Swan Witch

by Betina Lindsey

  She turned to Terwen. “Fire witch, breath to the flame.” Terwen clasped her feather.

  Lastly, Epona met Eithne’s eyes. “Swan witch, throat full of song.” Her fingertips trembled as she touched the feather tip. Then, like a spark of goodness, Eithne felt well-being enfold her.

  “Take these feathers and place them in a corner of the croft to unite the four winds in protection,” instructed Epona.

  Eithne moved past the other women to the corner nearest where Bron sat. There she secured the feather high up, between the chinks of stone. Then she returned to center and intertwined her arms with those of her sisters before the hearth fire.

  Epona began humming and tossed a red powder onto the fire. Flames flared and flashed with bright sparks, their light banishing the shadows, and darkness fluttered on black wings from the croft.

  Epona closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and then spoke softly. “The circle is cast and sealed in place.”

  Eithne looked immediately to Bron. There was light in his eyes and he matched her gaze with much warmth.

  Abruptly, Epona said, “We must leave now.”

  “So soon?” said Eithne, turning her attention to the swan sisters. She hoped to speak more with them of Myr and the sisterhood.

  “Aye, my child,” she said, picking up her beautiful feathered cloak and placing it over her shoulders. “There is much left undone.”

  “’Tis not a night that I would wish to be out-of-doors,” observed Niamh. “You are welcome here.”

  “Our thanks to you.” Ceith smiled. “But out-of-doors is more to our liking.”

  And with that Terwen opened the door and the three women disappeared into the darkness as if they had never been.

  Chapter 14

  It was after midday when eight curraghs beached on the rough sands of the western shore. The sun had burned away the last clouds of morning mist and the air was heavy and thick with the smell of the sea and the shrill cries of the gulls.

  Eithne sat upon Samisen on the cliffs above watching Bron greet his father, Drunn, and other clansmen. The tall figures moved through the foaming shallows to the drier upper reaches of the rocky beach. She counted twenty and six warriors. Like Bron their hair was waist long, thick, and as black as night’s darkest hour. The sunlight reflected off their armor gold and bronze, and struck like fire from their dolphin-emblemed shields. Their swords were sheathed and their spears held upright.

  Filled with nervousness, she patted Samisen’s neck and thought to herself, These men have left their women and homes to come here to face a terrible evil. And what my part will be I do not know. I am weakness itself in the face of their strength.

  As they approached, Eithne attempted to compose her features with self-possession, but she was far from it.

  “My Lady Eithne,” introduced Bron simply. One or two clansmen gave her a half nod and the others hardly gave her a glance. Bron took the bridle reins in his hand and turned Samisen’s head to follow him as he walked beside his clansmen.

  “The lady has agreed to submit to the ordeal,” said Bron to his father.

  “Arrah!” voiced the sea king, approvingly. He met Eithne with a respectful eye. “Tonight?”

  “Aye,” said Bron. “Tonight. The sooner the better. Sheelin will come. Since you have left each night the winds blow stronger as he gathers the dark forces.”

  “There is much treachery in a man who would so use his own wife and daughter.”

  “He is a man without honor,” agreed Bron.

  As Eithne overheard them speak of her father, she felt shame. What little pride she had came from her mother’s lineage of Myr, yet no gift was as coveted as the singer’s voice and this came from her father. He had not always been without honor.

  She watched Bron lovingly. Something the sea king had said caused him to shake back his long dark hair and laugh. Over his muscled shoulders his sky blue cape rippled in the breeze. More than anything in the world she wanted Bron mac Llyr to sire her daughters. He was a man with honor.

  The sun was setting in a crimson death across the waves of the western sea. Astride Samisen, Eithne gazed over the low hills of Tir nan Og and watched the three swans take flight, their large wings ruffling the waters of the pond. They circled above her head and drifted like clouds toward the barrow mound.

  “They are beautiful in form and flight,” said Bron, who sat behind Eithne on the horse. “I envy you, Eithne. I wish I were of a kith that could fly.”

  Eithne smiled and said, “And I wish I were of yours. Isn’t that the way of things.”

