I stared at her. I had disobeyed her order, certainly, but surely I had given myself to Constantius as the Goddess willed.
“You have until the sun goes down to make ready,” Ganeda said then. “When the sun goes down and the festival is over, you will be banished from Avalon.”
The Christians, I had heard, had a legend that told how the first parents of humankind were exiled from Paradise. When the mists of Avalon closed behind me I understood how they must have felt. Had it comforted Eve to know that Adam was still beside her? Knowing that my own choices had forced this destiny upon me was little comfort.
I told myself that if Constantius had gone alone, leaving me behind, I would have been weeping bitterly, but the grief that kept me numb and silent as the barge bore us through the mists was of a deeper order entirely.
As we slid up onto the shore below the Lake people’s village I felt a sudden disorientation, as if one of my senses had disappeared. I staggered, and Constantius lifted me in his arms and bore me up the bank. When he set me on my feet again I clung to him, trying to understand what had happened to me.
“It is all right,” he whispered, holding me against him. “It is all behind us now.”
I looked back across the Lake, and realized that the psychic sense that had always told me where to find Avalon was no longer there. Physical sight showed me marshland and blue water, and the beehive huts on the Christian isle. But when I had left before, I had only to close my eyes in order to sense, at an odd angle to the mortal world, the way to Avalon. I had taken the link for granted. Through it, the High Priestess could check on the well-being of her absent daughters, for even when priestesses were sent on errands away from the holy isle a thread of connection remained.
But now, Ganeda had severed it, and I was like a sapling that the flood uproots and whirls away. By the time I ceased my weeping, a cold grey dawn was breaking once more.
I do not know whether the fact that Constantius tolerated me for the next few weeks was a measure of his honour or his love. He told the keeper of the posting-inn where we spent the next night that I was ill, and it was true, though my sickness was not of the body, but of the soul. By day, my only comfort was Eldri’s devotion, and by night, the strength of Constantius’s arms. And when it became clear to him that it was a constant torture for me to live where every clear day showed me the Vale of Avalon, he concluded his business at the mines and we set out for Eburacum, where the workshops his family owned turned some of the lead into pewterware.
Constantius hired a trader to guide us cross-country through lanes and by-ways to the great Roman road that runs northeast from Lindinis to Lindum. For the first few days I rode in dismal silence, too wrapped up in my own grief to notice my surroundings. Still, if any time of the year could reconcile one to the loss of Avalon, I suppose it must be the smiling season that follows Beltane.
Cold though the wind might sometimes blow, the bone-deep chill of winter was gone. The triumphant sun laid a golden blessing across the land, and the land with joyous abandon made it welcome. The brilliant green of new leaves resounded with the songs of returning birds, and every hedgerow and woodland ride was adorned with flowers. As day followed glorious day, my body, like the earth, responded to that radiant light.
For so long—too long—I had searched out herbs only for their utility. Now I picked the creamy primroses and the nodding bluebells, bright celandine and hidden violets and forget-me-nots like pieces of fallen sky, for no other reason than that they were beautiful. The training of Avalon was intended to develop the spirit, and all the resources of mind and body were put at its service, under the direction of a disciplined will. The needs of the flesh were given grudging recognition only at the festivals, and those of the heart, no honour at all. But Constantius had conquered my awakening senses, and my heart was carried along in their triumph, a willing prisoner. I made no attempt at resistance: banished from the realm of the spirit, the world and its pleasures were all that remained to me.