Lhiannon took the cloak from the girl’s shoulders and her attendants helped her to fasten it again. Then she moved away from them, towards the festival.
Eilan’s eyes were still fixed on her. “The choice of the Goddess . . .you are to be one of them . . .What is the matter with you?” She came back to herself and saw that Dieda’s face was deathly white, her hands locked together.
Dieda shook her head, shivering, “Why couldn’t I speak? Why couldn’t I tell her? I cannot go to the Forest House – I am pledged to Cynric!”
“But you aren’t not yet, not formally,” said Eilan, still dazzled by what she had seen. “Private promises aren’t binding, and nothing has gone so far that it cannot be undone. I should think that anyone would rather be a priestess than marry my brother —”
“You should think-” said Dieda furiously. “Yes, you really should think, sometime – it would be a new experience for you, I dare say —” She broke off in something like despair. “You’re such a child, Eilan!”
Eilan stared at her, realizing that the other girl did not share her excitement. “Dieda, are you saying that you don’t want to be a priestess?”
“What a pity her choice did not fall upon you,” said Dieda helplessly. “Maybe we should say it was you. Maybe, like Father, she mistook us. Maybe it was really you she meant —”
“But that would be impiety, if the Goddess has chosen you,” Eilan protested.
“What am I going to say to Cynric? What is there that I can say to him?” Her control broke and she began to laugh helplessly.
“Dieda,” Eilan put her arm around the other girl, “can’t you speak to your father? Tell him that you don’t want this? If it were me, I should be happy, but if you hate the idea —”
Numbly, choked with misery, Dieda said, “I dare not. Father would never understand, nor cross the High Priestess. There is something —” In a voice which hardly reached her kinswoman’s ears, she said, “Father is so much Lhiannon’s friend – it’s almost as if he were her lover —”
Scandalized, Eilan turned her eyes upon the other girl. “How can you say that? She is a priestess!”
“I don’t mean they’ve done anything wrong, but he has known her so long. He seems at times to care more about her than anyone alive — surely more than any of us girls!”
“Take care how you say such things,” Eilan warned, her face flushing. “Someone else might hear who would understand you no better than I did.”
Dieda said dismally, “Oh, what does it matter? I wish I were dead!”
Eilan did not know what to say to comfort her. She was silent, clinging to the other girl’s hand. She could not understand how Dieda might wish to refuse this honor. And how happy it would make Rheis, that her youngest sister should be chosen.
Bendeigid too would be pleased; Dieda was like another daughter to him and he had always been fond of his wife’s little sister. Eilan tried to forget her own disappointment.
Gaius and Cynric moved through the holiday crowd, pausing from time to time to comment on the points of some pony, then moving on. After a time Cynric asked, “Is it true then, friend, that you know nothing of what befell on the Isle of Mona? I had thought -if you lived near Deva —”
“I have never heard the story,” Gaius said. “I’m from the country of the Silures, remember, away to the south.” And knowing that my mother was married to a Roman officer, he thought then, it would have taken a braver man than most to tell me. “Is it some well-known tale?” he said aloud. “You said that the Druid Ardanos could sing it.”
“Hear it then, and wonder no more why I have little that is good to say of the Romans,” said Cynric angrily. “There was – in the days before the Romans came – a sacred enclosure of women where now is nothing but a polluted pool. One day the Legions came – and did what they always do; cut down the grove and plundered its treasures, murdered such Druids as contested with them, and raped all the women – from the oldest priestess to the youngest novice. Some were near to grandmothers in age, some no more than little girls of nine or ten, but that did not matter to them!”