White Mare's Daughter Read online

  They were all sacred while they lived in the shrine. No hunter might follow them there, no cord or cage compel them. This was their free place, their goddess’ sanctuary. Therefore she was called the Lady of the Birds.

  Tilia told all these things to Catin, aware that the others listened, the sisters and brothers, even the Mother of Larchwood once she had paid tribute at the Lady’s altar. “I suppose,” Tilia said, “that you worship the Lady of the Wood, since you live so close to it.”

  “The Lady of Wood and Water,” one said, but not Catin. It was one of the sisters, a tall gawky child with a bold manner and a direct stare. “Yes, we worship her, but above all we give our hearts to the Lady of the Deer.”

  “Aren’t they all one?” said Tilia.

  “One may hope so,” the girl from Larchwood said.

  Her Mother spoke with ponderous serenity, in the voice that Mothers could put on with the power of their office. “We have walked far today,” she said, “and rested seldom. It would be great pleasure to sit in a place both cool and welcoming, and listen to the songs of the birds.”

  The Mother of Three Birds betrayed no sign of annoyance at what was almost an insult to her hospitality. She simply said, “Ah, sister; so you have heard of the Lady’s bower. Come. All has been made ready for your comfort.”

  oOo

  The Lady’s bower was her garden, a place of water and of greenery set beside her shrine. There were trees there, tall and rich with shade, trees so old that they were more than holy.

  Once, Tilia had heard, they had been worshipped as goddesses themselves, till the Lady came to teach the truth. They were still much revered, great-trunked broad-crowned oaks standing in their circle, and in the center, in the sunny space, the dance of a stream and the Lady’s pool, and a riot of flowers.

  There the Mother’s acolytes had spread the feast of welcome. By ancient custom they had prepared no flesh of beast or bird, but of bread and cheese and fruits of the earth, sweet honey and the nectar of flowers, herbs and grains and green things, there was enough and more to sate the most avid appetite.

  Tilia forbore to regret the lack of coarser dishes, and the absence of men, too. This was a women’s feast. Men were not allowed in this place, not even to serve the feasters. Any man who dared it would have died.

  It was very good, she thought, to be a woman.

  oOo

  There were times, Danu reflected, when it was a great burden to be a man. The women’s feast was theirs to trouble with, and he was glad of it, but he had had to see it prepared, and when the remains came back, they were his to dispose of.

  If such things had mattered greatly, he would have been glad that he had taken that moment to see the procession pass; he had had no opportunity since, to be sure, to look on the Mother’s guests. He was immersed in kitchen duties when they came in from the feast, nor could he escape till long after they had been shown to their beds.

  It was nothing, he told himself. There were no great marvels among them. They were strangers, and from farther away than any he had seen before, and they spoke somewhat oddly, with a hint of a burr; but they were women and men like any in Three Birds.

  He did not know why he should have expected anything extraordinary. A Mother might go on pilgrimage, might she not? Or she might choose to visit a sister, if that sister happened to be Mother to a great people. Mothers did such things. It was expected of them.

  Nevertheless he wished he could have been a woman, to sit at the feast in the grove where he was not allowed to go, and ask these strangers why they had come. The few men who had come with them, sons and servants, were taciturn, and not inclined to conversation. They were a dour lot; the women, too, from what the servants and the acolytes said.

  “As if they travel in the shadow of the Wood,” said Riki, who was given to fancies.

  Her sister acolytes hushed her, but Danu reckoned hers as good a guess as any.

  oOo

  Danu woke the next morning to two voices, two Mothers luring the sun from its lair. He had not heard such a thing before, a mingled beauty, and perhaps a greater richness to the day, for having been called forth by so much power.

  This morning the sun was wan, veiled in cloud. The air bore a scent of rain. Well for the household that yesterday had been the washing day. Today should have been a day for scouring out the house, but the guests needed looking after, feeding and plying with warmed wine and honeyed milk. The Mothers lingered long in the shrine, sharing such wisdom as Mothers shared. Their daughters and sons and servants mingled uneasily in a house grown small in the embrace of the rain.

