Daughter Of The Forest (71 page)

It seemed right, somehow, to come back to our mother’s birch tree on a day when the air was crisp and cool and the bare trees were still around the little sward by the lake. We had not planned it. It just seemed to be that on this particular morning, I took Finbar by the sleeve and led him through the forest after me, and that the others too made their way down to the shore by ones and twos until all seven of us were there. This time there were no ritual objects, and no ceremony. We simply stood in our circle about the silvery trunk of the tree, and drew the silence deep into our spirits. A voice within me said,
You are here. You are home, my daughter, and the wound is healed. Don’t leave us again
. But whether it was my mother’s voice, or the voice of the forest itself, there was no telling.

I watched my brothers’ faces as they stood there quiet. The spell had been undone, and we were home. That much was true. The shattered household, the broken alliances could be put together with hard work. But there was deeper damage here that lay still unmended, and some that might be beyond healing. I sent a silent entreaty to the Fair Folk that my brothers might be themselves again, all of them. And that I might somehow be relieved of the terrible ache in my heart, which never quite seemed to go away.

“It is almost winter,” said Conor quietly. “Out of winter’s darkness comes spring’s light. Out of winter’s sleep is born spring’s new life. We cannot be without hope, not when this truth is shown us year by year.”

But the others said nothing, and after a while each of us touched a hand to the tree’s pale bark, and made a quiet way home again.

Not all were happy simply to pick up the pieces and start again. It was too much for Diarmid to bear, that our stepmother had fled the forest unchecked, apparently unscathed, taking her infant with her. She must be punished, must be made to pay for what she had done. Without due vengeance, the tale was not finished, the pattern not completed. Liam and Conor tried to reason with him. What was done could not be undone, Conor said. He must let go his anger, and start to rebuild. It wasn’t as if there were no other outlet for his energies. But Diarmid was adamant. She must pay. The sorceress must pay. Why did they not go forth, and seek her out, and exact the price?

He remained on a knife-edge of anger, and took it out on his opponents in the practice yard. He fought with a frightening intensity, apparently heedless of his own safety. Whenever a bout involved Diarmid, you could see Donal hovering close by, watching every move; and that was just as well.

Finbar did not venture out to the settlement often, for folk would follow him and reach out to touch the soft feathers of that great shining wing, as if it were a talisman; and he shrank from any touch, as if something of the wild creature still lived deep within him. I feared for him, and did not know how to help him.

Conor made an inventory of the meager stores. He cast his eye over the remaining livestock, the state of the home farms, the disrepair of cottages and barns. He rode out to the other settlements to ensure the loyalty of the tenants there, to check the state of herds and flocks, and on Liam’s behalf, to arrange the manning of outer guard posts. But he was unusually abstracted, spending much of his time standing at a window looking out over the forest; as if he were waiting for something. Some days he would simply disappear, to return late in the evening without explanation. And he received his own visitors; ancient, robed figures, and young men with old eyes. He spoke to them in private, out-of-doors, and afterward he would be very quiet, as if his thoughts were in some distant place far from Sevenwaters.

Meanwhile, the villagers began to succumb to a winter ague that went deep to the chest, and caused the breath to rattle and squeak, and the body to grow hot and cold. I extricated Cormack from the practice yard, where he had stepped into the role of Donal’s right-hand man as if it had always been his own. I found Padriac where he was tending to a lame horse in the stables, the two lads hanging on his every word. I got a cart loaded with firewood, and the three of us, with the two boys, went around the village and made sure every household had a small supply. I brought soup which Janis had contrived from turnips and sorrel and a few scraps from a wiry old chicken. There was no lack of work for my hands. Old Tom was very sick; I knew no amount of balsam and peppermint would cure this cough. The fire helped ease him a little. But there were others that might be saved, given the right care. Back home, I set one of the girls to gathering and preparing what herbs were still growing around house and garden, and we began to stock the stillroom shelves once more. This was my work; this was my place. I was the daughter of the forest, a child that had grown up in the heart of its mystic growth, ever changing, yet ever the same. But I could not keep away the images that rose from deep in my heart. I wanted him so much; wanted him here by me, longed to feel his arms around me, to hear his voice, very quiet, the way it went when he was fighting to control his feelings.
It’s all right, Jenny. It’s all right
. I went about my day’s work, and however hard I tried, every moment I was wondering where he was, and what he was doing. I imagined him in the hall at Harrowfield, settling the disputes of his household, listening gravely, delivering his wise judgment. I thought of the winter mornings, of him and Ben practicing their games of combat. Bodies straining one against the other, one flaxen head, one red as flame. The girls clustered in the doorway, admiring. When it was finished, the two men would slap each other on the shoulders, grinning. Ben would tell a silly joke. The next day they might be mending a roof, or building a drystone wall, or breaking ice from water barrels. The cottagers of Harrowfield would not go hungry, or succumb to the ague untended. I had not said farewell to Margery. That was cause for sadness. Perhaps Johnny would be taking his first steps by now. I would not see that. I had to accept that I would never see Red again. I should let go, and move onto a new path. But like Diarmid, I found that I could not let go.

