The Forgotten Kingdom

by Signe Pike

No messengers had been sent. Eachna had deceived her. The betrayal stung like a hornet’s barb, and Angharad’s eyes blurred with tears. She could hear no more. Before either woman could utter another word, she pushed past Eachna and ran from the hut.

  She heard her hennain call out for the guard as Angharad raced past the bewildered faces of her fellow novices, across the half-frozen field, and into the hut she shared with Eachna. Objects clattered to the ground as she yanked her belongings from a wooden shelf and threw them into her trunk. She thought in a frenzy where she might go.

  Home?

  She could scarcely recall it. A faded dream.

  There was Bridei’s Tayside fortress, but what fate awaited her there? He was Eachna’s patron. He would only send her back. No, Angharad decided. She would strike out on her own.

  She snatched two spare woolen robes from their hooks on the wall and then, fastening her cloak over her shawl, grabbed her trunk and dragged it out the door.

  Up ahead, Mother Yew was a smear of emerald through her tears. The tree, the waterfall, and Fetla. Those were the things she would mourn the most.

  The trunk was not overheavy but was cumbersome, scraping and dragging over the mucky earth.

  “Angharad, what’s happened?” one of the priestesses called out. “Where are you going?”

  The women of Fortingall stood beyond the tree’s enclosure in alarm as three warriors came jogging, spears in hand, answering Eachna’s summons.

  Eachna’s wrinkled face was bent in a scowl as she strode from the dreaming hut, the dark-haired woman following behind.

  “Eachna, this is not the way,” the woman warned.

  But Eachna would not hear it. Her cheeks were tinged red. She did not favor rash behavior. She did not like that Angharad had made a scene. Now all the priestesses were watching.

  “Angharad, stop,” Eachna commanded.

  Angharad did her hennain’s bidding out of habit. But Eachna had lied.

  “Where do you think you are going, child? Stop this foolishness,” her hennain admonished her.

  Angharad swallowed, gripping her trunk. They all stood there now, the priestesses and novices of Fortingall, watching.

  “You cannot leave. I forbid it,” Eachna said. But there was pain in her command.

  “I cannot stay, Lady Priestess.”

  How her hennain seemed shaken by the cold formality with which Angharad used her title. Eachna stepped forward, taking her hands. “There is so much more I might teach you, Angharad. Your mother and Elufed, your own nain, they will never taste the world of spirit that awaits you here. Do not be swayed by this woman. Stay with me. You are my blood daughter. Fortingall is your home.”

  “Let the girl make her own choice,” the dark-haired woman said.

  “You have broken the bounds of hospitality, coming here to take my child,” Eachna said.

  “You have stolen this child, and I have spoken with Bridei.”

  Eachna scoffed. “With Briochan, more like.” She turned to her men. “Take her to the boundaries of my land, and do not depart until you have seen her gone.”

  Yet the warriors did not move.

  The dark-haired woman nodded to Angharad, her blue eyes calm. “Angharad? Is this what you wish?”

  A soggy March wind gusted, stirring the priestesses’ hair as they stood before the great tree. Angharad set down her trunk and went to stand before Eachna.

  The old priestess lifted her hands to Angharad’s face, her stormy eyes watering with tears. Angharad looked deeply into the blackness where Eachna’s heart crouched, cradling its wounds. Eachna was so powerful, but now Angharad realized just how twisted she had been by fate: she gripped too tightly things she did not wish to lose.

  “I wish to go alone,” Angharad said gently. “I will find my own way.”

  “Go, then,” Eachna said at last. “You are free to leave—you have never been a prisoner here.”

  But she spoke more for herself than to Angharad, it seemed. The old woman straightened, smoothing her wiry white hair. “Someday you will be grateful for all I have given you,” Eachna said.

  Her hennain was so elderly. In two winters, Eachna would be gone—Angharad knew this. And she did not wish to leave with bitter words on her tongue. “I am grateful now,” Angharad lied.

  She bent to pick up the handle of her trunk. Though it was not heavy, its weight felt immeasurable.

