"But that would be impiety, if the Goddess has chosen you,” Eilan protested.
"What am I going to say to Cynric? What is there that I can say to him?” Her control broke and she began to laugh helplessly.
"Dieda,” Eilan put her arm around the other girl, "can’t you speak to your father? Tell him that you don’t want this? If it were me, I should be happy, but if you hate the idea—”
Numbly, choked with misery, Dieda said, "I dare not. Father would never understand, nor cross the High Priestess. There is something—” In a voice which hardly reached her kinswoman’s ears, she said, "Father is so much Lhiannon’s friend—it’s almost as if he were her lover—”
Scandalized, Eilan turned her eyes upon the other girl. "How can you say that? She is a priestess!”
"I don’t mean they’ve done anything wrong, but he has known her so long. He seems at times to care more about her than anyone alive—surely more than any of us girls!”
"Take care how you say such things,” Eilan warned, her face flushing. "Someone else might hear who would understand you no better than I did.”
Dieda said dismally, "Oh, what does it matter? I wish I were dead!”
Eilan did not know what to say to comfort her. She was silent, clinging to the other girl’s hand. She could not understand how Dieda might wish to refuse this honor. And how happy it would make Rheis, that her youngest sister should be chosen.
Bendeigid too would be pleased; Dieda was like another daughter to him and he had always been fond of his wife’s little sister. Eilan tried to forget her own disappointment.
Gaius and Cynric moved through the holiday crowd, pausing from time to time to comment on the points of some pony, then moving on. After a time Cynric asked, "Is it true then, friend, that you know nothing of what befell on the Isle of Mona? I had thought—if you lived near Deva—”
"I have never heard the story,” Gaius said. "I’m from the country of the Silures, remember, away to the south.” And knowing that my mother was married to a Roman officer, he thought then, it would have taken a braver man than most to tell me. "Is it some well-known tale?” he said aloud. "You said that the Druid Ardanos could sing it.”
"Hear it then, and wonder no more why I have little that is good to say of the Romans,” said Cynric angrily. "There was—in the days before the Romans came—a sacred enclosure of women where now is nothing but a polluted pool. One day the Legions came—and did what they always do; cut down the grove and plundered its treasures, murdered such Druids as contested with them, and raped all the women—from the oldest priestess to the youngest novice. Some were near to grandmothers in age, some no more than little girls of nine or ten, but that did not matter to them!”
Gaius gasped. He had never heard that part of the story. The Romans spoke only of the Druids with their tossing torches and the dark-clad women who had shrieked imprecations, and said that the legionaries had been afraid to cross the boiling waters of the Menai strait until their commander shamed them into attacking. Mona had been the final stronghold of the Druid priesthood. Until meeting Bendeigid and Ardanos, he had thought most of them had been wiped out. Military logic made it obvious that Mona must be destroyed. But a good commander, he thought angrily, kept his men in line. Had the soldiers reacted so violently because the women made them afraid?
"What happened to the women? You may well ask,” said Cynric. As a matter of fact, Gaius had not asked; but he knew that Cynric was telling the tale as he had been taught, and would sooner or later get around to that.
"The Romans left most of the women pregnant,” Cynric went on. "When the babies were born, the girls were drowned in the sacred pool the Romans had already desecrated, and the boys were fostered with the families of Druids. When they came to manhood they were told of their background, and they were given training at arms. And one day they are to avenge their mothers and their gods; and, believe me, they will! They will—I swear it by the Lady of Ravens who hears me!” he added vehemently. He fell silent, and Gaius waited uneasily for him to go on. Cynric had spoken of an underground movement called the Ravens. Was the other boy, then, one of them?