~5000 words, ~27 minutes reading time
There are at least three stories here. There’s a bird, there’s a goddess, there’s a high school student—they’re either three stories, or they’re the same one. For now, I’ll tell it like three.
I’ll tell you two of them the way I remember hearing them, although I can’t promise exactly what was said. I’m translating them twice, once from other languages and once from my own memory. Maybe you’re getting the stories I was told back then, or maybe you’re getting something entirely new.
The other story isn’t old, though. In fact, it’s just about to start.
#
The god Midir appears to Aden Nikolajevich in the form of a swan. He taps his beak at her bedroom window until she opens it; he tracks rainwater across her school laptop and printed-off track schedule. Perches ungainly upon her desk and stares at her with a beetle-black eye; he only has the one.
Étaín, Étaín, the swan sings. Aden can tell her with her second-generation ears that he’s spelling it the right way, or rather, the wrong way. Just like she can tell with her second-generation eyes that the words are the green of her mother’s family’s language, not the slate-grey of English or the scarlet red of her father’s family’s language.
It isn’t so strange to her that a bird should talk with human words. That’s just how her city is, like how when she runs through the cherry trees in the park, she can see the flower-haired vilas curling through the branches. Or when she runs alongside the lake, she can sometimes glimpse reflections of trees that don’t exist on land, laden and heavy with golden apples. Or, for that matter, how both her families found a fragile series of homes in the same city, out of all the places in the world they could have gone. There’s magic in a lot of places. Aden doesn’t know that a talking bird is more magical than the rest of it.
“Not quite,” she tells the swan. “My name is Aden Nikolajevich,” and the parchment-colored name curls from her mouth like pressed snowdrops.
The swan is confused. Étaín, it sings.
This is going to happen a lot in the coming days.
#
Now for one of the old stories.
Once upon a time, in the ancient days, when the world was new and gods frequently walked among mortals, a game between children caused an accident that cost the god Midir his eye. His liege lord, Oengus, promised him anything in the world in recompense.
Midir could have asked for gold, or cattle, or horses. But what he wished for more than anything else was Étaín, the most beautiful woman in the world.
#
The swan comes back the next day, and the next. He tracks mud on Aden’s bedsheets until her mom mistakenly yells at the dog.
Aden does not mind the distraction. What she actually wants is to go for a run, but her doctor’s appointment to get a new inhaler has been delayed again, so she isn’t allowed to. Instead she finishes all her homework and is reduced to rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and looking out the window. The park is a green smudge in the distance; she keeps thinking about how nice it must be to run through it on a cold and misty day like today.
The swan sings for her, not in the car-horn honk of swans, but in a sweetly flowing human voice, in a language she does not know. She’s curious enough to ask Gran about it the next time she sees her, because it’s the rainy green of Gran’s language. It’s worth asking even though she knows it will make Gran complain again how Aden’s foreign father misspelled her name at the hospital, so thoroughly it ended up a different name.
Aden wonders how long she has to have a name before it isn’t misspelled.
“And it would have been so lovely, too,” Gran says, “to have a granddaughter named Étaín. And on top of that last name, too, Nic— Nico—“
“Nikolajevich,” Aden says. She tries to act casual. “Where’s that name from, anyway? I don’t know any Étaíns.”
“It’s from one of the old stories,” Gran says, like that explains it all. But when Aden pesters her, she goes into her study to find her old book and turns to a page with a watercolor of a woman and a swan. Or maybe a woman and a man, turning into swans together. Gran has to stare at the page for a while, because it’s written in the green language, which Gran studied in a special school when she was a child, and does not like to admit she does not read it as well as she used to.
“Étaín was a mortal princess,” she says, in her special, stiff, translated voice. “The god Midir married her. Or, well, tried to. His witch-wife turned her into a fly and cursed her to wander.”
Aden shivers as she watches the slate green words fly from Gran’s mouth, like swallows darting at dusk.
“Does he find her again?”