  “I will take my leave,” the dark-haired woman said. Bowing to Eachna, she drew up the hood of her cloak and started off down the narrow, mud-furrowed lane. Something tugged at Angharad. An urging. A whisper. She looked after the woman, wondering. But Fetla called out her name. “Angharad, wait!”

  Fetla was hurrying past the great yew and through the enclosure’s wooden gate, her face tight, her slate-colored eyes fraught with distress. In her arms she carried a wooden box. “Your feathers,” she said.

  In her haste, Angharad had forgotten them. Fetla extended the box and Angharad took it, clutching it beneath her arm. She felt the presence of the birds like a blanket. “Thank you,” she said.

  Fetla nodded, her stern expression wavering. Her gaze trailed after the dark-haired woman. Leaning in to kiss Angharad, she whispered in her ear: “Follow her.”

  Angharad drew back, questioning. Then she understood. Somehow this was Fetla’s doing. The arrival of this stranger. She wondered how Fetla had discovered her hennain’s deception and when. Perhaps she had only just learned.

  That was what Angharad chose to believe.

  Angharad embraced her fellow sisters, then bent to carefully set the box of feathers in her wooden trunk. The wind kicked up, changing direction. It seemed nearly to push at her back as she followed the muddy boot prints the woman had left on the road.

  Follow her, Fetla had said. But Angharad was uncertain. Only a little while ago, she had been grinding grain. Now she was running from home. She felt like a bird flushed from the bracken, heart skittering in her chest. She crouched to drag her trunk along, its metal fittings caked with mud.

  Dark clouds were mounting. She would not get far before being overtaken by the weather. She had not been practical. She had not been thinking. She spoke Pictish as if it were her first tongue, and no one dared trouble a priestess. But she was a girl of sixteen winters without the robes of a priestess to protect her.

  Up ahead the woman in the blue cloak turned, as if only realizing someone was behind her.

  I am not following this stranger, Angharad thought. She and I only happen to be traveling in the same direction.

  The dark-haired woman stopped at the boulder marking the fork in the road and paused, looking about. She leaned her head from side to side as if to crack the bones of her neck. Angharad reached the boulder only to find the woman had settled her slender frame against it and drawn out a small apple from the deerskin satchel she wore across her shoulder. She ate it in slices off the tip of her knife.

  “Hungry?” she asked, offering a crescent.

  Angharad shook her head.

  “A storm is coming,” the woman said.

  “Yes.”

  “What are your plans, then?” The woman’s pale face was expectant. Curious.

  “I do not know.” Angharad looked at her warily. She was a Seer blind to deception. Hadn’t the waterfall tried to warn her? Eachna was made of water. Wind and weather pushed water about. But who was made of wind and weather? This woman who stood before her now? Angharad still did not understand. She knew only that she had wanted so badly to be mothered, to be a child, to be loved. And Eachna had wanted to heal the wounds of a daughter she had given away too soon.

  All these years, her hennain had concealed her, used her for her own ends.

  The dark-haired woman wiped her small blade on her cloak, sheathing it at her belt. “You may walk a ways with me, if you like.”

  “Where do you travel?”

  “To the Orcades.”

  “But you do not speak like a Pict,” Angharad said. “You have a fu
nny way of speaking. As if it is not your native tongue.”

  The woman laughed, a deep, silky sound that belied her narrow frame.

  “You find that funny?” Angharad frowned.

  “It is only that you remind me of your mother,” the woman said. Then she grew serious. “I dwell in the Orcades, though I was born across the sea. But my story is mine to keep.”

  “I have heard of an isle of priestesses in the north. It is said they can raise storms.”

  The woman turned to her. “We wear the robes of the Cailleach, as many priestesses do. But as for our secrets, unless you should decide to come with me, I am sorry, Angharad. Those, too, are mine to keep.”

  “The way you say my name… you speak as if you know me.”

  “I have told you already, I once counselled your mother.”

  “Before I was born to her.”

  “Yes.”

  “And why did she never speak of you?”

  “I believe when I left, it made your mother quite sad.”

  “Well, then, why did you leave her?”