  When guests were congenial the house would ring with laughter. When they were dour as these were, uneasiness grew to annoyance, and then to barbed silence. Tilia had taken a clear dislike to the stranger Catin, and was not trying overly hard to hide it.

  She caught Danu in the weaving room where he had sought refuge, threading a loom. It was niggling, eye-wearing work by the light of a lamp-cluster and such dim daylight as window and doorway let in. She blocked much of that, so that he had to stop, squinting up at the shadow of her.

  Tilia never wasted time in preliminaries. “Come out of here,” she said, “and rescue me. I can’t get a word from her, not even yes or no. You’re much more charming than I am, and prettier, too. See if you can’t get her to talk.”

  Danu did not move. “Why? What do you want her to say?”

  “Anything,” said Tilia. “She’s not mute, I heard her mutter something to one of her sisters—criticizing my manners, I don’t doubt. Do you think she’s annoyed because we didn’t offer her the pick of our men to keep her warm last night?”

  “It was a warm night,” Danu said.

  Tilia stamped her foot. “Oh, you! Come out here and stop being contrary. I’m at wits’ end.”

  “You are not,” said Danu, but he rose stiffly, stretching the kinks out of his back. “You want me to do your duty for you. Is she as unpleasant as that?”

  “She’s not unpleasant. She’s not anything, that I can tell. None of them is. You’d think they were traveling to a funeral, they’re so sour in the face.”

  Danu sighed. “Someday you’re going to have to learn to be charming yourself, and stop expecting me to do it for you.”

  “Why? Because you’ll run off with Chana and be a trader?”

  “No,” said Danu. “Because I’ll run off with this Catin and never see Three Birds again.”

  “She’s not good enough for you, either,” Tilia said. She clasped him by the hand and pulled him out into the soft drizzle of rain. “I’m going to find you someone nearby, with pleasant manners and some small acquaintance with laughter. But until I do, you can charm Catin into something resembling a smile.”

  “What will you give me if I do that?”

  Her eyes narrowed. He smiled sweetly. She hissed at him, but she said, “My necklace with the blue beads.”

  “Oh, you hold me cheap! Make it your golden armlet and I’ll do it.”

  “I can’t do that,” she said. “It’s gold.”

  “So,” said Danu, slipping free of her grip and turning back toward the loom.

  She sprang after him and spun him about. “What will Mother say if she sees you wearing her gift to me?”

  “She’ll know you bribed me again,” Danu said calmly. “She won’t say a word. She never does.”

  “All right, then,” Tilia said. “You can have it. But not till you’ve done what I ask.”

  “Now,” he said, and held her glare until she gave way.

  She slapped the armlet into his hand with stinging force. “Now do it!”

  He took his time in putting on the armlet, turning it to admire its golden gleam, stroking the richness of its surface. A pattern of spirals wound along it, the Lady’s roads weaving one into the next. His fingers loved the feel of it.

  Just before Tilia would have struck him to make him move, he sauntered past her into the rain. The armlet was like a cool hand clasping his
wrist.

  It held him to a promise. Not one he hungered greatly to fulfill, but word once given was sacred. The Lady heard it, and remembered; and if one chose to forget, she well might choose to punish.

  10

  Catin, who would be Mother of Larchwood, occupied herself in this strange place and on this day of rain by sitting in a corner of the gathering-room while her sisters chattered among themselves. The names of their gossip meant nothing to the sisters and acolytes of Three Birds, but scandals were much the same everywhere.

  If not a congenial gathering, it had become a moderately friendly one. There was wine and honey mead to help it, and bread and sweet cakes at Danu’s order. The menservants knew what else they should do, the courtesy of their city to guests; and not an unpleasant one, either.

  Danu brought cakes and mead to Catin. She seemed wrapped in herself, rocking slightly, eyes fixed on nothing. She had the look of one who dreamed dreams, but all those dreams were ill.

