“I don’t understand why we’ve not heard more from my mother,” she said, eyes combing the darkening hills, more from habit than out of any real expectation. “I just don’t understand—do you suppose our messengers never got through? Did we not send first word back before Samhain?” She was talking to herself, she realized and the old man was letting her ramble. She turned around to see him leaning against the doorframe, his cloak falling off his shoulders so that his beaked nose and stooped back made him resemble a big bird with broken wings.
“She’s always been prompt with your dowry, my lady.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t fret so.” He took a few steps toward her. “We’ll get through this—we always have. Our people are tough, you’ll see. They’re not used to looking for help from the southlanders.”
That’s not exactly true, she wanted to retort. A flock of crows wheeled around the blighted fields. At least they aren’t vultures. She’d seen those terrible harbingers of death far too often this past spring. Fear gnawed at her more steadily than a fox through a henhouse, with far more stealth, plaguing her with the vague sense that something terrible had descended on the land. She herself had no druid ability at all, but her twin, Deirdre, had been recognized druid practically in the cradle and every so often, Morla felt a twinge or two of what the cailleachs called a “true knowing.” A feeling that she was being suffocated had lately invaded her dreams, and more than anything, Morla wished her mother would send, if nothing else, a druid—a druid to couple with the land, to heal and reinvigorate it. But the last druid house had been deserted nearly two years ago and no others had ever come back. “Mochmorna lies more east than south.” She looked steadfastly at the road snaking through the hills and felt him come to stand beside her.
He turned his back deliberately to the battlement and looked at her. “My lady—” He broke off, and she saw his eyes were dark with care and hollow with hunger. He wore the expression that told her he had something to say he didn’t think she wanted to hear.
“Say what you will, Colm.” Lately, she’d seen a lot of that look.
“What if there’s no help anywhere, and we’re all that’s left?”
Morla stared out over the gray land. Gray land, gray sky, gray stone, gray skin. She didn’t want to think about that. Hardly anyone came this far north in winter, and the spring traffic had been slow, too.
“Dalraida’s on the edge of things, my lady.” He came forward slowly, shoulders hunched against the wind and the few cold drops of rain that stung his cheek. “Things come to us but slowly, they trickle through the passes and filter up from the south. I don’t mean to frighten you, or give you any more trouble. It’s just that—”
“You want me to understand what we might be facing.” Morla met his troubled gaze with a thin, brave smile. Since her husband’s death, she had come to love Dalraida and its people, for it was much like the windswept, rocky shores below her foster mother’s halls, and they were similar in nature to the hardy souls who clustered there. It had taken her longer to learn to love the sheep, but this winter she mourned as the cold winnowed all but the hardiest of the herds, and she keened with all the other women as the spring lambs sickened.
A flicker of movement on the far horizon caught her eye and she squinted harder. Was that a rider?
“—shadows of war, my lady.”
Morla jerked her head around. “What’re you talking about, Colm? No one’s at war—we’re all too weak to fight, and what’s there left to fight over?”
The old man clutched his cloak higher under his chin and shrugged. “The old wives say they see the shadows in the fire, in the water.” He glanced up. “Even we can see the clouds.”
Morla ignored him. It was very hard to see. The road disappeared through a copse of blighted trees and the twilight had nearly fallen. She leaned a little farther over the wall, and just as she was about to give up and return below, she saw a dark dot burst out from beneath the withered branches. The wind whipped the standard he carried, and she was able to glimpse the colors. She pointed into the storm, relief surging through every vein. Thank you, Great Mother, Morla thought as she blinked back tears and wondered for a moment who she meant—the goddess or her own mother. Not for nothing was her mother called Great Meeve. “Look there, Colm. See, coming down the hill—do you see the rider? He’s bearing my mother’s colors.”
The old man tottered forward, shoulders bent against the wind, but before he could speak, to Morla’s horror, she saw a gang of beggars emerge out of the brush. They bore down on the rider, makeshift weapons raised. “Oh, no,” she gasped. With a speed she hadn’t known she still possessed, she raced down the steps, voice raised in alarm.