Gran reads on. “Yes,” she says at last. “But not for a thousand years. And by then, she was married to someone else, a mortal king. So Midir played a game of fidchell, with Étaín as the prize, only— oh. I forgot about that part. Well, you’re a bit young yet for the ending.” She closes the book. “Don’t worry, though. The god finds her. It’s just that it takes a thousand years.”
It’s raining when the bus carries her home from Gran’s. In her bedroom, she opens the window for the swan to come in. He looks cold; she wraps him in a towel.
Étaín, he sings, and the name shimmers in the air.
“I’m sorry,” Aden says. “I don’t know your language. If you have something to tell me, you’ll have to use mine.”
#
One more old story, and then I promise you’ll have all three. Once, an equally long time ago in a different faraway land, there lived a tsarevitch who was as cruel as he was beautiful and who, of all things, loved games and hated losing most of all.
He was so proud that he entered into a game with the vilas of the forest: he would race their snow-made daughter. If he won, he would take the vilas’ daughter to wife, and if he lost, the vilas would strike him down.
But in his pride, he did not ask the snow-made daughter’s name, and so did not learn that the vilas called her Maiden Swifter than Horses.
#
Of course, her name wasn’t actually Maiden Swifter than Horses. It was Devojka Bržа od Konja. I’m only translating it for you because I don’t think you’ll look it up otherwise, just like I said vilas instead of the actual plural, vile, to give you a better shot at pronouncing it. You can’t translate without compromising your integrity some.
And our villain wasn’t called the tsarevitch, he was called the kraljević, the son of the king. The first English translators always translated this word as tsarevitch rather than prince, so their readers would know just how foreign he was. I’m telling you this now so that you remember not everyone in this world gets called by their real name, and because I want to be as honest a translator as I can.
#
So the bird learns English, although Aden can tell he does not like it. He does not like many things: he hisses at the buses that hum below her window, scratches her on an icy morning when the sky works itself up to a few flurries, and only grudgingly sits beside her watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on her school laptop, learning the static-grey words.
Vampire, he sings. Wigging out.
“Good bird,” she says, running her fingers through his silken feathers. He gives her a glossy-eyed look and preens.
He learns words prodigiously fast, which is fortunate, because although she does not wish to say so, the bird is diminishing by the day. He stopped being a swan a while ago. Aden has to look up new types of birds to know that he becomes an owl, then a crow, then a blackbird, dwindling smaller and smaller each time.
“Where’s the rest of you going?” Aden says, while the rain taps on her window.
The bird is confused. The summer country, he sings. The undying lands.
Her mom keeps getting tied up with work and forgetting to call back about her inhaler, so Aden stays in her room, watching subtitled TV as the joggers go by, in the hopes that the bird can talk to her soon. She’s pretty sure that he’s the god Midir, and she wants him to learn enough English for her to tell him he has the wrong Étaín.
The next day she goes to Baba’s after school. Baba tells a story while Aden helps make sarma, doing all the standing parts since Baba uses a wheelchair. Baba’s mama told her this story. If it was written down, neither Prababa nor Baba had ever read it.
There’s a vila as small as Aden’s hand in Baba’s pot of violets. Her sleeping face looks like the golden burst at the heart of the flower.
“There is a king’s son,” Baba says. “And he chases a vila through the woods. The vila, she’s a runner like you, she says that she will marry him if he wins, but she runs faster than his horse. So he— ah, he does not play well, he—“
“Cheats?” Aden asks.
“Da, da, cheats,” Baba says, but she doesn’t finish. The story is the scarlet-dye red of Baba’s old language, only for her, it isn’t old. It’s the language that lives behind her eyes, and she has to translate it for Aden. It makes Baba tired, and remembering makes her sad.
So instead they watch Baba’s soaps on TV while the sarma cooks. There are leftovers for Aden’s parents, because Baba always doubles the recipe.
