The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy

The Dawn Stag is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental

Published by Juality Ltd

Copyright © 2012 by Juality Ltd

All rights reserved

Watson, Jules

ISBN 978-0-9572714-3-2    (ebook)

ISBN 9780752856872 (hardback) - ISBN 9780752868707 (trade paperback) - ISBN 9780752877617 (mass market paperback)

PROLOGUE

Linnet

M
y powers of seeing were strong in my youth, but I could never have foretold the path Rhiann’s life would take in the years of the Romans in Alba.

For the Great Goddess is a weaver, and though to us in Thisworld the patterns of our lives seem chaotic, with threads twisting and breaking, colours stopping and starting, She sees the greater design on the loom. I feel like Her now, for though I am an old woman, my eyes dimmed, my fingers gnarled, I can see Rhiann’s life unspooling before my eyes. I see it because I have memories and no longer need to rely on visions.

And they are light and dark, just like the threads in the cloth, which together make a complete whole. See how it works: my sister’s life was taken as she birthed Rhiann – surely a great darkness. Yet I had recently lost my own child, and so Rhiann became that daughter to me, the great light of my heart, a brilliant child with a precocious will. I raised her from baby to girl, before she went to the Sacred Isle for her priestess training.

And then at the age of eighteen, just as she was initiated, Rhiann’s fate turned suddenly, shockingly. For the Sacred Isle was raided, Rhiann’s foster-family killed – those whom she had loved as blood kin – and Rhiann’s body was violated by those raiders, and left for dead. It was not her body that died, however, but her soul.

She limped back to Dunadd, the seat of her tribe, the Epidii, feeling abandoned by her Goddess, blaming herself for her family’s deaths, turning her back on the Sisters she so loved, with words of rage born of grief. Yet her destiny would not let her sink into numbness, the refuge of the broken-minded. Rhiann had more to fulfil than that.

A year later, as she had barely begun to heal, her uncle the king also died, leaving Rhiann as the only bearer of her mother’s – his sister’s – royal blood. And at the very moment of his funeral, an exiled prince from the isle of Erin arrived on our shores: Eremon, son of Ferdiad.

After betrayal by his kin, the prince sought power and influence in Alba to win back his father’s Hall – and our tribe needed a noble husband for their princess. So the chief druid Gelert offered Eremon the match with Rhiann. Yet though the old priest schemed for this union with evil in his heart, seeking to hurt Rhiann and further his own power, such dark motives only serve the Mother’s great design.

Rhiann hated Eremon at first, because of the forced marriage. Yet respect did eventually dawn, and then friendship, and finally – so slowly! – some wary affection. And all the while things continued to evolve in the outer worlds as well as the inner. For the Mother had drawn these two together for a cause beyond themselves – to forge the warring tribes of Alba into a single people, to shield their land from the Romans who encroached from the south. Agricola, the Roman commander, had just received orders from his emperor to crush Alba under the empire’s heel.

For two years Rhiann and Eremon travelled Alba side by side, in a partnership of minds if not bodies, and Eremon proved himself as the tribe’s war leader. And though the other Alban kings and chiefs baulked at the idea of an alliance, Rhiann and Eremon did gain the favour of the great king of the Caledonii, Calgacus the Sword. It was a strong beginning.

And then … the dark threads surfaced once more, as an evil conspiracy created by Maelchon, king of the Orcades islands in the far north, sank Rhiann and Eremon’s boat in a storm. For Rhiann had unwittingly earned this man’s enmity long ago, when his suit for her hand was refused. He hated Eremon for possessing what he coveted.

Amidst even that chaos, though, the Great Mother’s light still glimmered. She drew the sinking boat safely shorewards to a place Rhiann knew well, yet dreaded to return to – the Sacred Isle, the place of her greatest joy and her greatest pain; where she had found her true self and lost it again. And though Rhiann quailed to face the Sisters, whom she felt she had wronged, the Sisterhood had kept their hearts and arms open, waiting until she was ready to come home.

And so that circle was at last joined and peace was made in Rhiann’s heart. For in the sacred Stones, on the eve of the Beltaine rite, Eremon was sent by the priestesses as the Stag to Rhiann’s Maiden. And though Rhiann was full of fear, for the first time they joined that night not just in body, but truly in soul.

With what fierce joy they and their friends left the Isle, after the uncertainty of their arrival! They had found each other, Rhiann had rejoined the priestesses, and Eremon had forged new alliances with the Caereni and Carnonacae tribes, who proclaimed him their Stag, their war leader, by giving him the sacred tattoos.

