Kinrowan's Ride

A story inspired by Alfred Noyes’ famous poem “The Highwayman,” set in Colonial Virginia.

Nights like these, when the owls cry on a cold wind and the sky is black ice laced with moonlight, the women walk by the roadside on bare feet that leave no prints.

You can see the foxfire burning in their hearts. Their bodies are gossamer-pale and translucent as still water, and hand in hand they wait by the side of a road that has no name. Their voices drift like the murmur of wind in the trees.

“It’s time, sisters.”

“Here he comes.”

Nights like these, Kinrowan rides. In the darkness on his black horse, he’s silver and shadows, cape and cocked hat and sword the color of the moon. A ruby rests upon his finger, red as blood. Red as the lips of the ghost women who wait for him to come riding to the big house on the hill.

When Kinrowan passes, the women eddy sideways like silver fish. Glimpsing them among the trees, his mouth curves a little, knowingly, and he spurs his horse toward the great house, where a candle burns for him in a bedroom window there.

They know, these foxfire women, what it means to dance in the arms of Kinrowan. What it means to die on the point of Kinrowan’s silver knife — and then to live again, graveless and ghosting forever in these white nights. They know what it means to wait, and gather strength.

Nights like these, Kinrowan kills.

Tonight, a woman stands in a room filled with soft light and velvet. On the sideboard, claret gleams in faceted glass. A bed waits too, strewn with pillows cased in silk and coverlets soft as doves. The woman stares at herself in the mirror, smoothing her throat and her hair.

Scented flesh covers her bones and the satin skin above her breast is cool and white and unmarked. She has hair down her back in a river of gold and lips like fire for Kinrowan. And so while her household sleeps and her husband sails away to France, she waits, heartbeat crashing in her ears, for hoofbeats on the road in this October night.

Chink of tack below the window; a muffled laugh. She flings the casement wide, flings her arms wide to the embrace of Kinrowan. Cape swept back from his shoulders, black hair streaming free from his hat, Kinrowan climbs to the window and drops a kiss on her lips.

On the road, the women drift, swimming in moonlight.

“Soon, sisters.”

“Will she come to us?”

“She must.”

In a room of velvet and scented shadows, Kinrowan slides indigo satin from the shoulder of the woman fair as flowers. She smiles an eager smile, and slips the combs from her hair.

Outlaw, highwayman, killer: Kinrowan is all of these things and she knows it. But he’s wild and he’s beautiful, and the light in his eyes burns for her. Just tonight, just this one night, Kinrowan is hers.

The candle burns, and the shadows turn. Kinrowan’s kisses fall into the nape of her neck, the hollow of her throat, the turn of her elbow. Kinrowan’s hands follow the curve of hips, of back and thigh. A glass tips sideways; a single drop of claret falls upon the coverlets of the bed.

Under the midnight moon, the women dance their foxfire dance.

“Now?”

“No, not yet. Remember.”

“Remember how it always is.”

Upon the wine stained bed, the woman cries her pleasure, wrapped in the arms of Kinrowan. The candle, spent, flickers out. Kinrowan presses his lips to the woman’s bruised mouth; his hand stretches to his boot upon the floor. Moonlight flashes on Kinrowan’s silver blade, plunging straight to his lover’s pounding heart.

Crimson fountains from that wound, red as the claret wine. Crimson stains her parted lips. Licking a single drop from the corner of her mouth, Kinrowan wipes the knife upon his lover’s daffodil hair and slips it back into his boot. He dresses slowly, smiling.

Pale as lilies, substantial as starlight, the women Kinrowan has killed raise white faces to the moon. Beneath the call of owls and the breath of the wind in the trees comes the muffled thunder of hoofbeats on the road.

“Now!”

“She is coming! We’ll be strong enough now!”

“Will she help us?”

“Of course she will.”

“If she’s with us, we can do it.”

Tonight Kinrowan’s riding, down from the house on the hill. The woman that he left there slips like a silver shadow from the body on the bed. Before the moon sinks down this night, she and her sisters will drift like fog, like smoke, around that fine black horse and bring it to a frightened halt. Then they’ll take Kinrowan in their foxfire arms and drink his heart’s blood dry.