She looks up the rest of the story when she gets home. There’s an animated video about it on YouTube. She likes Maiden Swifter than Horses immediately, enormously, as a fellow runner. She wishes the whole story were about her, not the tsarevitch, so that she could learn about what lived behind Maiden Swifter than Horse’s eyes, how she learned to run so fast or what she thought about when she was running.
#
Midir had a wife already, the witch Fúamnach. I don’t think anyone has ever told me what being a witch means in this context. But a witch she was, and she did not like that he married Étaín. Perhaps she did not wish to share power, perhaps she pitied this mortal woman all alone among the gods, or perhaps it was something else. The women in medieval epics seldom possess clear motives.
Whatever the case, she turned Étaín into a bird. I don’t know what kind of bird. For the sake of the story, let us assume it was a beautiful and geographically appropriate one. Fúamnach sent a wind to blow her across the earth for a thousand years.
In his fury at being denied, Midir cut off his wife’s head, which is a shame. Even if she didn’t mean to, I always thought that Fúamnach did Étaín a favor. Then Midir, a protean, formless god, took to the skies and flew after Étaín.
#
Only, that’s not quite right. Honest translation, remember?
Fúamnach doesn’t turn Étaín into a bird, she turns her into a fly. I don’t know what kind of fly, except that the text emphasizes it was a very beautiful one.
But, come on. What’s the audience supposed to do with that? Imagine Midir streaking across the sky like midday lightning after a weirdly sexy moth? No. It’s much easier— maybe even a better translation— to talk about birds instead. The melting colors of a cedar waxwing. The silent bulk of an owl, like all sound has fled the world. A hummingbird turning the air liquid with its wings.
That’s more understandable, right? You’ve longed for someone like that before, or thought you had. Think of the person you love the most, the one you believe you will never see again. What would you do if I told you it would only take a thousand years?
#
By the fourth season of Buffy, the bird has learned enough words to tell Aden what he has to say.
I am a god, he sings in his curiously human voice. I have searched the world a thousand years for you, my bride. At last you are returned to me and will accompany me to the undying lands, as my lord Oengus promised.
“Sorry,” Aden says, because this seems like a long time to have wasted. “You have the wrong Étaín. I’m Aden.”
The bird is confused. Étaín, he sings again.
“Aden Nikolajevich,” she tries again, in case this time it sticks. “I’m not a goddess, I’m a student.”
The bird shakes his head sorrowfully. Étaín, he sings.
#
“Be warned, you who would win me,” Maiden Swifter than Horses said. “Any who beats me to the golden apple tree at the heart of this forest will take me to wife. But all who lose against me will perish.”
But the tsarevitch did not believe he was in any danger, because when he could not win at a game, he resolved to cheat instead. He rode like the wild hunt ran behind him. But when Maiden Swifter than Horses stayed just a step ahead, he reached out and snatched her up onto his horse.
#
The bird doesn’t like Baba’s sarma, which is a huge red flag. The one time she feeds him some, he spits it back out over the camel-hair blanket Baba brought when she came to this country, so Aden has to spot-clean it before her parents get home.
Another red flag is how the bird simply pretends her last name does not exist and only ever calls her Étaín, Étaín. She can’t tell if he doesn’t like her last name or just can’t remember it. Sometimes it feels like the same thing.
One day, when her mom lets her stay home from school because her braces were just tightened and still hurt, Aden lays on the carpeted floor of her bedroom and stares at the bird. He’s the size of a thrush now.
“Nikolajevich,” she says with her aching mouth.
The bird sings, Étaín.
“Try it. Nee-koe-lie-yuh-vitch.” She tries to say it the way Baba does when she answers the phone, the way her cousins say it when she calls them on WhatsApp. But she can still hear the different alphabet, the appended h. It doesn’t fall out of her mouth, scarlet as blood, the way it’s supposed to. “Come on, say it.”
Étaín, the bird sings.
#
At last the wind, vexed with her wanderings, plucked a feather from Bird-Étaín and delivered it into a mortal queen’s cup. When the queen drank the feather down with the dregs of her wine, she bore Étaín as a daughter. Étaín grew up, married a king, and dreamed sometimes about seeing the world from above.
