Child of the Prophecy

by Juliet Marillier

  “Think, girl, think,” said a cracked, deep voice on my right, a voice which seemed to come from the very rocks themselves; was that crevice a kind of mouth, that neat, round hole studded with a bright shell, a kind of eye? The Fomhóire were everywhere. Thus had they survived for countless eons, while others were slain or exiled. “Think,” said the voice again. “Use your head. Think back.”

  “I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t see him. Surely it is too late.” And yet, out in the water, was not there a single selkie left, alone in the dusk, bright eyes gazing back toward the land, seemingly reluctant to swim after the others as they made their way eastward to the sheltered bays of the bigger islands? He waited; but he would not wait forever. What was I supposed to do? I could not call; this was a wild creature, my voice would only frighten him away. Think, Fainne. Remember. Remember.

  “Singing,” I muttered as it came back to me. Darragh playing the pipes, so sweetly, and coaxing me, trying to get me to join in. What had he said? Something about seals, that was it. I bet you could sing fit to call the seals up out of the ocean, if you tried, he’d said. The goddess help me. How could I sing this wonderful creature to the shore, I with my cracked and weeping voice that was like the cry of some small, lost marsh creature croaking alone in the reeds? I looked into the dark, liquid eyes of the selkie, and he gazed back at me, and I knew this was exactly what I must do; that mine was the only voice that could sing him home. For, choked and broken as it was, was it not the voice of love?

  “Hurry up then,” urged the owl-creature. “Too late, when it’s dark.”

  And indeed, out in the sea, the selkie turned his head to look after the others; and turned back to look at me. So I took a deep breath and began to sing. My voice was weak and tuneless; a little thread of sound snatched away by the west wind, surely a song too small to carry as far as the creature that bobbed there in the swell. He was watching me.

  “Good,” said the owl-creature with patent untruth.

  “More,” encouraged the rock-being. “More. Louder. He hears you. Quick, now.”

  It seemed he did hear me, for he swam closer, and I imagined I saw something like recognition in those strange eyes, dark, sorrowful eyes with the wildness of the ocean in them. I began again. The warmth of the great stones flowed into me, the west wind gave me breath, the voice of the sea lent a deep counterpoint to the halting flow of my melody. I sang on as the light faded and the water grew ink-dark, as the shadows stretched out their long hands over me, and the sky turned to the deep violet of dusk. My voice was a pathetic shred of ill-formed sound in the vast expanse of this remote place, my tune unformed, my words halting. But I made my song from the depths of my heart, and I poured into it all the love and longing I had held hidden there. All the things I had never told him, because I could not, I sang to him now. I sang on into the dusk, waiting for the time of changing.

  Come to me now, my bonny one

  Sleek-coated, wild-eyed selkie

  Son of the ocean, strong swimmer, come.

  The night grows dark, the air grows cold

  Swim in to safe shore, seek your shelter

  Wild is the west wind, chill the spring tide.

  Lad of my heart, my bonny one

  Come home, come home to me now

  Long have I waited to hold you close

  Long have I ached to hold you by me

  Safe in the circle of my arms.

  The last light faded. At my feet, close by the margin of sea and land, the selkie waited, smooth dark head barely visible above the water, around eyes fixed on mine. My song drew to a halting close. I reached down my hand as dusk turned to dark, and my fingers gripped the strong hand of a man. I pulled with all my strength, as tears began to flood my cheeks anew, and at last, there on the rocks beside me, sprawled shivering in the first dim light of a rising moon, was my dear one, soaking wet, shivering from head to toe and without a stitch of clothing on him. I put my two arms around him as I crouched there by his side, and wondered why I had ever doubted he would come back to me. Had he not always been the truest of friends?

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry, Darragh, oh, I’m so sorry I have done this to you.”

  He blinked, and turned his head this way and that, as if he were not quite sure which one he was, seal or man. Perhaps, if the tales were to be believed, from now on he would never be quite one or the other. He was shivering so hard I felt the spasms through my own body where I held him. I reached to unfasten my shawl, thinking to put it around him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again through tears of joy and pain.

