannon’s chest. A warmth bloomed and stayed. At Rhiannon’s questioning look, she smiled. “You will know.”

Back at the festival, heads turned as she passed. An old man smiled as at a long-lost friend. A child waved with both hands. A honey-cake vendor pressed one into her palm without taking money. Rhiannon ate it walking. It tasted like the inside of the spring.

She stepped into the circle dance. The pattern that had baffled dancers all evening resolved itself as she joined them, and one by one the others fell into step, laughing, surprised at themselves.

The sun took its time setting. When the stars finally thickened overhead, Rhiannon stood barefoot in the dew-cool grass, turning a slow circle of her own.

The summer, patient as ever, listened.

Knotty