Warrior's Daughter

by Holly Bennett

  Geanann left first, and it would not surprise me if he planned it so as not to overshadow my parting from Roisin. He is like that.

  I had already chosen what to give Berach and Roisin: a set of matched gold torcs, richer than was really suited to their rank. But they would look splendid on their wedding day, and if they never wore them again they would at least have some treasure that could be traded at need. Geanann was harder. No gift could repay what he had given me.

  I said as much as I handed him the enameled cloak pin.

  It was too small, I realized in dismay. The rich objects I had reached for at first—jeweled goblets, golden armbands—had all seemed to me to underline the impossible gap between the gift of a life and any mere treasure, but now I was afraid that I would seem mean or ungrateful.

  “It is only a token,” I explained, “and if there are gold or gems in my cache that your eye favors, you have only to choose. But this I chose, for it has a special meaning to me. It marks the first time Fintan showed me how to look through his eyes, the day I saw the ships sailing to Baile’s Strand.” And I told him how my father had won that pin from Baire in a game of fidchell the time Baire was camped on our strand, and how he had given it to me—even though it was sized for a man’s cloak—because it was cunningly fashioned as a raven.

  “So,” I concluded, “you could say that Fintan was my first guide along this path. And you were the second.”

  I dared look at him then, and all my hesitation fell away when I saw how his face lit up with pleasure at my story.

  “It has been an honor to be your guide for this short time,” Geanann told me, and he took out his old pin and replaced it with mine, skewering the raven’s beak through the circle of its body. He stepped forward then, placed his hands on my shoulders and kissed the top of my head in blessing.

  “I will check in on you when my travels bring me south again,” he promised. “But now my father awaits my report, and it has been too many months since my master in the healing arts has had sight of me.”

  “Will he be angry that you were delayed looking after me?”

  He shook his head. “He will be pleased that I have put my training to good use and eager to hear of my first treatment with the poppy.”

  And so we parted good friends.

  Roisin, though. Here was a thing I had not foreseen: that parting from her would feel like losing the last of my family, and that the loneliness filling me as I watched her ride down the lane would raise, like the cold currents that sweep up from the hidden depths of the sea, all the grief and fear that had gripped me when my mother died.

  We clung to each other’s necks and shed tears at our goodbyes, but I hope she did not guess how I had to force myself to let her go.

  “Tara is not so far,” I managed at last. “Not for seasoned travelers like us. And I am told my mistress presides over the Samhain rites on a great hill not far from Tara. I won’t lose track of you.”

  “You had best not or you will face my wrath, which is a more fearsome thing altogether than any warrior,” she replied, regaining her tart humor even through her tears. I might not have held myself together, without that. Then her face grew earnest. “I am counting on you to give the blessing to our babies.”

  And so they were gone, and I could not stay my weeping. But it was not the desolation of death that returned with Roisin’s parting, but only its echo. I spent half the afternoon with Fintan, walking the island’s tip, and Tlachta must have told the others to let me be, for I was not disturbed. And as the turmoil in my heart calmed, the understanding came to me that the web that had brought Roisin and me together was not ruptured, but only expanded. Our paths would intersect again.

  Nor was I alone—not for long, not surrounded as I was with women. Some, surely, would in time become my friends. I was ready, now, to meet them.

  Life at the Isle of Women was different from anything I had known, but within a few days I was more at home than I had ever been at Emain Macha. My fear—that the close quarters and tight boundaries of the island would be suffocating—proved unfounded.

  For one thing, Tlachta ensures that our privacy is respected. Both the work of memorization and the growth of the inner eye require solitude, and despite the intensity of our training I can always find time to be alone. I don’t think I have ever taken a walk with Fintan that I didn’t pass others—pacing the beach or sitting silently under a tree—but we never speak or disturb each other at such times.

