Daughter of Lir (3 page)

The prince from Lir seemed hardly aware of her. He was
staring at her bit of nonsense with such a mingling of shock and—horror?—that
she caught herself gaping at him in her own turn.

His voice came rough, as if half-strangled. “What is this?
Where did you find it?”

“I made it,” she said.

“From what? Who taught you?”

She was not one to be afraid of anything, least of all a
man, but this man almost frightened her. She answered altogether unwisely, “I
saw it in a dream.”

“A dream awake? Were you wandering off to the eastward? Have
you been riding with the traders?”

“I’ve never been more than a day’s journey from this
village,” she said with some heat. “I’ve not even been to Lir. I dreamed this
thing. I dream dreams, prince. Is that unheard of where you come from?”

“You dreamed
this?
”

“I dreamed this,” she said.

He scowled terribly. His glare was directed not at her but
at the child’s toy on the table. “Did you dream it so? As a plaything for
children?”

She found that her hands were fists. Her back was stiff. “I
dreamed,” she said, “that horses drew it and men rode in it. I tried to make
the wheels as I saw them, but I don’t have the skill for that. And how does one
teach a horse to pull such a thing?”

“How—” He shook himself suddenly, as if his wits had
recovered from a shock. “Have you spoken to anyone of this?”

She shrugged, a twitch of the shoulders. He was very
high-handed. She supposed a prince was permitted, but he had begun to annoy
her. When she was annoyed, she went silent.

She should not have told him about the dream. It had escaped
before she could stop it. It had never profited her to speak of the things that
she could do that others could not, or would not admit to.

This man had startled the truth out of her. She could not
even escape him: he barred the way to the door. She sat mute and sullen,
waiting for him to tire of her silence and go.

He did tire of silence, but not to the extent of leaving her
in peace. “Tell me what else you saw,” he said.

She blinked slowly. “Tell me why it matters.”

He sucked in a breath. “Because it matters.”

“Why?”

“You are—” He shut his mouth with a snap. “Maybe it matters
nothing. It drove you to make a toy for a child.”

“Because I wanted to know how it worked.” Again she had
spoken without thinking. “There was a wide field—very wide. It was full of
these things, rolling like a storm over the plain. The horses were galloping.
Men were shouting. They had spears and axes. They were laughing. Some were
singing. The wheels made a terrible noise.”

He sank down while she spoke, first to his knees, then to
sit on his heels. His face had gone perfectly white. “Did you see—were there
people on foot?”

Rhian had been trying not to remember that. “The wheels . . .
made a terrible noise.”

“Yes.” His eyes were wide, blind, seeing nothing in that
plain and pleasant place. Where he was, there was blood and screaming, and
wheels crushing bone into earth.

She could go there, if she would let herself. She refused.
She turned her back on it. She said to him, “If I make it small enough, maybe
no war will come.”

“The world is going to end,” he said. He said it perfectly
calmly. “My mother is dying, and she has no heir. The Goddess has turned away
from us.”

“She has not.” Rhian spoke with certainty so deep she could
not find the source of it. It simply was.

He was a priestess’ son. He must have drunk such surety with
his mother’s milk. He did not scoff as a man from Long Ford might. He sighed
heavily, shook his head, but held his peace.

o0o

The day had begun in odd and unsettling fashion. It went
on like a song sung out of tune. Bran was unwontedly surly when he woke—unwontedly
late—and shambled to his work. The prince by then had gone. Rhian had wrapped
the thing that she had made, that had so disturbed him, and laid it deep in the
box of scraps and half-finished workings. There was nothing for Bran to see,
except Rhian stirring a pot over the cooking fire.

Bran would not eat. She had no appetite. She left him to his
smelting and went where she should have gone hours since. She had promised to
help her aunt with the kiln that morning. She had pursued the shape of her
dream instead, and appalled a prince.

Dura was at the kiln, hair drawn back and wrapped in a bit
of scarf, broad face red and streaming with the heat. A glance was all the
rebuke she offered. Rhian bit her lip and lent a hand with the fire.

o0o

The priestess and her acolytes were shut away in the
headwoman’s house. The guards kept to their own camp in the field by the river,
except two who stood at the headwoman’s door. Neither of those was the prince
Emry.