  “Aye, ’tis,” Bron agreed.

  “As a child, I was very homely, graceless, and clumsy. My hair was mousy, my neck skinny, and my eyes too big for my face. My mother assured me it would not always be so. She told me that it was the way of swan maidens to be awkward and unattractive until their thirteenth year.”

  “By the look of you now, she was right,” he said.

  “Beway, that was the distress, she wasn’t. My thirteenth year came and passed and I was still as Gibbers said, ‘the ugly gurrul.’ In my disappointment, without my mother about to soften me in womanly ways, I became quite the wild thing. But in my sixteenth year the transformation began to take place. Each morning I’d wake and something different had changed in my face or form. And then one night, the wildness called me and I stood on the ledge of my window and leaped. For the first time I flew.”

  “It must have been very thrilling…and frightening,” said Bron, guiding Samisen around a quagmire and closer to the barrow mound.

  “No more than this very moment,” confessed Eithne of her approaching ordeal.

  Bron bent his head over her shoulder and kissed her cheek. “I have faith that you will fly through this as well.”

  Her love-desire for him swelled in her heart, but it could not push away her nervousness.

  The clansmen awaited them at the barrow mound. Now as she and Bron approached, the men stood in a ring around a fire at the mouth of the mound. The sun was sinking behind the tumbled stones, touching them with scarlet and gold—it appeared like spilled blood.

  Bron let loose her waist and slipped down onto the ground. Eithne shivered, as the rising wind tugged at her cloak. Bron had told her very little about the ordeal other than it was not common for a woman to undertake such an initiation. She was thankful for Niamh’s presence at the sea king’s side.

  Bron turned to her, his face grave with solemnity. She put her hands on his shoulders and he helped her off Samisen. She wanted to put her arms around him and hold him, like a child afraid to leave the protection of its parent. But she knew that would be a poor showing in front of his unsmiling and somber clansmen.

  Once she entered the circle, the sea king stepped forward. In his hand he held a shell drinking horn. Steam writhed above it like spindrift.

  “Drink, milady, we now begin the ancient ritual of trial.”

  Bron had left her side and stepped into the ranks of his clansmen. Eithne looked over to him, but his eyes were shadowed. Uncertainty gripped her. She did not want to do this.

  “Milady,” came the sea king’s quiet voice calling for her attention.

  Her hands reached for the proffered shell and she lifted it to her lips. The drink tasted scalding hot and bitter as wormwood. Her throat burned, and as the stuff settled into her stomach she wondered if she was going to spew it up again. The fire gave way to numbness, and a warmth in her belly gradually spread through her until the ends of her fingers tingled.

  Locking arms over shoulders, the clansmen began a low deep-voiced chanting in the oldest of tongues. The sound of their voices weighted the air with spell speaking and magic.

  Then Niamh stepped before Eithne looking not the young maid but the seeress. In the wind, the strands of her black hair waved over her penetrating eyes.

  “Take off your clothing, Eithne.” She held a clay pot of ashes in her hands.

  A quiver went through Eithne’s belly, but she knew she
must. First she slipped off her boots, then the cape. Awkwardly, her fingers unfastened the tangle of her shoulder ties and her tunic fell in a soft pool at her feet. Eyes lowered, the clansmen began moving counterclockwise in a slow rhythmic step around her. Briskly, Niamh rubbed the ash over Eithne’s shoulders, back, and stomach, down her legs, and lastly upon her forehead and cheeks.

  The men broke the circle and snaked in a curve toward the mound’s entrance. Niamh took Eithne’s hand and led her behind the men. She chanted,

  Out of day, comes the night—

  Through the smoke of firelight—

  Around them the night was growing, dimming the difference between light and shadow. Tension tightened Eithne’s shoulders as she approached the gaping, black-mouthed opening of the mound. She was afraid of what was going to happen to her but, at the same time, she felt the gaze of Bron upon her, looked up, and caught a glint of reassurance in his emerald eyes.