  He knelt in front of her and poured a cup of mead, then lifted the hand that lay slack in her lap and wrapped her fingers round the cup. He held them there, cold and thin as they were, until a semblance of life came back into her eyes.

  She looked at him as if she had never seen him before. Perhaps, at that, she had not.

  He could not tell what she thought of him. Mostly women’s eyes lit at sight of his face. He was beautiful, they said. He supposed that he was, since they all agreed on it.

  Her eyes blinked. “Here,” he said in the voice he used with animals and children. “This is honey mead, warmed over the fire. Drink. It will sweeten your spirit.”

  She drank as if he had given her no choice, a sip first, then rapid swallows, draining the cup.

  He smiled. “More?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  She drank the second cup more slowly, holding it in both hands, not pausing or lowering it till it too was empty. She did not surrender it to him to be filled again.

  He offered her the basket of cakes. She ate two as she had drunk: the first in a single bite, the second less swiftly but steadily. Again she did not wish a third.

  Tilia had had the right of it. This Catin was a dull creature, no life in her. In Three Birds, even if she was the eldest daughter of the Mother, she would have been passed over as heir.

  Larchwood was not lacking daughters with wit and intelligence. One of them had taken Beki’s hand and led him away. That was an interesting choice. Beki was neither the youngest nor the prettiest of the menservants, but he was known to be a wise and careful lover.

  Catin’s sisters were lively enough with wine and mead in them, though they laughed less often than the women of Three Birds. Catin seemed to gain no benefit from the mead.

  Danu did a thing he might never have done if Tilia’s wishing had not compelled him. He did a bold thing, a thing a respectable man might shrink from doing. He took Catin’s hand and met her eyes, and said, “Come with me.”

  She did not respond at once. He held his breath, braced to be struck, cursed, flung away for his presumption.

  She sighed a little, just enough to hear, and rose. It looked, perhaps, as if she led, and not the opposite.

  If it had not been raining they could have gone to one of the gardens or the bowers that were blessed by such things. As it was, with the house so full, there seemed no better place than Danu’s own cell of a room. It had a window, which he opened to the rain, and a lamp-cluster which he had had the foresight to light before he fetched the cakes and mead for Catin.

  There was nothing particularly beautiful about the room, though the bed’s coverlet was well woven, and there was a rug on the floor. The lamps were plain, without adornment. The chest of his belongings was carved with the Lady’s spirals and a hatching like the feathers on a bird’s wing.

  Catin seemed barely to see it, as she had barely seen Danu until he gave her no choice but to see him. She sank to the bed as if her knees had failed her. He began to wonder if she was one of the Lady’s children, so ridden with dreams and sendings that nothing in the world of flesh was real to her.

  He knelt at her feet, carefully, and took her hands in his. “You dream dreams,” he said. The Lady set the words in him; he felt her, a presence so strong that his soul reeled. But she held him steady, and let him meet the eyes that raised to him, startled, coming awake again and fully. Catin was no dull creature then, nor ill to look at, either.

  “You see,” Catin said. “You can see.”

  “She lets me see,” said Danu.

  “I do,” said Catin. “I dream . . .” She shivered. She reached for him, drawing in his warmth, taking him as a woman should take a man.

  He was glad to wrap arms about her, to give her what she was seeking. Warmth he had, of his own and of the Lady’s giving. He was not the lover that Beki was, nor had he Kosti’s bull-strength, but such as he was, he gave to her.

  She took it as if she had been starving. She did not want gentleness, or the subtle turns of the Lady’s dance. She wanted swift passion, white heat, and rhythm so rapid that she ran him out of breath; nor would she let him stop, only slow a little, till he could breathe again.

  He had never run so in a woman’s arms. He had not known he could.

  Her grip on him tightened suddenly. She rocked and spasmed, locked against him. Just when he must breathe, must break free, she fell back.

  He gulped air. His sight had begun to go dark.

  Light came back, too bright almost to bear. He was in her still, though she lay limp, unmoving. He could not move himself, to finish it. His will was lost somewhere, perhaps in her eyes.

