The day was wearing to a close, but Tlachta had not finished with me. For, as she explained, “You have excellent recall and an inquiring mind, and these are both important. But an initiate must also have the potential to learn in another way. It is the druid’s task to see what is hidden, to hear what is unsaid. It is the truth that lies beneath the surface of the world that we seek.”
I knew what she spoke of, knew too, that I had that ability. Whether I would ever be at ease with it was another question.
She must have seen my discomfort. “Will you walk with me?” she asked. “We will go to the tip of the island. These things are easier to speak of there.”
The farther we walked along the shoreline, the more the magic of the island took hold. My slightly disappointing first impression that this long finger of land was an “ordinary” settlement faded as we left first the buildings and then the fields behind. As we walked along the strip of sand that edged the island, the sounds of human life were replaced with birdcalls. The reedy shoreline bustled with waterbirds: plovers, yellowlegs, gray herons and jet-black coots. And with every step, the wild calling in the air grew louder.
When we reached the tip of the island, I caught my breath. Now, I realized, I saw the place of deep mystery that was the Isle of Women. It was not back at the settlement. It was not even on this lonely tip of land, silent and still but for the raucous cries overhead.
Past the reeds, across a narrow channel of still gray water, lay a second island. It spread before us, flat and green, the air above it snowy with untold numbers of wheeling, shrieking terns. They sliced the air above our heads, white and black spears of flight, but always they returned to the far shore.
From the dead center of the island loomed an ancient evergreen tree, massive and black. The trunk of it thrust from the earth like a mountain—it would take three or four people, I guessed, to span its girth—and its bottom branches brushed the ground, nearly as long as the tree was tall.
Tlachta let me gaze at the sight in silence for some time. Then she motioned me to a bench that faced out across the water.
“Do you know what kind of tree that is?”
I knew. The shape suggested it, but I did not guess. I knew.
“It is a yew.”
“The terns nest on that island. They will leave sometime after
Samhain, but always they return in the spring. They are beloved of Mug Ruith, for they are masters of the air and they greet his rising with loud cries and exuberant feats.”
I smiled at the thought, but it was the yew that filled my vision.
“The yew tree has been there for as long as human memory stretches back,” Tlachta said. “It is a tree of sanctuary and renewal, for the living and for the dead. Its roots sink deep, even to the Otherworld, while its branches stretch up to the sun god’s light.”
I had seen others, of course, at sacred places; yews marked springs and groves and graves all over the country. Now I understood why.
“You feel the power of the place, do you not?” she asked.
I nodded without breaking my gaze. The dark tree called to me. It was both frightening and comforting. Don’t ask me how that can be. It is a thing not to be understood until it is experienced.”Yes, I feel it.” My voice was soft as a sigh.
“Tell me, then. Has it ever happened that you felt such a thing before? Known or seen something that others don’t?”
Oh, yes. Only I did not like to speak of most of them. I began with the easiest to tell: the way I had recognized Liban, the woman of the Sidhe, when she came to my father’s side at Samhain, and the time when Fintan’s feather showed me the ships sailing into our bay.
“Cathbad taught you to use a Messenger?”
Her interruption was sharp—sharp enough that I tore my eyes from the island to search her face. Was she angry? There was consternation there, certainly.
“No, Mistress. He only gave Fintan to me for a companion, and bade me care for him. I...” I stopped myself. I had been about to say “I taught myself,” but that did not feel right.
“It was Fintan taught me.” It was as close to the truth as I could get.
“I see.” Tlachta smiled at me. “And I see also why Cathbad thinks you a promising candidate.” Hazel eyes held mine, considering.
“There is more, isn’t there?”
I sighed. In truth, this conversation, though it had sealed my acceptance to the isle, had made me question my fitness for it. I was not sure I wanted to open the door to more visions. I saw no reasonable response but honesty.
“I have seen things, Mistress, that I would rather not see.”