On the road, Pentand
Watch the road ahead. The rumbled warnings of both Donal, chief of Pentwyr, and Eamus, the graybeard-druid, echoed through Lochlan’s mind, as impossible to ignore as the thickening scent of threatening rain. Ever since he left the house of Bran’s foster parents, the sky had grown increasingly sullen, and now the misty day was falling down to dusk behind the heavy-leaden clouds. Druid weather—a day not one thing nor yet another, neither foul nor fair, a day easy to get lost in fog or stumble into a nest of outlaws—or any petty chieftain with a grudge and a mind for ransom. Lochlan glanced at the boy on the roan gelding beside him. He was fourteen or maybe fifteen by now, Meeve’s youngest child, and he rode with the giddy impatience of a colt run wild.
Bran seemed to know this was something more than an ordinary visit. It was a year earlier than most left their fostering, and the boy appeared to think the druid, Athair Eamus, was responsible in some way. Bran made no secret he was impatient to know what his mother’s summons meant. But Lochlan didn’t think it his place to tell the boy his mother was dying.
The road disappeared into the looming shadows beneath an arching canopy of trees and the skin at the back of Lochlan’s neck began to crawl. He was the First Knight of Meeve’s Fiachna, and so far as he knew, the only person in all of Brynhyvar the Queen had trusted with that information. When Meeve announced she was gathering all her children together, he had volunteered to escort the young prince. Lochlan wanted to gauge for himself the temper of the land she was about to leave, and Bran’s fosterage was closer to the center of the country, south towards Ardagh. What he’d learned troubled him even more than Meeve’s impending death.
Watch the road ahead. The old chief, Donal, had gripped Lochlan’s upper arm with a strength that had surprised the younger knight. “You show Meeve what I gave you. Those Lacquileans I hear she’s so fond of aren’t to be trusted.” The day before Lochlan’s arrival, a shepherd had come down unexpectedly from the summer pastures, bringing troubling news. A cache of weapons had been discovered in a mountain cave, weapons that bore no resemblance to anything made, as far as Donal or Lochlan knew, in all of Brynhyvar. The shepherd brought a sword, a fletch of arrows and a bow, and it seemed everyone in the keep, from scullery maid to blacksmith, from stable hand to bard, had a thought as to who had hidden them.
But old Donal had no doubts. “It’s neither sidhe nor trixies—it’s those foreigners who’ve been paying Meeve such court. They’re carving out toe-holds in the wild places, hunkering down and planning to attack us before winter. You mark my words, there’ll be slaughter while we sleep.” He’d insisted Lochlan take the sword back to show Meeve. Now it was rolled in coarse canvas, tied on the back of Lochlan’s saddle. Watch the road ahead. An enormous raven alighted on a branch just ahead, cocked a beady eye and stared at both of them, piercing Lochlan’s reverie.
“Why’d Mam send for me, Lochlan?” Bran interrupted his thoughts with the same question for the tenth or twelfth time since setting out. “You think it’s because Athair Eamus sent word to Aunt Connla? Did Mam say she knows I’m druid? Is that why they want to see me?”
“There’re could be any number of reasons, Prince,” Lochlan answered, also for the tenth or twelfth time. He watched the bird take flight as they rode beneath its bough, then s
lid a sideways glance at the boy. He wondered if Meeve even intended to tell him the truth. Calculating as she was flamboyant, Meeve might well decide not to, unless and until the boy himself guessed. “Maybe your mother missed you.”
Fortunately Bran accepted that answer and subsided into silence. He reached into his leather pack, withdrew a withered apple and bit into it. “Want one?” he asked, munching hard. Lochlan shook his head, but the boy held out the bag. “I have a bunch in here—Apple Aeffie gave ’em to me.”
“Who’s Apple Aeffie?” asked Lochlan. Bran appeared ordinary enough—his nut-brown hair curled at the back of his neck and spilled over the none-too-clean collar of a soon-to-be-outgrown tunic, the edges of his sleeves ragged, his leather boots scuffed and crusted with mud. He had no look of a druid about him at all.