They say time heals the heart, and that such feelings fade with absence. It was not so with me. By day I exhausted myself with work, but his image was always there in my mind. By night I slept little, and when I did, I dreamed of what I had lost. My brothers joked about it, dismissing it as a young girl’s calf love, something I would soon grow out of. Despite all, they still saw me as little more than a child, and they expected me to slip back into my old place at Sevenwaters as if nothing had changed. They could not imagine that I would love a Briton, that I could give my heart to a man in whose house I had so nearly been put to death. There was no point in trying to explain it to them. Only Finbar had understood the depth of my bond with Red.

Father did not talk much. He liked to sit in my little garden, whatever the weather. If gentle rain fell, he spread an old sack over head and shoulders, and let it fall. If the wind was chill, he wrapped himself in a cloak. When I was not busy in the village, I worked close by him, digging, weeding, clearing, while my little helper busied herself in the stillroom.

As often as not I would find Finbar there in the garden too, a pale, silent figure whose face was still gaunt and wasted; whose eyes still held a wild knowledge beyond human understanding. Since that last night at Harrowfield, he had laid a shield on his thoughts to keep them from me, and his inner voice was all but silent. I could not tell how it was with him; but I knew he was speaking to his father, mind to mind.

Perhaps Father answered him in the same way. I remembered what Father Brien had told us long ago. How the ancient ones would have taken Colum, had he been willing to learn their secret crafts and memorize the long lore of their kind, to become in time one of their mystic brotherhood. But Colum had laid eyes on Niamh, with her dark curling hair and her skin like new milk and her wide green eyes, and he had lost his heart. After that there was but one path for him. And so Conor had been chosen in his place. Father Brien had spoken of love, and of our kind. What had he said?
You know not, yet, the sort of love that strikes like a lightning bolt, that clutches hold of you by the heart, as irrevocably as death; that becomes the lodestar by which you steer the rest of your life…it is in the nature of your kin, to love this way
.

I knew now, painfully, what it felt like to love thus, as my father had loved my mother. I understood that Finbar sought to help his father back to self-knowledge, back to a place where he could touch this world without being destroyed by his guilt, and regret, and anguish. So they sat there in silence, and I moved around them clipping lavender and rosemary, and failing utterly to quell the longings of my own heart.

The weather grew chill and more chill. The rains ceased, and were overtaken by clear, bright days, and nights of deep frost. The last leaves fell from ash and birch, from the great oaks whose spreading roots were now blanketed in the golden brown remnants of their summer cloaks. The legacy of Lady Oonagh was a long and terrible one. Old Tom died, and then his granddaughter developed a rattling cough and a feverish brightness of the eyes. I tended to children whose bodies were clammy with sweat, who cried out for cold water while snow lay deep outside the cottage doors. I saw strong men grow feeble as infants and clutch at my hand as if frightened of the dark. That winter we lost ten good folk from our village. Had they not been so weakened by neglect, they might have been able to fight back.

