THE WISE WOMEN

Chapter 1

It was nearing sunset, and the quiet waters of the Vale of Valon were overlaid with gold. Here and there tussocks of green and brown raised their heads above the quiet waters, blurred by the glimmering haze which at autumn’s end veiled the marshes even when the sky was clear. At the center of the Vale one pointed tor rose above the others, crowned with standing stones.

Lean gazed across the water, the blue cloak that marked her as a senior priestess hanging in motionless folds around her, and felt the stillness dissolving the fatigue of five days on the road. It seemed longer. Surely, the journey from the ashes of the pyre at Ernemeton to the heart of the Summer Country had taken a lifetime.

My lifetime…, thought Lean. I shall not leave the House of the Priestesses again. Six months earlier she had brought her little band of women from the Forest House to found a community of priestesses on this isle. Six weeks ago she had gone back, alone, too late to save the Forest House from destruction. But at least she had saved the boy.

“Is that the Isle of Avalon?”

Awen’s voice brought her back to the present. He blinked, as if dazzled by the light, and she smiled.

“It is,” she said, “and in another moment I will call the barge which will take us there.”

“Not yet, please—” He turned to her.

The boy had been growing. He was tall for a lad of ten, but he still looked all haphazardly pieced together, as if the rest of his body had not yet caught up with his feet and hands. Sunlight backlit the summer-bleached strands of his brown hair.

“You promised me that before I got to the Tor some of my questions would be answered. What will I say when they ask what I am doing here? I am not even certain of my own name!”

At that moment, his great grey eyes looked so much like his mother’s that Lean’s heart turned over. It was true, she thought. She had promised to talk to him, but on the journey she had hardly spoken to anyone, wearied as she was by exertion and sorrow.

“You are Awen,” she said gently. “It was by that name that your mother first knew your father, and so she gave it to you.”

“But my father was a Roman!” His voice wavered, as if he did not know whether to be proud or ashamed.

“That is true, and since he had no other son, I suppose as the Romans count such things you would be called Aius Acellius Severus, like him and his father before him. Among the Romans it is a respected name. Nor did I ever hear anything of your grandsire but that he was a good and honorable man. But your grandmother was a princess of the Silures, and Awen the name she gave her son, so you need not be ashamed to own it!”

Awen stared at her. “Very well. But it is not my father whose name they will whisper on this Druid isle. Is it true…” He swallowed and tried again.

“Before I left the Forest House they were saying…It is true that she—the Lady of Ernemeton—was my mother?”

Lean looked at him steadily, remembering with what pain Eilan had kept that secret. “It is true.”

He nodded, and some of the tension went out of him on a long sigh. “I wondered. I used to daydream—all the children who were being fostered at Vernemeton would boast how their mothers were queens or their fathers were princes who would one day come to take them away. I told stories too, but the Lady was always kind to me, and when I dreamed at night, the mother who came for me was always she….”

“She loved you,” said Lean, more softly still.

“Then why did she never claim me? Why did my father not marry her if he was such a well-known and honorable man?”

Lean sighed. “He was a Roman, and the priestesses of the Forest House were f*******n to marry or bear children even to men of the tribes.

Perhaps we will be able to change that here, but in Vernemeton…it would have been death for her if your existence had been known.”

“It was,” he whispered, looking suddenly older than his years. “They found out and they killed her, didn’t they? She died because of me!”

“Oh, Gawen”—wrenched by pity, Lean reached out to him, but he turned away—“there were many reasons. Politics—and other things—you will understand more when you are grown.” She bit her lip, afraid to say more, for the revelation of this child’s existence had indeed been the spark that lit the flame, and in that sense, what he said was true.

“Ilan loved you, Awen. After you were born she might well have sent you away for fosterage, but she could not bear to be parted from you. She defied her grandfather the Arch-Druid to keep you with her, and he agreed on condition that it was not known you were her own child.” That wasn’t fair!”

“Fair!” she snapped. “Life is seldom fair! You have been lucky, Awen.

Give thanks to the gods and do not complain.”

His face flushed red, and then paled, but he did not answer her. Lean felt her anger fade as suddenly as it had come.

“It does not matter now, for it is done, and you are here.”

“But you do not want me,” he whispered. “Nobody does.”

For a moment she considered him. “I suppose you should know—

Acellius, your Roman grandsire, wished to keep you in Deva and to bring you up as his own.”

“Why, then, did you not leave me with him?”

Lean stared at him without smiling. “Do you want to be a Roman?”