As the sun rose toward noon, the cry of a ram’s horn sounded
through the village, calling them all to the gathering place.

Rhian had been waiting for it. She was washed clean of soot,
her damp hair plaited tight. She had on her best gown, that had been her
mother’s, with flowers embroidered on the hem; she was wearing her necklace of
shells, her armlets of amber and carved bone, and the earrings of bronze that
Bran had made for her. They were bells, and they rang softly as she walked.

She was as beautiful as she could be, and that, she knew,
was very beautiful indeed. People stared as she passed through the village.
None of them spoke to her. They all knew. They were drawing away already.

That hurt, but she put the pain aside. If she would be a
priestess in Lir, she must rise above everything that she had been. Even her
name; even that would fall away.

The gathering-field was full already. Everyone had come, men
and women, old and young, toothless elder and babe at the breast. The sun was
direct overhead, the sky a cloudless vault. The heat was breathless, the wind
utterly still.

Rhian slipped through the crowded bodies. The priestess was
standing on the gathering-stone, her acolytes in a circle about her. They were
all clad as priestesses in a sacred rite: bare but for a kilt of woven cords
dyed the color of blood. Their free hair curled exuberantly down their backs.
Sweat sheened their bodies, plump or slender, richly female or angular as a
boy’s.

They had no faces. Each wore a mask, blank, mouthless,
noseless. Their eyes were slits of darkness.

They were mortal women, living and breathing, flawed and
foolish. They stood in the open air, under the clear eye of heaven. And yet
Rhian’s hackles rose.

The girls and young women of Long Ford had found their way
to the open space between the gathering and the stone. Rhian took a place at
the farthest end, the eastward end. As she stood there, for a moment she
swayed, dizzy. The earth shook as if with the rolling of countless wheels, the
pounding of hooves, the onslaught of red war.

She gasped and steadied. There were no terrible battle-cars.
There was only the sun and the grass, the river, the sky; and the gathered
people of Long Ford, waiting for the priestess to choose a new servant for the
Goddess.

The priestess came down from the stone. Two of her acolytes
bowed before her. One set a shallow bowl in her hands, a bowl as plain as the
earth underfoot. The other poured clear water from a jar as plain as the bowl,
filling it to the brim.

The priestess trod slowly down the line of girls and women.
Her mask revealed no expression. There was no sound. No chanting, no sacred
words. Only the silence.

Her coming was like a fire on the skin, like a drumbeat in
the earth. It was not the same as the dream of war, and yet in its way it was
as terrible. Here was power. Rhian had never known its like.

Never, in the waking world.

She wanted—she felt—she could—

The priestess’ advance slowed. Rhian forgot to breathe. The
earth thrummed beneath her. She saw the water in the bowl, how it stirred and
shimmered. She met the eyes behind the mask.

They were dark. They glittered. They saw her—knew her. Read
her soul. She laid it bare to them. She gave it the dreams, the wind. She gave
it all her secrets that she had kept since she was small. All the
strangenesses. All the things that her kin had taught her to hide. They filled
her as water filled the bowl. They brimmed over as the water surged and
spilled, pouring out at the priestess’ feet.

She turned away, turned her back on Rhian. She walked again
down the line of young women, then paused once more. She poured out what little
water was left in the bowl, a thin stream upon Cara’s elaborately braided head.

Rhian did not remember leaving the field. She did not know
if she walked or ran; if anyone spoke to her, or if she fled in silence. One
moment she was standing in blank astonishment, knowing surely, to the very
bone, that the priestess had betrayed the choosing. Cara had nothing about her
that befit a priestess. She dreamed no dreams. She knew nothing but the world
that simple eyes could see.

There was no one in Dura’s house when she came to it. She took
off her beautiful dress. She put away her ornaments. She put on her plain and
work-scarred trousers, that she had almost outgrown: they strained across her
hips. But they were of good leather, and they were not quite threadbare.

