The Replacement Husband

The moors spread out on either side of him like an unrolled parchment. A particularly crumbly unrolled parchment, filled with the details of religious practices in ancient Pythia, perhaps. Although Pythia had at least been known for its fig wine and moonlit dances among the olive groves. Owen frowned. He was probably being rather too kind to Trewebury and its environs. If anyone could produce a single drop of fig wine within a hundred miles, he’d eat his unfashionably low-crowned hat.

The moors had very little to recommend them, too, in any light. They had a certain bleak grandeur, Owen supposed, but mostly they had drizzle, and low, prickly bushes that caught at one’s ankles, and the occasional surly sheep.

And Owen. He was there, seemingly for always, and seemingly always alone.

He could forget that, though, once he reached the cliffs that bounded the moors to the west. The glory of the ocean spread out before him seemed temptingly close despite the hundred feet of cliff-face that stood between him and it. Gulls swooped and wheeled, their calls echoing the shrill and terrifying cries of Mirreith, their patron goddess. And Owen’s, due to the sigil she placed on his body while he was still in the womb. At least he had their company — the gulls and the goddess. Although the latter had been marked by her absence since troubling to claim him some decades before; Owen would have welcomed some sign of what her plan for him might be, even if that came in the form of a portentous seagull.

He watched for a little while, but the gulls did nothing but circle, occasionally diving down to examine some presumably delicious bit of slimy ocean detritus on the shore below. If the goddess meant him to take some meaning from that, he lacked the intelligence to discern it.

With a sigh, Owen turned back, away from the setting sun and toward home, where his parents would soon expect him for dinner. He tramped across the moors as often as he could escape on his own from his family’s dull and respectable home, for there was simply nowhere else to go. Trewebury was more than a mere village; it was the local market town and busy enough in the mornings when tradesmen and farmers plied their services and wares in the central square and along the several streets that led into it. But it was entirely devoid of anything that could excite a young fellow of two-and-twenty with no interest in the girls who flocked to the market with their baskets.

Not that Owen would excite them, either. Trewebury was small enough that everyone knew of the goddess-touched in their midst. He wished, most passionately some days, that he could hide what he was. The town’s young women either giggled at the very thought of him, or — often worse — thought to treat him as one of their own, an impulse he knew had its root in kindness, but one that left him feeling less of a man but not nearly a woman, either. He tried not to think of what the town’s young men thought of him; if they thought of him at all, Owen suspected it was in terms he would not find flattering.

The sun sank deeper into the heavy bank of fog closing in from the sea, and the moor before him lost all its remaining color. One stray shaft of light still highlighted the top of a granite tor about a mile distant, the gently rolling swells of grass surrounding it only the gloomier and more featureless by contrast. It didn’t matter. He knew this stretch of moor as well as he knew his own bedchamber.

Owen set a course just to the right of the tor, planning to scramble down a bit of hillside and meet the path that led around the foot rather than circling to it across flatter ground. Just as he reached the top of the slope, the sound of hoofbeats startled him out of his reverie, and he jumped, slipped, and with a cry, went tumbling down.

There was the scrape of gravel on his palms, and the slide of scree beneath his flailing legs; the ground and the sky whirled in a sickening dance, and then he landed flat on his back with a crunch, his head swimming. He blinked, and flinched as a few more bits of gravel pattered down.

When he blinked again, a dark, rather wavery shape blotted out what was left of the light. A giant frowning hat? That couldn’t possibly be right. Owen tried to push himself up onto his elbows, only to be gently but firmly pushed back down again.

“Don’t try to move,” said a deep rasp of a voice. “You’ve most likely struck your head on something on the way down.”

The shape removed its hat and resolved into a broad-shouldered gentleman, his face still too blurry to make out in detail — except for the outline of his expression. Of course. It was the man’s face that was frowning. That made a great deal more sense.

Owen tried to laugh, felt very sick, and rolled to the side, retching and barely able to see, and then not seeing at all.