The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy (5 page)

Eithne curled herself into a tighter ball, though she did raise her dirty, tear-streaked face. ‘Lady?’ she whispered. ‘Lady?’

Swallowing, Rhiann brushed Eithne’s black hair from her flushed cheeks. ‘See here,’ she said, as if gentling a foal. ‘I am here. Feel me.’

One tiny, work-roughened hand, the nails crusted with dirt, crept up to cover Rhiann’s own. There was a moment of utter stillness, and then Eithne flung herself from the chair into Rhiann’s arms, collapsing in a flood of choked sobs that rocked them both on their heels.

‘Hush now,’ Rhiann murmured, rubbing between the girl’s shoulder-blades. Yet of course this outpouring drew the tears Rhiann had successfully squashed in her chest up to cloud her throat, and she swallowed even harder, her eyes stinging. She could feel the head-to-toe trembling of the small, seemingly fragile body in her arms, though she knew also of the wiry strength in Eithne that could grind grain for hours, and haul water from the well.

‘Now,’ Rhiann choked out, smiling through her tears, ‘sit right there, and let me make this a place of the living once more.’

Shivering with shock, Eithne wiped her face on her sleeve and sank back into the chair, watching Rhiann light the fire and tie up the hanging. Then Rhiann sat on the oak hearth-bench and coaxed the same story from the maid that Didius had given.

‘I thought of going back to my mother’s,’ Eithne whispered now. ‘Even though Rori offered to look after me … but … but I wasn’t ready to go anywhere, not with all your things here, lady, just as you left them.’

And indeed, the digging sticks against the wall still had earth clinging to them, and on a stool by the loom was a crumple of linen Rhiann had been embroidering on her last night here. Her healing bench was stacked with hastily sealed jars of macerating leaves, and covered trays of buds steeping in honey.

It was a wrenching thought, of Eithne sitting here alone amongst Rhiann and Caitlin’s belongings. Just then Rhiann’s eye fell on one side of the fire. Though Rhiann had taken her goddess figurines with her on her journey, the tiny, squat figure of the triple-faced Mother was still resting in her place on the hearthstone, guarding the home. Yet her feet were nearly smothered in a congealing mess of dried milk and barley grains – Eithne’s offerings, which looked like they had been flung there in desperate grief.

If this had been Eithne’s reaction to the news, Rhiann did not know what might be waiting for her at her aunt’s hut on the mountain.

After taking Eithne to be reunited with Caitlin, Rhiann quickly returned to the stables, feeding Liath some barley mash before saddling her again. She had put aside her long dress, and changed into her usual riding outfit of buckskin trousers and tunic, her priestess herb-knife and pouch tied on her leather belt.

As she was strapping on her pack, Eremon came looking for her, ducking in from the bright sun to the shadows of the stall. Yet when Rhiann fumbled with the saddle straps he was at her side in three strides, and Rhiann briefly closed her eyes as his thumb brushed her cheek.

‘You are tired,’ Eremon murmured. ‘Send a messenger instead, and go tomorrow.’

Rhiann shook her head. ‘Rest can wait another day.’ She tugged fiercely on one of the buckles. ‘You know she will be desperate.’

Eremon sighed, and when Rhiann turned to face him, her hand on her knife sheath, the light spilling through the open door had deepened the lines of tension around his eyes.

Rhiann’s heart jumped. ‘What happened in the King’s Hall?’ she whispered, laying her hand over the tight skin as if her touch could smooth the lines away.

Eremon shrugged, staring at the stable wall behind her. ‘Nothing that cannot wait for your return.’

Rhiann’s impulse to discover what had disturbed him warred with her own haste. Yet her fear for Linnet was a keen, sharp edge under her breastbone, and she knew she must go. Her aunt loved her like a mother, and would grieve like a mother.

On a sudden impulse, Rhiann leaned up and pressed her lips to Eremon’s mouth, and after a moment of surprise his hands came around her face to hold her there. The feathery touch gave another flutter low between her legs, as she pulled away, breathless, lowering her eyes.

And as Eremon helped Rhiann to mount, and she nudged Liath out into the sun, somewhere below the tension of this day Rhiann felt the strange, cold fear again stir with the desire, each entangled in the other.

CHAPTER 4

T
he Epidii territory between mountain and sea was burgeoning into the full, fertile life of leaf-bud, with a mist of green leaves on the trees and new bracken unfurling across the hills. Yet Rhiann, who loved riding alone through her land, now barely noted its beauty. Instead her eyes were fixed on the distinct peaks of Linnet’s mountain ridge to the north-west, her weight forward in the saddle to urge Liath on with her knees.

