Shapeshifter

by Holly Bennett

  Manannan reached forward to accept the bag, nodding his thanks. “And all its treasures intact,” he murmured, his hands moving over the shapes through the supple leather.

  As Oisin returned to his seat, Manannan rose and approached the couple. He took Oisin’s right hand and Niamh’s left hand in his own in a gesture of blessing.

  “You have chosen well, Niamh,” he said. “And perhaps not as unexpectedly as I first thought. I will send out the messengers this night, and the celebrations will begin on the morrow.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Oisin stretched, luxuriating in the deep softness of the bed and the wash of sunlight stealing into their chamber through the open window. So many windows, and so much sunlight, in this place! In Eire, a window was a rare thing, more trouble than it was worth when it so often had to be shuttered tight against the rain or the cold wind.

  Six days into their wedding celebration—or was it seven? Time slipped by so strangely here, it was hard to be sure— Oisin was still seeing new wonders daily. So far, not one could match the woman who slept now in the bed beside him, her golden, tumbled hair kissed by a stray sunbeam. Six passionate nights, six sleepy delicious awakenings, six days spent in the delighted discovery of each other, and still every morning the sight of her, the thought that she was his, filled him with new wonder.

  What would happen when the ten days were up, he wondered. It was hard to picture what “normal life” would be to these people. Perhaps he and Niamh would no longer wake up to warm baths and a table laden with fruit, warm bread, quail’s eggs and fresh-grilled salmon. But he was more than content to wait out the celebration to find out.

  Each evening at the feast there were new guests come to congratulate them, many bringing handsome gifts. More than once Oisin had wished he himself had not arrived empty-handed, with no wealth of his own and no gifts to cement new friendships. At least—thanks to Finn—he had been able to give something valuable to his father-in-law. And then, long into the night, it was music and singing and the telling of tales. He could have listened all night to that music, if not for the even sweeter pleasure that awaited him in their marriage bed.

  THE LAST GUESTS HAD taken their leave, all but Niamh’s sister Grian and her husband Derg. They had been introduced to Oisin a few days previous, and he had been a little discomfited by the strange, almost hungry way Grian stared at him. She did not seem much like her sister. Though Oisin enjoyed her flirtatious, lively talk, she reminded him of a harp strung too tight. Niamh’s calm grace was like a still, deep pool compared to Grian’s choppy waters. Yet when Grian had sung two nights ago, all the tightness had disappeared, and she had swept Oisin away in a river of beauty.

  Derg seemed a good man, very cordial and warm. He struck Oisin, though, as a man carrying some burden or care: just a hint of strain in his features that stood out in that carefree company.

  Now, Niamh had come to her new husband and asked him to join the family in her father’s Chamber of Councils. Thinking it must be some final ceremony, Oisin followed, taking his seat with Manannan, Grian, Derg and Niamh.

  “The time has come when we must speak of less joyful matters.” Manannan, no more the genial host, spoke with the blunt, determined voice of a commander. Oisin, who had seen the same transformation many times in his own father, alerted like a hound on scent.

  Manannan continued. “You are a fine young man, and we are all glad that Niamh has chosen you.” Oisin shifted in his seat, impatient at the preamble. He had heard more or less this same sentiment for the last ten days.

  “But that is not the reason why she came to your land to find you. She was sent by me—by us,” Manannan amended, waving his hand to include Grian and Derg.

  “For what purpose?” Oisin asked, startled and a little suspicious. All the tales of men being lured and tricked by the Sidhe crowded into his head. Surely his own Niamh would not…

  “To ask you to save our daughter, who is Sive, your mother.” It was Derg who answered, but Oisin did not notice the annoyed frown that fleeted over Manannan’s face at the interruption. He was staring at Derg and Grian, madly trying to recall if he had ever been told anything at all about his mother’s family. Derg…hadn’t his father mentioned the name Derg? It seemed a common name here, and he hadn’t connected the two men.

  “My mother is alive?” The words came out more urgent and strained than he intended.

