I took a careful breath, focusing my senses as I had been trained to do. In my first days on Avalon everything had seemed much more alive than it did in the outside world. Now that sense was intensified a hundredfold, and I understood that as the moon was to the sun, so was the magic of Avalon to this realm which was its source and its original.
The sash had come loose from Eldri’s collar, but it no longer mattered. The little dog was a glimmering shape that danced ahead of me, and white flowerets starred the track where she had passed. Did I see the dog this way because we were in Faerie, I wondered, or was it only in Faerie that her true nature was revealed?
The path led to a copse of hazel, like those that I had been trimming—only this morning—when Becca almost drowned. With a pang I realized that I had nearly forgotten why I had come here. Time ran differently in Faerie, I had heard, and it was easy to lose one’s memory as well as one’s way.
But these hazels had never known the touch of iron. And yet, though untrimmed they might be, surely some mind had guided their luxuriance into this interlace of supple branches in which there was only one opening, through which Eldri had disappeared. For a moment I hesitated, but if I could not find Dierna, I might just as well lose myself in Faerie, for I would surely never dare to return to Avalon. Only the thought of Aelia, anxiously waiting, kept me going forwards.
As I passed through the opening, there came a sudden singing, as if the branches hid a chorus of birds, and yet I knew, and I had been trained to notice such things, that these were no birds I had ever heard on Avalon. I looked up in delight, hoping to see the secret singers. When I lowered my gaze, a strange woman was standing there.
I blinked, finding it curiously hard to focus, for in the lady’s mantle were all the shifting pale golds of the leaves of the willow when autumn comes. Red berries were strung like a diadem upon, her dark hair and across her brow.
She looks like Heron, I thought in wonder, or like one of the little dark folk of the Lake village! But no woman of the Lake people had ever stood as if her surroundings had only been created to be her setting, stately as a priestess, noble as a queen. Eldri had run to her, and was leaping up against her skirts as she did to me when I had been away.
Stifling a pang of jealousy, for Eldri had never shown such affection to anyone else before, I sank down in the obeisance due to an empress.
“You bow to me, and that is well, but others will bow to you one day.”
“When I become High Priestess?”
“When you fulfil your destiny,” came the answer. The Lady’s voice held the sweetness of bee-song on a summer’s day, but I remembered how swiftly that music could turn to fury if one threatened the hive, and I did not know what might anger this queen.
“What is my destiny?” heart pounding, at last I dared to ask.
“That will depend on what you choose…”
“What do you mean?”
“You saw three roads when you came here, did you not?”
The Lady’s voice remained sweet and low, but there was a compulsion in it that turned my memory to the scene, and at once it was before me—the path that led back through the mists, the rocky road, but the middle way was broad and fair, bordered with pale lilies.
“The choice that you must make lies in the future—to seek the world of the Romans, or the Hidden Country, or Avalon,” the Faerie Queen continued as if I had answered her.
“But I have already chosen,” I answered in surprise. “I will be a priestess of Avalon.”
“So says your head, but what does your heart say?” the Lady laughed softly, and I felt a prickle of heat flush my skin.
“I suppose that when I am old enough to think about such things I will know,” I said defiantly. “But I am sworn to give myself to no man save as the Goddess wills, and I will not break my vow!”