Isobel

by Chloe Garner

  Layer by layer, the girls from the various Caledd clans came forward, year by year, until those who were on their third winter, unable to understand what was going on and often fidgety or anxious, came to sit in the outermost circle.

  Each year, she was a circle closer to the center, the ceremony of womanhood.

  As the final circle of girls finished, and before the littlest girls started crying or wandering, the druids came walking through the formation, arms tucked into their sleeves and faces hidden. The quiet became even more profound as the group formed a cluster at the center of the circle. The girls in the white dresses stood, and individual druids came to stand in front of each of them. Tavish walked a circle inside of the individual druids, his gait slow and measured, as the rest of the gray-cloaked men and women in the center of the circle murmured a rhythmic, foreign incantation.

  Three turns around the circle. Somewhere far away, fires crackled and popped. In the circle, it was cold, like they’d been taken away from everything for this moment. Tavish came to rest and held up his arms, speaking in the strange druid language. His voice was hoarse with age, but still held the power that Allie remembered from her first year with the Caledd. How strange the ceremony had been, then.

  As Tavish finished his benediction, the druids who stood before the oldest girls withdrew the curls of mistletoe from their robe sleeves and began the process of weaving them into the girls’ hair. The new women would wear the crowns for the rest of the night, then go back to their homes and encampments, where the older women would untangle the branches and rebraid their hair in a quieter celebration celebrating their womanhood.

  One of the girls reached up as her druid began to work the mistletoe into her hair. Someone cried out in the crowd behind Allie, and Allie’s heart broke for the girl’s mother. The girl didn’t flinch, but brought the druid’s hands back down, then knelt. The rest of the druids paused as Tavish approached the girl and brought her back to her feet. He spoke quietly to her for a moment, then turned and raised an arm back toward the group behind him. Someone came to join him in front of the girl and produced a short oaken staff, the sign of the druids. Tavish accepted it and turned back to the girl, laying it across her hands and putting both of his hands on top of her head. There were more words, then Tavish brought the girl into the circle. The druids, all of them, formed a cluster around her and there was more humming and murmuring. When they moved away again, most of them returning to their places at the edge of the ring and the rest going to the center of the circle, the girl was among them, hidden and anonymous in her new cloak.

  Some girls joined the druids to escape unimaginable homes or the marriage plans their families had for them, while others did so out of curiosity or religious fervor. Whatever the reason, it was a decision women made in this moment, with complete blindness to what it meant. No one knew what the druids did to initiate each other, nor what their lives were like. A family would only expect to see their daughter a few times, after this. Druids would attend the naming ceremony for babies in the spring, and relations would usually be in that contingent, as they would be in the groups that came for funerals. Outside of that, they were anonymous, part of a group like this.

  The rest of the girls waited while the druids finished with the mistletoe, then a gap formed in the ring and worked its way through the layers until it reached the outside. There was a nervous pause, then the young men began forming their line. Tavish raised a hand, beckoning them forward, and they shuffled into the ring, looking self-conscious, most of them. A few were openly excited.

  One by one, Tavish brought them forward and gave them a quiet word of blessing, then allowed them to walk to the edge of the circle, where they offered their hands, palms up, to one of the girls.

  It was rare for a girl to turn him down. Because of how public the ceremony was, the two involved had almost always agreed to it beforehand. One by one, Tavish joined their hands, giving his Druid blessing to them. This was a mark of finality for the intended unions. Only in very rare circumstances had one of these weddings not taken place, almost always because one of the two died before it could happen. Once, a girl had become pregnant and admitted that her betrothed had not been the father. Families, though, regardless of their own intentions for their sons and daughters, respected this. The religious and traditional weight that committing to each other through this ceremony bore was more than even the most high-strung parents and grandparents were willing to buck.