  Manannan nodded, regaining control of the meeting. “She is alive, and well enough.”

  “And under the Dark Man’s sway?”

  “No. If she were, there would be few left in Tir na nOg free of his chains. No, Far Doirche has been disposed of.”

  Oisin shook his head, confused. “I don’t understand.” Something else was nagging at him too, something that had nothing to do with the problem at hand but kept pushing itself forward. He pushed it firmly back. His focus now was on his mother.

  Manannan sighed. “It does not sit well on me to admit an error, but in this matter I judged ill. It is possible I allowed my anger at my daughter’s consort”—and here Oisin did notice Derg flush at the word—“to cloud my thinking. However it was, we left the Dark Man unhindered too long, telling ourselves he was no great threat.

  “We were too late to help your mother, and for that I blame myself. It was after she turned against him that Far Doirche became reckless, rage and impatience finally breaking out and bringing his malice into the open. He began a course of random destruction, striking any hapless traveler with his wand and sending him home with instructions to burn down his sidhe, conjuring up curses and plagues and raining them down on one king after another. When that happened, the Old Ones—myself, Bobd, and others—we put our might together against him.” Manannan gave a grim, satisfied laugh. “He soon found out his upstart spells were of little use against us.”

  “But my mother? You said she was all right?” Oisin was more mixed up than ever. If Far Doirche was conquered, what was left for him to do?

  “She is not all right!” Grian, her voice strident. “She has not been all right for many long seasons.”

  Derg leaned forward and touched Oisin’s knee. “It was Far’s serving boy, Oran, told us what happened, lad. Your mother found a way to defy the Dark Man. He had commanded her to keep her woman’s body, but she was able to change just her head into that of a deer, so that she could not sing. You remember she could become a deer?” Oisin nodded, and Derg continued. “When he couldn’t make her change back, Far went into a fury and cursed her, so that she would ever be stuck in a deer’s form.”

  He sighed. “With his death, the curse should be lifted. But your mother has not changed. We think she has forgotten how, even forgotten who she is and who we are. She must have some memory of home, for she roams the hills and woodlands near our sidhe, but she will let none approach her, nor does she come near to our dwellings.”

  And there was the memory he thought he had lost, so present and strong he could taste and hear and smell it. The sumptuous room faded from his sight and he was back in the cave, pressed against her warm, dappled flank, his head rising and falling with her breath. The fragrant animal heat bloomed like a cloud from her pelt and wrapped him against the cold stone floor and frosty air. His mother. His gentle, courageous, helpless mother. She had seemed helpless on the day Far Doirche dragged her away. And yet she had kept her will and outwitted him. And now she paid the price.

  Oisin looked up. Four pairs of eyes were trained on him, waiting. His cheeks were wet with tears, and he took the time to wipe them dry and become once again a man of the Fianna before replying.

  “I do not know how I will succeed where you have failed, when you have the same appearance as when she knew you and I am utterly different. But I will try. While there is breath left in my body, I will try.”

  THAT NIGHT IN THEIR bedchamber, the other thought, the one that had worried at the edges of his mind all evening, pushed its way forward.

  “Are you not coming to bed?” Niamh had a
lready slipped under the soft, blue blanket and was sitting against a heap of jewel-colored cushions. Her hair curled in waves around her breasts, a sight to make a man’s blood grow hot with desire.

  Oisin gazed at her, trying to square the facts in his mind. It was a young woman he was looking at, a lovely girl at the peak of her beauty. And yet it was not…

  “Oisin? What is it, love? Is it worry for your mother that weighs on you?” She patted the bed. “Come here and tell me.”

  He came, and sat, and groped for words. “You are my mother’s aunt?” Was he even allowed to marry her, he wondered. There were laws in Eire against the marriage of close blood relatives, but he doubted they covered this situation.

  “Yes.” She smiled. “Why?” Then her face fell.

