by Natalie Grey
His eyes met mine briefly, but he didn’t say anything to that. He finished one patch and began to run his hands over the rest of the hull.
“You left early,” he commented. His tone was neutral, but I could hear the question.
“Practicing my trances.” The lie was easy. I had planned it, and it had some truth to it. Accessing the domhan fior was technically a thing that required practice. “I still can’t sense wind.” That, I told myself firmly, was also true, even if it didn’t relate at all to what I’d just been doing.
Daiman’s expression said he sensed the half-truths, but he didn’t tackle it head on.
He never did. It unsettled me more than if he had, which might have been his goal. The man was sneaky.
Instead he asked me, “Have you thought about what you’d like to try first for shifting forms?”
“For what now?”
“Taking on another animal’s form,” he said patiently.
“I … no.” I drew my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, staring at him warily. “I don’t really want to … I mean … I don’t have to worry about that for a while, do I?”
He sat back on his heels and stared at me bemusedly. “Do you not want to learn that?”
“Well, no.”
“Why not?”
I gave him a look. It seemed a reasonable enough stance to me, but he clearly didn’t understand it at all.
“Doesn’t it freak you out?” I said finally. “Not to be you anymore?”
We had talked once or twice while Daiman had been in shifted form, so I knew that some link to the druid’s human mind remained. But Daiman had made it clear that to take the form of another animal, one also had to take its memories and thoughts, and absorb its very outlook on the world.
The thought was terrifying.
Daiman, however, was smiling. “Haven’t you ever wanted to fly?” he asked me. “Or … swim in a body that was made for swimming?”
I hunched my shoulders as I considered. “I … guess?” Frankly, if I thought about it, the idea of flying seemed more than a little bit scary—the sort of thing people said they wanted to be able to do, but wouldn’t actually enjoy. And the thought of being alone in dark waters….
I shuddered.
“Maybe we could start with something else?”
“Oh, you won’t learn shifting forms for a long time,” Daiman assured me. “Years—decades, maybe.”
“If they let me be a druid,” I pointed out.
Philip might have said it, but I’d already been thinking it. In fact, Daiman and I had had more than one argument about his absolute faith that I would be accepted by the Druidic version of the Coimeail.
He just gave me a look.
“You’ll learn to sense a lot more of the world, and see a lot more of the world first,” he told me. “I don’t know, maybe then it won’t scare you as much.”
“Why can’t you take a form without losing part of yourself, though?” I still didn’t get that.
His smile was sudden and amused. “Losing? No, you simply set it aside for a time.”
“But what if you—” I bit my lip on, don’t get it back.
“Nicky.” He came to sit next to me. “If you were dropped into a bird’s body right now, would you know how to fly? Maybe you could puzzle it out, but would you understand how to catch air currents, or drop down to the water to catch fish—or even what you should eat in that form?”
“I suppose not.” I knew he was slow-walking me to a revelation, but I couldn’t see a way out.
“This body that you’re in now is tied to who you are and how your mind works,” he explained. He traced the backs of his fingers up one arm and smiled when I bit my lip; his touch always made my breath come short, and he knew it.
“I know that, but—”
He took my face in his hands. “Becoming a druid is about stepping outside yourself to see the whole world. Because only when you can see it as it truly is, can you heal it.”
I felt suspended in this moment, the gulls above and the rocks below, the sea calling to me.
For a moment, I thought I could feel the wind above me—that elusive force without any lifespark, or with a slower, deeper heartbeat than I had ever learned to hear before.
For a moment, I believed I might be able to do this.
“Our magic isn’t a tool to be used for any flight of fancy,” Daiman told me. “Every spell is performed to address a need, and you can’t understand the need without seeing the world. You can’t even perform the magic without that.”
Abruptly, the feeling of hope vanished. I pulled away to look out over the water.
“What’s wrong?” His voice was low.
“Maybe I’m not cut out to be a druid. In fact, I definitely think I’m not.” I swallowed hard and made myself look back to meet his eyes. “I just wanted to learn these things so I could use them to fix problems I already have—I didn’t want to … change everything about how I see the world.”
“Didn’t you?” He sounded bemused.
I shook my head mutely. I didn’t know how to answer that. I watched as he crossed his arms and stared out at the waves.
“It seems to me,” he said pensively, “that you wanted to become a druid because you knew you’d never make up for what you’d done in the past, if you didn’t know how to heal.”
“Right.” I shook my head at his inability to understand. “That’s a problem I already had. I’d be using druidism to try to fix my sorcery. Daiman, I don’t think I’m cut out for this.”
We should go back before your reputation takes any more of a hit. I tried not to look across the Channel. What lay there was not for me.
Daiman, however, didn’t seem to agree.
“Didn’t you think,” he asked slowly, “that in order to heal, you’d have to learn new skills, see the world another way?” When he saw me open my mouth, he shook his head to cut me off. “Didn’t you realize that you were already seeing the world as something to be made more whole, instead of something to be exploited for your own benefit?”
That stopped me in my tracks. “I don’t know. I just thought….”
There was a pause.
