She was very young, it was true. Too young, some muttered. But it was young love, and who was anyone to argue? These people who had married without love, and waited until their heads were clear and they no longer wondered at the moon! She vowed never to end up old and bitter like them. She would wonder at the moon every eve, and die dancing, her head a giddy whirl.

He gave her a ring made from a peach pit, and the girls with rings of bright copper held out their hands to catch the sunlight. But she laughed and said it still smelled like peaches.

They pronounced him dangerously mad when he scaled a cliff to get for her a length of scarlet ribbon tangled in the bracken there.

They laughed at him when he walked two days for scarlet mud for their wattle-and-daub cottage, and laughed harder when it rained and the soft scarlet mud washed away. But she laughed and planted a white rose in the scarlet ground.

She said she did not care if they slept in a clearing under the moon, as long as she had him and they would still dance like intoxicated fey in the peach-pink dawn.

But there was one fine thing she would have, and that was her wedding train. She built a loom of rowan boughs, and strung it with ribbon, and wove a thousand feet of thread from spider-silk and peach-velvet.

She set it next to the forest road, and sat there every day.

She watched for travelers, and added a new band of color for each one that passed.

Swish-thunk, swish-thunk, she wove day after day.

She sang as she wove, wordless and enchanting. He sat in the branches of an oak tree garlanded with mistletoe and watched her weave and sing and dance at dawn.

Truly fey they seemed now, she like a banshee with her white gown and almost blood-red tresses in tangled fairy-locks, he nut-brown as the tree trunk. More than one wanderer had fled upon seeing their frenzied dancing, fearing they had stumbled upon a faerie ring.

She shone like a star against the green shade of the forest road, and sprung like a flame from the snow in winter. In the spring he would braid her circlets of snowdrops and bleeding heart.

When there were one hundred withered coronets at her feet, she spun the last spool of thread. Her hair was now white gold instead of fire or blood, and his was gray as the moss upon the tree. The hundred-and-first circlet unbraided as she set it upon her fair brow, for his fingers were growing stiff with age. But still they danced like dizzied fools at dawn, though he gasped for breath afterwards.

That summer, he began to cough violently from upon his branch, and her enchanting and joyous song became brittle and determined, overbright. She sang and wove with frantic intensity and speed now. When she had but one inch to weave, the thread was gone. She cut the fine pale hair from her head with her silver dirk and wove it in among the ribbons. She cut the train from the loom as dawn was breaking.

She turned from her work and curtsied towards the tree, waiting for him to jump nimbly from his branch and dance with her. He did not come. She pulled insistently at his hand, and he fell heavily to the mossy ground.

She picked him up, too light in her arms, an empty shell smelling of death, and danced for the dawn like a madwoman, twirling and twirling to some Unseelie song as his limbs flopped. Her singing was now like a banshee’s, half joyful denial and half lament. Her eyes were red as a banshee’s, crazed and bright. Faster she twirled, until it seemed that he danced along with her. As full light broke, she pulled the train from the loom and hung it from her shoulders. She ran along the forest road, short hair flying behind her and train twisting like a banner, him cradled in her arms. She ran along the shaded, mossy road until she came to the sea.

She flung the train into the water, where it floated perfectly. Tenderly she laid him on the train, then lay upon it herself. In her fist were two quartz rocks plucked from the beach. The train floated out to sea, and it appeared as if they were lying only upon the surface of the water. She struck the stones together, and a golden shower of sparks rained down upon her. She smiled and sang peacefully, as from the tips to the roots the flames turned her white gold hair fiery red again.