I grew weary, and angry, so that I understood when one day Diarmid announced suddenly that he was off to seek the sorceress and bring her to justice, and if nobody was prepared to go with him, that was not his problem. Someone must be bold, and have the courage to do the right thing, he said. He took his sword and his bow, and he rode off alone. A little later Cormack, mouth set tight, saddled up and went after him, for as he said, Diarmid was like an arrow loosed at random, which might find the right target or the wrong one, and he had better make sure no more ill was done than had been already.

“I’ll bring him back safe,” said Cormack as his horse fidgeted and stamped, eager to be away. “There’s a child to be found. Our brother. Diarmid forgets that, in his passion. I’ll stay by him until he comes to his senses. We’ll be home by spring.” Conor reached up from where he stood by the horse, to clasp his twin’s hand.

“Go safe on your journey, Brother,” he said quietly.

“And you,” Cormack replied with a crooked smile. “I think it is your journey that will be the longer one.”

Seamus Redbeard came to visit Liam. They spent two days conferring, and reached an agreement to share men and arms and the duty of defending borders. They talked of Eamonn of the Marshes, who had wed Eilis. Their faces were grim and their manner purposeful. Seamus left behind a small troop of his own men, and assurances of help. But before his departure, Seamus sat with Lord Colum all one afternoon, speaking quietly, and I thought there was a glimmer of recognition in my father’s eye.

With Diarmid and Cormack gone, the rest of us drew closer together. It was a fierce winter, and it became harder to keep the village supplied and the outposts manned. We worked each day until we were dropping with exhaustion. In the evenings, there was little ceremony. The household would gather, lord, servant, and man-at-arms together, in the kitchens where a fire was kept burning. Janis would provide what she could, usually a soup and loaves of dark bread. We ate together, as we worked together. The hall was deserted, too big to keep warm with our carefully rationed stocks of dry wood. When the simple meal was over, tales would be told by one or another, as Janis passed around mugs of mulled wine, seasoned from what I knew to be her diminishing stocks of spices and dried fruits.

And slowly, as dark, still night followed night, my father’s eyes began to lose their dead, frozen expression and wake to the tales of heroic battle or star-crossed lovers. He gave a little smile as I told the tale of the warrior queen with a raging appetite for young men. He nodded gravely as Padriac related the old saga of Culhan’s routing of three giants, each bigger than the last. Even Donal, reluctantly, was persuaded one night to join in, telling of the great voyage of Maeldun and the wondrous things he found, such as an island where the ants were as large as horses, or a grove of apple trees that bore fruit all year round, or a fountain that gushed forth fresh milk. Once this story was begun, everyone had a bit to add, and it took many nights before all was told. My father sat close by Finbar, listening to this story, and once or twice he would lean toward his son, making quiet comment, and Finbar would give the smallest of nods. Then there came a day when, instead of making his way to the garden to sit in silence, Father went in search of Liam, where he watched the men schooling their horses. He stayed there through the afternoon, and what they said to each other, I did not ask. But that evening, there was a new warmth in his eyes.

Slowly he began to speak and to respond as if he knew us. Things were not, however, as they had once been. Our father now seemed like a man much older in years. The burden of what he had brought on himself, and on us, was near intolerable for him, and I fancied he sometimes held onto his sanity by the merest thread. Now Finbar watched over him, silent, always there in the shadows to one side, as if his mind held our father’s in check, weaving a net of protection about the gradually mending spirit. So father and son came to understand each other, and another wound was healed. But the victory had been hard won. Finbar grew thinner and thinner, eating little, speaking not a word. One could not give so much of oneself, without a terrible cost.

Father did not talk to me much. I told myself, that was nothing new. Before, he had seemed not to know what to make of his small daughter, who looked so much like her mother. Now, I was even more like Niamh, so alike that at first he had mistaken me for her whom he had loved and lost. My brothers had told him my story. He knew that I was wed to a Briton, one of that breed he despised so bitterly. One of those who had taken the islands that held the most secret of our people’s sacred places, and for nothing but a foothold from which to venture forth in anger and greed, to lay waste our lands. They told him that. But, Liam quickly assured him, it had not been a real marriage. The union could be annulled, said Conor, and in time, a suitable husband could be found for me. In time. There was no hurry. My father listened, and said nothing.