  “Oisin, you mustn’t think…I swear I did not pretend my love to persuade you to come. It was not like that at all. When I found you, you were in that terrible war. And I knew you would not leave your father and comrades in such straits, so I waited and watched, while the killing went on and on. And the more I watched you, the more I came to love you. Oh, my heart, I was in such fear you would die!” Tears glistened in her eyes, making them even more brilliant, and what could he do but kiss her lashes to stop them from falling?

  “No, Niamh, no. It is not that. It is much sillier.”

  “Then what?” She was genuinely perplexed.

  “You are as old as my grandmother! I thought you were young!” The words blurted out, sounding as ridiculous as he had feared. But there it was. He was married to a woman who, in his world, would be gray and withered.

  She laughed, a merry cascade of music. “Well, not quite as old as her, as a matter of fact. She was well grown when I was born.” She laid her hand—a slim, white, young hand—over his. “But, yes, I am nearly her age. And I am young, as you will be many years from now. A few seasons, a few sleeps, and we will be much the same age. You will learn—age does not matter for us. Unless you are one of the ancients, like my father, who all believe they are wiser and better than the rest of us.”

  Oisin shook his head. “It is more than my mortal head can understand,” he confessed.

  Niamh shot him a sultry look from under her eyelashes and snaked her smooth arms around him. “There is one thing I have learned you understand very well indeed,” she whispered. The faint breath in his ear lit a fire that coursed through his veins. He took his wife in his arms— his young, eager, beautiful wife who was, impossibly, some three times his own age—and buried his confusion in the joy of their love.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Surely he would never get used to the strange ocean journey to and from Manannan’s secret stronghold, however many times he made it. This time the trip was much shorter, landing them on a strand that looked strangely familiar.

  But it was not until hours later that Oisin was certain.

  “That hill!” He turned on his horse to look backward at Derg, left arm still outthrust and pointing. “That is the Hill of Almhuin!” And they had traveled here from Baile’s Strand, but…the road was different. And why could he not see Finn’s dun topping the hill?

  Derg smiled. “In Eire it is the Hill of Almhuin, home of the mighty Finn mac Cumhail. Here it is simply one of the two hills that keep company with our hill.” Derg pointed, in his turn, to the first of the approaching hills, and now Oisin noticed the cluster of buildings crowning its top. “Welcome to Sidhe Ochta Cleitigh.”

  THEY AGREED THE first thing was for Oisin to see Sive for himself. Accordingly, Derg would fly out at first light to find her and then lead Oisin to the place where she was spotted. After that, Oisin would have to—his mind balked at the word, but what other was there?—hunt her.

  He spent a good part of the evening wandering around Derg and Grian’s beautiful house and through the grounds of their sidhe. He had never imagined his mother as a young girl or thought of the kind of life she had had. To be accustomed to such luxury and then be cast unprotected into the wilds! How had she ever survived? he wondered.

  On their journey he had asked Derg, “Why did you bring me and not my father? Will you not reunite them?”

  Derg shook his head. “I do not think so. Not, at least, unless Sive comes back to us and, knowing all that it would entail, insists upon it.”

  “What do you mean, all that it would entail?”

  “Your father has remarried, Oisin. He has a young son, and another child on the way. His Fianna look to him to make them once again a mighty force. Would you have him abandon all these charges to come to Tir na nOg?”

  Oisin did not answer. He wasn’t sure what his answer was. But Derg was not finished.

  “There is another problem. Your father is old.”

  Oisin’s protests were stilled by Derg’s raised hand.

  “I know, lad. I know he is still strong. He is a great man. But he is more than twenty mortal years older than when Sive loved him, and it shows. What hope is there that she would know him, when she does not even recognize us, who are unchanged? We cannot undo what Time has already done. We cannot make him young again.”

  And yet they think she will know me? Oisin shook his head and made to ride on, but Derg’s next words slowed his pace.

  “It is not your appearance we expect her to know. You are the child of her heart, the one who gave her a reason to endure through all the years you were together. You were the source of her strength and her hope, and that hope was that you would survive to manhood.

  “We want to show her that her hope came true. Perhaps you will fail, as we have failed. But we think that if anyone can awaken her heart, it is you.”

