Eilan burned and was not consumed, and it seemed to her that the voice she had heard sang in tones of flame —
“The enemy you would conquer, you must love . . .The law you would fulfill, you must defy . . .The thing that you would keep, you must now
give . . .
Thus will you have the victory . . .Daughter of Druids, through you the Dragon will
be reborn.”
Her awareness flared with images of blood and splendor, battles and stone cities and a green tor above an inland sea, fire and sword and finally a fair-haired man with Gaius’s eyes who rode to battle with the image of the Lady on his shield.
“I will!” came her reply. “But do not leave me alone—”
“Daughter, I am always here” came the reply. “Thou art Mine, from age to age, while Time endures.”
She knew that she had heard those words before, that this was only the renewing of an ancient bond, but the love that lapped her was becoming a sea in which she drowned, a light in which all awareness was consumed.
Eilan’s next conscious thought was of floating in cool water. She sensed dark trees around her, and moonlight, and in the next moment many hands had hold of her and were lifting her to the shore. She blinked in amazement as she realized that she was lying beside the bathing pool in the stream below the House of Maidens.
Eilan tried to speak and found she could not. She realized then that what had happened to her was a mystery too deep for telling, even here. And yet she wondered that they could not see it, for the Divine Heat still blazed within her so that her skin dried as soon as they helped her rise from the pool. In silence the other women clad her in a robe of new linen dyed the deep blue that the consecrated priestesses wore.
“You have journeyed between the worlds; you have seen the light that is without shadow; you have been purified . . .” said a voice Eilan recognized as Caillean’s. She looked up, but it was the woman she had seen on the parapet in her vision who seemed to be standing there. “Daughter of the Goddess, arise, that your sisters may welcome you —”
The priestesses helped her to her feet and fell in behind her as she followed Caillean along the path that led to the Sacred Grove.
By the light of the torches that flickered among the trees Eilan saw that Lhiannon was waiting, attended by Eilidh. Beside her stood Dieda, her eyes as huge and dazzled as Eilan knew her own must be, and her hair clinging to her brow in damp tendrils. What, Eilan wondered, happened to her? Their eyes met, and all the barriers that the past years had built between them vanished; they remembered only that they were sisters now.
I am glad that we will be making our vows together . . .she thought. The testing was always the same, but each priestess received the vision the gods willed. Dieda, she supposed, would have found music. She looked at the other girl, and it seemed to her that the Goddess smiled back at her from Dieda’s eyes.
Eilan looked around her and saw that they were all here — Miellyn and Eilidh and the others who had taught her for the past three years. But in each woman’s face she saw a reflection of the light of the Otherworld, and in some of them, something more, a hint of faces she had seen in her visions, constantly changing and yet always the same.
Why do men fear death when we will live again? Eilan wondered then. The Druids taught that the soul could take many forms through the circling years, and she had always thought she believed it, but now she knew that it was true.
At last she understood Caillean’s serenity, and the holiness that despite her fragility and fallibility, she sensed in Lhiannon. They too had been where she had gone, and no mortal accidents could change the truth of it.
She heard the words of the ceremony as if in a dream, and made her vows without hesitation, for the most important promise, the one that included and commanded all others, had already been made to the Goddess in the Otherworld. With the blood still singing in her veins, and the light of the Lady in her eyes, she scarcely felt the prick of the thorn as the blue crescent that proclaimed her priestess was drawn between her brows.