To be your successor, I thought, smiling at the dark-haired woman beside her. “Teleri: I know and give thanks to the Lady for bringing her safely home.”
“I bring with me two who have become my daughters, and my own great-grandchild,” I said then.
“And do they also wish to cross over to Avalon?”
Lena’s eyes were shining. “This is like a dream that turns out to be true! If you will have us, I and my daughter will gladly go.”
Dierna’s gaze grew wistful as she looked at Crispa. “My own children died,” she said then. “It will be good to train another child of our blood for Avalon…”
But I had turned to Cunoarda, and my heart sank as I saw on her cheeks the silver track of tears. “What is it, my dear?”
“I will miss you till my life’s end, lady, but I cannot go,” she whispered. “I need to learn how to use the freedom you have given me. And it is the Christ, not your Goddess, whom my heart follows, and I cannot do that on your isle.”
“Then stay, with my blessing.” I kissed her on the brow. It would be no use to tell her that there was a place beyond all such divisions where Truth was One. She still belonged in this world.
“That is settled, then,” Dierna said briskly. The barge is waiting. We will breakfast on the holy isle.”
“Not quite—” I pointed out over the waters. Tor you to accept me means much, but Ganeda cast me out. I must prove—to myself, if not to you—that I am still a priestess. Let me call the mists, and win my own way back to Avalon.”
The barge rocks to the push of the poles as the boatmen move us away from the shore. lean see the silver waters part before the prow. Dierna sits beside me, trying to hide her doubts, and Cunoarda is watching from the village, hoping that I will fail and return with her to Londinium. Perhaps they are right to question, and this vow of mine is no more than a final act of pride.
But since I came to this decision I have been silently rehearsing the words of power. If I have got them wrong, everyone will pity the foolish old woman who thought she was still a priestess. But if I succeed …
It is the gift of age to remember the events of fifty years ago more clearly than what happened yesterday. Suddenly the timing and distances of this journey are clear. My heart is pounding, and when the shifting flow of energy around us peaks, it is hard to breathe. Crispa steadies me as I get to my feet, shoulder-joints protesting as I raise my arms high.
I fight for air, and then, all at once, power surges through me. Words pour from my lips, and now it is easy, so easy to bring down the mists and slip through the chill dark passage between the worlds. I can hear the others calling out in alarm, but I cannot allow them to distract me now, for the silver veils around us are thinning, wisping away in coruscations of rainbow radiance—
Light is everywhere, light all around me, light that grows beyond all the words I have for vision until I see, glowing as if lit from within, the shores of Avalon…