  HE STALKED HER patiently, silently, careful of the betraying breeze that might put her to flight. The pain of it—that she would fear him so—caught him unawares.

  That was the throbbing of a just-knit wound. When at last he watched her browsing in a glade, and, catching his scent, she raised her head to look at him—that was when the wound’s edges were torn apart. For he had thought she would know him. Not in his mind, he didn’t. His mind had truly reasoned that she would not. But his heart, he realized now, had believed that when she saw him, she would know him.

  She didn’t. The startled brown eyes that gazed at him before she bolted away had none of the awareness and intelligence he remembered—oh, now he remembered!— from childhood. Those eyes had been his mother’s eyes, whatever form or color they took on.

  Now they were a wild creature’s, nothing more.

  THE WOODS WERE nearly dark, and Oisin was most of the way home when the white patches of a magpie’s wing flashed in the gloom. Soon Derg was pacing at his side.

  “It’s slow going through unfamiliar forest in the dark. Thought you could use a guide.”

  Oisin did not point out that in Eire, there were few places he knew better than the land surrounding Finn’s dun. He simply nodded his thanks. He was glad to see Derg. He had had time to think on the long trek back, and what he had concluded was this: so long as he tracked Sive like a hunter, she would respond as prey. He must find a way to gain her trust.

  “I need a place that she frequents,” he said to Derg now. “Somewhere she goes to rest or drink. Can you follow her as a bird and find one?”

  “I already have.” Derg’s smile was sad. “There is a pool she was fond of as a child. It is where she learned to become one with the wild creatures. Which is, as I gather, what you propose to do?”

  “Something like that.” Oisin did not have his mother’s powers, but he had been a child of the woodland, and he knew how to be still and unnoticed.

  “Does she go there often?” he asked.

  Derg shook his head. “I can’t say. By day, she rarely comes that close to our settlement. The pool is not far into the forest. But I think perhaps it draws her, for I have seen her there several times at dawn. If you were there each daybreak…”

  “I will be there each daybreak,” said Oisin. And whether she came or not, he would leave food—grains, apples, hazelnuts�
��for her to find when she did come.

  IN THE GRAY HALF-LIGHT of early dawn, a dappled deer picked her way cautiously down the bank. Her dainty prints from several days ago still dented the mud by the pool’s edge.

  She was almost at the water when she stopped, her wide nostrils flaring. The scent was delicious, fragrant with oats and the sweet heavy odor of fruit. A mound of food lay heaped on a fallen log just off the trail.

  The doe stood motionless, torn. It was man-food on that log. She remembered the lean, hungry winters that had driven her, at times, to skirt along the edges of the hunters’ fields and orchards, scraping through snow to find fruit or grain heads that had been left behind. There was nothing better than that food, but always it was gained under threat of the spear and the dogs.

  She lifted her head, scanning the underbrush around the pool and testing the faint dawn breeze. Yes, there was man-scent about, and—she stretched out her muzzle to an apple that had fallen off the pile and lay near her feet— definitely on the food.

  The doe’s feet did a comical little dance as the war within—to flee or to eat—played itself out. Then she snatched at the apple, ready to leap away at the least noise or movement as she munched through its sweet flesh. The strange thing was, the man-scent on the food, which should have repelled her, made it all the more enticing.

  Sive Remembers

  The next morning, the food was there again, and the man-scent was stronger. And though my skin shuddered over my shoulders at the smell of it, I didn’t want to flee. I wanted to stay, not just for the grain, but to be near that smell.

  When I saw him—a big man with pale hair, on the other side of the pool—his presence was so quiet and still that I didn’t bolt but simply retreated into the undergrowth and watched. The food still drew me, yes, but it was more than that. It was like a remembered dream, so many elements that I seemed to have seen before: a deer at the edge of a pool, a quiet person across the water. A big man with yellow hair—why did he feel safe, when other men made me run? And his scent—that tantalizing scent—drew me. Some mornings I had a crazy longing to run around the pool and bury my nose against him.