“That is a good thought,” Lhiannon agreed a little vaguely, her attention already flitting away. “Look after it, Eilan, if you will.”
The little hand slipped trustingly into her own, and something in Eilan’s heart that had been sore since she lost her sister at last began to ease. As they walked across the courtyard, she asked the child, “You are not unhappy to be called Senara? It was my sister’s name.”
“Not at all,” the little girl answered. “Where is your sister? Is she dead?”
“Dead or carried off beyond the seas,” Eilan replied. “Alas that I do not know.” And then she wondered why she had not asked Caillean for some word of her sister’s fate, and her mother’s when the older woman was scrying. Was it perhaps that she preferred to think of Senara peacefully dead than living in slavery?
She looked at the child, seeking some sign of her Roman parentage, and thought of Gaius. As the Prefect’s son, Gaius could find out if there was anything to be known. Before Valeria became Senara forever, she owed it to the child at least to try.
As Eilan showed her charge where she was to sleep and found a linen novice’s gown that could be cut down for her to wear, she found herself thinking about Gaius as much as about the girl.
Where was he now? Was he thinking of her as eagerly as she was of him? Had he put some spell on her, that she could not only think of nothing else, but did not particularly want to? She sighed, remembering the strength of his voice, his handsome face and form; the slight accent with which he spoke her name, his lingering kiss at the Beltane fires.
I did not then realize fully what he wanted of me, she thought. I was too young to know – or care. But now I am older, and I am beginning to understand. What have I thrown away? The thought came to her then: For the rest of my life am I to dwell unloved — until I am as old and loveless as Lhiannon?
Who could she ask? Who could she tell? Dieda would understand, but separated from her own beloved, she would hardly sympathize. Caillean, mishandled and unloved so young, would be angry. And if Caillean would not understand, how could she expect it of anyone else here?
There was no one to whom she could describe the hungry need in her heart just to look on him once more, even if after that she should never set eyes on him again.
The next morning, as she was cutting bread and cheese for Senara, she asked, “Do you remember anything about your kin in the Roman town?”
“They are not in the town, Eilan. I think my mother’s brother was some kind of Roman official; he wrote the letters for the Prefect of the camp, and other such things.”
“Indeed?” Eilan stared at her. Surely the gods were smiling, for this man must be the secretary to Gaius’s own father.
She thought for a moment of taking the child into her confidence, but after a moment’s reflection decided against it. If a priestess of the Forest House should be discovered in the company of a Roman, no matter how innocent her motives, it would mean trouble for anyone involved. And would it be all that innocent?
Twelve
That very day, Valerius, who was secretary to Gaius’s father, had arrived out of breath and looking shaken. “I have just heard that my sister is dead,” he told Gaius.
“Tell me about it,” suggested Gaius as they walked across the parade ground towards his father’s offices.
“It’s a long story,” Valerius replied. “I lost contact with my sister when she married; I haven’t seen her a dozen times in as many years.”
“Did she move far away?”
Valerius gave a short laugh. “Only so far as Deva, but she married a man of the tribes, and my father disowned her.”
Gaius nodded. It was bad enough for a Roman to marry a native woman of a princely house. He knew only too well how Roman” society would view a daughter who ran off with a native lover.