  And then it was over. The last hands were joined, and Tavish rejoined the druids and they left as quietly as they had arrived. Allie sat in her ring as the girls in the white dresses left through the gap in the circles, and then she and the rest of the girls her age left in turn. The rings peeled themselves from inside out. Kenna walked with Allie back up the hill.

  “Next year it’s us, can you believe it?”

  “No,” Allie answered.

  The sun was set, now, and the men started to assemble the great bonfires at the foot of the hill. Kenna and Allie went back into the hillfort and towards Kenna’s hut.

  “Where are you two going?” someone asked. Allie turned to find Gede watching them.

  “We were just…” Allie started.

  “What does it matter to you?” Kenna interrupted.

  “I just know better than to let you go sneaking around unsupervised,” he answered. “Especially with her.”

  “I can’t think of anyone I should spend time with, more than her,” Kenna said, planting her fists on her hips. Gede glowered at Kenna, then addressed Allie.

  “There are better influences for you than Kenna,” he said. “Someone who is in less trouble than yourself, perhaps?”

  Allie didn’t know what to say to that. Kenna grabbed her hand and pulled her away, rescuing her from a need to come up with something.

  “He makes me so mad,” Allie said as Kenna pushed the heavy curtain into the hut out of the way.

  “Why?” Kenna asked. Allie laughed.

  “Why doesn’t he bother you?”

  Kenna shrugged.

  “What can he do?”

  Allie jerked her head back.

  “Cane you?”

  Kenna shrugged again, dropping onto a bench and flipping her braid forward over her shoulder to pick at it.

  “Not for much longer,” she said. “I just never considered letting him get to me.”

  Allie laughed, sitting down next to Kenna.

  “Aedan says he has to catch me, first.”

  Kenna laughed heartily.

  “That sounds like him.”

  Down at the bonfires, the drums were starting.

  “You want to go watch?” Kenna asked. Allie nodded, and they made their way to the front gate of the hillfort. Allie was still stewing over Gede. What right did the man have to tell her who her friends should be, and how she should behave? Why did he think she should listen to him? Why should he even have an opinion?

  The drums gained rhythm, the drummers driving a familiar pattern. The men danced in the stretch of ground between the two great bonfires as a crowd formed a ring around the few men who had begun dancing. As the drinks continued to pour and the night grew darker, the central space would become more and more crowded with men.

  Allie nodded to the prevailing beat of the drums, watching the men dance. Something triggered the back of her mind and she looked at Kenna.

  “Would you help me?”

  It was the woad.

  She’d seen the bowl of it that Aedan kept near his bed, and something about practicing with the bows earlier, combined with the womanhood ceremony and Gede’s intrusion had triggered a sense of un-reality that had made her need to do what they were doing.

  And for some reason, Kenna was going along with it.

  More, Kenna seemed in awe of her, and jealous that she’d never thought of it, herself.

  Allie’s hair was down, wild in brown kinks down to her waist, and her skin was blue with the ashy woad. She wore nothing but the loin
cloth Kenna had stolen from Aedan’s possessions and the two strips of leather from her wrists, one around her chest and the other criss-crossing her face, leaving her eyes uncovered, but making her unrecognizable, according to Kenna.

  “Maybe your ma will know you, but no one else would,” the girl said, standing back with her fists on her hips again. “Are you really going to do this?”

  Allie could hear the crowds getting louder as more of the drummers joined the musicians and more men joined the dancers. Her heart rate was up high enough to make her hands tremble, and even inside the hut, the air was sharp and cold on her skin. And yet nothing could hold her here any longer. She had to go out, to seek the drums, the firelight, the bitter, bitter cold.

  There were no clouds out tonight, as she stepped into the deserted space enclosed by the hillfort’s defensive wall. The moon blazed down with a fierce white light, and the stars were dizzying, the mind ever searching for which were real and which were imagined. And there was drumming, and somewhere, over the wall, firelight. The sounds of people grew less and less important; even Kenna’s voice at her elbow as she walked was unable to reach her in a meaningful way.