(Only, you and I remember that she wasn’t a bird, she was a fly. It wasn’t just a feather that landed in the queen-mother’s cup. Étaín’s mother swallowed her entirely.)
#
That night, Aden can’t sleep. Her braces feel like there’s a cantering in her head, hooves striking against the bones in her face. She’s been thinking about Maiden Swifter than Horses without realizing it. It’s the sort of thinking that feels heavy, like a die stamping the face on a coin. Like it’s leaving something behind.
The bird is a dark shadow against her moon-silvered window.
“Listen to this,” she says softly, so her voice won’t travel down the hall. “Once long ago, a prince entered into a game with the vilas, to race against their snow-made daughter. But in his pride—”
Étaín, the bird sings. She can hear him tapping at the window.
“I’ll let you out in a minute,” Aden says. “In his pride, he did not ask the vilas her name, and so did not learn that she was named—”
There’s a flash of bright claws. She sees the lines on her hand before the pain hits. Gleaming bright white pain, so sharp even the air aches. Startled tears spring into her eyes before she can work out what happened. Red dots sprinkle her sheets.
She whispers, “I just wanted to tell you—”
Étaín, the bird sings, like that settles the matter.
#
In the version of Tochmarc Étaíne from the Yellow Book of Lecan manuscript, Midir and Étaín pick up right where they left off. Midir plays a game of fidchell with her new husband and wins; Étaín is the prize. He turns them both into swans, and they fly away together.
Only that’s not how a thousand years works. Countries well up on the map like dew and, like dew, burn away. The sea takes mouthfuls out of the land. People move, sometimes tremendous distances. All the old gods of Ireland are departing for the summer country, the honeyed land, Tír na nÓg, leaving only tales of their passing. And one lost son, Midir, high in the ever-changing, ever-unchanging clouds, still seeking his bride.
Imagine you’re a god. Imagine after a thousand years of searching, one day you find her. You fly down to a steaming, smoke-ridden city, crouched on the edge of a great mirrored lake like a dragon, and she’s there, and she isn’t a bird anymore; she’s your human bride. You watch her run around the city parks, go to school, visit her grandmothers. Only she doesn’t know you anymore, and you never knew her in the first place. You don’t know what buses are, or glass windows. Print money is still a cutting-edge technology to you.
What are you supposed to do then? Gods aren’t known for their ability to change.
#
Aden still watches season five of Buffy with the bird, but that’s for personal reasons, as she has started to wish the bird would speak less, not more. He keeps singing that she belongs to him, that he was promised her, and that they will return to the old country on a magic wind together. It’s wigging her out, to borrow Buffy’s phrase. Still, she doesn’t think it will be a problem for much longer. The bird is only the size of a butterfly now.
#
I can almost hear you saying: Nadia, we’ve gotten a lot about Étaín so far. What about Maiden Swifter than Horses? What’s she like?
But I’m afraid the text doesn’t say.
Devojka Bržа od Konja was recorded by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, a philologist famous for writing things down. He was born in the eighteenth century, when literacy had started to endanger the bardic traditions that until then persisted in the Balkans. And so he wrote down everything: folktales, songs, women’s stories, fairytales. He wrote down Maiden Swifter than Horses in just a few paragraphs.
And that’s about it. A few paragraphs from someone whose job meant lover of language wrote down long ago. That’s the thing about Serbian texts, especially old ones. People don’t write essays about their nuance or commentaries on their linguistics or long Tumblr posts trying to read agency into a girl who only says three sentences, which aren’t even about her. Or they don’t write it in English, at least. Probably they write them in Serbian. But I don’t read it as well as I used to.
