Shapeshifter

by Holly Bennett

  I never did that, of course. But I did grow accustomed to his presence. Soon I was coming every morning to the pool, and he was always there. He spoke to me sometimes in a quiet voice, a voice that recalled another quiet, gentle voice I had heard once, and trusted.

  DAYS STRETCHED INTO weeks, and Oisin came to the reluctant conviction that he had failed to reach his mother. What he was about, in fact, was taming a deer. That alone was an improvement; if Sive could be tamed enough to stay in a stable with the horses, they could, at least, ensure that she was warm and fed. But she didn’t need feeding. She needed to wake up.

  “I suppose Grian has tried singing to her?” he asked Derg. Derg looked at him in surprise.

  “Grian?”

  “She must have sung to Sive as a child.”

  “Of course,” said Derg. “And then trained her in the gift. They spent many hours singing together.”

  “So,” said Oisin. It seemed too obvious to have to explain. “Music was a big part of her life. I was thinking it might help her remember.”

  Derg flashed Oisin a quick, sad smile. “I forget you haven’t known us long. Grian has a voice to make the heavens weep, true enough, but she has no woodlore whatever. We’ve never been able to get her close enough for even a glimpse of Sive.”

  Derg’s eyes grew bright with excitement. His forefinger pressed into Oisin’s chest. “You must sing for her, lad.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “She won’t know my voice.” Oisin lay in his deep bed staring up at the dark ceiling. He should sleep— he would be rising well before daybreak, to be at the pool before Sive—but he was too jangly with hopes and worries. Derg had found a small harp for him, and soon he would be playing it, and singing, to a half-tamed deer. He told himself that if it didn’t work, there was no harm done, that it might take many days, that there were other things to try; but that was not how it felt. It felt like the sudden-death move in a fidchell game—everything won or lost in a single play. And what stood to be lost was his mother’s life.

  “Then she must know the song,” Niamh’s quiet voice countered. She was curled into him, her breath a gentle rhythm on his chest. Their marriage right now was a far cry from the first ten days, Oisin thought, with him gone every morning, long before Niamh awoke, and buried in the woods half the day. When he had tried to apologize, though, she had given him a round-eyed look of comic confusion.

  “And how would I be complaining of that, Oisin mac Finn, when it was I myself searched you out to beg you to do this very thing?” Then she grew serious. “There will be many days for us to spend our time as we please. Now your quest is with Sive, and I am well able to get by in my sister’s house without you.”

  Oisin thought about Niamh’s advice. His mother must know many songs from both worlds, but what he needed was a song that would allow her to know him. And he knew which song he wanted, only…

  “Niamh, do you know any cradle songs?”

  “Certain I do. But I haven’t the gift, if it’s singing to sleep you’re wanting.”

  Oisin shook his head in the dark. “There’s a song my mother used to sing to me. I only remember a little bit of it.”

  Haltingly, he hummed a little phrase of music. “Something about sleep and the moon?” he ventured.

  Niamh’s laughter tinkled beside him. “Is there a cradle song ever created that doesn’t have sleep and the moon in it? But I think I know that tune. Does it go like this?” And she sang him to sleep after all, with a song that had come back to him entire as soon as she began it.

  HE FOUND HIS WAY to the pool in the dark and played the harp softly as the night softened into shadowy dawn. He wanted Sive to become accustomed to the sound as she approached, rather than be startled as he began. The tiny instrument had the sweetest, truest voice of any harp he had ever played, and as his fingers grew used to the tight intervals he found first the melody, then the accompaniment to his song.

  THE LITTLE DOE STEPPED slowly into the clearing. She paid no attention at all to the food Oisin had left, but kept her attention wholly on him. Her ears swiveled toward the harp, quivering and flicking almost in time with the notes. Was he imagining it, or was she watching him—really looking at him—in a way she hadn’t before?

