Daughter Of The Forest (3 page)

“Which servant has charge of this child?” snapped Father testily. “She is no longer of an age to be let loose like some—some tinker’s urchin. How old are you, Sorcha—nine, ten?”

How could he not know? Didn’t my birth coincide with his loss of all he held most dear in the world? For my mother had died on midwinter day, when I was not yet a day old, and folk said it was lucky for me Fat Janis, our kitchen woman, had a babe at the breast and milk enough for two, or I’d likely have died as well. It was a measure of Father’s success in closing off that former life, perhaps, that he no longer counted every lonely night, every empty day, since she died.

“I’ll be thirteen on midwinter eve, Father,” I said, standing up as tall as I could. Perhaps if he thought of me grown up enough, he would start to talk to me properly, the way he did to Liam and Diarmid. Or to look at me with that hint of a smile he sometimes turned on Padriac, who was closest to me in age. For an instant, his dark, deep-set eyes met mine, and I stared back with a wide green gaze that, had I but known it, was the image of my mother’s.

“Enough,” he said abruptly, and his tone was dismissive. “Get these children out of here, there’s work to be done.”

Turning his back on us, he was quickly engrossed in some great map they were rolling out on the oak table. Only Liam and Diarmid could expect to stay; they were men now, and privy to my father’s strategies. For the rest of us, it was over. I stepped back out of the light.

Why do I remember this so well? Perhaps his displeasure with what we were becoming made Father take the choice he did, and so bring about a series of events more terrible than any of us could have imagined. Certainly, he used our well-being as one of his excuses for bringing her to Sevenwaters. That there was no logic in this was beside the point—he must have known in his heart that Finbar and I were made of strong stuff, already shaped in mind and spirit, if not quite grown, and that expecting us to bend to another will was like trying to alter the course of the tide, or to stop the forest from growing. But he was influenced by forces he was unable to understand. My mother would have recognized them. I often wondered, later, how much she knew of our future. The Sight does not always show what a person wants to see, but maybe she had an idea as she bade her children farewell, what a strange and crooked path their feet would follow.

As soon as Father dismissed us from the hall, Finbar was gone, a shadow disappearing up the stone steps to the tower. As I turned to follow, Liam winked at me. Fledgling warrior he might be, but he was my brother. And I got a grin from Diarmid, but he wiped his face clean of all expressions but respect as he turned back toward Father.

Padriac would be away off outdoors; he had an injured owl in the stables that he was nursing back to health. It was amazing, he said, how much this task had taught him about the principles of flight. Conor was working with my father’s scribe, helping with some calculations; we wouldn’t be seeing much of him for a while. Cormack would be off to practice with the sword or the staff. I was alone when I padded up the stone steps on my bare feet and into the tower room. From here you could climb up further, onto a stretch of slate roof with a low battlement around it, probably not sufficient to arrest a good fall, but that never stopped us from going up there. It was a place for stories, for secrets; for being alone together in silence.

He was, as I’d expected, sitting on the most precarious slope of the roof, knees drawn up, arms around them, his expression unreadable as he gazed out over the stonewalled pastures, the barns and byres and cottages, to the smoke gray and velvet green and misty blue of the forest. Not so far away the waters of the lake glinted silver. The breeze was quite chill, catching at my skirts as I came up the slates and settled myself down next to him. Finbar was utterly still. I did not need to look at him to read his mood, for I was tuned to this brother’s mind like the bow to the string.

We were quiet for a long time, as the wind tangled our hair, and a flock of gulls passed overhead, calling among themselves. Voices drifted up from time to time, and metal clashed on metal: Father’s men at combat in the yard, and Cormack was among them. Father would be pleased with him.

Slowly, Finbar came back from the far reaches of the mind. His long fingers moved to wind themselves around a strand of his hair.

“What do you know of the lands beyond the water, Sorcha?” he asked quite calmly.

“Not much,” I said, puzzled. “Liam says the maps don’t show everything; there are places even he knows little about. Father says the Britons are to be feared.”