  Then she felt the push of strong hands and she stumbled into the darkness of the mound, the doorway into night. Trying to see, she turned and heard the grind of the great stone slab being rolled over the entrance, imprisoning her until the morn.

  A sudden, all was cold and still.

  She crouched down, silence pulsing palpably in her ears. In all that dark emptiness nothing stirred. She had to remind herself to breathe.

  Bron’s words returned to her: ’Tis a rare man of the isles who would not prefer to die on the open sea rather than enter a barrow mound. Aye, she thought, the place is full of bones and death. She smelled it.

  And it was full of something more…She heard it moving now…slithering toward her. Her heart pace quickened. Her greatest imagined fears leaped into her mind’s eye.

  In reaction she opened her mouth to cry out, but then some sense stopped her. She shifted and moved to put her shoulders against the stone wall. After a moment of feeling here and there, she realized nothing solid was near. She felt wildly exposed. On hands and knees she crawled on the earthen floor away from the slithering sounds into deeper darkness.

  When her knees began to hurt, she stopped. You are crawling in circles, came the small voice of reason. Stay put. She curled into a fetal ball and thought she might sleep, but she dared not close her eyes. Even in the pitch blackness she was afraid that if she closed her eyes and let her guard down something fearful would happen. Whatever shared the darkness with her, waited…and if she closed her eyes it would come.

  Like a bowstring, time stretched taut, released, and stretched again. Odd sensations prickled her body and sometimes it seemed as if she had no body at all. Cradling herself against earth’s bones she rocked and rocked toward sunrise.

  After a while her eyelids felt like lead. They burned and watered. She fought to keep them open as fear gripped her.

  And then it happened…her eyes fell shut and in that split second the darkness transformed…the evil broke loose. She blinked and saw swirling figures in the patches of darkness. The demons of her father’s Unseelie Court surrounded her. She screamed, scrambled to her feet, and began running blindly.

  Suddenly, her legs sank into oozing mud. She lurched, her arms flailing for handholds, then she fell. She smelled the rich tang of peat and bog as she struggled. Already she was mired to the belly, and every movement only worked her deeper in.

  If I keep struggling the bog will swallow me, came her realization in snapping clarity.

  Who would help her? Rising in the darkness surrounding her, the grotesque faces of her father’s demons lurked. Fanged jaws hung in gaping anticipation and bulging eyes burned with a devouring fire.

  Closest hovered the Fir Darrig, blood spouting from his handless arms. “Take my hand, milady,” he screeched over and over.

  Revulsion consumed her, and no matter if she sank all the way to hell she would never take his offered help.

  And then beside her in the bog the green head of Gibbers emerged. “Like us yer evil. We’re yer kith, you wicked gurrul. We’re yer kith. Yer same as us,” he cried foully, until Eithne covered her ears.

  “You are not my kith!” she shouted at his grimacing face. “I am nothing like you. You have no souls. I have a soul.”

  “Are you so sure, Eithne?” Sheelin’s voice was smooth as a glassy sea. She turned and saw her father just beyond her reach. White fear gripped her and she felt as if her heart had ceased to beat. Of all the visages his was the most frightening. He stood in all his black grandeur. Panic-stricken, she struggled. The movement cost her as the dank rottenness imprisoned her to below her arms. He knelt and leaned to her. “Are you so sure we have no souls?”

  “Aye, you cannot love. Only those with souls love.”

  He took his time before speaking and when he did his tone was hauntingly mild. “And do you love, Eithne?”

  “Beway! You mock me,” she spat vehemently.

  Unruffled, his perfect mouth curved into a smile that quit before reaching his eyes. “I merely asked you a question, my daughter.”

  “I wish to the moon I was not your daughter. I’m shamed by you.”

  “Take my hand, Eithne, and save yourself before you sink and disappear into the bog of your own shame.” She glared at his proffered hand with hostility.

  “I hate you,” she cried out. “I hate what you’ve done to my mother. I hate that you will invade Myr with your dark powers. I’d rather die than take your hand. I’d rather die than be like you.”

  “But you are…like me.”

  “Nay, nay!” she denied, sobbing uncontrollably.

