“He may as well,” said Eilan, considering. “I don’t intend to send any more of our women there for punishment, nor, I suppose, do you, and the Ravens have all found new hiding places.” It gave her a pang to think of a stranger living in the place where she had borne and suckled her child, but there was no point in sentimentality.
“Very well,” said Caillean. “And if Ardanos objects I can point to the precedent set when they let Christians build the chapel of the white thorn on the Isle of Apples below the Sacred Well.”
“Have you been there?” Eilan asked.
“Long ago, when I was much younger,” Caillean replied. “The Summer Country is a strange land, all marsh and lake and meadow. If there’s any rain at all, the Tor turns to an island. Mist lies on the land sometimes so that you think the next turning will bring you to the Otherworld; and then a flare of sunlight cuts through the clouds and you see the holy Tor with its ring of stones.”
Listening to Caillean, Eilan felt as if she could almost see it. Then she was seeing it, in a flash of vision as unexpected as it had been transitory—but Caillean had been in the vision too, gliding through the mists towards the hill in a flat-bottomed boat poled by the little dark men of the hills, with several of the novice priestesses huddled in the stern. But Caillean stood upright, with gold upon her neck and brow.
“Caillean,” she began, and from the widening of the other woman’s eyes, something of what she had seen must have shown in her face, “you will be High Priestess on the Isle of Apples. I have seen it. You will take the women there.”
“When—” Caillean began, and Eilan shook her head.
“I don’t know!” She sighed, for the vision, as so often happened, had been only a glimmering. “But it sounds a safe place, hidden from Roman eyes. Perhaps we should think about installing some priestesses there.”
Gaius’s new position kept him much on the move about the country. Since for the time, the main supply depot had been established at Deva, now occupied by the Twentieth Legion, it made sense for him to move his family to a pleasant estate that they called Villa Severina, south of the town. Julia was not happy about leaving Londinium, but she settled in to country life with a stoic resignation, and a year after their arrival in the West gave birth to twin girls whom she named matter-of-factly Tertia and Quarta. The latter was so tiny they soon took to calling her Quartilla instead.
“But why?” asked Licinius. The old man had come to pay a visit to see his new granddaughters.
“Can’t you guess?” Julia asked, but without humor. “If she were a jug, we would have to name her half-pint, not quart at all.” Her father looked at her oddly, and she realized that it was not much of a joke—but then Quartilla was not much of a baby.
She found it hard to warm to the twins. When her belly grew so large, she had been certain she was about to bear Gaius a strapping son at last. Surely to go through such a hard labor with no more result than a pair of daughters, one of whom was sickly, was a reason for depression?
She recovered slowly, for she had been much torn during the delivery, and when it became clear that she could not nurse these children herself, gave them up to wet nurses with hardly a pang. The sooner she was fertile once more, the sooner she could try again for a son. The Greek physician had hinted that it might be dangerous, but he was only a slave, and Julia’s threats kept him from saying anything to Gaius or her father.
Next time, she swore, I will build a temple to Juno in Deva if I have to—but next time it will be a boy!
Yet, as the children grew, Julia became accustomed to living most of the time among the gentle hills south of Deva and staying in her father’s house in Londinium only during the wintertime. Licinius loved the children, and was already looking around for families with whom to ally them in marriage.
Gaius was a somewhat indifferent father, but she had expected no more. She knew that when she was unwell he sometimes slept with one of the slave girls, but so long as he did his duty in her bed as well she could hardly object to it. She had married to gain the status of a matron and to give her father an heir. Her relationship with Gaius was one of mutual respect and affection; for a Roman girl of good family anything else would have been unseemly.