Haltingly, I told her what had happened to me at my coming of age, when I watched my father’s Gae Bolga kill a young man I knew to be my brother. Tlachta’s grave face was still through the telling, and she did not move even when my eyes spilled over with tears at the memory. Only when I fell silent and my breath calmed, did she speak.
“It is difficult when such strong visions come upon a child with no training,” she said. “There is little wonder you found them overwhelming and frightening. Will you trust me when I tell you that with time and study, you will learn to be at ease with this gift? I will not say there will be no horror or pain in it—not so long as pain is a part of life. Did your father not suffer on that day, also, though his vision failed him?”
I let my eyes travel the smooth green body of the island and then up to the wheeling white flecks that danced about it, and I
thought about her words. I did not completely understand them, but I nearly did, and I found it was enough.
“I do trust you,” I said at last. “And I am ready to learn what you have to teach me.”
Besides, I had discovered something about myself, a secret nestled perhaps in the stiff black arms of the yew or chiming softly amidst the bird cries. I had lied to Tlachta—or rather to myself—when I said that I would rather not have my visions. When I looked deep inside and asked would I truly give up the Sight that I shared with Fintan, would I rather see only what everyone saw—the honest answer was no.
I had a hunger for the truth, you see. And the truth does not come without cost.
By midday my friends were gone, and I was alone among strangers.
Geanann left first, and it would not surprise me if he planned it so as not to overshadow my parting from Roisin. He is like that.
I had already chosen what to give Berach and Roisin: a set of matched gold torcs, richer than was really suited to their rank. But they would look splendid on their wedding day, and if they never wore them again they would at least have some treasure that could be traded at need. Geanann was harder. No gift could repay what he had given me.
I said as much as I handed him the enameled cloak pin.
It was too small, I realized in dismay. The rich objects I had reached for at first—jeweled goblets, golden armbands—had all seemed to me to underline the impossible gap between the gift of a life and any mere treasure, but now I was afraid that I would seem mean or ungrateful.
“It is only a token,” I explained, “and if there are gold or gems in my cache that your eye favors, you have only to choose. But this I chose, for it has a special meaning to me. It marks the first time Fintan showed me how to look through his eyes, the day I saw the ships sailing to Baile’s Strand.” And I told him how my father had won that pin from Baire in a game of fidchell the time Baire was camped on our strand, and how he had given it to me—even
though it was sized for a man’s cloak—because it was cunningly fashioned as a raven.
“So,” I concluded, “you could say that Fintan was my first guide along this path. And you were the second.”
I dared look at him then, and all my hesitation fell away when I saw how his face lit up with pleasure at my story.
“It has been an honor to be your guide for this short time,” Geanann told me, and he took out his old pin and replaced it with mine, skewering the raven’s beak through the circle of its body. He stepped forward then, placed his hands on my shoulders and kissed the top of my head in blessing.
“I will check in on you when my travels bring me south again,” he promised. “But now my father awaits my report, and it has been too many months since my master in the healing arts has had sight of me.”
“Will he be angry that you were delayed looking after me?”
He shook his head. “He will be pleased that I have put my training to good use and eager to hear of my first treatment with the poppy.”
And so we parted good friends.
Roisin, though. Here was a thing I had not foreseen: that parting from her would feel like losing the last of my family, and that the loneliness filling me as I watched her ride down the lane would raise, like the cold currents that sweep up from the hidden depths of the sea, all the grief and fear that had gripped me when my mother died.
We clung to each other’s necks and shed tears at our goodbyes, but I hope she did not guess how I had to force myself to let her go.
“Tara is not so far,” I managed at last. “Not for seasoned travelers like us. And I am told my mistress presides over the Samhain rites on a great hill not far from Tara. I won’t lose track of you.”
“You had best not or you will face my wrath, which is a more fearsome thing altogether than any warrior,” she replied, regaining her tart humor even through her tears. I might not have held myself together, without that. Then her face grew earnest. “I am counting on you to give the blessing to our babies.”
