Child of the Prophecy

by Juliet Marillier

  “Yes, Grandmother,” I whispered.

  The warm days passed, and the voices of children floated up on the summer breeze and made their way, laughing and shrieking, into the shadowy inner chambers of the Honeycomb. The curraghs sailed out of the cove in the dawn and returned at dusk, laden with their gleaming catch. Women mended nets on the jetty, and brown-skinned lads exercised horses along the strand, high-stepping over the mounded seaweed. I lay awake, night after night, listening to the distant lament of the pipes. Though Fiacha came and went, there was no sign at all of Father, and I began to fear I might never see him again. That hurt me terribly; and yet I did not want him to see what I was becoming, to witness my ill-use of the craft, and so in a way his absence was a relief. I hoped he would never have to learn the truth, that in sending me forth he sacrificed his only child to the most foolhardy and impossible of quests, where his own life was the price of failure. As for Grandmother, to her I was no more than a finely tuned weapon, a tool many years in the fashioning, which she would now employ for a purpose of such grandeur I still struggled to come to terms with it.

  The summer was nearly ended. Grandmother had made practical preparations of a sort. My small storage chest now held two gowns of a slightly better standard than my usual garb of old working dress and serviceable apron. I had a new pair of indoor shoes as well as my walking boots. A man had made them specially, muttering to himself as he took measure of my misshapen foot. This was a trial. I would have blistered the cobbler’s fingers for him; but I needed the shoes.

  I had not asked my grandmother how I was to travel to Sevenwaters. It was a long way, I knew that because Darragh had told me; nearly the length and breadth of Erin. But I had no idea how many moons such a journey might take. Perhaps my grandmother would work a spell of transportation, and send me north in an instant with my baggage by my side. In the end there was no need to ask, for one day Grandmother simply announced that it was time to go.

  “You’ll travel north on Dan Walker’s cart,” she said, checking the strap which fastened my storage chest. “Very practical, if not altogether stylish.”

  “Practical?” I echoed in dismay. “What’s practical about it?”

  “You’ll arouse a great deal less suspicion if you turn up with the traveling folk,” she said dryly, “than by manifesting yourself in your uncle’s hall amidst a shower of sparks. This way nobody’ll notice you. What’s one more lass among that great gaggle of people? Not nervous, are you? Surely I’ve worked that out of you by now. Use the Glamour if you must. Be what pleases you, child. These folk are only tinkers, Fainne. They’re nothing.”

  “Yes, Grandmother.” Her words did little to settle the nervous churning in my stomach. I knew I must be strong. The task I undertook for my grandmother, her terrible work of vengeance against those who had slighted our kind, must be pursued with the utmost strength of purpose. My father’s very life was in my hands. I could not fail. I would not fail. Still, I was barely fifteen years old, tortured by shyness and quite unused to the world at large. It was this, I suppose, that made me such a subtle weapon. I must have seemed as innocuous as some little hedge creature that scuttles for cover at any imagined danger.

  I took my leave of Grandmother. If she still harbored any doubts, she kept them to herself.

  “I almost wish I was coming with you,” she sighed, and for an instant I caught a glimpse of that other manifestation she was fond of, an alluring, curvaceous young creature with auburn hair and pearly skin. “There must be fine men in those parts still, though there’ll never be another Colum. And I could still cast my net, make no doubt of it.” Then, abruptly, she was herself again. “But I can see it wouldn’t do. They’d know me, Glamour or no. The druid would know me. So would that other one. This is your time, child. Remember what I’ve taught you. Remember what I’ve told you. Every little thing, Fainne.”

  “Yes, Grandmother.”

  We walked out of the Honeycomb to the point where the cliff path stretched ahead all the way down to the shore and along to the western end of the cove, where Dan Walker and his folk would be making ready for departure. And there, dark-cloaked, ashen-faced, stood my father, staring silent out over the sea. My heart gave a great lurch.