The wind off the far, white-capped mountains still cut, yet as Rhiann left the open valleys around Dunadd and entered the wooded glens below the hills, she was warmed by the pools of sun in the hollows, and the still, sheltered air. Here, drifts of hyacinths and pale yellow primroses carpeted the slopes beneath the mostly bare trees.

For once, though, Rhiann didn’t draw the smells in: sun-warmed damp soil; dew on wet leaves. She couldn’t spare her heart for any of this. Caitlin, Linnet’s only blood child, had been lost as a baby, before returning by chance a year ago. After her loss, Linnet had raised Rhiann as her own. So if Linnet thought both her daughters had been taken by the sea … Rhiann leaned forward again, her thigh muscles burning, desperately urging Liath to greater speed.

Dercca, Linnet’s maid, was nowhere to be seen when Rhiann cantered into the yard surrounding her aunt’s turf-roofed hut, which was nestled in a sheltered glen halfway up the mountain. Rhiann slid to the ground, looping Liath’s reins over the brushwood pen that held the four brindled goats. Then she hastened for the path leading to the sacred spring that Linnet tended.

Rhiann hurried between the tangled hazels on the path, brushing away the catkins that caught at her hair. Yet when she came in view of the still pool surrounded by the circle of pale, silvery birches, she jerked to a halt. For a moment Rhiann didn’t see her aunt in the dappled shadows cast by the thin cover of leaves. Then a figure uncurled itself from a pile of deer-hides on the stone-built lip of the spring. It was a tall woman, as slim and elegant as the birch trees around her, with Rhiann’s auburn hair and fine bones, long nose, and tip-tilted eyes.

Although Rhiann was breathing so hard she gulped air, and her muscles were cramped from riding, all this fell away when her eyes met Linnet’s. The impulse came over her to run like a child and fling herself into Linnet’s arms, as she had so many times when she was younger.

But something arrested her feet. Rhiann’s aunt had not slept for some days, that was clear, and her skin was translucent, her fine features drawn. Her hair was unbound – tangled by wind and the nap of the deer-hide – and her eyes far away, as if her spirit had not quite returned from its journeys. Yet Rhiann did not see the deep lines of grief that she had so dreaded. Linnet had known they were not dead.

Wordlessly, Rhiann and Linnet stepped forward at the same time, and then Rhiann found herself wrapped in the circle of her aunt’s arms, as Linnet pressed Rhiann’s face fiercely against her breast. And as they held each other, the sun at last sank below the crooked rim of the mountainside, and they were plunged into cold shadow.

‘I tried to watch over you after you left Dunadd,’ Linnet finally said. ‘Every day I spent time at the pool, and sometimes I was rewarded with a seeing: you walking on the walls of a great dun; stepping on to a boat. Then … nothing …’ She paused, and her collarbone moved against Rhiann’s cheek. ‘Until a messenger came with Gelert’s vision.’

Rhiann stirred with renewed pain, but Linnet held her still. ‘I would not leave the pool then, night or day, and begged the Mother to give me some news of you, any news. Yet most of the visions made little sense.’

Rhiann choked out, ‘How did you know we lived?’

Linnet’s breast rose and fell, with a smile or a sigh, Rhiann could not tell. ‘There are other ways of seeing, daughter, between those who love each other.’ She drew back to cup Rhiann’s face with cold hands. ‘I knew, as surely as my body lay here, that you and Caitlin were safe. Gelert’s words came not from the Source; they were wrapped in the blackness that he himself carries. I would know,
I would know
, the moment you left Thisworld.’ For a moment she gripped Rhiann’s cheeks, her eyes burning fever-bright even in the shadows. The evening wind stirred the wisps of hair about her face as she gave Rhiann the Sisters’ kiss on her spirit-eye, in the middle of her forehead, before releasing her.

Turning to the spring, Linnet swept up a handful of dried, crushed petals from beside the creased deer-hide, and scattered these over the dark water. ‘All my thanks to you, Lady,’ she said simply. Turning back to Rhiann, she took her hand, and they left the clearing together.

Rhiann sighed and placed her willow platter on Linnet’s hearthstone, crossing her legs on the floor cushion. Her belly was warmed with fragrant lamb stew and Linnet’s goat’s cheese, and she had washed and changed into a clean robe from her pack. Now she drew up her knees, wrapping Linnet’s thick wool shawl around her so she was swaddled like a baby.

She wasn’t sleepy, though. In between bites and swallows she had been telling her aunt all that had befallen them. The story was so long and involved that, by the end, the old maid Dercca was slumped against the loom by the wall, snoring softly, the grinding quern tilted between her knees.

