The new moon was already high in the sunset sky, adding a silver gleam to the opalescent waters of the Sacred Pool. The salmon had come when summoned, and taken the cake Gawen offered almost from the boy’s hand. Eilan waited until she could hear his prattling die away into the silence of the evening, then drew her veil over her face and took the path up to the shrine they had built around the spring that fed the pool.
Her maidens thought it a great grace in their High Priestess to take her turn to minister to those who came to the Forest House for counsel. And often enough, that was all that Eilan did, serving as a sympathetic ear for the troubled, or referring those with more tangible problems to one of the spell-women or herbalists. But since learning of Cynric’s plans for insurrection, she climbed this path with a little tremor, dreading those nights when the one who waited would whisper of ravens and rebellion.
It was cool in the shrine; Eilan pulled her mantle more closely around her, letting the murmur of running water soothe her. The water trickled from a fissure in the rock with a leaden figure of the Lady set into a niche above it, and splashed into the channel that led to the drinking well and the Sacred Pool.
Source of life . . .she prayed, bending to cup some of the icy water in her hand and touch it to lips and brow. Sacred water, forever upwelling, fill me with your serenity. Then she lit the lamp below the image, and settled herself to wait.
The moon was high in the sky when she heard the dragging footsteps of someone who was either ill or exhausted forcing himself up the path. Her throat tightened as the dark figure appeared in the doorway. It was a man, wrapped in a coarse sagum that might belong to any farmer, but below the cloak old blood stained his trews. When he saw her, some of the tension went out of him in a long sigh.
“Rest, drink, receive the Lady’s peace . . .” she murmured. He dropped to his knees and scooped water from the channel, visibly struggling for control.
“I have been fighting . . .the ravens flew over the battlefield,” he whispered, looking up at her.
“Ravens fly at midnight as well,” she answered. “What have you to say to me?”
“The rising . . .was set for midsummer. Red-cloaks found out about it somehow, attacked us —” He passed his hand over his eyes. “Night before last.”
“Where is Cynric?” she asked, her voice low and quick. Was her foster brother still among the living? “What does he want from us here?”
The man shrugged hopelessly. “Cynric? On the run, probably. There may be more like me coming, needing a place to lick their wounds.”
Eilan nodded. “Behind our kitchens a path goes off into the forest. It leads to a hut our women use sometimes for meditation. Go now. You can sleep there, and someone will come with food.” His shoulders sagged, and she wondered if he would have the strength to get that far.
“Blessed be the Lady,” he murmured, “and a blessing on you, for helping me.” He heaved himself to his feet, saluted the image, and then, more silently than she would have thought possible, was gone.
But Eilan sat for a long time after he had left her, listening to the plash of the water and watching the hypnotic flicker of lamplight on the wall.
Goddess, she prayed, have pity on all fugitives; have pity on us all! In a month it will be Midsummer; Ardanos will want me to tell the people to accept this latest blow, and my father will want them to rise and avenge the Ravens in blood and fire. What should I say to them? How can we bring peace to this land?
She waited for what seemed a long time, but the only vision that came to her was that of water continually welling forth from the rock and running away down the hill.
Gaius sat writing in his quarters in the fort at Colonia Agrippensis, listening to the rain. He supposed that Germania Inferior was not really wetter than Britannia, but it had been a rainy spring. Sometimes the two years he had been gone, first in the lands north and west of Italia and now here, where the gorge of the Rhenus ended and it began its meanderings through flat marshes towards the northern sea, seemed only weeks. But today it felt to him as if he had been away from home for centuries.