  He knew not to stare back, however strong the temptation. He tried to think only about the strings, about the clear notes cascading into melody. He played the harp until the set of her head and haunches told him she was no longer on the verge of flight. It was as relaxed as she was going to be. Oisin drew in a long, slow breath, and he began to sing.

  Sive Remembers

  From the time he first came to the pool, strange sensations and feelings had been coming to me. I know now they were memories, or fragments of memory, but as a deer all I knew is that many things that should have been strange and alarming seemed instead familiar and safe.

  The sound that came from the clearing that morning—it drew me, just the way mortals say the music of my people draws them. I knew that sound. I knew it! Yet I had no understanding of what it was.

  And then Oisin began to sing, and all the faint, weak voices that had been whispering to me joined with his voice, and it was like a clear bell sounding in my head, calling me home. And I remembered.

  AND THAT QUICKLY, before he was twice through the verses, it happened. She stood before him, trembling and wide-eyed, looking like she might still vanish into the forest if he so much as spoke to her, but without doubt a woman. And he hardly dared look at her, she seemed so frightened, but fought to calm the emotion that shook his own voice. He kept singing. And it came to him, as he sang, how it had once been with them, him just a small boy lying in her lap, Sive stroking back his hair as she sang, and his eyelids growing so heavy he kept forgetting to keep them open.

  He kept singing as she stared at her own hands, front and back. Slowly she raised one and felt her head, her face, her lips. She bent forward to look at her feet, and the tears spilled over then and dripped onto her bare toes. At last, hesitantly, she made her way around the pool to where Oisin sat.

  It was as if a bird had perched beside him on the log, so light she seemed and so likely to fly. She was weeping almost silently, and Oisin wanted nothing more than to throw the harp aside and sweep her into his arms, but he could tell she was not ready. She had been away so long; he must not rush her returning.

  Sive Remembers

  The winter I was at Finn’s dun, a young boy came in on a bitter afternoon with the tips of his ears and fingers white. His mam scolded him for staying out too long, but he was saucy, saying they didn’t hurt, so no harm done.

  But once he got inside and sat by the fire awhile, his frozen parts began to thaw. His fingers turned fiery red and the edges of his ears swelled and he cried at the throbbing pain.

  That’s what it was like for me, as if my heart and mind had been frozen deep in the ice and were now pulled out into the sun and thawing. But the pain of it—all those lost memories and sorrows rushing back—if Oisin hadn’t kept singing that little cradle song, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to endure it. I held on to that unfurling song and let it pull me in, like a man fallen into the sea hangs on to the rope his comrades throw to him.

  The urge to sing was strong in me before I dared try. I could feel the words in my throat, trying to get out.

  Moonsilver bless you,

  Starshine caress you,

  Sleep in the peace of a night free of fear.

  Dreams will delight you,

  Sunrise will light you,

  Slumber till morn, for your mama is near.

  But what would come out? I feared I would not know how to form the sounds in my mouth, or that my voice would be a goat bleat or donkey’s bray. And—does this sound strange?— I also feared it would be unchanged, for the Dark Man had made me think of it as an evil thing.

  But Oisin’s song—a baby song, so innocent and uncomplicated— reminded me that before the Dark Man, my song had been my own. I could almos
t feel my son’s little head under my fingers, the curls sweaty from hard play, his forehead and cheeks so smooth and soft.

  I began to hum, so softly I could hardly hear myself, but it was there. My voice was true. And then I was singing, singing with my own grown son who I had never thought to lay eyes on again. And the song was like Miach’s healing spell. The song was making me whole again.

  FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE, Oisin had heard that voice only in his dreams. Now it rose beside him, real as his own, and it was as hard a trial as he had ever faced to keep from faltering.

  He kept his voice steady as her own grew in strength beside him, doubling the melody he had learned from her own lips. He hung on when her voice rose into a harmony line that brought a new, unguessed-at beauty to the simple song. But then he let down his guard and started really listening to Sive’s voice, and that’s when his own failed him. There was too much contained in that lovely, liquid sound— too much sorrow and fear, too much joy and love, too many memories. He fell silent and then, to his chagrin, was overcome with weeping.