At this point, however, Rhiann was grateful for Dercca’s sleep, for the events on the Sacred Isle were for priestess ears only.

Glancing at Linnet now, Rhiann saw the glitter of tears on one firelit cheek, as her aunt listened with her head half-turned away, staring into the leaping flames from her place in her rush chair. Only Linnet could grasp how much the welcome of Nerida, the eldest priestess, had meant to Rhiann, ending an exile that had festered as a wound in Rhiann’s soul for three long years.

‘What I said to them,’ Rhiann whispered, watching the birch logs snap and settle in the fire, ‘I thought I could never go back. I blamed them …’

Linnet reached for the iron poker and nudged an errant branch back into the hearth. ‘I knew they would understand, child. They were just waiting for you to return of your own accord.’

Rhiann nodded, unable to speak, and drew the fringe of the shawl through her fingers.

‘And did you go to the village, daughter?’ Linnet asked, in a carefully gentle voice.
To the beach. Where the raiders came
.

‘Yes.’ Rhiann cleared her throat, glanced up at her aunt. ‘I had to. But Eremon was there, and that made it easier.’

Instantly, the shadow of Linnet’s pain cleared, and her eyebrows arched. ‘Eremon?’

His name hung there, all the unsaid questions behind it drawing a wan smile to Rhiann’s face. However, what happened in the stone circle was too new to share with anyone, and instead she told Linnet about Eremon as the King Stag, and his sacred tattoos.

At that, the lines of strain remaining around Linnet’s eyes smoothed out in the firelight. Rhiann’s aunt was close to forty, but the fine bones of their family held the flesh well, and the life of a priestess – in Linnet’s case, a life of quiet duty separate from the cares of others – lent her face an ageless tranquility. Rhiann, cradling her cheeks in her hands, severely doubted she would ever look so serene. She was the Ban Cré, the Mother of the Land. Her role was not to retreat into a solitary life on the mountain, but to embody the Goddess for her tribe and live among them.

And now I can serve them truly again
. Suddenly Rhiann’s eye fell on Linnet’s doorway and the silver gleam of moonlight creeping under it, fading into the glow of the lamps. The joy that had infused her as she stood outside Dunadd’s gates fountained up again, tinged with excitement. If her full connection to the Goddess had returned, then she should be able to see visions in the sacred pool again. She would no longer be blind!

‘Aunt? Does the Goddess swim now in the sacred water?’ At this time of year, the moon often passed directly over the spring.

Linnet sat up, the blanket in which she had wrapped herself falling from her shoulders. ‘Yes, child – do you wish to speak with our Lady? I will give you what you need.’ She rose, taking a rush lamp and making her way to the workbench that stood against the curved wall, between the two box beds. The rafters were so laden with dried herbs, roots and salted joints of meat that she had to duck to reach the shelves. ‘I have the
saor
here.’

‘No,’ Rhiann said quickly, rising from her cushion, letting the shawl drop away. ‘No
saor
.’She wanted to do this without the aid of the herbs that freed spirit from body. She used to be able to see unaided, when she was pure, before the raid. Now that she had returned to the fold of the Sisters, she should be able to do it again.

Her whole body ached with yearning at the memory of the light she used to sense, filling her body. Surely she would feel it again …

Out in the moist, silvered night, Rhiann tried to step softly and slowly. Yet as soon as the hazel trees closed around her she couldn’t restrain herself – for the first time since the stone circle she was alone, and at one of the Mother’s most sacred gateways. Rhiann’s feet quickened, and she began to run.

Leaves trailed against her cheeks, and the cool air misted her breath, scented with loam and wet rock. Ahead, a soft light beckoned, and when she broke into the clearing, her chest heaving, it was as if she had fallen into a pool of molten silver, as moonlight spilled through the trees. The clearing held an unnatural stillness, too, as if the land was holding its breath, as if all the night sounds of wind and the stirring of the creatures had been suspended.

With fumbling fingers, Rhiann unrolled the deer-hide on the lip of the spring, setting out the flowers and bronze finger-ring Linnet had given her. Then she dug in her pack, her fingers closing on her goddess figurines, wrapped in their soft linen bag. One by one she reverently lined them up on the spring: Andraste, war goddess, with her spear and shield; Flidhais of the woods; Rhiannon the Great Mother on her white mare; and Ceridwen with her cauldron, bringer of life and death. Finally, Rhiann knelt on the lip and opened the tiny vial of scented oil. With trembling hands she anointed her spirit-eye.