  The cold was painful on her arms and legs; her toes crunched the frozen ground and her feet quickly went numb, but it was like being purged. All of the ceremony, all of the awkwardness, all of the forbidden and desired… it was simply gone, absorbed and conquered. It was hers, like everything else, and she owned it the way a forest spirit owned everything without controlling anything.

  She walked through the gates and started down the hill, quickly encountering the slushy remains of snow where the crowds had trod it down. She went faster. Kenna faded away out of a sense of self-protection, likely going to find a place where she could see what would happen next.

  It wasn’t long before someone noticed her. She was like the druids, an ashy mist walking through their midst, dark leather striping her more than concealing her. It was much longer before anyone said anything. She sensed, rather than saw, the following of the awed and curious that formed a wake behind her.

  Someone tried to grab her arm, to tell her that she didn’t belong, and she slipped away like a fog. There was a sense to her, now, that her mind was disconnected from her body, and they couldn’t touch her body any more than she could touch her mind. The cold drove the numbness in further and further. She couldn’t feel anything below her elbows or her knees, then her arms were simply an idea, and her chest began to shake with the cold.

  And the drums.

  She hit the thicker crowd around the fires and the warmth of the bodies stung her; where she made contact with fur and skin, it was a shock.

  She pressed on.

  The wake broadened, growing more disturbed and less mystical. People were complaining, trying harder to stop her, or just to determine who she was. They couldn’t impede her.

  At the edge of the clearing, the mud grew deeper, cold and sucking at her feet. The ground had been wet and frozen deep, but the fires had melted the water. She kept forward, and something held her pursuers back.

  She danced.

  At first, the music cut back to only a few players, as the rest of the musicians took her in in surprise, but the romance of the mystery and the passion of playing kindled each other and the drummers redoubled themselves, playing for her, the blue-gray forest pixie who had materialized in their midst. The deep, sloppy mud directly between the fires was warm, and the fires themselves cast a high radiant heat that nearly brought her to a sweat as she danced.

  She was possessed, her mind and her body fully separated, a creature of the music. Things happened that she would have never been able to recount as the men around her reacted, positively, negatively, or otherwise. There were voices, but they were meaningless, another language. She played the drums and the drums played her.

  And then she was spent.

  Exhausted, exultant, she slipped away again, arms untouchable, face unseen. The crowd parted for her as for a spirit, and she cut sideways along the hill, reaching the treeline before heading up toward the rocks.

  Impulsively, she climbed, her skin the color of slate, her hands once again freed from her.

  It was foolish. She would have never considered climbing anything with numb fingers, under different circumstances, but in that moment, she was charmed, invincible. She summited the rocks unseen and dashed to the hillfort, gliding in shadow back to Kenna’s hut.

  Kenna was waiting for her, eyes wide. Allie waited for Kenna to speak, but the short, ruddy girl was silent. She helped Kenna scrape the mud from her feet, ankles, calves, knees, and hands, then they set to work on the woad, scrubbing it from her skin.

  That was when Aedan showed up.

  Kenna made a small, sharp noise, then jumped to her feet.

  “Did you see?” she squealed.

  “Who didn’t?” Aedan asked. Allie glanced up at him from where she was scrubbing her ankles, warily. He raised an eyebrow at her.

  “What, am I supposed to be surprised? I’d know that loin cloth anywhere.”

  Kenna laughed.

  “Wasn’t she amazing?”

  Allie was still watching Aedan. He knelt in front of her, his hair falling to either side of his eyes, and he looked at her for a long time.

  “No matter what,” he said, pausing again, dark eyes searching hers. “Don’t ever, ever let anyone tame you.”

  She nodded, and he took the cloth from her hands, putting it to her face and rubbing at the woad there. He was much too gentle for it to have done anything, but she sat and let him, anyway, until Kenna broke in.

  “Out! Out!”

  She dragged Aedan to his feet and pushed him toward the door.