  “I told your mother when I agreed to be her counsel that I did not answer to women and men. A woman of the Gods remembers to listen. Always she knows when it is time to leave.”

  “I agree it is so. And that is precisely why I have left.” Angharad stopped to yank her trunk over a protruding rock. They had come to the river. Ever since arriving at Fortingall, Angharad had felt as if the river had drawn her there. When she visited the waterfall, it beckoned as if to hold her, soothing her in its cold and weightless embrace. But now Angharad felt no such pull. It was as if the river had released her.

  The woman frowned at Angharad’s trunk. “What possession can you carry in that impossible box that is so necessary?”

  “Things I have collected over many seasons,” Angharad said, tugging it determinedly. She looked at the woman from the corner of her eye. Angharad could not dispel the sense of familiarity. She had seen this woman before.

  But where?

  And then, in a flash, it came to her. The vision she’d had as a child in the woods, after the battle. The dark-haired woman had been walking in morning mist, wearing a blue cloak.

  Please help me, which way? Angharad had begged.

  The woman had directed her into waiting danger. And yet, had the dark-haired woman truly led her astray? Or had she been summoning Angharad since her long journey began?

  Angharad’s skin tingled. Soon it would rain, the icy sort that brought phlegm and fever if one was exposed overlong. And the woman came from the north. Could she be one of the weather workers Angharad had heard of in legend?

  “You said you came to speak to me about my training,” Angharad said.

  “Yes. There is a place for you, if you would come. I can see you are gifted. But there is still much you might learn. I am only a messenger. You may ignore your summons. That is your choice. I would not tell you what you should or should not do. But we do not have long before the storm sets in.”

  Somehow Angharad felt the woman warned of more than just weather.

  “You could always return home,” the woman said. “I imagine your mother loves you very much, and she has been deceived most terribly.”

  Angharad considered it. The path was forked. Seven winters she had been away, and so much had changed. There had been a time when all Angharad wished was to return to her childhood home. But she was not the little girl she once was. The cord to her mother had long since been severed. Angharad was a woman now.

  “If I go with you, and I do not feel it is right, am I free to leave?” she asked.

  “What a funny question,” the woman said. “We are always free.”

  Angharad was intrigued by this woman. She loved her mother. And she would return. But somehow Angharad knew this was not that day.

  “Very well. I shall go with you.”

  “I am gladdened to hear it.” Her tone was wry. “Yes, you are very much like your mother. You make nothing easy.”

  “Nor do you,” Angharad countered. “For you have left me to drag my trunk on my own, and you have yet to even tell me your name.”

  The woman stopped, her lips tugged into a smile. “You are right,” she said. “My name is Ariane.” She bent to grip the other handle of Angharad’s trunk. “Come, then, child. We will carry it together.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Angharad

  Woodwick Bay

  Orcades

  Kingdom of the Picts

  2nd of June, AD 580

  It had taken nearly three weeks to reach the Bull Fort, Bridei’s citadel at the northernmost point of the Land of the Picts. As they sailed beyond the fort, there was nothing but ocean.

  But then, in the distance, a new world of islands sprang up before her eyes.

  “What is the head priestess like at Woodwick Bay?” Angharad asked. “For I will admit I am nervous to meet her. Can she summon storms and scatter fog? Does she know many curses? Can she help heal the sick? Is she kindly or stern? Does she strike with a rod when giving her teachings?”

  Ariane frowned, thinking. “She never uses her power without purpose, like any good priestess. She has never used a rod upon novices because she has never been given cause to. She is proficient in healing enough to teach others. And I am certain she knows curses, but she casts them only at young girls who arrive asking far too many questions.”

  As they’d traveled, Ariane had explained that the king of the Orcades was Cendalaeth. Cendalaeth was the patron of all the sacred settlements on the islands, of which there were seven.

  “The settlement at Woodwick trains priestesses for the six sacred sites and beyond,” Ariane said. Pledged to Cendalaeth were several chieftains who yet inhabited their ancestral isles, which were scattered both near and far, out to sea. All the lords, including the king, paid tribute to Bridei. “It is much like the rest of Pictland,” she said, “only our little kingdom is floating.”