  “Aye, Eithne, like me you have the singer’s voice, like me you weave the powers of dark and light, like me you can breed evil.” His eyes held a demonic light as he stretched out his arms to her. “Embrace me, Eithne. Together we will invade Myr. Embrace your own darkness.”

  Then Sheelin was gone. And before her stood herself, the self that embodied her own evil. The same demonic light reflected in her eyes. Appalled, she turned away.

  Bron’s words echoed in her mind like thunder: You cannot truly love until you learn to love yourself. She knew now what he meant. She must learn to love all facets of herself. The good and the bad. But how?

  Slowly, she looked back. From behind, she heard Gibbers muttering, “Ye are more than ye think ye are.”

  Take my hand, said the aspect of herself she disowned. Tremors shook her body as the mire covered her shoulders.

  Feeling utterly wretched, she dug her fingers into the slime and dragged herself toward the other Eithne. Her limbs moved with lethargy and she wondered if she might ever free herself. Then she was staggering forward on solid ground. Her breast heaving, she clasped the proffered hand. Racked with sobs, she collapsed to her knees. Despite her loathing, she embraced her own darkness.

  Beway, beway, comforted the dark aspect of herself. You are evil as well as good.

  And Eithne knew that was more truth than she herself had wanted to accept until then. She felt the light touch of a hand upon her hair.

  You are worthy of love as you are. I love you.

  She felt the other Eithne’s arms tighten around her. In that moment she felt freer than flight and light engulfed her like the noonday sun. Her crying slowed and her tears became tears of joy. Peace filled her and she sank into a sleep that was as restoring and healing as any fairy enchantment.

  “Eithne, my love. ’Tis over. We’re here now.” It was Bron’s voice she heard as the clansmen rolled away the great stone blocking the entrance to the mound. She was coiled on the ground, her arms hugging herself. She blinked, unable to decipher the faces. Strong hands lifted her.

  They carried her out into the morning sunrise. She realized that the ordeal was over. As her eyes adjusted, everything became clearer, brighter, and more vibrant. The sea crashed against the cliffs and the gulls cried in an awakening din. She was alive.

  She sought out Bron’s face. It was lined from sleeplessness. He appeared as if he’d traversed his own night of fear. She offered him a timid, heartfelt smile.
He stepped forward and embraced her a long, long reviving moment.

  Then he whispered softly in her ear. “It’s not a matter of slaying your dragons, Eithne, love. It’s a matter of embracing them.”

  He drew back.

  Niamh came up and blessed her with alder, willow, and oak, and hung a wreath of sea flowers around her neck. Then, Bron lifted her upon Samisen. They rode down to the sea and by his own hand he bathed her. She reveled in his touch and his careful washing away of the black ash. The water was cold, but it invigorated her with the vitality of life itself. She found her voice and began singing out to sea. Her voice was higher and purer and her song more lilting and joyous than ever before. Encircling her on the beach, the others came to hear her song.

  When she ceased, the sea king stood by her. His face kindly, he said, “You have survived the night of fear. You’ve had the courage to face the enemy within. You are now of our clan, milady Eithne. By my word we adopt you into our sea clan.”

  He removed his sky blue cloak and placed it over her bare shoulders. Tears welled in her eyes and she drew it around her with pride.

  The clansmen lifted their swords. The blades gleamed in the sunlight. Together in bold salute they shouted, “Arrah! Arrah!”

  Bron stood beside her. His gaze was an endearment. He said loudly, “You are well-loved, my Lady Eithne.”

  She smiled and declared proudly, “And I now love myself as well, Bron mac Llyr.”

  Bron left Eithne in the croft napping through the afternoon and wandered along the shore. Long strands of seaweed splayed like grasping fingers over the barnacle faced rocks. The waves shattered against the cliffs in the persistent heartbeat of the sea. The foaming white water ran hissing up the beach almost to his bare feet as he made his way along.

  As he walked onto a sandy spit, a flash of silver caught his eye. He stopped and squinted into the shining mirror of the sea. There was a shimmering silver shape moving through the water toward him.