  “I might walk down with you,” Grandmother said. “See you on your way.”

  It’s not easy to cast a spell over a fellow practitioner of the art. You need to be quick or you’ll encounter a barrier or counter-spell, and your efforts will be entirely wasted. This was exceptionally quick. In an instant, without so much as a glance at each other, both Father and I threw nets of immobility over Grandmother, so that she was held there in place from both left and right, feet rooted to the rock, mouth slightly open, eyes frozen in piercing annoyance.

  “She’ll be angry,” I remarked to Father as we set off down the path, he carrying my small wooden chest on his shoulder, I clutching a roll of bedding for the journey. Fiacha flew overhead.

  “I’ll deal with it,” Father said calmly. I glanced at him and thought I detected a shadow of amusement in his dark eyes. But he was thin, so thin, and he seemed far older than he had last autumn, his cheeks hollow, his severe mouth bracketed by new lines of pain. “Now, Fainne, we don’t have long. Are you well? This will have been a difficult time for you, a time of great change. It was hard for me to leave you thus; hard but necessary. Are you ready for this journey now, daughter?”

  I picked my way with caution down the narrow, steep pathway. It had been raining, and the surface was treacherous. Questions raced through my head. How could you let your own mother do this to you? And, Why didn’t you tell me the truth? And, strongest of all, Will I ever see you again? I could not ask any of them, for Grandmother would know, and it would be my father who was punished for it. I longed to throw my arms around him and blurt out the whole truth, and be a child again in a world where the rules made sense. I could not tell him anything.

  “Yes, I’m ready,” I said, feeling an odd sensation behind my eyes, as if I were about to cry.

  “Sure?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  So we walked on in silence, and it seemed to me that although we walked quite slowly, as if reluctant to reach the end, we were very soon down on the level track that skirted the strand, and Dan and Peg and the jostle of bright-clad folk were in sight along the path.

  “Father,” I said abruptly.

  “Yes, Fainne?”

  “I want to say—I want to thank you for being such a good teacher. To thank you for your wisdom and your patience—and—and for letting me find things out for myself. For trusting me.”

  He said nothing for a moment. When he did speak, his voice was a touch unsteady. “Fainne, it is difficult for me to say this to you.”

  “What, Father?”

  “I—you need not go, if you do not wish to do so. If, in your heart, you feel this way is not for you, you have that choice.”

  “Not go?” My heart thumped. Now, now that it was too late, he told me I could stay, and I was forbidden to say yes. I cleared my throat. I had never lied to him before. “When we have come so far, not do this for you? Do I not owe it to my mother to go back to Sevenwaters and become what she would wish me to be? Surely I must go.” And, oh, how I longed to tell him I would give anything to stay with him in Kerry, and have things be as they once were. But he was my father, and for his own sake I must find the courage to leave him.

  “I wished—I simply wished you to understand that ultimately, what occurs, what develops, is for you to determine. And—and, Fainne, this may be a far greater, a far more momentous unfolding of events than either you or I have ever envisaged. So important that I would not dare put it into words for you. We are what we are by birth and by blood. Over that, we have no control. We cannot break the mold of our kind. But one always has the choice to practice the craft, to one end or another, or to stand aside. That choice you do have, daughter.”

  I stared at him, “Not practice the craft? But—but what else is ther
e?”

  Father made no reply, simply gave a little nod. His expression remained impassive. He had ever been a master of control. We began to walk again, our last walk together around the cove, with the plumes of spray dashing the Honeycomb behind us, and the remote cries of the gulls above us, and ahead, Dan Walker advancing toward us, a hand reached out in greeting and a grin on his dark, bearded face.

  “Well, Ciarán. You’ve brought the lass, I see. Give that bundle to Darragh, young lady, and we’ll see you settled on the cart. All ready to go?”

