Child of the Prophecy (6 page)

It took me a while to catch my breath.

"Well," said Darragh eventually, which wasn't much help.

"Well," I echoed.

"You're abroad early."

"I heard you playing."

"I've played up here often enough, this summer. Didn't bring you out before. We're leaving this morning. But I suppose you knew that."

I nodded, sudden misery near overwhelming me. "I'm sorry," I mumbled. "I've been busy. Too busy to come out. I—"

"Don't apologize. Not if you don't mean it," said Darragh lightly.

"But I did want—I hadn't any choice," I told him.

Darragh looked at me straight, his brown eyes very serious and a little frown on his face. "There's always a choice, Fainne," he said soberly.

Then we sat in silence for a while, and at length he took up the pipes and began to play again, some tune I did not recognize that was sad enough to bring the tears to your eyes. Not that I'd have cried over so foolish a thing, even if I'd been capable of it.

"There's words to that tune," Darragh ventured. "I could teach you. It sounds bonny, with the pipes and the singing."

"Me, sing?" I was jolted out of my misery. "I don't think so."

"Never tried, have you?" said Darragh. "Odd, that. I've never yet met a soul without some music in them. I bet you could sing fit to call the seals up out of the ocean, if you gave it a try." His tone was coaxing.

"Not me," I said flatly. "I've better things to do. More important things."

"Like what?"

"Things. You know I can't talk about it."

"Fainne."

"What?"

"I don't like to see you doing that—that—doing what you were doing yesterday. I don't like it."

"Doing what?" I lifted my brows as haughtily as I could manage, and stared straight at him. He looked steadily back.

"Carrying on with the lads. Flirting. Behaving like some—some silly girl. It's not right."

"I can't imagine what you mean," I retorted scornfully, though I was struck to the heart by his criticism. "Anyway, you weren't even looking at me."

Darragh gave his crooked grin, but there was no mirth in it. "I was looking, all right. You made sure everyone would be looking."

I was silent.

"My father was right, you know," he said after a while. "You should get wed, have a brood of children, settle down. You need looking after."

"Nonsense," I scoffed. "I can look after myself."

"You need keeping an eye on," persisted Darragh. "Maybe you can't see it, and maybe your father can't see it, but you're a danger to yourself."

"Rubbish," I said, bitterly offended that he should think me so inadequate. "Besides, who would I wed, here in the bay? A fisherman? A tinker's lad? Hardly."

"You're right, of course," Darragh said after a moment. "Quite unsuitable, it'd be. I see that." Then he got to his feet, lifting the pipes neatly onto his shoulder. He had grown a lot, this last year, and had begun to show a dark shadow of beard around the chin. He had acquired a small gold ring in one ear, just like his father's.

"I'd best be off, then." He looked at me unsmiling. "Slip you in my pocket and take you with me, I would, if you were a bit smaller. Keep you out of harm's way."

"I'd be too busy anyway," I said, as the desolation of parting swept over me once again. It never got any easier, year after year, and knowing I would myself be leaving next autumn made this time even worse. "I have work to do. Difficult work, Darragh."

"Mm." He didn't really seem to be listening to me, just looking. Then he reached over to tweak my hair, not too hard, and he said what he always said. "Goodbye, Curly. I'll see you next summer. Keep out of trouble, now, until I come back."

I nodded, incapable of speech. Somehow, even though I had learned so much this season, even though I had come close to a mastery of my craft, it seemed all of a sudden that the summer had been utterly wasted, that I had squandered something precious and irreplaceable. I watched my friend as he made his way through the circle of stones, the wind tugging and tearing at his old clothes and whipping his dark hair out behind him, and then he went down the other side of the hill and was gone. And it was cold, so cold I felt it in the very marrow, a chill that no warm fire nor sheepskin coat could keep at bay. I went home, and still the sun was barely creeping up the eastern sky, dark red behind storm-tossed clouds. As I walked back to the Honeycomb, and lit a lantern to see me in through the shadowy passages, I made my breathing into a pattern. One breath in, long and deep from the belly. Out in steps, like the cascades of a great waterfall. Control, that was what it was all about. You had to keep control. Lose that, and the exercise of the craft was pointless. I was a sorcerer's daughter. A sorcerer's daughter did not have friends or feelings; she could not afford them. Look at my father. He had tried to live a different sort of life, and all it had brought him was heartache and bitterness. Far wiser to concentrate on the craft, and put the rest aside.

Back in my room I made myself picture the traveling folk loading their carts, harnessing their horses, setting off up the track northward with their dogs running alongside and the lads bringing up the rear. I made myself think of Darragh on his white pony, and forced myself to hear his words again. I don't like to see you doing that. . . you made sure everyone would be looking. . . you're a danger to yourself. . . If that was how he saw me, it was surely far better that our paths were separating now. Ours was a childhood friendship, untenable once we were grown, for we were of different kinds, he and I, kinds that cannot be joined for long. Other girls might sit on the cart, and flash their smiles, and think of a life like Peg's and Molly's, full of laughter and music and family. Other girls might look at Darragh and think of a future. I was not like other girls. Yet I felt the loss of him like a deep wound, as if a part of me had been torn away. Year after year, season after season I had waited for him, pinning my hope and happiness on his return. It had seemed to me, sometimes, that I was not fully alive unless he was there. Now my grandmother was coming, and I was being sent away; everything was changing. Best if I put Darragh from my thoughts and just get on with things. Best if I learn to do without him. Besides, what could a traveling boy understand about sorcery, and shape-changing, and the arts of the mind? It was a different world; a world beyond his wildest imaginings. It was a world in which, finally, one must be strong enough to move forward quite alone.