  Darragh rose cautiously to his feet. His body was very pale in the moonlight; pale and naked and quite, quite beautiful. I swallowed.

  “It is possible to live here,” I went on, wanting him to speak, yet fearing it too, for I had laid my heart open and now I began to wonder if that had been very foolish. After all, he had turned his back on me once before, when I had longed to feel his touch. “There is food and water and shelter. But it is not much. We cannot leave this place. I’m sorry. Because of me, you have lost all that you might have had.”

  Darragh looked at me in the half-dark. “You always said you c—couldn’t sing,” he observed through chattering teeth. “I’d dearly like to hear that song again. Loveliest tune I ever heard, that was. Would you sing it to me one more t—t—time, if I asked nicely?”

  I felt a blush rise to my face. “I might,” I said. “Right now, we have to find some way of warming you up, before you freeze to death.”

  “I could think of one or two,” said Darragh, himself blushing fiercely as he spoke. He reached out his arms to me, and I wrapped him in mine, never mind the lack of tunic or trousers or a scrap of anything at all, and I felt the steady beat of his heart against my body, such healing for the wounded spirit I thought I might die with the sweetness of it.

  “Darragh,” I said. “There’s nothing for you here. Nothing at all but me and the seabirds and the weather. It’s no sort of life for you.” All the same, I held on tight to what I had; I understood, now, that some things are too precious to let go.

  “All I ever wanted was you by my side, and the road ahead of us,” said Darragh. “I’m well content with that.”

  “Not much of a road,” I said, feeling the flood of longing begin to flow through my body, feeling the need to be closer still rising fast in me, near overwhelming.

  “A great adventure.” Darragh’s voice was soft against my hair. “That’s what it is.” Another deep shudder went through his body, and I made myself step away.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “That night on Inis Eala, when you played the pipes, and upset me. Why did you turn away from me? Why wouldn’t you say goodbye with a kiss, or a hug, or some little thing? I thought—I thought—”

  “Silly girl,” Darragh said gently. “You never saw it, did you? You never saw how much I loved you, and longed for you, so that I couldn’t trust myself to touch, knowing if I started I couldn’t stop, and I might do something that would frighten you away forever? It gets to a lad like that, Curly, the wanting; even now—” he glanced down at his naked body, and up again, “even so cold, you see—?” He gave a helpless sort of grin.

  “Come then,” I said shakily, reaching out my hand to him, “let us waste no more time.”

  And together, the two of us began the long climb upward to warmth and shelter; to a life reborn. For it seemed his destiny was to be mine, and mine his, here in this place of the margins, this place where earth and fire, air and water so sweetly and mysteriously met and parted and met again in their eternal dance.

  Epilogue

  In the years after the great battle for the Islands, many tales grew up about the events that took place and their aftermath. For a time something resembling the truth was told; a tale that might be called history. This tale told how Sean of Sevenwaters defeated the Britons, with the help of his allies, and the leadership of the young man Johnny, a warrior of near-supern
atural powers. Such was this victory, that Northwoods renounced his claim to the disputed territory forever. Yet in a way Edwin did not lose. New alliances were formed between old enemies. In time, the daughter of Northwoods wed the heir to Harrowfield, and so, ironically, by making peace at last these two great estates of Northumbria achieved exactly what that villain Richard of Northwoods had once desired: a strong, united holding in the north west of Britain. There was an even stranger alliance, that between Northwoods and Sevenwaters, no less than a pledge of peace and goodwill between Briton and Irishman. That was Johnny’s doing, and it led to long years of content and prosperity on both sides of the water. Nobody spoke much about the battle itself; all knew there were oddities about it, such as the use of ships suspiciously like those of the Finn-ghaill, and the intervention of some powerful strangers, and how it all hinged, in the end, on a sword fight between two men. Some folk said there had been a woman there, and some said an ogre or a faery; but most dismissed that as wild imagination.