“He fears what he does not understand,” said Finbar. “What about Father Brien and his kind? They came out of the east, by sea, and showed great courage in doing so. In time they were accepted here, and gave us much. Father does not seek to know his foes, or to make sense of what they want. He sees only the threat, the insult, and so he spends his whole life pursuing them, killing and maiming without question. And for what?”

I thought about this for a while.

“But you don’t know them either,” I ventured, logically enough. “And it’s not just Father that thinks they’re a danger. Liam said if the campaigns didn’t go right up to the north, and to the very shore of the eastern sea, we’d be overrun one day and lose everything we have. Maybe not just the islands, but Sevenwaters as well. Then, the old ways would be gone forever. That’s what he says.”

“In a way that’s true,” said Finbar, surprising me. “But there are two sides to every fight. It starts from something small, a chance remark, a gesture made lightly. It grows from there. Both sides can be unjust. Both can be cruel.”

“How do you know?”

Finbar did not reply. His mind was closely shuttered from mine; not for now the meeting of thoughts, the silent exchange of images that passed so often between us, far easier than speech. I thought for a while, but I could think of nothing to say. Finbar chewed the end of his hair, which he wore tied at the nape of the neck, and long. His dark curls, like mine, had a will of their own.

“I think our mother left us something,” he said eventually. “She left a small part of herself in each of us. It’s just as well for them, for Liam and Diarmid, that they have that. It stops them from growing like him.”

I knew what he meant, without fully understanding his words.

“Liam’s a leader,” Finbar went on, “like Father, but not quite like. Liam has balance. He knows how to weigh up a problem evenly. Men would die for him. One day they probably will. Diarmid’s different. People would follow him to the ends of the earth, just for the fun of it.”

I thought about this; pictured Liam standing up for me against Father, Diarmid teaching me how to catch frogs, and to let them go.

“Cormack’s a warrior,” I ventured. “But generous. Kind.” There was the dog, after all. One of the wolfhounds had had a misalliance, and given birth to crossbred pups; Father would have had them all drowned, but Cormack rescued one and kept her, a skinny brindled thing he called Linn. His kindness was rewarded by the deep, unquestioning devotion only a faithful dog can give. “And then there’s Padriac.”

Finbar leaned back against the slates and closed his eyes.

“Padriac will go far,” he said. “He’ll go farther than any of us.”

“Conor’s different,” I observed, but I was unable to put that difference into words. There was something elusive about it.

“Conor’s a scholar,” said Finbar. “We all love stories, but he treasures learning. Mother had some wonderful old tales, and riddles, and strange notions that she’d laugh over, so you never knew if she was serious or not. Conor got his love of ideas from her. Conor is—he is himself.”

“How can you remember all this?” I said, not sure if he was making it up for my benefit. “You were only three years old when she died. A baby.”

“I remember,” said Finbar, and turned his head away. I wanted him to go on, for I was fascinated by talk of our mother, whom I had never known. But he had fallen silent again. It was getting late in the day; long tree shadows stretched their points across the grass far below us.

The silence drew out again, so long I thought he might be asleep. I wriggled my toes; it was getting cold. Maybe I did need shoes.

“What about you, Finbar?” I hardly needed to ask. He was different. He was different from all of us. “What did she give you?”

He turned and smiled at me, the curve of his wide mouth transforming his face completely.

“Faith in myself,” he said simply. “To do what’s right, and not falter, no matter how hard it gets.”

“It was hard enough today,” I said, thinking of Father’s cold eyes, and the way they’d made Finbar look.

It will be much harder in time
. I could not tell if this thought came from my own mind, or my brother’s. It sent a chill up my spine.

Then he said aloud, “I want you to remember, Sorcha. Remember that I’ll always be there for you, no matter what happens. It’s important. Now come on, it’s time we went back down.”

When I remember the years of our growing up, the most important thing is the tree. We went there often, the seven of us, southward through the forest above the lakeshore. When I was a baby, Liam or Diarmid would carry me on his back; once I could walk, two brothers would take my hands and hurry me along, sometimes swinging me between them with a one-two-three, as the others ran on ahead toward the lake. When we came closer, we all became quiet. The bank where the birch tree grew was a place of deep magic, and our voices were hushed as we gathered on the sward around it.