“That I was blinded by how I feel about you,” he said bluntly.
“Daiman—”
“No.” He cut the word off. “I understand.”
“Daiman, please—”
“You think everyone over there isn’t going to say the same thing?” he asked me wearily. “I know they are. Especially now that—well, never mind.”
“Now that what?” I pressed.
“Not important. Look, you’re not saying anything I didn’t know already. I’ve asked myself the same question.”
I couldn’t decide if I thought that was reassuring or not.
“You were trying to fix the damage you had done, Nicky, that’s why you wanted to be a druid.” He shook his head. “I was a child when I went to be trained. I’d heard all these stories of Merlin, of druids making the trees grow and the deer run. I had no idea what I was asking to become a part of.”
“But that’s how everyone trains to become a druid.” I lifted my shoulders. “It works out.”
“That doesn’t mean it has to be the only way we do it!” His voice rose and he looked away. “Most people wash out of the training, did you know that?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” I admitted.
“Some die, of course. But for the rest who don’t make it, it’s almost always because they don’t want to learn to see the world through new eyes. Being a druid is difficult, but doing the magic isn’t nearly as difficult as wanting to be a druid.”
I frowned over at him, but he didn’t see it. He was looking down at his boots where they were propped on the rocks, and he blew out a slow breath as he searched for the words.
“Nicky, you were the first person I’d ever seen who wanted to be a druid because you already knew how broken the world was, and you already knew that
you needed to be a different person to fix it.”
I looked back at him and felt dread settle into the pit of my stomach. “You can’t change who you are.”
“That’s wrong,” he said. There was no hesitation in his voice at all. “Who you are is the sum of your actions in this world. I don’t buy it that some people are just cruel and vindictive and there’s nothing else to them and no hope for them to be different. That’s laziness. I’m not the same person I was when I started my training, and I’m not close to the same person I would be if I hadn’t done any training to start with.”
I looked at him mutely.
“You can be a druid,” he assured me. “And they’ll see that. They will. Whatever they say now.”
“Wait.” I felt my eyes narrow. “What do you mean, whatever they say now?”
His eyes slid sideways guiltily. He forced a smile a moment later, but I had already seen it.
“Daiman.” I kept my voice even. “What do you mean, whatever they say now?”
He hesitated, and then he sighed. “They told me not to bring you.”
“What?”
“Just that. I got a message this morning, telling me that I was to return … but not with you.”
For a moment, I could hardly breathe with disappointment. I had been terrified of this training for its own sake, worried I wasn’t suited to it, sure that there would be backlash—but I hadn’t ever really thought they would deny my request outright.
I was surprised, honestly, by how much it hurt. And even that surprise didn’t help much.
“We’re still going,” Daiman assured me.
“What?” I shook my head at him. I was angry all of a sudden. “Daiman, it’s over. Why can’t you accept that?”
“Why are you giving up so easily?” he countered. “You’ll be a powerful druid, Nicky—”
“No, I won’t,” I said dangerously, but he didn’t even pause.
“You will make the world a better place, I watch you do it every day. I took vows to do what I thought was right and I will hold to them—I have no intention of just backing down because Taliesen sent an order he doesn’t even want to explain.”
“Taliesen is … the Chief Druid?”
“Yes. And things like this are one of many reasons that more than a few people are calling for a successor to—well, never mind. Druid politics.” He shook his head. “My point is, I don’t back down when I’m right.”
I bit my lip. “I’m not sure it’s my place to push things. Whatever you think I might be one day, I’m not a druid yet.”
He said nothing for a moment. Then his hand strayed over to mine and he squeezed my fingers. When I looked up, he was smiling at me.
“But it’s my place, isn’t it?” he asked me.
“Yes, but—”
“And I need some moral support,” he said. “I really do. Will you come for that?”
“Daiman.” I melted against him when he pulled me close for a kiss. “Oh, not fair.”
“Very fair.”
“This is….” I gave a little gasp as his lips traced along my collarbone. “Not a logic-based argument.”
“But you have to admit, it’s a very good one.” He pressed me back against the rock, brown eyes alight with amusement. “Come with me,” he said again. His voice was low.
“This is bribery.” But I was grinning as I arched against him. “And if I say yes?”
He grinned. “Let me give you a preview.”
Chapter Two
Daiman had been a druid for hundreds of years, and try as I might, I couldn’t tell when we passed from the real world into the domhan fior.
The water seemed to same, there was no hitch in the waves or the wind, but after a while it became clear that the boat was gliding over the water a bit too easily. The coastline of France disappeared behind us rapidly and the coastline of England grew clearer.
We wouldn’t be landing in Britain, however. The Comhairle lay in Ireland, for reasons—like the Gaelic nomenclature used at the Acadamh—that seemed incredibly convoluted.
I’d asked Daiman once, and the answer made my head hurt before he was close to finished.
“The druids and the sorcerers have been close sometimes and not others,” he’d said finally, with a shrug. “And between different groups shifting around, and the Romans, and all of that … well, the druids went where they felt safe. Ireland was where they found shelter.”
