Entity story · 3 min read ·
The Long Dance at Midsummer
A ring of pale dancers performs a jig in a field above Ostrova every midsummer night, and a farmer's daughter who has joined the dance each year since she was twelve has not once been home before the sun comes up.
The field above the Ostrova farm is called the Long Acre, though nobody has farmed it for a century. It is a broad, flat meadow of coarse grass and clover, ringed by hawthorn, with a single standing stone at the north edge that the children are told to avoid. On midsummer's night the dancers come.
Nobody in the village has ever seen them arrive. They are simply there, at the first hour of dusk, in a wide circle that stretches across the whole meadow, moving to music that comes from nowhere. Their faces are pale and long, their limbs very thin, and their clothes are the colour of birch bark. They dance a jig, fast and light, with their arms swinging and their feet barely touching the grass, and as the night goes on the circle tightens and the music quickens, until the whole field seems to be turning like a wheel.
Maud Hale first went to watch when she was twelve. Her father had forbidden it. She went anyway, with her friend Joan, to the hawthorn hedge at the edge of the field, and watched the dancers from behind the thorns. A pale girl with long fair hair caught her eye across the circle and smiled, and waved her in. Maud stepped through the hedge, and her feet found the rhythm, and she danced all night.
She got home at dawn with her shoes in her hand and a dream in her head that she could not remember. Her father was waiting at the kitchen table with a face like stone. He did not shout. He only said, "It's the Long Dance, isn't it?" and Maud nodded, and he put his head in his hands and wept.
Every midsummer after that, Maud went back. Her father could not stop her. The village said it was a sickness, or a spell, or simply a stubborn girl who had grown into a stubborn woman. Joan married a shepherd and moved away to the coast. Maud stayed on the farm. She ran it well. But each year, when the solstice came round, she laid out her dancing shoes on the back step and walked up to the Long Acre at dusk, and the circle opened for her, and the music began.
She has not been home before the sun is up in thirty-one years.
Her father died in the spring of the year Maud turned forty. The funeral was small. The vicar spoke kindly of him. At the end of the service, when the mourners were walking out into the churchyard, Maud noticed the pale girl with the fair hair standing by the lychgate. She was just as young as she had been on Maud's first night. She smiled, and nodded toward the field above the farm, and then she was gone.
Maud went up to the Long Acre that evening. The ring of dancers was already there, turning slowly in the dusk, and as she came through the hedge the music rose to meet her. She stepped into the circle. She danced the whole night, with her father's face in her mind, and when the sun came up over the hawthorn she did not stop.
The village has a theory about her. Some say she has become one of the dancers, that the circle takes what it is given and keeps it. Others say she is still on the farm, asleep in her bed each morning and up at dusk to dance, and that the ones who see her only ever catch her dancing away from them, very fast, with her arms swinging and her long hair flying out behind her, always just too quick to be recognised.
On midsummer's night the farm lights stay on until dawn, out of respect. Nobody goes up the Long Acre. But sometimes, around three in the morning, the children on the lane hear a jig from the field above, bright and light and urgent, and see a figure at the hedge, very tall and very thin, beckoning them to come and join in.