  But the other thing, the thing that is harder to explain, is that the island seems larger than it is. Though I rarely leave it, I do not feel confined. Perhaps it is because the island rests so close to the Otherworld that it seems to expand at need and to present new features and vistas even on the most familiar paths. And then of course there is the other island—what I have come to think of as the real island. We do not name it, for it is a world unto itself.

  When I first came here, there were only two other apprentices in their first year of study. We soon knew each other well, for we spent many hours of every day together. Bronach was the youngest of us, only twelve and by the looks of her not yet a woman. Dark, skinny and silent, she radiated a brooding intensity that was truly a little frightening. I imagined her family sending her here with some relief, not knowing what on earth else to do with such a girl.

  And then there was poor Muireann. Or perhaps I should not say poor, for she seems happy enough now. She was sixteen when I arrived and had already been at the island for two years. She came seeking refuge from a vicious father, and at first helped in the kitchen and with the herb preparation. And from there, I suppose, it was not a far jump to wishing she might take up the training herself. It was apparent to me within weeks, though, that Muireann could not keep up. As the moons waxed and waned, she fell farther and farther behind. Her pretty face became drawn, and at night I sometimes heard her weeping quietly in the dark. Before it came time for her to take the formal vows that transform an initiate to a full apprentice, Muireann went to Tlachta and asked to be released from her training. She has not left us, though. She works still with the herbals, and has also begun helping with the trading and provisioning. Perhaps she will spend her life here; for though she is golden-haired and plump-cheeked, she says she has no wish for any husband of her own.

  There was a gap of several years to the next newest apprentices, a group of about ten who were all halfway or better to earning the white robe that marks a first-degree druid. Another four or five were, like Geanann, working toward their second degree, using the isle as a home base but leaving freely to lend their services or to study with a master adept in their specialization. It takes fourteen years of study to attain the feathered robe, and along with it the right to perform any of the druids’ offices, save only taking apprentices of their own, acting as chief druid to a king, or performing the Bull Feast to choose a high king. These only the tonsured masters may undertake.

  Do you imagine me reading omens into bird flights, inducing visions and conducting secret, sacred rites? Then I will tell you now—the first year of a druid’s apprenticeship is a dull, never-ending stream of straight memorization, punctuated with menial physical tasks like grinding herbs, preparing and laying wood for ceremonial fires and cleaning away the smelly remains from sacrifices or divination. There is little of the discussion and explanation I anticipated, not even as much as in Cathbad’s classes, and virtually none of the druid’s secret knowledge. And the work is relentless.

  Day after day, we were simply, ruthlessly, stuffed with words— verse after verse of them, history upon history, classifications, genealogies, impenetrable triads, medicinal recipes, legal tracts. I was kept awake at night by the gibbering fragments of lists and lore chasing about in my head, and when at last I slept, my dreams more often than not trapped me in failed recitations and lectures spoken in some incomprehensible tongue.

  It was another test, of course. It was Saraid, who sleeps with her two young children in the bed next to mine, wh
o told me. I had wakened her with my dreaming, yelling apparently that there was no corner of space left in my head and they must leave off lest it burst open. “It will get better,” she whispered to me in the dark. “They weed out the weak plants as early as possible. If you endure through the first year, then they know you have the strength to continue.”

  “Next year will be easier, then?” I asked.

  “I did not say easier.”

  I have not mentioned our teachers. Besides Tlachta, there is one other druid master on the isle. Her name is Macha. She is old and very fat, with a wheezy chest and thin white hair that sprouts unevenly from the line of her tonsure. Macha teaches us everything to do with the history of Ireland—its origins and invasions and battles and people—and while her frail voice sometimes gives out, her mind never does, but is as precise and nimble as a cat. Her knowledge of astronomy is also great—but she leaves that to others now, for the night air is cruel to her old bones.

  Of the others, my favorite teacher is Rathnait. Her passion is the earth and its vast lore, and she says its lessons must be read with the body as well as the mind. So even in our first year, she would sometimes relieve us of the endless memory work and lead us out to forage for herbs or read weather in the clouds. It was like a release from captivity, these little excursions, and I returned with a new sense of space in my overcrowded head.