  I nodded nervously, staring at the ground. I did not even look at Darragh as he came up and plucked the roll of bedding out of my hands. The wooden chest was loaded unceremoniously onto one cart, and I found myself hoisted up on the other one, to be seated next to Peg’s friend, Molly, and several small girls with rather loud voices. Father stood alongside, and I thought he seemed even paler than before, if that were possible.

  “I’ll take good care of her, Ciarán,” said Dan as he leapt up on the first cart and took the reins in his hand. “She’ll be safe with us.”

  Father nodded acknowledgment. At the back of the assembled folk the lads were herding ponies into line, whistling sharply. Dogs added their excited voices. Fiacha retreated to a vantage point atop a dead tree, and the gulls scattered.

  “Well,” said Father quietly. “Goodbye, daughter. It may be a long time.”

  Now that the final parting was come, I could hardly speak. The task ahead was so daunting it could hardly be imagined. Change the course of a battle. Beat the Fair Folk at a game they had been practicing for more years than there were grains of sand on the white shore of the cove. A momentous unfolding of events…I must complete the task my grandmother had begun, I must do it at any cost, to repay him for the years of patience and the priceless gift of knowledge.

  “Goodbye, Father,” I whispered, and then Peg called to the horses, and gave a practiced flick of the reins, and we were off. I looked back over my shoulder, watching my father’s still figure growing smaller and smaller. I remember colors. The deep red of his hair. The ashen white of his stern face. The long black cloak, a sorcerer’s cloak. Behind him the sea swept in and out, in and out, and the sky built with angry clouds, slate, purple, violet, dark and mysterious as the hide of some great ocean creature. A wind began to stir the beaten branches of the low bushes that bordered the track, and the little girls huddled together under their blanket, giggling and whispering behind their hands.

  “It’ll pass,” said Peg to nobody in particular.

  “All right, lassie?” queried Molly rather awkwardly. I gave a stiff nod, and winced as the cart went over a rock. Then we rounded a bend in the road, and Father was gone.

  Chapter Three

  It was not a time for looking back, so I gritted my teeth and got on with things as best I could. The worst of it was the constant noise: neighing, barking, the squeak of cart wheels and folk chattering all at the same time like a gaggle of geese. I longed to cast a spell of silence. I was tempted to put my hands over my ears. With an effort, I did neither.

  We made a stop by the way quite early on, so Dan Walker could see a man about a horse. The carts were drawn up in the shelter of tall elms, and the women made a little fire and boiled a kettle for tea. But the horses stayed in harness, and were watered from a bucket. All too soon we would be on the road again.

  The noise went on. The smaller children ran about laughing and yelling and getting wet in the nearby stream. Peg whistled; Molly hummed to herself. The older girls were conducting a conversation about the horse fair, and which of the lads they’d met last year might be there again. The boys were joking as they went among the animals with their clanking water buckets.

  I sat under the trees and imagined the dim stillness of the Honeycomb, where a whole day might pass with barely a word spoken; where the only sounds were the whisper of sandalled feet and the distant roar of the ocean.

  “Come with me.”

  Darragh’s voice interrupted my thoughts, and then Darragh’s hand was grasping mine and hauling me to my feet, before I had a chance to say yes or no.

  “I’ve got something to show you. Come on.”

  He pulled me back under the trees and, faster than was comfortable, up a precipitous grassy hillside to a vantage point crowned with a little cairn of stones. We had already traveled a long way up from the coast; the track had been hard for the horses, and at times folk had climbed down and walked alongside the carts. Peg had told me to stay where I was, and I had not argued with her. Perhaps they thought I would not keep up, because of my foot. Darragh was making no such concessions.

  “Now,” he said. “Look out that way. That’s your last sight of the Kerry coast. You’ll want to remember it. There’s no sea at Sevenwaters, just lots and lots of trees.”

  It was far away; already so far. There was no crash of waves, no roar of power, no sound of seabirds squabbling on the shore as the fisherfolk gutted the catch. Only the gleam of sunlight on distant water; only the pearly sky, and the land stretched out in folds of green and gray and brown, dotted here and there with great stones and clumps of wind-battered trees.