They don’t tell you these things when they give you your last name. They don’t even tell you how to pronounce it. And your parents don’t think it matters, and your grandmother doesn’t like to talk about it, and you don’t even call her your grandmother, that’s just another translation. It’s just you and Google translate and a context you don’t understand, clues you keep missing, trying to read something into Maiden Swifter than Horses that gives a thesis statement to everything you’ve been doing to find her. Stabbing around your keyboard trying to find the right Cyrillic letters. Blundering around in the dark.
She was a girl. The vilas made her. She ran better than anyone in the whole world. The text doesn’t even tell us if she liked running.
#
The appointment works out at last, and Aden gets her replacement inhaler. It tastes like a gulp of the wintry sky. Like the world whizzing by while your feet thunder against the earth like hooves, sleek and shining and never slowing down.
The park is tangled grey and brown from winter. The cherry trees raise their bare fingers to the pale sky. She can see the vilas in them, twining around the branches.
At first she thinks he’s another vila. A shining dark speck in the air.
“Bird,” she says in surprise. “What are you doing here?”
He isn’t a bird anymore. He has dwindled over the last day, from a hummingbird to a butterfly to a moth. He’s a fly now.
“Étaín,” the fly says. It isn’t a song anymore. It’s Midir’s voice, distant and dragging, like a match striking.
For a moment, the fly is a fly, flitting like it’s treading air. Then the small dark speck is a sphere, shining and dark, glossy like a marble.
It’s an eye. And then a nose, and a face, coalescing around the single eye like oil fanning across water. The air retreats and leaves Midir behind.
It occurs to Aden at last how often princes cheated in the old stories, and that she should have wondered where the rest of the bird went as he faded.
“I don’t understand,” she stammers. “What do you want?”
Midir gestures with a not-there-yet hand. They’re at the edge of the lake. The sky is chilly and grey, but the lake isn’t. It reflects the brilliant blue of high summer. In it, the slanting reflections of graceful ships slice through the water.
“Étaín,” Midir says. His voice is growing closer and changing pitch, the way water rushes higher and higher when you fill a kettle. “The ships are leaving for the undying lands. Come away.”
“That isn’t my name,” she says. “My name is Étaín,” but the wind pulls the word from her mouth and turns it the wrong color. She can hear the grate and skip of it and knows that it’s Gran’s language, the one she doesn’t know. She can’t see a hint of scarlet in the words. They’re green-gold all the way through.
“Étaín,” she says, and it tastes wrong in her mouth. “Stop it. Étaín, it’s Étaín, my name is Étaín—“
“Étaín,” the god sings, and the wind sings with him, combing its fingers through the cherry trees, the sails on the ships.
Of course this would happen right when she’s allowed to go back to track practice. She doubts they have track and field in the otherworld.
It’s an incongruous thought, one that belongs to her, not the story. It clears her head.
She needs another story. She is full of stories, after all, crammed with them. They flutter in her chest like birds in a cage, trying to fly out her throat. She needs one soon. In the reflections on the water, the ships are departing. She’s pretty sure she only has one last move in this game.
Games. Midir plays two games in Tochmarch Étaíne. One where he loses his eye, another where he wins Étaín. He loves games, loves winning them, maybe loves cheating at them. Because isn’t it always cheating, when gods play against humans?
“Étaín,” Midir sings. Don’t think of him as Midir. Think of him as just another shape in the story. The god-prince, the greedy, overreaching one.
“That isn’t my name!” she says, because she hates it when people get it wrong. She hates it when everyone thinks they can name her, and no one believes who she is.
The wind is rising, the ships are streaming past. The cherry trees toss their branches. She wonders if they will shake loose the vilas. She wonders if Midir can see them, if it would occur to him to look at something that small.
But she already knows that it won’t.
“My name is not Étaín,” she says. “Or at least, that is not my only name. Didn’t you listen? The vilas named me Maiden Swifter than Horses.”
The god is confused. “Maiden?” he sings. “Vilas?”
“And Midir is not your only name,” she says. She really hopes this works. “You are also the kraljević.”
The wind catches the scarlet word and holds it, until it echoes scarlet all around. She can almost taste the arrival of the other story, hot as blood, rich as dye, heavy as hooves.