  He sobbed into his hands as though he were still six years old, and Sive opened her arms and pulled him against her breast, just as she had when he was little. And then she was weeping too.

  It was a very damp day they had, with first one and then the other tearing up at the least thing. They sat together a long time without talking at all, but at last Sive straightened up and took a proper look at her son.

  “Look at you, then,” she marveled, and was promptly crying again because they were the first words she had spoken in so many long years, and because her joy at seeing how handsome and strong he had become was tempered with the loss of having missed his growing up. And Oisin looked fully at his mother, too, and was shocked at her appearance, for she looked as she had before her last change, half-starved and roughly dressed. She caught him looking with horror at the burn mark on her forearm, and covered it from his sight, saying only, “That’s nothing. It was a long time ago.” She would not speak, not now, of her time with the Dark Man.

  When the sun was high, Oisin rummaged in his pack and brought out food. He broke his round of bread in two and passed one to Sive, who held it, smelled it, and had to dash the tears from her eyes once more. She offered Oisin a shaky, apologetic smile. “You can’t imagine how it feels to hold food in my hand.”

  Eating seemed to give his mother courage.

  “Tell me how you fared,” she said. “Did…? ” The name was like a hurdle in her path. She swallowed, took a run at it and cleared it. “Did the Dark Man send you to your father?”

  Oisin nodded. “In a way. We found each other anyway.”

  Sive released a sigh of relief. “And he raised you well?”

  An easy question to answer. “Aye, Mother. He was a good father, and he saw well to my training. I am a champion of the Fianna now, and also their poet and bard.” Was. Was a champion of the Fianna, he corrected himself. Did every new gift come with a corresponding loss? Well, there would be time to tell that part later.

  “And your father—Finn—he is well?” The question was carefully neutral, but there were deep waters to cross here.

  “Yes, he is well.” Oisin paused, feeling his way. “Ma, he tried to follow you. He tried and tried, in every way he could think of.” The old childhood name came easily and without thought, so intent he was on making her understand this one thing.

  “I know. His way was barred.” The flat hardness with which she said this made it clear who had done the barring.

  It was well into the afternoon before she was ready to ask the question that burdened her the most.

  “The Dark Man. Is he…?” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t look at Oisin for fear of the answer.

  But he turned to her and very gently tipped up her chin so she could see his head shaking and the truth in his eyes.

  “He is dead and gone. Manannan and the others took care of him. He will never be a danger to you, or to anyone else, ever again.”

  There was more weeping then, and no attempt to stay it, for the dread of Far Doirche had been a weight Sive had carried for more than Oisin’s lifetime.

  “ IT’S NOT LONG ’TIL DARK.” The pool, dancing with sun-diamonds at noon, was now murky and opaque from the trees’ long shadows. “Will I bring you home now?”

  Sive looked at him in alarm, and though her hazel eyes were almond-shaped and filled with her own intelligence, Oisin thought that for a fleeting moment it was a deer’s eyes that stared back at him. Then she gave herself a little shake and straightened her back.

  “Ah, son. It’s a long way back for me still.” She nodded resolutely. “Of course we must go home. Only”—and now the eyes were pleading—“they’ll be sitting down to evening meal, and…”

  “And that’s a bit too much to face?” Oisin suggested gently. She nodded gratefully. He could well believe it, imagining Grian’s dramatic welcome. He himself was tired to the bone, exhausted as if from a hard day’s fighting. He would never have thought talk and tears to be such taxing work.

  “Supposing we sneak in the back way, through the cookhouse?” he suggested. “I’ll find a servant to run a bath and bring you some dinner—”

  “And some decent clothes,” Sive interrupted.