  Tlachta herself we see little of, for she works mainly with the more advanced apprentices. She is wise not only in law, but in ceremonial magic, ritual, divination and sacrifice. It is for this knowledge that she leads the Samhain ceremony for the high king himself.

  I had not been long at my studies when the autumn wind grew cold teeth and the wheel of the sun left the sky earlier each day. I had no doubt that Samhain on the island would be unlike any I had known.

  Tlachta would not be there. The daughter of Mug Ruith makes the long journey each year to preside over Tara’s Samhain ceremonies, and the hill where the great fire is lit is now called the Hill of Tlachta. There are hills closer to Tara that might be more convenient for the high king, but there is none in all Ireland so close to the Otherworld. My mistress and her helpers spend more than a week there every year, seeing to the preparations and presiding over the judgments afterward.

  Those of us who remained on the Isle of Women had no hill, but then we did not need our fire to be seen far and wide, but only by our own little community. I knew where our Samhain bonfire would be—by the yew tree, at the heart of the island’s power.

  Tlachta made it clear before she left that the first-year students were not to invite visions or have any contact with the Sidhe. “Some of the senior apprentices will be seeking dreams of power,” she said. “You are not to join in their rituals or drink the dream draught. If you see people of the Sidhe or spirits of the dead, do not speak to them. Simply look away, and let them pass by. If you are frightened in any way, seek out Macha. She can protect you.”

  And so we were put to work as Samhain laborers. As a child, I had always marveled at how the Samhain fire lit without fail, even in the foulest weather. It is not, I hope, giving away too much of the druid’s craft if I reveal that this has less to do with magic than with painstaking preparation. Every single log that goes into the Samhain fire has been soaked in oil or rolled in fat ahead of time. It is backbreaking work that leaves a person greasy and rank as a rendering floor.

  But we were bathed and clean as evening fell and we paddled our way back by threes and fours in our little coracles to the dark shores of the island. And in the black of night before the fire was lit, as the songs and chants were offered, I felt them before I saw them—the Other ones, exhaled on the island’s misty breath, drifting across its waters. The veil that held them back was thin here at any time; on Samhain it simply wafted away like smoke and our worlds mingled. I watched in wonder as the fire leapt up, revealing tall men and women with silver hair and jeweled gowns holding their hands out to its warmth. As the night wore on I saw many of them stop to converse with one or other of our women, sometimes at length and earnestly. Indeed I am sure I saw Treasa, who will win her feathered cloak next season, entwined in a shining figure’s arms, her face lifted up to his kiss, as they vanished together into the darkness. Others of our women lay in a dream trance, their eyes faraway, mouths moving without sound. I remembered my instructions, though, and if the eyes of one of our visitors fell upon me, I would nod respectfully and look away, and they would drift by without stopping.

  And so the night passed until nearly dawn. I was tired by then, my shoulders achy from hauling wood and my eyes worn out, it seemed, from the wonders parading before them. I hunkered into my cloak, dropped my head onto my knees and let my eyelids close.

  I felt her presence, as surely as I had in the Speckled House so long ago. She hovered before me, not passing by as the others had, and finally I raised my head, thinking perhaps she waited for the polite acknowledgment I had given the others.

  It was Liban. I knew her, and she knew me also and had waited to speak with me. Knowing this—that she remembered the young girl who had been a mere bystander to the drama that played out the night she came to my father’s sickbed—I could not look away. I rose to my feet and bowed my head to her, and when she smiled I remembered the first smile she had given me, and I but a child of eight summers.

  “I have come this night to speak with you,” she said, “and though I have seen you avoid others of my kind, it is my hope you will remember me and know I bring no harm.”

  “I remember you, lady,” I said. “It is honored I am by your presence.”