“Couldn’t they hide in the domhan fior?” I had pressed.
His eyes gleamed. “Did you think the Romans had no sorcerers, no druids? Did you think the Christian priests had none?”
The way he said it was chilling for some reasons.
“Well, not the Christians, anyway.” I gave him a look. “Wasn’t that kind of their whole thing?”
“Indeed.” He smiled, and the smile was one half rueful and one half bitter, or so it seemed to me. “Haven’t you ever met someone who hated what they were? There were plenty of sorcerers who dragged others to be burned at the stake, at least in the purges of the druids.” He shook his head. “I guess I would have thought you’d see the same thing.”
“I called them Separatists and Unitarians,” I rejoined flatly. “People who wouldn’t defend their own.” It was unfair and I knew it, and even now, remembering the conversation, I felt my shoulders hunch with guilt. I’d muttered some kind of apology.
“It’s one thing to back away from a fight you can’t win—or a fight that doesn’t need to be fought,” Daiman had said easily. “It’s another thing to turn around and hunt your own kind like animals. You know that.”
“Like Philip,” I’d said softly.
“Like Philip,” he agreed. “And Philip isn’t even the worst of them.”
A hand on my shoulder jolted me back to the present.
“Hey.” Daiman was looking at me. “You all right? Your eyes got sad.”
“There’s a lot of history here.” I nodded to the landscape of England, faintly visible in cliffs and the occasional verdant hill. “The land feels old, like it remembers blood spilled.”
It was unusually poetic for me, but Daiman only nodded.
“It does,” he said. “It really does. The land remembers what people do not, and sometimes it reminds them.”
I stared at him, unsure how literally to take that.
After a moment, I cleared my throat. “And it sounds like there’s a lot of history to the druids. You might as well try to fill me in. It sounds like something I’ll have to know.”
He grinned. “After the looks you gave me last time? No, it’s … not all that relevant to you.”
“Oh, come on.” A mist was creeping up around us, cutting off our view of the shoreline, and I looked around myself worriedly. “Since when is there fog on a sunny day?”
Daiman’s face closed off. He went to the rudder and I saw his eyes drift closed as he steered the boat by magic rather than by his senses—or, I supposed, by a larger set of senses than a human usually had access to.
I watched in fascination as the fog retreated some little ways. We were now in a bubble of clear air, the billows and currents of mist sometimes pressing against a barrier of some kind.
It reminded me rather of the cage I had Philip in.
“Daiman—is the barrier holding the magic out, or us in?”
He opened his eyes and smiled. “It’s holding the magic out,” he assured me. “And it’s not dangerous magic, per se.”
“Per se?”
“It would have brought us back to France if we hadn’t paid attention.” He lifted a shoulder, and shook his head at my worried look. “We knew they didn’t want you here. What I want to know is why—and I’m not inclined to follow an order that was delivered so presumptuously.”
I settled back on a coil of rope and smiled at him. “I’m starting to get the sense that you really don’t like this Taliesen guy.”
“Liking has nothing to do with it,” Daiman said, prickly. “It’s his fitness as C
hief Druid that is my concern.” He paused. “But no. I don’t always like him.”
I laughed. “Well, go on. Tell me why.”
“I’m not sure I should.” Daiman looked troubled. “Bringing in a new student is fine, telling another druid what I think of Taliesen is fine, but … well, talking to you about it when you’ve never met him feels rather like I’m trying to stuff the ranks of the druids with people who agree with me.”
“Oh, come on.” I trailed my fingers in the water. “You’re always telling me that slopes aren’t as slippery as I think. You’re telling one person, and it’s one person who’s about to get embroiled in a mess partially caused by the reasons you don’t like Taliesen.” I worked my way back through the sentence. “Did that make sense? I think it made sense.”
“I’m beginning to see how things went wrong for you at the conclave all those years ago.” He was laughing at me.
I gaped, and reached over to flick his arm, but I was laughing. Losing the votes of the conclave had tipped me over the edge into full-scale mass murder, and was a memory that came with fury and disbelief and deep betrayal. No one else would have dared joke with me about it.
Daiman wasn’t, however, anyone else. And he had no reverence for who I had once been—perhaps for the same reason that he was so certain I could change if I wanted to.
And I loved him for it. When he leaned away from me, still laughing and trying to make sure I didn’t flick him again, I crawled over the rope to kiss him.
For a moment, I stayed there, my forehead against his, and then I settled down with my head on his shoulder.
“You have a good sense about people,” I told him. “Mostly, anyway. Why are you so unsure about him?”
Daiman said nothing for a moment, but I felt him get tense.
“Honestly? I … don’t know.” He shrugged slightly. “It’s not even that I don’t like him. When I think about it, I approve of the things he’s done. This is his second term and he’s ruled for three hundred years, which is unprecedented—but before him, Morgana ruled for well over one hundred and fifty years and no one had done that before.”
“You can rule more than once?”
“Yes. The conclaves aren’t regular—someone has to ask for there to be one, and enough people have to agree, and all of that. Taliesen has survived about ten challenges, I think.”