Chapter Two

That day I set all my things in order. I tidied my narrow bed and folded the blanket. I swept the stone floor of my bedchamber, which was one of many caves in the Honeycomb's maze of chambers and passages. I put away my shawl and outdoor boots in the small wooden chest which housed my few possessions. Our life was very simple. Work, rest, eat when we must. We needed little. Deep in the chest, half-hidden under winter bedding, was Riona. She was the only possession I had that was not a strict essential of life. Riona was a doll. When folk spoke of my mother, they would say how beautiful she was, and how slender, like a young birch, and how much my father had loved her. They'd say how she was always a little touched in the head, though it had shocked them when she did the terrible thing she did. But you never heard them talk about her talents, the way they'd mention that Dan was a champion on the pipes, or Molly the neatest basketweaver, or how Peg's dumplings were the tastiest anywhere in Kerry. You'd have thought my mother had no qualities at all, save beauty and madness. But I knew different. You only had to look at Riona to know my mother had been expert with the needle. After all these years Riona was more than a little threadbare, her features somewhat blurred and her gown thin in patches. But she'd been made strong and neat, with such tiny, even stitches they were near invisible. She had fingers and toes, and embroidered eyelashes. She had long woollen hair colored as yellow as tansy, and a gown of rose-hued silk over a lace petticoat. The necklace Riona wore, wound three times around her small neck for safekeeping, was the strongest thing of all. It was strangely woven of many different fibers, and so crafted that it could not be broken, not should the greatest force be exerted on it. Threaded on this cord was a little white stone with a hole in it. I did not play with Riona in Father's presence. Of course, now I was too old for play. It was a waste of time, like taking silly, dangerous dives off the rocks when there was no need for it. But over the years Riona had shared countless adventures with Darragh and me. She had explored deep caves and precipitous gullies; had narrowly avoided falling from cliffs into the sea, and being left behind on the sand in the path of a rising tide. She had worn crowns of threaded daisies and cloaks of rabbit skin. She had sat under the standing stones watching us as if she were a queen surveying her subjects. Her dark embroidered eyes held a knowledge of me that could at times be disturbing. Riona did not judge, not exactly. She observed. She took stock.

That day I felt a strong need to be occupied, to channel my thoughts into the strictly practical. So, when my chamber was bare and clean, I went to the place where we kept our small supply of food, and took the fish the girl had brought, and a few turnips. The fish was already gutted and scaled. My father and I were not cooks. We ate because it was necessary, that was all. But I had time to fill. So I made up the fire, and let it die down, and then I roasted the turnips in the coals, and baked the fish on top. When it was ready I took a plateful down to the workroom for my father. But the door was bolted from the inside. I could not hear his voice chanting or speaking words of magic. The only sound was the harsh cawing of a bird within the vaulted chamber. That meant Fiacha was back. My heart sank, for I disliked Fiacha intensely. The raven came and went as he pleased, and when he stayed in the household he always seemed to be staring at me with his little, bright eyes, summing me up and finding me less than impressive. Then he'd be suddenly gone again, without so much as a by-your-leave. Perhaps he brought messages. Father never said. I did not like Fiacha's sharp beak or the dangerous glint in his eye. He pecked me once when I was little, and it hurt a lot. Father said it was an accident, but I was never quite so sure.

I left the food outside the door. There was a rule which need not be spoken, that when the door was locked, one did not seek admittance. Some elements of the craft must be exercised in solitude, and my father sought always to deepen and extend his knowledge. It is too easy for an outsider to judge us wrongly, to see a threat in what we do, simply because of a lack of insight. Our kind are not always made welcome, not in all parts of Erin, for folk tell tales of us which are half truth and half a jumble of their own fears and superstitions. It was not by chance that my father had come to live in this distant, remote corner of Kerry. Here, the folk were simple souls whose lives turned on sea and season, whose world had no place for the luxury of gossip and prejudice. They had accepted him and my mother as just two more dwellers in the bay, quiet, courteous folk who left well alone. And everyone knew a settlement with its own sorcerer was the safest of places to live in. My father had quickly demonstrated that, for one summer, soon after his arrival in Kerry, the Norsemen came. All along the coast there were tales of their raids, the brutal killings, the rape, the burning, the stealing of women and children, and there were tales of the places where they'd come in their longships and simply moved in, taking the cottages and farms and settling down as if they'd a right to. But there was no Viking settlement in our cove. Ciaran had seen to that. Folk still told the story of how the longships with their carven prows had come into view, rowing in hard toward the shore with so little warning there was no time to flee for cover. The sunlight had flashed on the axes and the strange helms the men wore; the many oars had dipped and splashed, dipped and splashed as the fisherfolk stood frozen in terror, watching their death come closer. Then the sorcerer had walked out onto a high ledge of the Honeycomb with his staff of yew in his hand, and raised it aloft, and an instant later, great clouds had begun to roll in from the west, and the swell had risen till white-capped breakers began to pound the shore. The longships had begun to struggle and list, and the neat rows of oars were thrown into confusion. Within moments the sky was dark with storm, and the ocean boiled, and the folk watched round-eyed as the vessels of the Norsemen cracked and split and were torn asunder each in its turn. Later, children found strange and wondrous objects cast up on the shore. An armlet wrought with snakes and dogs, curiously patterned. A necklace in the shape of a tiny, lethal axe threaded on twisted wire. A bronze bowl. The shaft of an oar, fine-fashioned. The body of a man with pale skin and long, plaited hair the color of wheat at Lugnasad. So, there was no Viking settlement in our cove. After that my father was revered and protected, a man who could do no wrong. When my mother died they grieved with him. All the same, they gave him a wide berth.