And yet
. The weaving of Rhiann’s fate was not complete, and the years of the Romans not over: greater dangers were still to be faced, greater evils to be overcome. This I wish I had known then, but one can only watch the spinning of the Mother’s shuttle, the twisting of the wool, and wait for Her design to emerge.

And now the rest is clear, and no more marvellous pattern of intricate, subtle hues have I ever witnessed in all my years in Thisworld, and may so not again, until the Goddess calls me home.

BOOK ONE

Leaf-bud, AD 81

CHAPTER 1

T
hese days at sea were the most peaceful she had enjoyed in years, Rhiann realized, her cheek pillowed on the bow. It felt as if their little, open boat floated between the shining water and pale sky, its white sail a wing, suspending it in a void of blue.

As the journey unfolded, the drowsy sea rocked her into a trance, as it gathered itself every now and then for a listless roll against the hull, only to subside into a dark mirror all around, laced with drifting weed. The breeze had stayed westerly, a sea-wind to bring them home to Dunadd, but it barely roused the water to waves, or billowed the sail that rose from the centre of the hide
curragh
.

Rhiann loved this type of boat, for it sat close to the water, and yet skimmed like a gull over the swells, and when the side dipped, she could trail her hand in the cold sea, feeling its pull on her fingers. For now she lay, still aware of little beyond the tang of salt and tar, the creak of oars and the sun on her eyelids.

‘Beast! I’ll get you …
there
, hah! Cold, isn’t it!’ Caitlin’s defiant words, floating over Rhiann’s shoulder, were followed by an even louder screech, and Rhiann didn’t have to turn to guess that Conaire, who had much bigger hands, had dashed another palmful of seawater over his wife. Either Rhiann’s tansy brew had softened Caitlin’s nausea or, true to character, she was gamely ignoring it. A rumble of laughter lifted from the others at the oar benches, those of Eremon’s men who had come to the Sacred Isle with them, and the islanders who crewed the boat.

Rhiann’s knees were numb, and she shifted on the willow ribs of the hull to ease them. As she did, she half opened her eyes. Beyond the glitter of the sun on the water, the nearest island was sliding past in a fine weave of black cliffs thronged with sea-pinks, its green hills sprinkled with yellow gorse, the white surf edging bays of pale water. At the end of one spill of rocks a seal watched their passage, its head and tail curved into a bow, its eyes as dark and liquid as the sea itself.

‘Hello.’ Rhiann saluted to it with one finger.

Below the seal’s perch the sea was being sucked between rocks in a turmoil of white foam. And as she stared at the roiling water, Rhiann made the connection, suddenly realizing what she had been sensing from afar for the past day: a deep thrumming on the edge of her hearing, resonating through the air.
The whirlpool
.

The whirlpool’s spinning waters churned the narrow strait between the islands close to Dunadd, making a boundary between Thisworld and the Otherworld. And Rhiann knew, with the refinement of her priestess senses, that she was hearing it because it was a sign for her. So she did what any sensible person would do: bit her lip, and futilely clamped her eyes shut again.

The sun prickled her forearms where she’d pushed up the sleeves of her wool dress, yet inside Rhiann had gone cold. For the whirlpool was telling her she must wake from the sea dreams in which she’d been floating. It meant that her span of days must resume, that they were nearly home and must face all that lay there. And by the Goddess, Rhiann didn’t want to.

Instead, she wanted to hold on to the deep thrill of joy, the thread of gold wound through her now that she had returned to the fold of the Sisters, and had been filled by the Goddess light once more, in the stone circle. Now that …

‘Ah, my sea-sprite.’ There was a creak of the hull, as a tentative hand brushed Rhiann’s cheek. ‘And have you returned to me at last from the faery deep?’

Now that Eremon was hers
. Rhiann completed the thought and allowed herself a smile, for although everyone else had known somehow to leave her alone, Eremon hadn’t, nor had she wanted him to. ‘Just now,’ she replied, although she couldn’t stifle a sigh as she stretched, blinking her eyes fully open in the bright, leaf-bud light.

Rhiann’s seat, a pile of leather packs and wrapped weapons, squeaked as Eremon flopped onto them. ‘And were you pining for me from the depths of your watery abode?’

Rhiann squinted up at him from one eye, though in the glare she could only see a pale grin against a tanned face. ‘Keep spouting such words, husband, and it won’t be me in that watery abode, I can tell you.’ Yet her hand crept out and laid itself on his warm, bare foot. Just to remind her he was really there, and laughing down at her.