“Apple Aeffie’s what we call Athair Eamus’s cornwife. He used to jump the room with her each Lughnasa. She died last Imbole, but she comes to me in dreams. She tells me stories of who I was before. Do you ever wonder who you were, before?”
“Before what?”
“Before now.” Bran chomped on the chewy fruit.
“Before I was what I am? I was a lad much like you, of course. I wasn’t a chief’s son, but my family’s—”
“No, no.” Bran swallowed the entire apple, core and all. “I meant before you went to the Summerlands. In your last life—don’t you ever wonder?” He licked his fingers, looking at Lochlan expectantly.
Keep a close eye on the boy. He’s more than he seems. And watch the road ahead. Those were the druid’s parting words, spoken when they were already in the saddle. “No, boy, I can’t say as I ever have.” Lochlan wished there’d been more time to ask the old druid what he meant, but the boy’s next words startled him.
“Do you suppose Athair-Da is dying? I know he misses Apple Aeffie.”
“Dying?” Lochlan looked more closely at the young prince. The old druid had seemed in fine enough health to him. Athair Eamus wasn’t a young man, by any means, but he certainly didn’t appear as if the Hag was ready to send him to the Summerlands, either. “What makes you think he’s dying?”
The boy shrugged, gazed moodily into the distance. “I don’t know—the thought just came to me. You think maybe Mam’s planning on sending me to Deirdre’s Grove-house? Deirdre’s been there a long time. She used to send me things. I’d like to go there. Think Mam means to give me leave to start my training early?”
A flicker of movement out of the corner of Lochlan’s eye made him glance in the opposite direction, and when he turned back, he saw that Bran was staring in the same direction.
“Did you see that trixie, too?” he asked.
“What trixie?”
“The one that went darting across that branch and down that trunk—I know you saw it, too—you turned to look at it.”
“It was a squirrel, boy.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Bran insisted. “It was a trixie.”
Only druids could see the earth elementals, and only druids could control them. Lochlan regarded Bran more closely. Deirdre, one of Bran’s older twin sisters, had been born druid, though not much good it had done her. Her disgrace was one reason Meeve wanted nothing to do with druids, Lochlan knew, even though the great queen would not admit it. But Bran himself, as far as Lochlan could tell, lacked all signs of any druid ability. He hair was neither pure white nor shot through with tell-tale silver, his eyes were neither bright blue nor impenetrable brown-black, nor lacked all pigment. He was not, so far as Lochlan had heard, particularly gifted in music-making, nor singing, nor recitation, which were all considered certain signs of druid ability and critical druid skills.
Even his seat on the horse, his hands on the reins, didn’t mark him as anything but an adequate horseman. Except for the fact he was Meeve’s son, he seemed as ordinary as an old boot. It would certainly be better for the boy if he were, Lochlan thought, listening with only half his attention as Bran chattered on. The druids as a group did not number among Meeve’s favorites right now, despite the fact that Meeve’s own sister was ArchDruid, or Ard-Cailleach, of all Brynhyvar. As far as Lochlan could discern, Meeve at times appeared deliberately determined to antagonize them.
He’s more than he seems. The old druid’s warning repeated unbidden in his mind. There was something odd about Bran, something difficult to define perhaps, but definitely there. Lochlan tried to remember what Deirdre was like, but he’d not seen her much when she was young.
“Will Deirdre be there? And what about Morla?”
Lochlan stiffened and raised one brow. Druids read thoughts, but only after long training and never without permission. Was it possible this boy could read thoughts without the training? Maybe it was only logical the boy would inquire about his sisters. After all, as far as Lochlan knew, Bran hadn’t seen either of his twin sisters since he was a very young child. And neither had Lochlan, for Deirdre stayed at her druid-house, except for a holiday or two at Ardagh, and Morla, the other twin—Morla was long married. Her husband died a year back, a voice reminded him, and he tried unsuccessfully to push all thoughts of Morla out of his mind. He remembered she came home from her fostering a young woman of sixteen, moody and quiet, dark and ripe as the brambleberries that grew along the beach she loved to wander. He might have married her himself if Meeve hadn’t tapped his shoulder the Beltane after Morla came home. Fleetingly he remembered the stricken look on the girl’s face as her mother had led him out of the hot, smoky hall. She’d been about to pick me. The pang of regret that accompanied that realization was unexpectedly deep. “I don’t know,” was all he said. “They may have work of their own—after all, Morla’s married—”
“She’s not married anymore,” Bran said. “Her husband’s gone to the Summerlands.”
