“Did I really do that?”
“You did,” Caillean said. The coal had reached a cloth lying in the hearth, which began to smolder. A strong stink of burning cloth rose suddenly from the singed edges as Caillean picked it up and blew it out.
Eilan stared at her in astonishment. “How did you know that in another moment it was going to burn?”
Caillean said, “I could feel you beginning to think and wonder -and doubt. Doubt is the enemy of magic. We are taught to do things like this to astonish the common people with wonders and marvels, or to guard ourselves in danger. But you must learn,” she cautioned, “that it is not right to do miracles for the sake of merely astonishing the once-born. Even to preserve yourself against danger, you must be wary of doing what may seem miracles. It may not have been altogether wise to use it that night in Main’s house; but done is done. Now that you know it is possible, you shall learn when it is right to use such things, and when it is not.”
As the year’s passage was marked by the festivals, the girls received not only the lore of the gods each festival honored but the meaning behind the tales, many of which, true in symbol, were not true in fact. They argued about the virginity of the goddess Arianrhod, and the fate of the bright son she so unwillingly bore; they analyzed the transformations of Gwion who tasted the brew in the cauldron of wisdom. They learned the secret lore of the Sacred King and the Lady of Sovereignty. And in the darkest days of winter, they contemplated the mysteries of the shadowy goddesses whose bloody faces and withered flesh were the embodiment of men’s fears.
“But why do men fear old women?” Eilidh asked. “They do not feel that way about old men!”
“The old man becomes a sage, something for a man to aspire to,” Caillean told them. “They fear the hag because she is beyond their power. With the coming of her moonblood a girl becomes a woman. She needs a man to become a mother, and a mother needs a man to protect her children. But the old woman knows all the secrets of birth and death; she has rebirthed herself and needs nothing. So of course the man, who knows only the first change that brings him to manhood, is afraid.”
Lhiannon’s name was sacred even when the younger girls giggled about their elders late at night in the Hall of Maidens, but Eilan could not help wondering if the High Priestess had gone through the rebirth Caillean had described. Old as she was, one could not imagine that any human grief or passion had ever touched her. She had lain with no man, borne no child; she drifted through the Forest House in a cloud of lavender scent and trailing draperies, her smile sweet and vague and distant as if she moved through her own private reality.
And yet Caillean loved her. Eilan could not allow herself to forget that the older priestess, with whom that night of Mairi’s childbirth had given her so deep a bond, saw something in the High Priestess that she herself had not seen; but she would take it on faith that it was there.
When they began to teach the girls the disciplines that would give them access to the inner planes, Eilan applied herself with diligence. Such things — dreams and intuitions — had always come to her easily and without warning. Now she learned to bring the visions at will, and when it was necessary, to wall them away.
She learned the work of seeing visions in a bowl of water and the use of spells for far-seeing. One of the first things she saw through her scrying was the battle with the raiders who had destroyed her home.
“A blessing on the Lady of Vernemeton, if it is she who has sent this wind!” said Cynric, sniffing the mist that was blowing past him, heavy with the scent of the sea.
“She was as good as her word,” answered Bendeigid beside him. “Since the third day after they burned my hall this wind has blown. When the scattered bands came back to load their curraghs with their spoils they found the breeze dead against them.” He grinned mirthlessly. “We shall pin them between the strand and the sea!”