  She stirred. He slipped out of her, limp, unsatisfied. She drew into a knot and began, piteously and horribly, to weep.

  Danu was too numb to be dismayed. He gathered her into his arms as if she had been one of the children, and held her until she quieted.

  Danu had never danced so odd a dance with a woman before. Nor had he known so odd a woman.

  When Catin had done weeping, she did not pull away as another woman might, or flay him with embarrassment or injured pride. She looked up into his face from the circle of his arms. Her eyes were wide and dark and very calm.

  “I hope,” she said, “that the women of Three Birds know what they have in you.”

  He blinked. That was not what he had expected, either. “Are you mad?” he asked her. He meant it as a question to be answered.

  She took it as he had intended. “I don’t know that I am,” she said. “The Lady’s hand has been heavy on me. You . . . I see that she loves you.”

  “I’m not a woman,” he said.

  “Is that what they teach here?” she asked.

  “What, that woman is the Lady’s first and best creation? Isn’t that truth?”

  “No,” she said. “The way you say it—as if you were something lesser. As if she could never love the likes of you.”

  “I’m not—” He stopped in confusion. “I don’t understand you.”

  She smiled. It was a dazzling smile, astonishing, wonderful—terrible. “You don’t need to understand. Come here.”

  When a woman spoke so, a man had no choice but to obey.

  She had exhausted him short of the finish, and now she asked him to rouse again. No man was strong enough for that.

  She made him so. This time she took him with both power and gentleness, soft as water, inexorable as the river wearing away stone.

  She did nothing for herself. She roused him again, cradled him inside her, brought him the gift that her desperation had denied him. It was quick; it took him by surprise. He cried out.

  She held him until the gift was all given, the song all sung. He did not weep as she had. He was too astonished.

  He must look a perfect fool. She laughed at him, but gently, too light to wound. “I owed you that,” she said, “after what you had done for me.”

  “I will never understand you,” Danu said.

  She shook her head, but this time she did not r
espond.

  She sat up. Her hair had fallen out of its braids. Her face was vivid, no dullness in it. She was staring at him, so hard that he blushed and tried to turn away, but she would not let him. “You dream, too,” she said.

  “No,” he said. He meant it; but something caught his throat. He had forgotten—he had willed to forget—

  It came back in a black flood, memory that he had buried deep, a dream of fire and shouting, blinding fear, and the terrible beauty of blood.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. You see. You know.”

  “I don’t know anything!”

  Danu pressed his hand to his mouth. He did know—he did not want to, but he did. He knew what she knew.

  “What are we seeing?” he demanded of her. “What has the Lady given us?”

  “Fear,” she said. She did not, in spite of that, sound afraid. “Something is coming. It comes from the east, from the rising sun. It is like a flood, but a flood of fire.”

  His belly knotted. “Fire in the wood? But that could never come as far as Three Birds. Even Larchwood might escape it in such a year as this, with the rain coming so often.”

  “We thought so, too,” she said. “But the dreams have never stopped. They’ve only grown stronger. Something comes. I think . . . did you hear the tale people are telling? Of the stranger who came through the wood, and the beasts he brought with him?”

  Danu stiffened. What? Was he never to be free of this thing? “You saw him? You saw his beasts?”

  She nodded. “He came to Running Waters, and its Mother sent to ours, because she’s reckoned wise. She sent me to see what it was that so troubled her sister.”

  “They were real? They weren’t deer, or ghosts, or shadows?”

  “They were as solid as you beside me,” she said, resting her hand on his shoulder as if to make sure of it. “I’ve never seen a creature quite like them. They’re a little like cattle for size, but like deer for grace, a little. Their hooves are round, and not divided. Their eyes . . . they aren’t quiet, as cattle are, or placid like sheep. They think. They know when a person is looking at them.”

  Danu frowned, listening to her. It made no sense, and yet in a strange way it did. He could not see the beasts, but he could feel them. They were caught in the fire somehow, in the memory of his dream. “Horses,” he said. “They are called horses.”