  But the Orcades were not like the rest of Pictland.

  It was a place of deadly swirling whirlpools and whole islands inhabited by nothing but birds. Great beasts called whales sometimes washed up upon the beach, and the main island was largely without trees and exceedingly flat—the only real mounds upon it being hills of the dead.

  As they came up the eastern coast, arriving at Woodwick Bay, Angharad found she was utterly enchanted. The beach curved to meet the water like a waning moon. The shoreline was rocky and heaped with green and purple kelp, but beyond it the goddess had turned fickle, tossing up fat banks of wildflowers that spilled onto swaths of lush green grass. Warriors kept watch here, bowing to Ariane as she and Angharad carried the trunk, following a neatly kept path into a beautiful old wood.

  Roundhouses and a temple dotted the forest floor. Women came out to greet them, much like at Fortingall, yet all wore blue cloaks, just as Ariane did. And as they caught sight of Ariane, they brightened, or straightened, or grew suddenly reverent, dropping their heads in a bow. “Welcome home, Lady Priestess,” they said.

  Angharad turned to Ariane, gray eyes widening. “You told me you were only a messenger.”

  “Yes, that is true.”

  “Yet they call you Lady Priestess.”

  “What is a priestess if not a messenger of the Gods?” Ariane asked, looking at Angharad expectantly. She smiled as they neared a tall young woman with dark hair and amber-colored eyes. “Here,” Ariane said. “This is Catrin. She will show you where you will sleep.”

  Spring passed into summer, and Angharad scarcely thought of Eachna’s betrayal or the women of Fortingall she’d left behind. Woodwick became her new family—not only her sisters, all nearly as skilled as Angharad, but also the warriors and their families whom Cendalaeth had settled in the broch a short way up the beach.

  Their task was the care and protection of the Daughters of the Cailleach training at Woodwick Bay.

  It was a flat white morning in June when the women went out to gather kelp for the sheep, for they had a
break before the afternoon teaching, and they always found delight in seeing what the storm tide had turned up. The waves lapped gently. But they soon lost one another, buried in cloud. Fog had rolled in, thick as a blanket.

  Now the blue-cloaked figures of the other novices were shadows flickering at the edges of another realm. Angharad smiled, delighted to be blind to everything around her. Always she was seeing. Now she could only feel. She stretched out her hand as far as it could reach, and her fingers disappeared into the unknown. Anything could emerge from out of this mist, she thought. Gods or monsters. The isle could have come loose from its roots. It could be drifting out to sea even now, a vast and anchorless boat.

  She walked to the shoreline, where water lapped at her leather boots, peering into the white. And then suddenly, slogging out of the thigh-deep water, appeared a man. Angharad went still. He was muscled and dressed for war, a golden torque fixed at his throat, his eyes the color of the sea and looking at Angharad as if she might be a selkie.

  Manannan? she thought. But this was no god. This was a man of flesh and bone stumbling from the ocean, seawater clinging to his curly reddish-blond hair. He blinked. Then one of the priestesses cried out. “Raiders!”

  Screams echoed in the fog as the raiders thundered out of the blinding mist, crashing their boats ashore. The watch horn at Woodwick Broch blasted in return, summoning more men as the warriors plunged into the white, weapons in hand. There was a moment when all was eerily quiet. Then the bay erupted into chaos.

  “Watch yourself!” one of the guards shouted, colliding with Angharad, sending her out of harm’s way.

  Angharad skidded onto her bottom on the rocks. She and the raider from the sea looked at each other as if suddenly remembering their parts. She shouted a curse at him. He glanced at her, then leveled his weapons, eyes set upon the guard, dirk in one hand, sword in the other. The two men circled each other from a distance, testing and feinting. Sizing each other up. The raider raised a brow at the guard, shaking his head slowly, as if in warning.

  Her guard charged. It happened so quickly that Angharad did not even see the blow. Only blood spilling on sand and the guard’s eyes blinking in surprise before he crumpled at her feet, going still. She screamed, grabbing hold of her wicker basket and swinging it at the raider’s head as he lunged at her.