  As time passed the tales developed a life of their own. Fishermen, in particular, liked to exchange them on cold nights around the fire, their telling embroidered by the effects of a tankard or three of good ale. The funny thing was, everybody spoke of the Islands, and how they were won back at last by great courage and skill. But when you asked someone where they were, nobody seemed quite able to say with any accuracy. Some said south of Man, but that couldn’t be right, for they had all sailed there in their curraghs, and everyone knew there were no such islands there, only a bit of rock the sea washed over every high tide. Some said maybe north, but others argued the point. Wherever the Islands had been, they were not there now; not so as you could find them, anyway.

  But sometimes, they’d hear a tale from one fellow or another who thought he’d seen something, and when you put these tales together, there was a sort of story to it, a story so strange it was past believing; and yet they did believe it, almost. You’d be rowing along, and a mist would come down as sudden as if by magic, and when it parted for a moment, you could see a tall pillar of stone, like a tower built by giants, only this stood in the sea with the waves crashing in all around it. And sometimes you’d see folk there at night, sitting on the rocks by moonlight, or climbing up and down as if they were crabs, so nimbly did they move on the precipitous slopes. Little folk like children, with hair as red as the leaves of an autumn beech; and sometimes a man or a woman, but all you’d catch was a tiny glimpse of them before the mist closed in and hid them once more. One fellow had seen lights, right on the very top, and another swore he spotted a creature with a feather cloak and scarlet shoes; but the others told him he was letting his imagination get away from him. Another had told how there were many selkies there, all around the rocks on the south side; and a woman sitting by the water, singing. A mermaid, he thought it was. Nonsense, said the others. But still they told the tales.

  The stories make me laugh. I watch the ways of men in my mirror of clear water, and as the years pass I see our tale twisted into a strange distorted reflection of itself, evolving into something more acceptable to folk, without the blood and loss, without the cruelty, the terrible errors and the waste, and I smile and let it pass me by. I hear my daughter recite the lore, and praise her efforts, Well done, Niamh, but not too much, or she will have nothing to strive for. I give her time for play, with her father and small brother. They laugh and sing and tell tales as they sit in the sun under the rowans. They make whistles of whalebone, and invent new names for fish and bird and scuttling rock creature. They see no strangeness in Fomhóire folk.

  Danny may choose to leave us when he is grown; but we think he will stay. He has two homes here, the sea and the land, and he revels in the freedom of one and welcomes the warmth of the other. Our daughter’s path is more difficult. For her, perhaps the Fair Folk will indeed shipwreck a likely voyager, a man of courage and vision to be drawn through the mists to this hidden place, and captured by love.

  It will be a long time. It will be after my time, and my daughter’s, and her daughter’s as well. We will see terrible things in the caves of truth; we will see the rape of the earth, the fouling of the oceans, the burning of the great forests. We will see man’s cruelty and his greed, and the loss of the old faith save in the hearts of a dwindling few. But the time will come. It must; have not the Fair Folk said so themselves? Wisdom will prevail at last, when the world is all but lost; and man will find his bond with the earth, his mother, once more. This is a great and solemn trust, and we will fulfill it faithfully.

  I learned many things on my journey to the Needle. I learned about loyalty and courage and forgiveness. I learned that love is the cruellest thing, and the kindest. I learned that friends are found in the strangest of places, if you know how to look. My life here is rich beyond measure; the goddess was indeed kind. She granted me the wondrous gift of a second chance; and I will not fail her.

  Also by Juliet Marillier

  Daughter of the Forest

  Son of the Shadows

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  CHILD OF THE PROPHECY

  Copyright © 2002 by Juliet Marillier

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by Claire Eddy

  Map by B. Marillier and K. Knappett

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marillier, Juliet.

  Child of the prophecy / Juliet Marillier.

  p. cm.—(The sevenwaters trilogy; bk. 3)

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN: 978-0-312-84881-1

  I. Title.

  PR9619.3.M26755 C48 2002

  823′.92—dc21

  2001057480