“I don’t know who that is,” he says.
“You should have listened, then,” she says. “And now you owe me a game. A foot race, to the promontory at the northern edge of the park. First one there wins.”
She doesn’t wait to see if he agrees. She isn’t swifter than horses, but she loves running more than anything else in the world.
There’s a sound behind her. She can’t tell if it’s wings or hooves.
#
Imagine you’re the kraljević. You’re riding along on your horse, nearly back to the kingdom that you will inherit someday. The creature you have found to be your wife is on the horse behind you. She isn’t saying anything. This is not a major turn-off for you.
You never learned her name was Maiden Swifter than Horses. But how, kraljević, did you forget that she was the daughter of the unknowable vilas? That the vilas made her from snow and magic and that, someday, to magic she would return? You knew this. You just didn’t think it would happen so soon.
Kraljević, what happens if you look back?
#
She’s not even halfway when the air becomes a chilled blade in her throat, and her chest feels like it’s filled with damp tissue paper. The inhaler clacks against her teeth as she runs.
She can hear something behind her. She’s never been chased before. It’s making something frightening happen where her spine meets her lungs.
The vilas’ distant, abstract faces are upturned, like they’re looking for rain.
“Please,” she says. “Please, slow him down.” She can taste her lungs. “I’m not made of snow. But whatever I am, some of it is the same as you.”
The vilas’ voices are thin scratches, like cells swimming across your eyes on a bright day. So old now they’re the palest pink, like early buds on trees.
Run swiftly, littlest daughter.
Their arms blossom out, reaching to the sky, reaching for the horse or the bird or the god.
“Thank you,” she gasps and keeps running.
#
Through his trickery and great cruelty, Midir stole Étaín away from her mortal husband. He took her to the undying country, the isle of apples, from which not even death is an escape. That is the last we hear of her.
#
She’s sitting by the edge of the lake, trying to breathe from her diaphragm, when the bird alights beside her. He is a swan again, enormous and ungainly on land.
You have won, Étaín, he sings. Maiden Swifter than Horses. His voice is like sunlit honey, the way tears taste when you’re happy to cry them.
“I did,” she says, and manages to swallow the apology before it slips from her mouth.
She’s looking at the reflection in the water again. It’s the isle of apples, the undying lands, the otherworld.
She knows the vibrant green from the pictures Gran brings back when she visits her parents’ graves. It’s the old country, an old country, one of the two countries she has swung between like a pendulum her whole life, caught and pulled equally by their weight. It’s the country where they spell her first name with all the vowels, where her family’s memories are turning into stories but are, for however long remains, still theirs.
The ships are still out in the reflected water, but they’re fading now, burning like mist in the sun. She watches the swan watch the ships and thinks that, although she does not like Midir, even he does not deserve to see a thousand years.
Tell me, Maiden Swifter than Horses, the swan sings. How does this tale end?
“You should go,” Aden says. The light is welling like water. “They’ll leave without you.”
They will, the swan agrees.
He does not say goodbye. First he is a bird, then he is a god, then he is a reflection on the water. The light rises. The vilas are singing in the trees, in a language she almost understands.
Aden is left sitting on the edge of the promontory, watching the ships sail away. All she has, in the sum totality of three worlds, are the twin bones of her name. Sometimes they sound misspelled, no matter what letters are in them. She still isn’t entirely sure what to make of them, what her names mean or what they make her.
But she figures she has time to find out.
Legs protesting, Aden stands up and starts running home.
#
With the towers of his kingdom in sight, the kraljević turned back to look upon his bride. And there was nothing behind him but the gathering night, the wind and the rain, and the invisible sound of a bird’s wings carrying her away.
Nadia Radovich is a writer and librarian from North Carolina. Her short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine. Her family is from the Balkans. She is on Twitter @RadovichNadia and Bluesky @nadiaradovich.bsky.social
Photo by Antonio Ristallo on Unsplash
