Caillean handed the child to Eilan, bent over the other woman, murmuring softly.
“There, now, it’s no use weeping. You have two fine children with their lives ahead of them. You must gather your strength, Mairi, to get them to safety before the Scotti come again!”
Main’s eyes flew open and she reached out wildly. Eilan, shaken between tears and laughter, set the baby in her arms. Caillean had been right. Once Mairi was done weeping, she would go on living for her children. Caillean had experience of women’s hearts.
A little while later, while Mairi still slept, exhausted with weeping, Eilan heard a horse’s hoofs sloshing in the mud left by the storm. They came to a halt outside. The raiders! Eilan thought wildly. But no attacker would strike so slowly and heavily upon the door. Her heart beating like a war drum, Eilan drew the bar. When she peered out, she saw her father there.
At the moment she could think only of Rhodri. Had her father come to bring Mairi the news? The young man had been one of their best warriors, living like a son of the house and treating her like a sister even before she was one. Now that Mairi knew about her loss, Eilan too could grieve.
She pulled open the door. Bendeigid stumbled as he entered, as if the ride had wearied him or he had suddenly become old. Then she felt the hardness of his hands closing on her shoulders. For a long moment he stood looking at her.
“Caillean has just told Mairi about Rhodri,” she said in a low voice. “Did you know?”
“I knew,” her father said with great bitterness. “I hoped that the word that had come to me was not true. A curse will certainly light on all Romans for that deed. Now do you see, Eilan, why I would not allow you to marry into that accursed people?” He let go of her and dropped down upon the settle by the fire.
Gaius’s people might be guilty of such evil, but she did not believe that Gaius himself would have done it. But looking into her father’s harsh face, she held her tongue.
“But that is not the worst evil we have to mourn.” Bendeigid’s face contorted suddenly, and Eilan felt the first twinge of real fear. “I do not know how to say it, Eilan.”
“It may be that I already know,” Caillean spoke behind them. “I am sometimes foresighted, and the night before I left the Forest House I dreamed I saw a house lying in ashes, and knew it for yours. But then I found Eilan here and thought I must have been
mistaken. Last night we had a visit from a band of raiders. I know the size of pack such wolves run in – and I feared. Did the main body turn south, then, to you?”
“A band came here?” he croaked, turning to stare at her.
“Only a few of them, and I managed to frighten them off.”
“Then I have you to thank that I have children yet alive!”
Eilan needed no foresight to understand his words, but what she was hearing was too horrible to believe. She felt the color draining from her face. “Father —”
“Child, child, how can I tell you? Word came that a mixed band of raiders were attacking Conmor’s steading. I took my men to go to his aid. But there were more of them than we dreamed could come in such weather. While we were gone —”
“Are Mother and Senara dead then?” Her voice cracked, and Mairi, rousing, pushed back the bedcurtains and stood unsteadily, staring. Caillean went to her and the Druid continued.
“I dare to hope so.” His face contorted with pain. “For the alternative, to be carried off as slaves beyond the sea, is worse still. To think that either might live in such dishonor —”
“Would you rather see them dead than alive in slavery?” Caillean asked in a low, tense voice.
“I would that,” Bendeigid exclaimed fiercely. “Better a quick death, even in the flames, and a welcome in the Otherworld, than life with the memory of all our people’s deaths to haunt them, as I must live now. The gods know those monsters would have paid in blood for their deaths, and mine, if I had only been there!”