  “Look further out. Out beyond that promontory there. Tell me what you see.” Darragh put one hand on my shoulder, turning me slightly, and with the other he pointed to what seemed to be a stretch of empty ocean. “Look carefully.”

  There was an island: a tiny, steep triangle of rock, far out in the inhospitable waters. If I squinted, I could detect plumes of spray as waves dashed its base. Another small isle lay close by. Even by my standards, it was a desolate spot.

  “You can’t see them from our cove,” Darragh said. “Skellig rocks, they call that place. There’s folk live there.”

  “Live there? How could they?”

  “Christian hermits. Holy men. It’s supposed to be good for the soul, so they say. The Norsemen put in there once, killed most of the brothers, smashed what little they had. But the hermits went back. Strange sort of life, that’d be. Think of all you’d be missing.”

  “It would be quiet, at least,” I said somewhat testily, still staring out at the specks in the ocean, and wondering at such a choice.

  “Finding it a bit much, are you?”

  I said nothing.

  “You’re not used to folk, that’s all it is. It’ll get easier as we go. You’ve no need to be scared of us.”

  “Scared?” I bristled. “Why would I be scared?”

  Darragh thought for a moment. “Because it’s all new?” he ventured. “Because you’re used to the quiet, just you and your father shut up alone doing what you do? Because you don’t like being looked at?”

  Misery settled on me like a small, personal gray cloud. I stared out toward the sea in silence.

  “True, isn’t it?” said Darragh.

  “Maybe.”

  “Perhaps you’d rather be a hermit living on a rock in the sea, feeding yourself on seaweed and cockles? You’d not have to think about a soul besides yourself then.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.

  “No more nor less than it says.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a life like that,” I said. “At least it’s—safe.”

  “Funny way of looking at it. What about the cliffs? What about the Norsemen? What about starving to death in winter? Or might you point your little finger and turn one of the brothers into a nice fat codfish maybe?”

  I froze, unable to look at him. There was a difficult silence.

  “Fainne?” he asked eventually. “What’s wrong?”

  And I knew that his words had been innocent, a joke, and that it was my own mind that had put the fear into me.

  “Nothing.”

  “I worry about you. There was someone else there this summer, wasn’t there?”

  “My grandmother. On a visit.”

  “Uh-huh. And that was why you wouldn’t come out?”

  “Part of the reason.”

  “And what
was the other part?” He was frowning, his dark brows drawn together.

  “I—I can’t do ordinary things anymore. I can’t have—friends. I can’t let that get in the way. It’s hard to explain. This is bad enough, going on the cart, mixing with folk, having to talk and listen and—I just can’t do those things anymore. I—I can’t let anyone close.”

  Darragh did not reply. I stared at the ground, knowing he was looking at me, but unwilling to meet the expression in those too-honest brown eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “So am I,” he said slowly. “Sounds pretty odd to me. You might think yourself too fine for the likes of us. But there’s folk of your own kind, where you’re going. Family. It’ll be good for you, Fainne. They’ll welcome you. Folk are not so bad once you get to know them. And—it’s only right, to have family and friends around you. I don’t understand how you could do without them.”

  I drew my shawl closer around my shoulders. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” I said. “But our kind don’t have friends.”

  Then we turned and made our way back down the hill, and he took my hand on the steepest bits, and neither of us said a word until we were nearly under the elms and could hear Molly laughing at some joke of Peg’s.

  “You have, you know,” Darragh said softly. “Sometimes you get friends without asking for them. And once you’ve got them, they’re not so easy to lose.”

  “I’m going a long way away,” I said.

  “I’m a traveling man, remember?” said Darragh. “Always on the move, that’s me.”

  The journey was long. I learned to shut out some of the noise by repeating in my head, over and over, the recitation of question and answer that Father and I had perfected during the long years of my childhood.