We all accepted that this land was a gate to that other world, the realm of spirits and dreams and the Fair Folk, without any question. The place we grew up in was so full of magic that it was almost a part of everyday life—not to say you’d meet one of them every time you went out to pick berries, or draw water from your well, but everyone we knew had a friend of a friend who’d strayed too far into the forest, and disappeared; or ventured inside a ring of mushrooms, and gone away for a while, and come back subtly changed. Strange things could happen in those places. Gone for maybe fifty years you could be, and come back still a young girl; or away for no more than an instant by mortal reckoning, and return wrinkled and bent with age. These tales fascinated us, but failed to make us careful. If it was going to happen to you, it would happen, whether you liked it or not.

The birch tree, though, was a different matter. It held her spirit, our mother’s, having been planted by the boys on the day of her death, at her own request. Once she had told them what to do, Liam and Diarmid took their spades down to the place she had described, dug out the soft turf, and planted the seed there on the flat grassy bank above the lake. With small, grubby hands the younger ones helped level the soil and carried water. Later, when they were allowed to take me out of the house, we all went there together. That was the first time for me; and after that, twice a year at midsummer and midwinter we’d gather there.

Grazing animals might have taken this little tree, or the cold autumn winds snapped its slender stem, but it was charmed; and within a few years it began to shoot up, graceful both in its bare winter austerity and in its silvery, rustling summer beauty. I can see the place now, clear in my mind, and the seven of us seated cross-legged on the turf around the birch tree, not touching, but as surely linked as if our hands were tightly clasped. We were older then, but children still. I would have been five, perhaps, Finbar eight. Liam had waited until we were big enough to understand, before telling us this story.

…now there was something frightening about the room. It smelled different, strange. Our new little sister had been taken away, and there was blood, and people with frightened faces running in and out. Mother’s face was so pale as she lay there with her dark hair spread around her. But she gave us the seed, and she said to us, to Diarmid and me, “I want you to take this, and plant it by the lake, and in the moment of my passing the seed will start to grow with new life. And then, my sons, I will always be there with you, and when you are in that place you will know that you are part of the one great magic that binds us all together. Our strength comes from that magic, from the earth and the sky, from the fire and the water. Fly high, swim deep, give back to the earth what she gives you…”

She grew tired, she was losing her life blood, but she had a smile for the two of us and we tried to smile back through our tears, hardly understanding what she told us, but knowing it was important. “Diarmid,” she said, “look after your little brothers. Share your laughter with them.” Her voice grew fainter. “Liam, son. I fear it will be hard for you, for a while. You’ll be their leader, and their guide, and you are young to carry such a burden.”

“I can do it,” I said, choking back my tears. People were moving about the room, a physician muttering to himself and shaking his head, women taking away the bloody cloths and bringing fresh ones, and now somebody tried to make us leave. But Mother said no, not yet, and she made them all go out, just for a little. Then she gathered us around her bed, to say good-bye. Father was outside. He kept his grief to himself, even then.

So she spoke softly to each of us, her voice growing quieter all the while. The twins were on either side of her, leaning in, each the mirror image of the other, eyes gray as the winter sky, hair deep brown and glossy as a ripe chestnut.

“Conor, dear heart,” she said. “Do you remember the verse about the deer, and the eagle?” Conor nodded, his small features very serious. “Tell me then,” she whispered.

“
My feet will tread soft as a deer in the forest
,” said Conor, frowning with concentration. “
My mind will be clear as water from the sacred well. My heart will be strong as a great oak. My spirit will spread an eagle’s wings, and fly forth. This is the way of truth
.”

“Good,” she said. “Remember, and teach it to your sister, when she is older. Can you do that?”

Another solemn nod.

“It’s not fair!” Cormack burst out, angry tears overwhelming him. He put his arms around her neck and held on tight. “You can’t die! I don’t want you to die!”