“I must,” he agreed. At that moment Lhiannon stirred; one of the women bent over and spoke soothingly to her, and hearing those low tones, it finally reached him that Eilan was a priestess of the Druids now.
He stumbled towards the entrance, and it was only when he was outside, blinking in the light, that he realized that he had not said goodbye or wished her well. Was she happy in the Forest House? Had she chosen that life, or had they forced her into it? But the door flap had fallen closed behind him. As he strode away, he heard Dieda’s voice behind him.
“Eilan, what were you saying to that man? He walks like a Roman!”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he heard Eilan say slowly. “Wouldn’t he have been in uniform? The rest of them all were.”
He slowed, amazed at her guile. It was at least partly her innocence that had at first attracted him.
Now where the devil had his centurion got to? He forced himself into motion again. Was the man likely to tell Macellius about this? And, more important, how would Gaius manage to see Eilan again? Now that he had found her once more, he could not simply let her go.
Behind him in the tent, Eilan clasped her hands over her pounding heart. It seemed almost impossible that the other priestesses could not hear it.
Lhiannon stirred, and murmured, “What happened? Was anyone hurt?”
“Some fool frightened the cattle and they stampeded,” Caillean answered.
“How . . .how did I get here?”
“A passer-by carried you. Huw fainted – the great halfwit,” Caillean said crisply. “No, your rescuer is gone; Eilan blessed him in your name.”
Eilan, hearing, thought it lucky Gaius had not been wearing Roman uniform and wondered why. She wondered what he would look like in the uniform of the Legions. Handsome, she imagined, but then, he was nice-looking anyhow. She shook her head, knowing that she should not be thinking of him that way, certainly not here. That part of her life was over.
“First make certain that Huw is all right, then bring him in here.” Lhiannon ordered. “If the cattle have stampeded, they probably cannot be rounded up at once, and we will be here for the rest of the day.”
Eilan went out into the sunlight. She found Huw sitting on the ground, barely conscious, shaking his head dizzily.
“Is the Holy Lady safe?”
“No thanks to you, if she is,” Eilan said crossly. “She fainted, and a passer-by carried her into the herb seller’s booth.”
“Where’s all the cattle?”
Eilan looked around her and realized that Lhiannon had been wrong. The square was busy with folk setting up fallen booths and chattering, but there was not a cow to be seen.
“Only the gods know that, and maybe their drovers; they stampeded.” The man who had been gored, she noticed, had been carried away by his friends. “That’s why they gored that man; they were frightened,” she said crisply.
“It was the Romans frightened them,” Huw mumbled, getting painfully to his feet again. “Marching in all clanking and glittering that way. A murrain on them; why did they come here anyway? Did they think the blessing of the cattle was some kind of unlawful gathering?”
“There’ll be no blessing of the cattle this day,” he went on, shaking his head, “I’d best carry the Lady home. With Romans around there’s more likely than not to be some kind of trouble,” he added in a grumbling undertone.
Not for the first time, Eilan wondered why Lhiannon tolerated this great oaf. He was little use to her as a bodyguard; Eilan could not see that he was any use at all. If she should be ever in the position of the Oracle priestess – little as she desired it – the first thing she would do would be to rid herself of the services of this great bobby.
About a month after Beltane, Eilan was summoned to Lhiannon, and found her with a man who reminded her oddly of Cynric, and a little girl of eight or ten years with light reddish hair sun-touched with gold.