Startled, Lochlan looked at him harder. “How did you know that?” Dalraida comprised the remote northwestern tip of Brynhyvar. Lochlan found it hard to believe that Morla spent much time sending messages back and forth to Bran. In ten years, she’d never come back once to Meeve’s court.
“He came to me last Samhain.”
“Fionn? Her husband?”
Bran stared off down the road, as if he could see the shade rising before him. “Said I’d be seeing her soon and asked me to give her a message from him. It was an answer to her question.”
“What was the question?”
“Oh, I don’t know that. But you see, I’ve been sort of expecting to see Morla since MidWinter.”
Lochlan looked more closely at the boy in the greenish shadows. Meeve had first mentioned bringing Bran home nearly nine full moons ago, just after Samhain. Before he could stop himself, he said, “So what was the answer?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“‘No’ is all the answer he gave me,” said Bran. “He told me to tell her that the answer to her question is ‘no’ and then he vanished.”
There was a queer light burning in the boy’s eyes, reminding Lochlan of the druid fires flickering around the standing stones up on the Tors while they worked their magic within the stone circles. It was not uncommon for the dead to come uninvoked to the living at Samhain, when the veil to the Summerlands was thinnest. But not common, either, and how could Bran know that Meeve had first mentioned bringing both Bran and Morla home shortly after Samhain, right before MidWinter? The road ahead looked very dark. A chill went down his arms. The druids said the trees were aware, and looking down the road, he could believe it. The trees stood on either side, so evenly spaced, it was hard to imagine how random chance gave rise to such order.
Lochlan glanced at Bran’s eager face. It was hard to imagine such an ordinary boy could possess any kind of extraordinary talent at all. He’s not what he appears. Lochlan shifted in his saddle and flapped the reins. Maybe it wasn’t his place to tell the boy his mother was dying, but maybe he should tell the boy the druids weren’t high on his mother’s list of favored people right now, and that he doubted that any plans she had for
Bran included druid training. He cleared his throat. “That’s quite an amazing thing, all right.”
The boy narrowed his eyes, his expression an exact replica of Meeve’s when crossed. “You sound like you don’t believe me.”
“It’s not that I believe or don’t believe you, boy. It’s not for me to say.” Thank the Great Mother, he added silently. “But as for the druids—well, there’s something I think you should know. Your mother’s been at odds with her sister, your aunt, for months now, and she’s not at all happy with her. Nor any druids.”
“Because of the blight?”
Lochlan shrugged. Blight was not yet a problem in Eaven Morna. “Blight, goblins, silver—whatever it is, boy, you don’t want to be in the middle of it. So, when you meet her, wait to see what she says to you, before you go telling her you feel you’re a druid. All right?”
Bran frowned, opened his mouth, then shut it.
“Just remember, she’s not just your mother. She’s the Queen of all Brynhyvar, the beloved of the land. You listen, and speak when she asks you, not before.”
Bran made a face, but said nothing.
Night was falling quickly behind the lowering clouds, far faster than Lochlan had anticipated. He wanted all his wits about him, and the road was getting dark. His shoulders ached from a bad night’s sleep. “I say we stop at the next house we come to.”
“All right,” replied Bran. “That suits me—I’m starved.” He caught the reins up in one hand and kicked his heels hard into the horse’s flanks. “Let’s go,” he cried. “I’ll race you!” He took off down the road as the old druid’s warning echoed once more through Lochlan’s mind.
Watch the road ahead. “Hold up, boy,” cried Lochlan as he touched his own heels to his horse’s sides. Keep a close eye on him. With an inward groan, he galloped after Bran who charged heedlessly down the darkening road like a stone tumbling down a mountain. “Wait!” he shouted and plunged headlong into the dark green twilight.
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