  “And some decent clothes,” Oisin agreed with a smile. It was a good sign, surely, that she was thinking of her appearance.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Despite a generous bribe from Oisin, the serving girl who helped Sive with her bath and dinner did not keep quiet—at least not to the other servants—and so Oran knew of Sive’s return before her parents did.

  He stayed in the background, though, and not only because it was for Derg and Grian to welcome her first. He was still not quite used to the way people saw him now, after all those years of invisibility. It made him uncomfortable to push himself forward, the more so that he was a servant and Sive a lady of the house.

  It was Derg who thought to bring them together privately the next morning, the way she would not bump into him in the hallway or serving at table.

  Her mouth had gone slack with surprise at the sight of him, and then, laughing and crying, she had rushed across the room and more or less thrown herself into his arms. Oran, beet red and not knowing what to do with his hands, looked at Derg helplessly. Sive’s father was smiling broadly.

  “She’s a wee bit over-emotional right now, lad. Best just to let her be.”

  “Oran, you’re so big!” Sive was feeling his arms and shoulders, completely unembarrassed. Oran blushed an even deeper red.

  “You should have seen him eat when he got here,” said Derg. “At least, once I persuaded him he was allowed to.”

  “I was so afraid he had killed you,” Sive confessed and burst once more into tears. “I couldn’t bring myself to ask, didn’t think I could bear to know.”

  Oran again shot a pleading look to Derg, who made a patting motion with his hand and nodded encouragingly. Gingerly, Oran patted Sive’s shoulder.

  “Aye, well, he made a good try at it,” growled Derg. Manannan’s healers had, indeed, brought Oran back from the very brink of death. They hadn’t been able to do much about the mangled leg though. That was an older injury, badly healed, that left him with a twisted ankle and a pronounced limp.

  “Yet you have him working!” Sive rounded on her father. “After all he did for me, you make him a servant!”

  “Sive.” Finally finding his voice, Oran interrupted. “I asked him to give me a position. He asked me how he could repay me, and this is what I wanted.”

  Sive stared at him. “But why? Surely there’s no need…”

  “There is for me.” Oran searched for the words that would help her, a highborn lady, understand. “I wouldn’t know how to live like you do. And I don’t want to be a burden on Derg, who had no need to take me in at all.” He held up a hand, most un-servantlike, to forestall her protests.

  “Sive, imagine my life up to now. I have never had a choice
. Never earned a wage of my own. Never had companions to work with or friends to pass my leisure with.” He gave a short, breathy laugh. “Never had any leisure to pass, for that matter.” He spread his hands wide. “This is so much better than anything I’ve ever known. Perhaps some day I’ll want more. But right now, this is what I need.

  ”

  “You need to learn to be in the world again,” Sive said softly. “Just as I do. I should have realized.”

  Oran nodded. He had had his own exile to endure, even longer than Sive’s. He couldn’t remember his home before the Dark Man took him.

  But he had a home now. He and Sive, they had both been marked by the Dark Man. Yet among his victims, they were the lucky ones. They had come home.

  Sive Remembers

  I went back to the pool a few days after Oisin brought me home.

  I needed to look with my true eyes on the place where my life as a deer had begun, and ended. Oisin was a bit alarmed when I told him what I meant to do; I could tell he half-feared I would change again and run off. But I assured him I just needed a little time alone, and he seemed to understand.

  The water was dark and still, the woods hushed, and it was easy to imagine it as it had been that first morning, the light just breaking and I a young girl on the verge of her first change. It had been a different doe then, and a tiny fawn, and myself. And who could have foreseen how this one event would color my life?

  Shapeshifting had been a gift and a curse to me, as my voice had been both gift and curse. Yet it had protected me from the Dark Man’s evil, if not from his wrath. A gift then, but one that came at a high price.

  A blackbird’s cheery burble broke the silence. I took a final, lingering look around the pool. To see green again! Even in the shadows, the world was rich with color. Never again, I thought, would I trade the colors and faces of my world for the brown and yellow vision of a deer.