“Eilan, don’t go back.” Gaius raised himself on one elbow to look down at her. “I am afraid for you.”
“I am the Arch-Druid’s granddaughter; what do you suppose they would do to me?” she replied.
Her father had once said he would kill her with his own hands if she allowed what Gaius had just done, but this was not the moment to mention that. She was a woman now, and a priestess sworn, accountable only to her sisters and the gods.
“If I were there to protect you, it wouldn’t matter what they tried,” he said darkly.
“And would I be so safe if we ran away? Where could we go? The wild tribes of the North might accept me, but you would be in danger, and where else could we run beyond the reach of Rome? You are a soldier, Gaius, as bound by oaths as I. I broke one vow to fulfill a greater one, but that does not release me. I still belong to the Goddess, and must trust her to take care of me . . .”
“That’s more than I can do —” he said then, rubbing his eyes.
“Nonsense. If you go back on active service you will certainly be in greater danger than I.” Eilan clung to him once more at the thought of cold iron piercing the heart that now beat against her own, and as he kissed her again, all thoughts of the future were forgotten. For a little while.
Fifteen
Lying with a man had not, despite the whispered speculations Eilan remembered from the House of Maidens, destroyed her magic. At least the shielding spell she murmured as she eased through the kitchen gate and along the path to the Hall of the Priestesses appeared to prevent the few people who were about from noticing her as she passed.
In her own room she slid out of her gown and washed herself, hiding her stained shift until she should have time to soak the smear of maiden blood away. That done, she put on her night-garment and built up the fire, realizing that she was half frozen with cold, and famished. It was past the hour of the sunset meal. She ought to go to the kitchens and find herself something to eat; but she needed time to think about what had happened to her and Gaius. Or perhaps, she thought with unaccustomed self-mockery, she simply wished to close her eyes and relive their lovemaking again.
She might have expected that Gaius would be eager, but not that he would be so tender, holding back until he quivered like a drawn bow lest he go too fast and hurt her. But virgin though her body might be, the pleasure that pulsed through her had more than matched his. And in the final moments, when the ecstasy became almost too great for mortal endurance, it had seemed to her that once more it was the Goddess who encompassed her and received the gift of the God.
She sighed, noting the unaccustomed soreness and the sweet lassitude that weighted her limbs. Will the Goddess strike me dead for breaking my oath, she wondered, or will my punishment be to weep in the night, remembering what I will never have again? Isn’t that better than never having known it at all? She pitied Caillean, scarred since childhood from her only experience of what men call love.
As day followed day, a certain equilibrium began to assert itself. Eilan attended Lhiannon at the rite of the full moon, and no lightning struck. The advanced training that followed initiation continued, both in skills and in lore, and as the days grew longer, they met with the older priestesses when weather permitted in one of the gardens or in the holy grove.
There were thirteen sacred oak trees, twelve in a circle, and the oldest, in the center, shading the stone altar. To Eilan, looking up at them, it seemed that even in the drowsy warmth of afternoon the trees still held something of the magic with which the moon had vested them a few nights before. Caillean’s voice receded to a background murmur as Eilan gazed upward. Surely the light that glowed in their leaves was more than sunshine. All her senses seemed heightened since Beltane.