And so they were gone, and I could not stay my weeping. But it was not the desolation of death that returned with Roisin’s parting, but only its echo. I spent half the afternoon with Fintan, walking the island’s tip, and Tlachta must have told the others to let me be, for I was not disturbed. And as the turmoil in my heart calmed, the understanding came to me that the web that had brought Roisin and me together was not ruptured, but only expanded. Our paths would intersect again.
Nor was I alone—not for long, not surrounded as I was with women. Some, surely, would in time become my friends. I was ready, now, to meet them.
Life at the Isle of Women was different from anything I had known, but within a few days I was more at home than I had ever been at Emain Macha. My fear—that the close quarters and tight boundaries of the island would be suffocating—proved unfounded.
For one thing, Tlachta ensures that our privacy is respected. Both the work of memorization and the growth of the inner eye require solitude, and despite the intensity of our training I can always find time to be alone. I don’t think I have ever taken a
walk with Fintan that I didn’t pass others—pacing the beach or sitting silently under a tree—but we never speak or disturb each other at such times.
But the other thing, the thing that is harder to explain, is that the island seems larger than it is. Though I rarely leave it, I do not feel confined. Perhaps it is because the island rests so close to the Otherworld that it seems to expand at need and to present new features and vistas even on the most familiar paths. And then of course there is the other island—what I have come to think of as the
real
island. We do not name it, for it is a world unto itself.
When I first came here, there were only two other apprentices in their first year of study. We soon knew each other well, for we spent many hours of every day together. Bronach was the youngest of us, only twelve and by the looks of her not yet a woman. Dark, skinny and silent, she radiated a brooding intensity that was truly a little frightening. I imagined her family sending her here with some relief, not knowing what on earth else to do with such a girl.
And then there was poor Muireann. Or perhaps I should not say poor, for she seems happy enough now. She was sixteen when I arrived and had already been at the island for two years. She came seeking refuge from a vicious father, and at first helped in the kitchen and with the herb preparation. And from there, I suppose, it was not a far jump to wishing she might take up the training herself. It was apparent to me within weeks, though, that Muireann could not keep up. As the moons waxed and waned, she fell farther and farther behind. Her pretty face became drawn, and at night I sometimes heard her weeping quietly in the dark. Before it came time for her to take the formal vows that transform an
initiate to a full apprentice, Muireann went to Tlachta and asked to be released from her training. She has not left us, though. She works still with the herbals, and has also begun helping with the trading and provisioning. Perhaps she will spend her life here; for though she is golden-haired and plump-cheeked, she says she has no wish for any husband of her own.
There was a gap of several years to the next newest apprentices, a group of about ten who were all halfway or better to earning the white robe that marks a first-degree druid. Another four or five were, like Geanann, working toward their second degree, using the isle as a home base but leaving freely to lend their services or to study with a master adept in their specialization. It takes fourteen years of study to attain the feathered robe, and along with it the right to perform any of the druids’ offices, save only taking apprentices of their own, acting as chief druid to a king, or performing the Bull Feast to choose a high king. These only the tonsured masters may undertake.
Do you imagine me reading omens into bird flights, inducing visions and conducting secret, sacred rites? Then I will tell you now—the first year of a druid’s apprenticeship is a dull, never-ending stream of straight memorization, punctuated with menial physical tasks like grinding herbs, preparing and laying wood for ceremonial fires and cleaning away the smelly remains from sacrifices or divination. There is little of the discussion and explanation I anticipated, not even as much as in Cathbad’s classes, and virtually none of the druid’s secret knowledge. And the work is relentless.
Day after day, we were simply, ruthlessly, stuffed with words— verse after verse of them, history upon history, classifications,
genealogies, impenetrable triads, medicinal recipes, legal tracts. I was kept awake at night by the gibbering fragments of lists and lore chasing about in my head, and when at last I slept, my dreams more often than not trapped me in failed recitations and lectures spoken in some incomprehensible tongue.