  She grew serious then. “I have come to tell you I am sorry for the death of Cuchulainn, a hero well-deserving of my sister’s love, and of Emer too, who was a woman of great heart. For when news came to us of this grievous loss, my sister Fand sent up a lament for her lover of old. But I thought of you, Luaine, left on this earth alone, and I remembered how your eyes knew me even as a child. So it is glad, but not surprised, I am to find you here, though,”—and here her silvery outline leaned in toward me as she looked more closely—”I see there has been harm done along the way, after all.”

  There was anger in her voice then, and I was so moved by her concern that for a moment my throat threatened to close off my words. But I found them again. When there is need, the words come.

  “There was harm done,” I agreed, “but it has been healed, and I am well.”

  Long fingers reached toward me, and I was startled to feel them warm and solid against my cheek. I suppose I expected her to dissolve against me like a misty illusion. In fact the warmth became a heat, radiating into my scar, and my eyes widened at the sensation.

  Finally she drew back her hand. “There is a little more healing for you, such as I can offer,” she said. “But why I have come is to give you this.” She placed in my hand a crystal teardrop. I could feel its many facets against my palm. “If there is ever a time you have need of me, hold this in the sun’s rays, or even against the fire or lamp’s flame, until it breaks the light into a fan of colors. Call my name, and I will come through the rainbow light. For your father served us well against our enemies when he came to the Happy Plain, and his memory is honored among us.”

  I gazed at her in astonishment and stammered out my thanks. Before my eyes she began to drift back and grow dim, until finally she was truly no more than the mist I had imagined.

  The next morning I looked in a mirror, hoping that Liban had somehow erased the mark of my wound. She had not, but her touch was healing nonetheless, for the scar has never again kept me awake with its aching. When the weather makes it grumble, it is not long before a steady soothing heat grows within it, and the pain quiets.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE WHITE BLOSSOM

  I had but one visit from Geanann that first year, for he would be eligible for the feathered robe in just over a year’s time, and his two masters were pushing him hard.

  “Fingin is determined I shall have the sk
ill of the god of healing himself before he is done with me, while my father will allow no scrap of knowledge from the other branches of learning to be overlooked,” he told me ruefully. “It is all I can do to survive their zeal.”

  “You are at Emain, then,” I said, my voice flat. Fingin was Conchobor’s personal healer. It sickened me to think of Geanann there, right under the king’s nose. Foolish, I know. There was no healer more renowned than Fingin. Who else would Geanann study under?

  But I was surprised to see him shaking his head. “I will not stay there,” he said, his eyes dark and hard. “I am with my mother’s people, not far west of Emain. There is travel back and forth, of course, but I prefer that. My father knows the reason. Fingin does not, but he accepts it.” Then he flashed me a quick smile. “Actually, Fingin probably does know something of the reason. There is little that escapes him. But he has a physician’s discretion.”

  We talked of lighter things, then, and the hours flew by until the time came for his leaving. And then he laid his hand on my shoulder and returned to the subject of the king.

  “I began my apprenticeship when I was only twelve years old,” he said to me. I did the figuring in my head—he was twenty-five, then. Ten years older than me. “It is half my life I have been on this path, and now my goal is within my sight. I cannot change masters now, not so close to my testing.”

  I would not ask or expect it, I began to say, but I remembered how my heart had gone cold at the thought of him there, and realized I had indeed, in some secret place, hoped for it. So I did not say a half-truth, but only nodded my understanding.

  “But it is this I wish for you to know, Luaine. I am not bound to Conchobor, nor will I be. When I win my robe, I will be gone from that place, and Conchobor no more aware of my absence than he is of my presence now. To him, I am just one of Cathbad’s many apprentices.”

  I was not sure he was right about that. Conchobor did not get where he was by being oblivious to his surroundings, and I didn’t imagine the identity of Cathbad’s son escaped him. But I was glad Geanann would not stay with Conchobor. It was selfish of me, perhaps, to put my own grudge before Geanann’s prospects, for there is no doubt he could become the king’s physician after Fingin. But I was glad all the same.