She was not thinking at all. She had had no clear thought
since the priestess turned away from her—deliberately, coldly refused the
Goddess’ own choosing. She gathered certain things from Dura’s house, and
certain others from Bran’s. She made a pack out of them, as a hunter would. She
had her bow, and a filled quiver.

They were celebrating on the field by the river. There was
music, laughter. She fancied she heard Cara’s high sweet giggle.

She turned her back on them, just as the priestess had done
to her. She left them to their falsehood of a choosing.

Emry’s world had always been a bright and splendid place.
He was a prince in Lir. His father was the king, the warleader of the city. His
mother was the Mother, Goddess incarnate. His brothers were tolerable, and some
he even liked. He did not want to kill any of them. The people loved him. And
everyone knew that when the time came, Emry would be king in Lir.

Then came this terrible year. The wasting sickness began to
eat at the Mother from within. A sickness very like it ate at Lir. There was
confusion in the temple, dissension among the warriors. Emry dreamed of war.

Men were not the firstborn of the Goddess, nor had she
blessed them as she had her daughters. And yet Emry dreamed as a woman might,
saw visions as if he had been a priestess in the temple. Had he been born a
daughter, he would have been the Mother’s heir.

But he was a son, and would be king instead. Though king of
what, he had begun to wonder.

In this village among so many, on this journey that his
mother had laid on him with the force of a geas, he watched yet another thread
of the world unravel. First he had seen a young woman’s insolence, then he had
known her prescience: dreaming the war that would come and the terrible engines
it would bring, and making of them a toy for children.

The temple would take her, he thought. Simple rustic she
might be, without great wit or wisdom, but she was as full of the Goddess’
power as a summer cloud with lightnings. She crackled and blazed with it. Maybe
she was the one, the Mother who would be.

He stood at the choosing with the rest of the priestess’
guard. He saw when she came. Her gown was long out of fashion, but the blue on
blue of it caught the deep and dreaming blue of her eyes. Her ornaments were
poor enough, except for the bronze bells in her ears, but she wore them
proudly. She was beautiful. She shone like a pearl in a field of common clay.
Surely even a blind man could see that this one was blessed of the Goddess.

The priestess was worse than blind. She turned away from
that shining splendor, turned her back on the Goddess’ own choosing, and laid
the blessing on a coarse and common creature whose only distinction was the
excess of copper and shells and river pearls that she wore about her person. If
that one was blessed of the Goddess, then Emry had lost all power to see.

The one who should have been chosen was nowhere in evidence.
No one would admit to knowing where she could have gone, or seemed to care.
They were all caught up in celebrating the false chosen.

The priestess, mercifully, was not minded to linger for the
festival. She left an acolyte in the village to look after her new sister and
conduct her to Lir, then took her boat and her escort, though the sun was
already sinking, and sailed away down the river.

Emry was glad enough to leave that village behind, nor did
he object to camping on the riverbank between towns, as they had to do when
darkness caught them. A camp was simple; it was, in its way, a clean thing. And
there were no strangers in it.

The priestess had not spoken a word since before the rite of
choosing. She took no nightmeal, nor did she sit with the rest or share their
wine and ale. She hid herself away in her tent.

In his right mind Emry would never have done what he did
that night. But he had been brooding on the day’s ill fortune until he was lost
to all good sense. He waited till the camp had quieted, till most of the escort
were asleep, all but the sentries and an acolyte or two who had drawn some of
the guards into the bushes. He slipped into the priestess’ tent, unannounced
and uninvited.

She was waiting for him. She sat upright as she did in her
boat, legs folded, hands on knees. A lamp flickered beside her. It smoothed the
lines of her body and masked her face in shadow, so that she was the living
image of the Goddess in the temple.

Emry had no shame of what he was. He was as the Goddess had
made him. And yet in front of this most powerful of women, he was all too
keenly aware of his lesser nature. Heavy bones, heavy limbs, heavy dangling thing
between his thighs. He shuffled. He shambled. His voice was a beast’s growl.