"Is Caillean a priestess name then?”
Caillean smiled. "It is not,” she said. "Caillean, in our tongue, means only ‘my child, my girl’。 So Lhiannon called me whenever she spoke to me; I think of myself now by no other name.”
"Should I call you that then?”
"You should, though I do have another name given me by the priestesses. I am sworn never to speak it aloud or even whisper it, save to another priestess.”
"I see.” Eilan stared at her, then blinked, because for a moment a name had echoed in her awareness as loudly as if it had been spoken. Isarma…when you were my sister, Isarma was your name…
Caillean sighed, "Well, dawn is still far off. See, your sister has already fallen back into slumber. Poor lass, the birth exhausted her. You should sleep as well—”
Eilan shook her head, trying to bring the world back into focus. "After such a disturbance, I do not think I could sleep even if I tried.”
Caillean looked at her and suddenly laughed. "Well, to be truthful, neither can I! Those men terrified me so that I could scarce speak. I thought I had forgotten their dialect—the last time I heard it was so long ago.”
"You did not look terrified,” said Eilan. "You looked like a goddess standing there.” She heard once more the other woman’s bitter laugh.
"Things are not always as they seem, my little one. You must learn not to put all your trust in how folk look, or in what they say.”
Eilan stared into the fire, whose embers, stirred back to life by Caillean’s raking, snapped and sparkled on the hearth. The man she had learned to care for as Gawen had been an illusion, but even as Gaius the Roman, the thing that made her love him was the same. And he had spoken truth to her. I would know him, she thought then, if he came to me as a leper or a wild man. For a moment she grasped at something that lay beyond face or form or name. Then a coal snapped, and it was gone.
"Tell me what is true, then,” Eilan said to fill the silence. "How did that cotter’s child you say you were become a priestess who could hold fire in her hands?”
Tell me what is true…Caillean stared at the girl, who had lowered her fair lashes over those changeable eyes as if frightened by her own boldness. What other truths might come back to haunt her, as her mother tongue had returned on the lips of those monstrous men? She was twice Eilan’s age—old enough to be her mother if she had married young, and yet at this moment the younger woman was like a sister, a twin soul.
"Did you come at once then to the Forest House with Lhiannon?” persisted Eilan.
"I did not; I think that Vernemeton was not yet built then,” Caillean pulled herself together enough to answer her. "Lhiannon had come to Eriu to study with the bean-drui, the priestesses at the shrine of Brigid at Druim Cliadh. When she returned to Britain, we dwelt at first in a round tower on the shore far, far to the north of here. I remember that there was a ring of white stones laid around the tower, and it was death for any man, save only the Arch-Druid—not Ardanos, but the one who was before—to come within this ring of stones. Always, she treated me as her foster daughter; once she said, when someone asked, that she had found me abandoned on the seashore. It might as well have been true; I never saw any member of my family again.”
"Didn’t you miss your mother?”
Caillean hesitated, shaken by the flood of memories. "I suppose you had a good and a loving mother. Mine was otherwise. It is not that she was evil, but I cared little for her nor she for me.” She stopped herself, eyeing the younger woman warily. What power is in you, girl, she thought, that you can conjure such memories from me? She sighed, trying to find the right words.
"For her, I was only an extra mouth to feed. Once, years later in the market at Deva, I saw an old woman who reminded me of my mother. She was not, of course, but I did not even feel regret when I realized it. It was then that I knew I had no kinfolk but Lhiannon and, later, the other priestesses of the Forest House…”