  “We have to get her dressed before ma gets back. And no boys.”

  He laughed, wrestling his sister good-naturedly for a minute before letting her win. He gave Allie one last look, the heat of which nearly broke her out of her un-reality, then turned and left. The draught of cold air that spun across her from outside made her shiver. Kenna turned back to her and frowned.

  “At least it will be pretty dark out when you go home. I don’t know if we can get all of this off.”

  “They do use it as a dye,” Allie said, watching after Aedan for another moment before she returned to scrubbing. Kenna collapsed next to her and wrenched Allie’s foot out from under her, nearly knocking her backwards, then resumed scrubbing as she chuckled to herself.

  She had blue tinges in her hair, but if you didn’t look too close, she didn’t think anyone would notice. Her leather wraps were returned to her wrists and Aedan’s loincloth went back to his pile of things, slightly muddier for wear. Allie’s clothes, long skins intended to keep skin away from cold air, would do nicely for keeping it away from eyesight, as well. She suspected Gwen knew, anyway, but her mother hadn’t said anything specific.

  “You have a good time with Kenna?” she asked as they started the journey back home at dawn.

  “Yes, I did,” Allie answered. Gwen nodded.

  “She’s a good lass. A good friend to have,” her mother said. Allie nodded, tucking her hands further into her riding blankets.

  “Did you see it?” one of the women from the kitchen asked, pulling even with Allie and her mother. The dancer the night before had been central to the conversation since Allie had re-emerged. She had maintained that she had been up at the hillfort with Kenna and has missed the whole thing, and so far, it seemed she had caused enough of a disturbance that no one had noticed that Kenna had been there.

  “Something we’ll all be talking about for years to come, I expect,” Gwen said. The woman nodded heartily.

  “What do you think she was?”

  Opinions were divided between human and spirit. Among those who said she was a spirit, there was a sharp divide over whether she were a warning or a boon. Allie had heard someone suggest that she was a product of contaminated mead, but she didn’t think that made sense.

  “I think she was some woman’s da
ughter, acting without thinking,” Gwen said. The cook laughed.

  “You never did understand the local fairies,” she said.

  “I thought they were all little,” Gwen said dryly. The cook laughed again.

  “That’s what they want you think,” she answered, calling to someone else and riding ahead. Gwen gave Allie a knowing glance, and it was everything Allie could do to keep herself from reaching up to touch the hair that Kenna had said the dye wouldn’t come out of.

  “The womanhood ceremony went well,” Gwen observed a minute later. Allie nodded. No one had cried or turned down a suitor, which was generally agreed to mean it was a good year. Gwen nodded to herself and continued. “I’m supposed to be supportive if you did, but if you decide to join the druids, I will chase you down and drag you back by your hair, do you understand?”

  Allie laughed.

  “Yes, ma.”

  “If a bard was good enough for your da, a bard will be good enough for you. They can keep their druids and their great secrets.”

  “Yes, ma,” Allie said again, grinning. They shared enough traditions to be comfortable, but it was seasons like this that Gwen got touchier about the differences between Allie’s father’s people and the Caledd. She was determined that Allie grow up just a little bit different.

  “Do you smell the spring?” Gwen asked after another few minutes. Allie shook her head.

  “No. Not yet.”

  It was her part of the tiny exchange she’d had with her mother for as long as she could remember. Gwen answered as she always did.

  “It’s coming.”

  Winter dragged on. There were chores and stories by the fire; Allie missed fresh vegetables. Everything was dried and salted, and while she had long been taught to never look with disappointment on a day that she went to bed with a full stomach, the end of winter always came with a particularly poignant sense of anticipation of the great food of spring.

  She spent fair days out on her tiny archery range, practicing, as she grew further and further out of the bow Isobel had given her. She traveled through the forest without touching the ground, growing even more adept at crossing from tree to tree as her arms grew longer and her fingers grew stronger.